Dream

An awful movie ran through my head twice while I heaped criticism on the no-talent woman who wrote it. Then I woke up and realized, to my chagrin, that since I dreamt it, I’m the fool who wrote it.

In the dream, the woman is that actress from that French movie, “Ni pour ni contre,” with that same timid but secretly clever look on her face. She is a low-level reporter who works at a reporting station feeding wired news from one terminal into the other, and her more experienced coworker is Sanjukta, my friend from Bangkok (who is in the dream as she is in real life: beautiful, worldly, smart, and demanding).

A wire comes in from “IFS” that thermal underwear is banned in some country for safety reasons. The main woman, let’s call her Nini, processes the incoming story but finds it quickly retracted and suppressed. “What’s the import?” she asks Sanjukta, who explains that movie directors use thermal underwear for their actors, who must work in a wide range of conditions, and thermals breathe well so can protect against both extreme heat and cold. Why did IFS retract it? That remains a mystery.

Nini quits reporting and turns the suppressed story into a movie so the public can find out about the truth. I see this movie on TV and note that she’s the writer, director, and lead actress, and in the story she’s made her character, the intercepting reporter, crucial to the plot. That’s in poor taste, I note. I only see the last bit of the movie, where her lover (played by her romantic interest in the real-world French movie) who works for the authorities but is in fact the renegade thermals smuggler, has colluded with a rough-looking airplane mechanic to make the shipment. In the final scene they’re hand-carting an airplane (in the dream world, this is normal), with the mechanic steering inside and the boyfriend leading a team of men down below. He knows she is leaving (for reporting duties? to tell the truth? in disgust, because she is really me and knows the movie sucks?) and looks up into the sky for that reason, although she is leaving by foot rather than by plane, but in that moment of distraction the airplane falls on him and he dies, and maybe the mechanic dies, too. The credits come up over our protagonist fallen on the floor in grief, with a ridiculously melodramatic expression on her face, and a tacky script font crediting her, “D’angelou Francais” if I read and remember it right, for writing, directing, and starring in the thing.

In inexplicable dream chronology, Benni takes the role of the worldwise friend (mine) and is now at the set of the making of movie. I warn her the movie sucks but know she’ll form her own opinion. Meanwhile I’ve changed the channel and see another movie just beginning. Then I realize it’s the same story begun halfway through, and am annoyed that Nini’s stretched her plot scrap to three hours: a movie and its sequel. What I saw earlier was the end of the sequel, which I’m about to see again. At the making-of, the movie technicians, the same muscly men who drag the plane, do their editing in a room of computers, and even their screen savers are stupid, I note: it’s the tropical fish scene but the umbrellafish has a cartoon face and does a vaudeville dance. The love interest is again making plans with the mechanic. I need to leave, because I can’t bear to see the tragic crap unfold. Benni gives me the exit route: I have to walk through vast expanses of Middle East desert as well as the huge party celebrating the movie’s success, which has multiple rooms separating men, single women, and married women (dream-consistent as the love interest looks French-Arabic, the underwear-banning country is in Muslim Africa, and the movie is filmed on location. Probably the crew is wearing the banned thermals to protect against extreme heat and cold.) As I’m hurriedly walking, I can read the final pages of the script in my mind; abrupt changes in format confirm its stupidity. The script becomes a novel for a few paragraphs, and then a childish open letter: “Here is my script, Daddy! I hope you like it. Let the girl sing her song.” and then a final few pages of dialogue back in novel form, and the plane falls on the boyfriend, and the girlfriend makes a face, and she’s an idiot, and I wake up at 4:30 in the morning and I’m the idiot, and dream-inexplicably, I have to write it all down.