Johnny Cash, Dmitri Hvorstovsky and the Awesome GIF

My celebrity dreams are back! Yay!

Last night I dreamt that Johnny Cash and Russian opera singer Dmitri Hvorostovsky were doing an album together. I was so psyched about this in the dream, because I love both Mr Cash and Mr Hvorostovsky. I suppose Johnny Cash was still among the living within my dream sphere.

At some point, Hvorostovsky posted a youtube clip in which Johnny Cash, overjoyed with his and Hvorostovsky's musical achievements, grabbed Hvorostovsky and kissed him on the lips. Hvorostovsky reacted with a moment of shock, but then he giggled nervously, obviously amused with Johnny Cash's exuberant behaviour. Someone on the internet made a GIF file out of this little clip and I saved it in my "Favourites" file. It was really awesome.

The Gay Detecting Douchebag Bus Driver

I don't know what's wrong with me these days: I can hardly remember any of my dreams. And the ones I do remember, get this, there are no celebrities in them. I can't even get, say, Brendan Fraser to star in my dreams these days. I suppose this may be my brain's way of telling me that my life is way too full at the moment for me to let random celebs take up my energy. But I am seriously not sure that that is a price I'm willing to price for living a full life.

Here's a dream that I somehow managed to remember in details (still no celebs, though, sadly): I was with my friend Laura somewhere in a Danish called Køge, and we decided to climb a near-by mountain. There are virtually no mountains in Denmark, so there isn't any truth to this, geographically. It was late afternoon and sort of dark and rainy, but we were determined to go anyway. It was a bothersome trip. Most of the time we were able to trek, but for some parts, we needed to crawl and climb our way up. When we finally reached the top, we sat down at some kind of café and started talking about various university papers we had written during our studies. For some reason I had my master thesis with me, so I took it out to show her. When I looked at the front page that the title of it was "The Henchman and the Landscape in Nature". This struck me as a horribly clumsy title (indeed it is not the title of my actual thesis), but I seemed to remember that it was a title I'd picked randomly a few minutes before deadline. I was sort of glad, however, to find that I had encarved tiny little words into the letters of the word "landscape": I didn't really remember doing that, but I knew that I must have done it in order to graphically emphasize a point in my thesis about the landscape of a traumatic event carrying a certain signifiance, like a secret code, to a second hand witness trying to gain access to said event (which is indeed an actual point in my thesis. Although I never actually incarved tiny words into any letters).

After a while, we wanted to head home, but it was getting dark outside now, we realised. If we started climbing down the mountain at this hour, chances were that we would get stuck somewhere half down the mountain in the dark. Somehow we were now in Salzburg, where they don't have the light Scandinavian summer nights that we have here.

Luckily, however, we realised that there was a bus going down the mountain that we could get on, and incredibly, the bus was supposed to depart from where we were situated in just one minute. Sure enough, after a few moments we saw the bus approaching - except it wouldn't stop when it saw us. Instead it went on a little, and then the bus driver shouted to us that we had been too late for the bus. We protested and followed him, but then he drove a little further before stopping and shouting at us some more. This repeated itself a few times before we were finally let in.

Half-way down the mountain, however, the bus driver suddenly stopped and left his seat. He walked into the aisle where he intended to perform what he called a "magic show". His trick, he said was this: He was capable of telling if any person he met was or straight, and he would like to demonstrate this on a few of us. Every single one of us found this offensive, and people protested, but the chauffeur insisted. For his show he picked two men, a woman (whom I somehow instinctly knew was a Lesbian) - and me. I told him that I didn't want to be in his show, but the driver said that if I didn't want to participate, I'd have to leave his bus and make my way down the mountain on foot. By then it was pitch dark outside, and there was really no way I'd be able to find my way down by myself, so I had no choice but to stick around and be a part of his stupid gay-dar show. I don't remember how things turned out with the show. I just remember intending to file a complaint to the bus company, demanding that the chauffeur be fired.

Sarah Jessica Parker and the Chocolate Figurines

I recently had a dream in which I was at the top floor of Illum, a Copenhagen department store. I had somehow got my hands on three chocolate figurines, like the ones children get for Easter. Except these figurines weren't Easter bunnies or anything like that. Instead they were made out to look like Thor, Siff, and Loke from Norse mythology. For some reason, I was devouring these chocolate figuring, with a ravenous appetite. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, a door opened and Sarah Jessica Parker stepped into the room. She was wearing a beautiful silver dress, Charleston-like, and her hair was short like it was in the fifth season of Sex and the City. Upon seeing me and my wild consumation of these chocolate figurines, she got this completely horrified look on her face, and rushed out of the same door that she'd entered Illum through.

That's all I remember from that dream.

"Interests", "Relationship Status". "Favourite Swedish Tenor"

I dreamed several different dreams last night. In one of them I was thinking about a Danish book called "Tusmørkebørn" and suddenly realised that it must be at least partly inspired by Swedish Astrid Lindgren's "Madicken", particularly in the depiction of the relationship between two young sisters. Apparently, my inner Master of Art in Comparative Literature never sleeps.

Later that night, I dreamed that I had just graduated from high school and decided to celebrate by taking a roadtrip up through Sweden. I had a friend with me at first, but then she went home, and I went on by myself, mostly hitch-hiking. After a while, however, I decided that I wanted to go home and I caught a train back to Malmö. At Malmö Station I tried to book a ticket for Copenhagen, only to find that I had apparently created a profile on the Malmö Station homepage back in 2002. Among other things, I had been asked to pick my "favourite Swedish tenor now living". There were six different Swedish tenors to choose between, and I had picked Niclas Björling. I've never even heard Niclas Björling, but in the dream I figured that I had probably picked him because I assumed that he was a grandchild or some other kind of relative to Jussi Björling.

There was also a box where I had to name the "Person I Would Want to Narrate My Life". I'd put down "Jonas" who was my boyfriend in 2002.

I can't remember much else from the dream, but I really appreciate the lengths that my dream brain will apparently go to in order to squeeze random cultural trivia into my dream plots!

I would also like to point out that there were no celebrities in this particular dream. Unless you count Niclas Björling, who actually does exist, but I think that's a bit of a stretch.

"God damn it, Alexis!"

I dreamed that I was in soap opera Dynasty, as one of the characters, (probably insired by the recent death of John Forsythe). To be more precise: I dreamed that I was a teenage daughter of Blake Carrington and Alexis Colby. I had apparently been living with Blake in the Carrington mansion along with my brothers or sisters (who must have been Adam, Steven, Fallon, and Amanda, but I don't remember actually interacting with those characters), but this was the on-set of season 7, which is the time when Alexis manages to ruin Blake financially and take over not only his business, but also his mansion, so she throws Blake on the street.

In the dream, this meant that I now had to live in the house with my mother, Alexis, instead of with my father, Blake. This upset me terribly, and I was very angry with Alexis about her treatment of Blake. As a result, I did the only sensible thing: I went on a hunger strike. We were sitting down to have dinner, Alexis, my brothers and sisters, and myself, and I was famished, but instead of digging in, I solemnly announced that I wasn't going to eat a single bite again until Blake was back in the house.

That's all I remember from the dream.

Charles Widmore's Escalators

Last night I dreamed that I was watching Lost season 5. I don't remember much from the dream, except there was a scene in which Kate Austen had to go to Charles Widmore's office building in order to retrieve something or other. She had toddler Aaron with her, but she was being followed by someone, so she had to be really secretive. When I watch movies or television within a dream, it is however always really difficult for me to discern between myself and the protagonist I'm watching and at some point I became Kate, and I was in the office building myself. It was a futuristic type of building, very streamlined, and it had a lot of escalators. I had to go down a set of escalators at one point - except, as I realized when I was half-way down the set, instead of lowering you gently onto the below floor, like normal escalators do, all the escalators in this building ended mid-air, and you had to plummet about three metres after that.

The thought scared me, and for a moment I contemplated going back up the escalators, but I had to abort that idea, because as I glanced over my shoulder, I realized that an agent working for Benjamin Linus was right behind me, and he was out to get Aaron and me.

So instead I braced myself for the fall. "You can do this, Kate/Marie. You've jumped from the three-metre diving board before, and you were just fine." I thought to myself. And also "Damn that sadistic bastard Charles Widmore! Who else would have their fucking office building escalators end mid-air?"

And then I fell, and I know this sounds like the set-up for one of those dreams where you dream that you fall and then you wake up and can actually feel the sinking feeling in your stomach, but it wasn't. Instead, what happened in the dream was that I basically just fell down and landed on my ass. Yeah. Not a very dignified ending to that highly dramatic dream.

Ain't No Mountain High Enough (To Keep Joe from Getting to You)

Last night I dreamt that my co-blogger Martin and I had decided to climb the highest mountain in Greenland for some reason. I sadly don't remember a lot of details, other than the fact that it was an extremely dangerous journey, and it was very cold and dark. By the time we reached the top, we were both injured and exhausted, and Martin was very weak and ill, although I can't remember what ailed him exactly.

In any case, Joe from Family Guy came to our rescue in the nick of time! He was in his wheelchair and everything, but somehow that didn't stop him from climbing the mountain and he lifted up Martin and brought us both to safety.

Later in the dream, Tyne Daly broke into someone's home and pointed manically at the person who was living there. She just stood there, pointing, in the middle of the night. It was frightening.

In Which I Can't Remember What Movies Daniel Day Lewis Is In

I dreamed the other night that I had to impresse somebody - I don't remember whom - with my knowledge of Daniel Day Lewis movies. Except in the dream I couldn't think of a single movie with Daniel Day Lewis in it. I kept thinking that I'd thought of one, only to realize that I was confusing him with Jeremy Irons.

I don't remember what happened after that, but the dream is slightly reminiscent of the dream in which I was trying to impress Harrison Ford by mentioning Harrison Ford movies, but couldn't come up with any titles. And I just have to say how incredibly random I think it is that this has become a recurrent theme in my dreams. Other people, sane people, dream that they show up naked in school or that their teeth fall out. I dream about my own inability to name-drop movie titles.

The Art Salon

Last night I dreamt that I was going to attend some kind of art salon, and I had to prepare something for it - a song or a poetry recital or something. For some reason, I was going to recite a piece of dialogue from the 1990s TV series The X-Files. I have no idea why. I guess maybe it was somebody else's idea. I certainly wasn't very happy about it. I don't remember which dialogue it was, except for two lines: "The egg hatched..." "The egg hatched... and a hundred baby spiders came out...". Which isn't even a piece of dialogue from The X-Files. It's from Blade Runner. And thus I have now, indirectly, dreamt of Harrison Ford for the fourth time, since Martin and I started this blog.

Anyway, a friend of mine, Cat, from high school, was also to attend the salon. She was doing something way more fancy and appropriate than a piece of dialogue from a TV-series, but I don't remember what it was. I just remember that on the night of the salon, I met with her and I told her: "I can't do this. I cannot get up in front of a bunch of people at an art salon and recite a piece of dialogue from The X-Files. It will look ridiculous!" She looked at me very sympathetically and said: "You're right, you can't. Listen, why don't you just come up with some kind of excuse so that you can get out of it." I agreed with her that this would be the thing to do. I decided that I would claim to have a sore throat.

It was harder to get out of it, however, than I had thought. As it turned out it was a teacher of mine who had put me up to performing at the salon. And get this; my teacher was Beethoven. Yup. My teacher was Ludwig van Beethoven in the flesh. So I approached him in an attempt to get out of the concert, and I remember wondering if this was Beethoven before or after he went deaf. Because if it was after, that could make things even more difficult. Just in case, I decided to speak very loud. Except I couldn't remember the German term for "sore throat". So I just went: "HERR BEETHOVEN - ES TUT MIR RECHT LEID, ABER ICH HABE SCHMERZEN - HIER." and pointed to my throat before I contintued: "WÄRE ES MÖGLICH, DASS ICH HEUTE NACHT ZU HAUSE BLEIBEN KÖNNE?"
Alas, as it turned out, Beethoven thought of me as his favourite pupil - his protegé - and he was not about to let his prize student out of his art salon. I was going to have to participate, he said, and I got a bit of a creepy vibe from him, because he kept smiling and patting my cheek as he spoke.

So there really was no way out, and I showed up for the art salon. My friend Cat was there, but she was no longer my friend Cat - she was Pamela Sue Martin, the actress who played Fallon Carrington on Dynasty. A young version of actor Tom Hulce was there as well, sitting in the audience. He wasn't dressed up in his Amadeus attire, as one might expect. Instead he looked like himself in Animal House. At some point during the evening, he was fixed up with the best friend of the hostess of the salon, and started making out with her. I got the impression that he was actually mostly invited because the hostess wished to fix him up with said friend.

Meanwhile I became more and more determined not to get up in front of a number of people and recite a piece of dialogue from The X-Files. Instead, on the night of the salon, I decided to do a recital of ee cummings "Somewhere I have never travelled, gladly beyond". Except I don't know that one by heart, so I kept trying to find a computer that worked, so that I could get online and find the poem there. I found a computer, and I managed to print the poem as well, except the paper came out very mangled and torn, and I worried that I might not be able to read the poem.

Seeing no way out, however, I went in there in front of the audience and prepared to recite the poem to them. But then I woke up.

The Autograph

I guess if this blog has established anything thus far, it's that I dream about celebrities a lot. However, my dream brain seems to favour some celebrities over others, and it seems to be particularly fond of Harrison Ford, of whom I've now dreamed a total of three times since Martin and I started this blog.
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The dream was this: I was talking to a girl named Lisa who was in my class when I first went to the university years ago (and whom I've had very little contact with since then in real life). She was telling me that she was going to star in a play along with Harrison Ford and several other A-list actors. The play was to be staged in Greenland, and it was supposed to be about the early history of the country, in celebration of some innuit holiday. In the dream this made sense because, as I thought, Harrison Ford looks vaguely like an innuit. Which makes no sense to me now that I'm awake of course. I don't think Harrison Ford looks anything like an innuit.

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But then the dream changed and suddenly I was on a sidewalk somewhere in Copenhagen, and I noticed that Harrison Ford was standing about near by. I figured that if I wanted to meet Harrison Ford, this was a once-in-a-life-time opportunity, so I went up to him and said hello and asked him for an autograph. Which is a little surprising in and of itself, because I don't think I would ever do that in real life. Besides, does anyone even do the whole autograph thing anymore? I'm pretty sure people just snap a photo of themselves and the celebrity in question with their camera phones nowadays.

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But Harrison Ford was very friendly and not at all as grumpy as he is often rumoured to be. He looked younger than in real life - he looked like himself in the 1990s. He started writing his signature on a sheet of paper that I'd handed him. "I really admire your work, Mr Ford," I then blurted out and he replied, still very friendly and smiling, "Yeah? What movies have you seen me in?" I panicked for a moment here, because once I got to thinking about it, most of the movies I've seen him in aren't very good. Like, I was wracking my brain trying to come up with a good title, and all I could think of was Regarding Henry which is an awful, awful film. I considered mentioning Blade Runner, which I love, but then I remembered that Ford reportedly had a terrible time shooting that movie, and I didn't want to run the risk of alienating him. I finally managed to tell him that I really like the Indiana Jones movies, "especially Raiders of the Lost Ark", and that I also love Witness. I then added a semi-nonsensical and much too long sentence about how I thought that "great acting, a great script and wonderful art direction really went perfectly together" in Witness and things got a little awkward again, because I could tell that Harrison Ford was thinking that I was starting to ramble a little there.

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He handed me my signed piece of paper, and I was going to thank him and walk away, but then it occured to me that I ought to get an autograph for my dad as well, who loves Harrison Ford. So I asked Ford for another autograph. But it turned out that he was a little pressed for time, so instead he just suggested that he possess me, you know, kind of like the Devil does in The Exorcist. Yeah. As weird and/or scary as this sounds now, it seemed perfectly reasonable to me in the dream, and Harrison Ford was very casual about the whole thing. So he just possessed me, and then I felt my hand moving on its own, putting the pen to the piece of paper and scribbling a greeting and an autograph in Harrison Ford's handwriting. After that, Harrison Ford's spirit or whatever left me, and I thanked him politely and walked away.

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I was eager to see what he'd written so after a while I took out the pieces of paper. I noticed that he'd written quite a long message for me on the first piece of paper I'd given him. I managed to read the first sentence. It read:

"I am a gorgeous man."

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But then I was suddenly unable to read, and I couldn't make out the rest of it. Then I woke up.

A Macabre Visit to a Hospital

Last night I had this really weird nightmare-ish dream. In the dream, my mother was going to visit the editorial staff of one of the departments at the Danish Broadcasting Corporation, (even though in real life she does not have any connections there). She invited me to come, because I know some people there, and she thought I'd like to go say hi to them. We had to ride an elevator to get there, and in the elevator I realized that I was wearing a really ugly outfit, which caused me to fret a little.

Once we got out of the elevator, however, the dream changed, and it was no longer the DBC we were visiting, it was a hospital. We went into a hallway where my mother noticed a TV screen with a kind of information video playing. In the movie, a woman doctor in a white coat was talking about infant death. I didn't want to see it, but my mother was showing some interest in it and insisted that we stayed to watch it. Suddenly, however, the movie started showing the bodies of two dead infants being placed on some kind of weight, and this startled my mother and myself, so we started walking away.

Still a bit shocked by the images in the movie, we went into the first adjacent room we could find. There, however, a grim surprise awaited us: The room was some kind of a morgue, and there were several shelves on which dead babies were lying, piled on top of each other. We rushed out of the room, appalled at the sight, and my mother was horribly upset.

She quickly led us into another room where some empty hospital beds were standing around. It looked like an ordinary patient's ward, but for some reason I said to my mother: "This is the ambulatory - do you really think we're allowed to be here?" My mother, lowering herself on to one of the beds to sit down, said that she really didn't care right now; she just needed a moment to sit down and recover. She looked very pale, and I was afraid that she was going to be sick or faint.

Before I could tend to her, however, there was a loud pang and a tall black man fell on to one of the other beds, a gunshot wound through his chest, dead. "Danny Glover!!!" my mother and I yelled out in unison, because sure enough; Danny Glover it was, shot to death. For some reason I didn't even think about who might have shot him, I just thought about how incredibly unlucky my mother and I were being, walking into one macabre situation after the other. My mother must have had that same thought, because for a moment we just stared at each other in disbelief. Then I woke up.

While the dream was extremely unpleasant, I can't help being somewhat amused by the Danny Glover aspect of it. It's really incredible the lengths my dream-brain will go to, in order to squeeze in a celebrity sighting in my dreams. I think I've reached a new level of random celebrity-ness now that I've had Danny Glover fall dead out of nowhere in the middle of a dream about me, my mother, and infant death.

They're Heeere

My dream-brain must have decided that I didn't need to get any rest tonight. Because I had a strange combo of a stress dream/scary dream. I had to go to an exam at a music school where I took piano lessons when I was a kid. I never actually took any exams there in real life, so I don't know what that was about, but in the dream I had three exams that I needed to go to, only I couldn't figure out when the exams were supposed to take place. This seems to be a recurrent theme of mine - for another example, see the 90210/Ziggy comic strip dream.

At some point I ran into my aunt and told her about my exam troubles. For some reason, my aunt had the phone number for the music school administration - she even knew it by heart and promptly gave it to me. I walked over to a phone and managed to dial the number, but once I got through to the secretary of the music school, the connection was really bad, and we couldn't hear each other very well. I shouted louder and louder into the phone, while the secretary just seemed to give up, and it was all very stressful.

Suddenly, however, the whole scene changed, and it wasn't me on the phone anymore - it was little Carol Anne from Poltergeist. She was talking to the evil poltergeist spirits and they made her blow into the phone with all her might. It was very scary, because it was somehow obvious to me that the evil poltergeist spirits were doing this in order to suck the life out of Carol Anne, so the child was slowly dying.

Then I woke up. Thanks a lot, brain.