Whenever I want to fail at finding you, all I have to do, is dream.

I saw a show on the discovery channel about dreaming. It showed, rather fabulously, how dreams work. It had this badical rendering of a person sleeping, and you could see how their eyes looked while they were sleeping, roving about -- ohh it was eerie. It revealed to me how I have such a distinct emotional impression of how a person looks with their eye(lids) closed, and how it's really such a silly thought, that it means anything, cause under those lids we are really an unflinching lot. The program explained that dreaming is where we go over the events of the day and sort through information and decide whether or not to store it in our deep memory or not. This explains why there are so many disjointed aspects of our dream narratives. But what it doesn't explain is why my dream-T. S. Eliot was trying to attack me with an axe -- and was actually hacking me with it (although I couldn't feel any pain), or why I constantly have a dream in which I'm looking for a very specific person and I can never find them. I have recurring dreams (the plot recurs, although sometimes the images and characters change), and every so often I have lucid dreams where I try out flying and stuff. So while I get that the brain is sorting during these experiences, it doesn't explain why the brain gives us a virtual reality to sort them in.

A dream can set the tone for the whole day. If it is an especially haunting dream, I often won't feel like I can function in the "real" world until I have written something for the day. I think it's so interesting that scripture contains sacred dreams. The idea of dream as communication is so appealing to me, even if I'm only communicating with myself.

To completely digress, I watched Death of Salesman, the Hoffman/Malkovitch version, yesterday, and it is quite a disturbing play. All the characters are disturbing. The mother is fascinating. I think the most interesting thing is the end, when Biff has completely broken down and confessed to his father that he is a 'nobody' and that he is not 'a magnificent' boy like his father has always dreamed, and right after this magnificent display of emotion, the family goes back to their old ways. Immediately. Hap tells them he's going to get married, the mother is back to being loving, and the father says something like, 'that boy's really going to be something.' I like how the only thing missing from this family is honesty. I like the idea that wanting to be well liked is an agenda of dishonesty that eventually self-destructs. In wanting your children to be liked you sacrifice your own honest relationship with them. I still think that I like The Crucible better -- a far as the text goes (Daniel Day-Lewis might have a little something to do with it).