I am getting very little sleep lately. "Lately" means at least since May. My insomnia is the worst it's been since 2006. I am trying not to talk about it all the time here because it's not very interesting and I don't want medical advice. I had a voice lesson this afternoon; I met Matthew at J.P. Licks and brought him back to meet the cats: Autolycus rode around on his shoulder and was confused by his sandals and Hestia hunted his feet. After he left, I finished some work and fell over sideways on the couch with a cat curled up against my stomach and didn't so much doze for an hour as lay there listening to traffic noises for forty-five minutes and then suddenly blacked out. I was woken by a call center wanting my statistics on grocery shopping. I said I'd really rather not and hung up.
I was asleep just long enough to dream: a scene like a page from a book or five minutes from a movie. I tried to think after I was awake if it was something I'd read or seen, but I'm not coming up with anything. The clothes and the cars look like Britain in the 1940's, perhaps just after the war. There are no barrage balloons or signs stenciled on the streets; I don't see rubble everywhere or so many vacant lots, so we're well after the Blitz. A girl is walking up the steps of a theater. There's a man sitting at the top, sharp-kneed, hands braced on the dirty stone behind him. From outside the dream, I can tell he's younger than I am, but to the girl he looks formidably adult and impressively dissipated, like all the worst rumors about actors. His dark hair is stickily uncombed; he's got his shirt buttoned straight, but hastily. He looks like he just fell out of someone else's bed. They might have been using his jacket for a pillow. You can see her trying not to wonder if he's drunk; not to wonder what else she wouldn't know how to recognize. Before she can decide between saying something or stepping past him, he jerks his head at her and says without greeting or preface, "You can go in." His tone is malicious; she almost looks behind her to see if there's someone else he's choosing between. He has a skeptical, tight-angled face, not handsome; he must know he's making her uncomfortable. As she takes the top step, he leans back a little to toss the words after her: "Radley likes them young." As if he himself doesn't. An encouragement that's intended to unsettle. She walks faster because of him and he doesn't look satisfied with himself. He isn't drunk: he's just been fucking the director, ten minutes before auditions, and he's tired of being hustled offstage to make room for the ingenues. (Nothing in the scene said what he did, but I thought it was set design. They have worked together since school. My opinion of the director, in the dream and after it, is low.) He's being deliberately offensive, making himself look worse than he is—an impulse rather than a habitual behavior, but the impression will stick with her. She'll get a part. That's all there was. I can't even remember if it was in color.
So I don't know who that was meant for and I don't know what I'll do with it—I do not write historical fiction easily and I feel there's no shortage of stories about the theater, especially about sexuality and secrets; I wouldn't give it to Mary Renault to write (she would not be sympathetic to either of them and something stupidly melodramatic would happen in the last chapter), but she feels like the right era. There's nothing fantastic in that scene at all and the only realist fiction I can remember finishing right now was a fairy tale retelling. On other hand, I have had dreams turn into stories before (sometimes years after the fact: I wrote "The Clock House" because of a dream in 2008), so I am not going to throw it out. But it was a strange vivid little fragment and I can't help feeling the rest of the story was going on somewhere else; I just tuned in. I could have kept watching if it were on TCM.
I was asleep just long enough to dream: a scene like a page from a book or five minutes from a movie. I tried to think after I was awake if it was something I'd read or seen, but I'm not coming up with anything. The clothes and the cars look like Britain in the 1940's, perhaps just after the war. There are no barrage balloons or signs stenciled on the streets; I don't see rubble everywhere or so many vacant lots, so we're well after the Blitz. A girl is walking up the steps of a theater. There's a man sitting at the top, sharp-kneed, hands braced on the dirty stone behind him. From outside the dream, I can tell he's younger than I am, but to the girl he looks formidably adult and impressively dissipated, like all the worst rumors about actors. His dark hair is stickily uncombed; he's got his shirt buttoned straight, but hastily. He looks like he just fell out of someone else's bed. They might have been using his jacket for a pillow. You can see her trying not to wonder if he's drunk; not to wonder what else she wouldn't know how to recognize. Before she can decide between saying something or stepping past him, he jerks his head at her and says without greeting or preface, "You can go in." His tone is malicious; she almost looks behind her to see if there's someone else he's choosing between. He has a skeptical, tight-angled face, not handsome; he must know he's making her uncomfortable. As she takes the top step, he leans back a little to toss the words after her: "Radley likes them young." As if he himself doesn't. An encouragement that's intended to unsettle. She walks faster because of him and he doesn't look satisfied with himself. He isn't drunk: he's just been fucking the director, ten minutes before auditions, and he's tired of being hustled offstage to make room for the ingenues. (Nothing in the scene said what he did, but I thought it was set design. They have worked together since school. My opinion of the director, in the dream and after it, is low.) He's being deliberately offensive, making himself look worse than he is—an impulse rather than a habitual behavior, but the impression will stick with her. She'll get a part. That's all there was. I can't even remember if it was in color.
So I don't know who that was meant for and I don't know what I'll do with it—I do not write historical fiction easily and I feel there's no shortage of stories about the theater, especially about sexuality and secrets; I wouldn't give it to Mary Renault to write (she would not be sympathetic to either of them and something stupidly melodramatic would happen in the last chapter), but she feels like the right era. There's nothing fantastic in that scene at all and the only realist fiction I can remember finishing right now was a fairy tale retelling. On other hand, I have had dreams turn into stories before (sometimes years after the fact: I wrote "The Clock House" because of a dream in 2008), so I am not going to throw it out. But it was a strange vivid little fragment and I can't help feeling the rest of the story was going on somewhere else; I just tuned in. I could have kept watching if it were on TCM.
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