And the biggest old rascal come tumbling down first

[sovay]

I dreamed last night of a boy who had been a cat when everyone first met him, a skinny, terrified kitten with flat antifreeze-green eyes, placed in the bed of a corpse as part of a practical joke. He grew up to be thin, tough, a little standoffish, suddenly capable of presenting someone he had never shown much attention with a complicated gift or a piece of thoughtfulness, and apparently human, which no one really talked about. I think he might have been in the military, although maybe he just looked at everything around him like a combat zone. Occasionally he could still be seen as a cat, which everyone around him nicely did not mention, with the same slightly pointed restraint as when you don't tell your housemates you know exactly when they've been looking at porn; he didn't seem to care. And he liked musical theater, which is how I came to dream later that I was watching something like the Tony Awards with my cousins who now live in Texas. There was a number we all knew was from Oklahoma!, although it was being performed by a beautiful middle-aged, very dark-skinned black woman dressed in cowrie shells. There was another number we couldn't identify, panicky and sarcastic, half-patter, staged in an old-fashioned train station where the singer went back and forth among the benches, bitterly mimicking the whistles and the all-aboard calls; we knew all through the song that we should have been able to place it, and so felt stupid when we realized simultaneously from the last few bars that it was the hero's introduction from Rodgers and Hammerstein's Sleeping Beauty, where he's shell-shocked and badly coping with mid-'20's Mitteleuropa, where he's gone because of a promise he made to a German soldier during the Christmas truces. Danny Kaye had famously and somewhat controversially taken over the role for the 1950-something film version, which none of us had seen. I believe rushthatspeaks and I were debating whether we really wanted to hunt through libraries for the VHS or just stick with our memories of the original cast recording, which we'd both had around the house on vinyl as children. And since what I did last night was go with captainbutler to hear his girlfriend in a taiko extravaganza at Odaiko New England, I have no idea where this all came from. But I got it from sleeping eight hours, so I won't complain.

Comments

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

I wish I could get over to that next-door universe to see the Rodgers and Hammerstein Sleeping Beauty.

[gaudynight78.livejournal.com]

You have amazingly detailed and erudite dreams. That opening number is practically ready for production, and I love the conceit of Sleeping Beauty set in a post-WWII ambience.

Glad to hear of eight straight hours, too!

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

What an amazing person this cat boy is! I can just see him.

[schreibergasse.livejournal.com]

That would be an AWESOME musical. Especially if you could actually work the sleeping beauty legend in there...

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

I had a weirdly simple and comforting series of interlocking dreams best described as "Zuko and Iroh in the Land of the Sexy Cheerleaders"--both sexes, more gladiators than cheerleaders really (like bull-leapers?), and all of them liked Zuko so much he really started to like them back. They loved his scar, for some reason. It was therapeutic!

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

Fascinating dreams. I wonder what the cat-boy thought of the Rodgers and Hammerstein Sleeping Beauty.

In addition, I'm delighted you got eight hours of sleep.