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.