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Tried talking about Jean Miró to commuters wearing earphones
I went to bed before midnight last night. I read Frank Boyce Cottrell's Millons (2004) and spent about three hours not being able to fall asleep, although I'm not sure if I was feverish for some of that time. Eventually, I think I slept for eight hours, which is more than I've managed in months at this point. Most of it was nightmares. This seems very unfair. I have spent most of the day since feeling spacy and disoriented, although I could also chalk that up to fasting for bloodwork since last night; any second now this rather substantial grilled cheese I just ate will kick in and I'll start feeling like I can focus again, I hope. I sat in the waiting room and read Somerset Maugham's Up at the Villa (1941), noting the ways in which it differed from the film I saw in 2000. A complete stranger encouraged me to eat something afterward, because I looked so hungry. I don't think that's happened to me since high school.
There were two exceptions to the nightmares, both of which made me think that for my own mental health I should be watching more old movies. One was a kind of Technicolor musical starring James Mason.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel and I remarked in the dream that he must have done his own singing, because that dark, dry, slightly gritty timbre was unmistakable. Sometime later in the night, I dreamed about Leslie Howard. Himself, in person, although I can't remember if he was in color or not. The house we were in looked more like my grandparents' than my parents' or mine. We were standing by the fireplace, looking at pictures on the mantel. I hoped he didn't mind my asking, but was he dead? He shook his head slightly and said regretfully, "Fifty-one . . ." Awake, I checked his dates: on June 1, 1943, he died at age fifty. The regret was for a year he didn't see. At least my subconscious knows its math.
(The dream ended when someone stole a picture I had of him—not a photograph, a sketch; he was very young in it, done by a theater friend years before his film career—and everything went back to nightmares and I woke up.)
There were two exceptions to the nightmares, both of which made me think that for my own mental health I should be watching more old movies. One was a kind of Technicolor musical starring James Mason.
derspatchel and I remarked in the dream that he must have done his own singing, because that dark, dry, slightly gritty timbre was unmistakable. Sometime later in the night, I dreamed about Leslie Howard. Himself, in person, although I can't remember if he was in color or not. The house we were in looked more like my grandparents' than my parents' or mine. We were standing by the fireplace, looking at pictures on the mantel. I hoped he didn't mind my asking, but was he dead? He shook his head slightly and said regretfully, "Fifty-one . . ." Awake, I checked his dates: on June 1, 1943, he died at age fifty. The regret was for a year he didn't see. At least my subconscious knows its math.(The dream ended when someone stole a picture I had of him—not a photograph, a sketch; he was very young in it, done by a theater friend years before his film career—and everything went back to nightmares and I woke up.)
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Thank you. I will keep you posted.
*hugs*
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Thank you!
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Thank you; I hope so. I was very upset by the ending, especially since I couldn't remember for the first few minutes after I woke up whether I did own a picture of Leslie Howard or not. I mean, I got a photo of George VI from a flea market. It wasn't impossible.
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I started a conversation once with a guy because I saw he was reading Ovid's Metamorphoses in Latin. I ended up being invited to watch Morris dancing. It was pretty sweet.
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Seriously, you have a moral obligation to compliment a person in that situation.
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I've been trying to remember the plot, but all I've got are crowd scenes, blue skies, and the impression of autumn. And the memory of James Mason as a positive character, which cannot be taken for granted in all his roles. It wasn't a Western, is about the only thing I'm sure of.
I keep thinking someone should write a story where Leslie Howard didn't actually die in that plane crash and had secret adventures.
You write it, I'll read it.
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Nine
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I did dream the Technicolor musical—I just can't remember enough of it to reconstruct it for purposes of conversation!
Or do you mean Leslie Howard's secret history?
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Nine
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Seriously. Being beseeched by the living is not necessarily more comfortable than by the dead. I hope you are getting a hell of a poetic cycle out of this.
I wonder if there's something about that particular window of the morning? I had been on more of a midnight - 6am schedule previously.
Interesting! I've never been on a natural midnight-to-six schedule in my life, so I don't know what its dreams are like. Alternately, perhaps the vivid dreams cluster after your first phase of sleep, when you've already been woken once. There must be studies on this.
Boo, nightmares.
Amen.