Day: April 14, 2006

The institution and the frightening steps

I was staying in some kind of institution, it could have been a monastery, where the men in charge would just walk into my room without knocking. I was packing up and getting ready to go home for the weekend. I was meeting a woman who I didn’t know for a date in a cafe somewhere. I woke up at 10.10 and I realised it was too late and that I had stood her up. Nevertheless, I started the journey back to where I lived. First walking through narrow lanes quite high up, then I joined a group of others and we had to walk down some old fashioned black metal steps high up over a steep hill, or over or next to the roof of some large church. I was almost paralysed with fear of heights as I stepped down from one to the other. The people around rallied to encourage and support me.

I don’t remember getting to the journey’s end.

That plane dream again

a muddle of interconnected memories of dreaming. I am in a plane returning from a holiday. We are flying too low and the wings almost crashing into trees, powerlines and now we stop just a couple of feet above a building just before the runway. Somehow we land. The captain wanted to land really slowly because there was some fault with the plane.

I am walking up a hill in some woody place with leaves all over the ground. I am pushing a pram and J comes up and holds my arm and leans her head against my shoulder. I turn to kiss her and she has turned into A. Oh no, A is NOT someone you do that to, being extremely upright. She is indignant and outraged but was clearly drawn into it for a moment.

Then a couple of nights ago was the helicopter and the excrement dream

Good thoughts — bad thoughts

Say you had a cancer diagnosis and you forgot about it but then it came back to your mind and your whole being drooped as the feeling came crashing back. Or you are light of foot because you have a meeting with someone to look forward to or you have accomplished some huge challenge and it comes back into your mind. Good thoughts bad thoughts.

Here’s a list of my current thoughts; there is no correspondence intended acros the rows… its just a start

going to work in the morning —- enjoying a cigarette later
can’t upload pics and am wasting- —- dream of living in s of France
huge amounts of my life —- some resolutions at work
my marriage and divorce —- spring and warm weather
my ageing mother —- building a sauna
my poor grant income at work —- cool fruit bowl from tkmax
—- getting my house sorted
—- slowly doing Berlitz German

My time on the asteroid

I was travelling or visiting somewhere and in a cave or some enclosed space when I looked out or somehow saw a reflection and realised I was miles above the earth in an asteroid – I could see it from the huge height of space and was suddenly terrified and looked away, back into the cave. Later, I felt some gentle movement and realised that I was drifiting down to earth, now sitting on a black sheet of currugated iron fencing. I landed in an allotment, saying ‘Thankyou God. Teach me to see God in the people around me!’ then a man walked by.

(Cache) Hidden

Wow. I was reluctant to see another “Michael Haneke”:http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/03/haneke.html film. Funny Games, was disturbing. I read that Wim Wenders walked out of the screening at Cannes in 1997). The Time of the wolf was depressing, The Piano Teacher was at least engaging, Code Unknown I didn’t get to the end but sensed it was good.

Hidden was, by contrast, fairly clear in its message and its alegory was plain. There were minor shocks and some narrative details left uncertain (who DID take those films? Was the last scene chronologically the first?) Most powerful werre scenes where Middle Eastern Western violence dominated a scene of domestic anxiety even though it was in the background – and we were always – often uneasy about whether we were watching the film or a film within the film, the rewinds reminding me of Funny Games. This is definately worth seeing.

Crossing the Bridge

German bassist Alexander Hacke orders beers and commits various other leather-coated acts in Istanbul. There are some idiots and some beautiful traditional musicians and an awesome singer of Kurdish balads. Some of this is sublime but the film and our friend Alex is annoying. E.g. a beautiful shot of dusk over the Bosphorus – ah here’s the leather-coated silhouette of Hacke walking across it – just so we know he WAS ACTUALLY THERE. And why do they, even in the middle of the most beautiful songs, give us voice-over commentaries and other stuff?