Werner Herzog claims that he never dreams in his sleep, only when he is awake. Harmony Korine claims that there is nothing more boring than someone telling you their dreams from the night before in lieu of conversation. Dr. Carl Gustav Jung had other ideas.
With these things in mind, here's something that happened to me today and that I decided to try and write down, for some reason...
...I pop a Valium and quickly swill a large bottle of cider.... Sleep comes rushing and is filled with dreams... On waking intermittently I check my Facebook account and each time find no notifications... I stumble and sway around the empty house, encased in a swamp of comfortably furnished amnesia... Turn on the TV... It registers as a miss...
...I fall back to sleep and my next dream is of a mountain ski resort...
"...Can you slide..?" I'm asked by a vaguely anonymous young woman...
"...Yeah..." I reply...
...My recollection of the preceding scene is unreliable at best, but I think it was a replica of a sequence from the film Into The Wild (Penn, Sean. 2007), wherein the young 'hero' and the wife of his emotionally ailing hippy road-friend cast their clothes off onto the wet beach and lovingly punch and dance into the sea... In my dream it was colder, far less epically liberating and covered in dirty ice...
...By some omnilateral transition we are at the top of the ski slope...
"...Can you slide..?"
"...Yeah..." I reply and bind into a snowboard and boots...
...Sloshing and slicing down the melting piste, naked but for some white underwear, I make it to the bottom...
...The way out - back onto the well worn route that leads to the woodsmoke wood-cabin town - has been shut off for the end of the commercial day's skiing... I come to a halt at the foot of an enormous launch ramp, much bigger than any I have ever jumped from...
...Its not clear whether they have been with me the whole time, but I am now in the company of my father and his second wife B... There is a palpable intoxication in the air...
...A mountain ranger directs us down a pine lined side path and into a kind of large wooden cubicle... We're joined by a host of other high spirited professional types - all drunk and smiling... Cheeks beaming red with whiskey anti-depressants red wine and bought-and-payed-for mountain air... Jokes ensue encased in little reciprocal recitals of improvised songs... rude and witty limericks... Not one individual is off the pace... (I regret now not being able to recall any of the jokes or songs. They really were good) ...B's jokes in particular, her rosy cheeks, lolling head and glassy eyes are affecting, welcome and a catalyst for us all...
...There is a comfortable presence of human fluids, like wet lips going in for a kiss, or tears at a funeral...
...The wooden room is octagonal and partly comprised of polished plate glass windows... All in all it bears more than a slight resemblance to The Great Glass Elevator at the crescendoing moment of Roald Dahl's masterpiece, only this one is distinctly alpine and seems to swing and spiral down through the snow instead of firing up into the heavens...
...One of the skiers in the lift is unmistakably Malcolm MacDowell, red headed and around 35 or 6... His inclusion in the group is indicative of the loose and violent genius of hatred...
...Pine handled knives appear cooly amidst the joviality and it is not long before I awake from the dream - the words "...and then we'll chop their heads off..." reverberating softly in my ears...
