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I roam the middle of the night to find the light again
For weeks I have been having the kind of nightmares from which I wake nauseated and with my head aching, which is on one level par for the course and on another a bad sign even for me. Last night, however, I dreamed of watching a famous war film from the late 1960's or '70's; its writer-director and milieu were Russian, although the film itself was in French, which in the dream I did not question and awake I wish the director existed so I could look her life story up. Among other things, I can't remember if the film was supposed to be partly autobiographical: it concerned a partisan unit operating in Belarus or Ukraine which had aggregated out of a roving band of war orphans, so that no one was older than nineteen and the effect was as much Wild Boys of the Road (1933) as it was Ivan's Childhood (1962) or Come and See (1985). The core had been a pair of siblings who got out of their village when no one else did. One was the leader now and the other was dead. About fifteen of them are alive at the start of the movie, all of them looking terribly young and self-sufficient as M1891/30s; some are girls, some are Jews, most of them are sleeping together one way or another and one of them doesn't sleep with anyone. They are fiercely protective of one another, they'll work with more adult or more official detachments but not join them—to outsiders, they all give the same last name. (The subtitles didn't translate it, but it was the word for alder tree. I don't know if my brain remembered while I was asleep that alder turns red when cut, as bright as bloodstains. It was never explained.) I remember the tone being simultaneously grimy-realist and stylized, with peculiar, theatrical flashforwards of papers being filed in a drab government office that seemed to have nothing to do with the events of the main narrative. The plot drifted until it jolted, full of shared histories and memories, their communal ritual of telling one another's stories as if they'd all lived them; atrocities were shot from the same slight remove as adolescent makeouts. The most conventional action sequence came somewhere in the second act, when the alders successfully blew up a German tank. What I remember most vividly is the final scene, everyone briefly and rarely out in the open around the same fire, drinking, celebrating something minor but vital as everything is when you are literally fighting for your lives, and the girl who doesn't sleep with anyone comes over to the boy who in a timeline with classes instead of dugouts and sniping and sabotage would have been the class clown and puts her arms around him, which is unusual enough that he stops telling his dirty joke for a moment but not so weird that he isn't still drinking as she rocks him and murmurs into his ear, "You won't remember this. You're fifteen years old, and you're drunk, and everyone still calls you Berlin." (He could read and speak German.) "I'll remember when they don't. You'll remember the rest for me," at which point it became clear that the film was her recollection of the war and her figure in the action was not the sixteen-year-old in the real time of 1943 but the memory-projection of the middle-aged woman who becomes visible only in the last frames of the government office, looking at the papers that document so scantly, incompletely, and in some cases wildly inaccurately the lives of these people who were her comrades and her siblings and her lovers she didn't make love with. And then, because the movie was over, I woke up.
Happy solstice!
Happy solstice!
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I resent a lot of the media I dream about not existing, but this one feels personal.
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I feel like I'd read that, but I didn't remember until you said it. Thank you. That's great.
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It should definitely have a Criterion edition.
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Thank you. Me, too!
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Thank you. I wish I could show it to you!
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I have a lot of dreams that aren't so hot. But sometimes they are doozies.
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(This is the advantage of dreams, because awake I wouldn't know the word for alder in Russian/Belarusian/Ukrainian without looking it up—or even in French—but I like it, too.)
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It might be more efficient than the current distanced state of film production . . .
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I think your household would very much enjoy it if I could lend it to you!
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*gently tops up your cortisol from the communal supply*
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I would also need not to have my job, which has turned into a complete brain sink, and that would in itself be something of a problem. But it is an appealing picture. And thank you.
*gently tops up your cortisol from the communal supply*
Remember to save some for yourself now it's rationed!
*hugs*
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So complete, so coherent. I never have dreams like that.
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Thank you. I wish I could just tell everyone where to find the DVD.
So complete, so coherent. I never have dreams like that.
I mean, last night I dreamed of my grandparents' house—in which no one of my family has lived for more than twenty years—flooding and being stolen from. I just have the other kind of dreams as well.
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I would, too, now that you mention it.
Meanwhile, I dreamed about how I would arrange my greengrocery order into weekend menus.
That sounds remarkably efficient of your brain! I have to make mine do that sort of thing while I'm awake.
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Thank you. It was one of the kind that felt complete of itself while I was in it and I am glad to have been able to bring as much back with me as I did. Sometimes all I'm left with are fragments: premises, images, emotions. Dialogue or written words are rare.
(I mentioned that To the Edge of Sorrow has that same post-apocalyptic or post-shipwreck "building a society" vibe, right?)
You did! You used the word "shipwreck" specifically. I really have to read it now.
I would so love to see this film.
I would love to be able to show it to you. This is the worst part of their not being real.
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Hey, it saves time…
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I've always dreamed in narrative frames, as far back as I can remember. Sometimes things I watch, sometimes things I read, sometimes things I write. I have the other kind of dream, too, whose events happen to me, and sometimes they cross, but I think it's just one of my normal modes.
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You have another huge advantage as well: You consciously remember the result. I've had dreams that amazed me upon waking - a romantic comedy, a spy story, slice-of-not-my-life - and all I can tell you about them now, I just did. Yet they are there, engulfed cathedrals that sometimes I will later glimpse, and realize the memories still exist. I wish I knew how to access them as you do.
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Alders are one of the great magical trees. "Alder was the tree of prophecy and sacrifice, and a shield made from its wood was believed to imbue the carrier with ferocity and protection in combat."
Nine
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Thank you. I so wish I could show it to you!
"Alder was the tree of prophecy and sacrifice, and a shield made from its wood was believed to imbue the carrier with ferocity and protection in combat."
Oh, that's wonderful.