I was travelling with a few others in Poland, not really Poland but a country with an oppressive regime and secret police. One local warned me that small groups of secret police roam the streets and expect total silence when they approach. If anyone fails to comply they are forced to eat rotten meat. A little later I am talking merrily in the street and realise that everyone around me has become tense and silent. I notice, out of the corner of my eye 4 or 5 men standing around me looking more like monkeys in light grey suits and light grey faces. One comes up to me and first hangs a piece of rotten meat over my face then commands me to eat it. He has a gun pointed to my head. He indicates particularly rotten and bright red pieces for me to eat. I notice that it doesn’t really taste that bad. Then he offers me a can of some liquid which I assume is urine to wash this down with. I realise that I am not terrified but key into the humiliation of the event.
I am a house church leader: I am on death row
After an evening at Geoff’s I had two vivid and somehow interconnected dreams:
I was the leader of an alternative house church. The house in question was very small (like my own only smaller) and lemon yellow and a turquoisey-green were strong colours that predominated. I had a partner or wife and she had a gift for spiritual discernment. She looked steadily into people in the church’s eyes. She herself was small, incredibly white and unhealthy looking – in fact quite frightening.
Then I was in a room with two other men (o no – I’ve just realised the Jesus being crucified implications of this) and we were sentenced to death and being prepared for death by lethal injection the next day. I was still sort of the same person from the earlier dream. I asked the doctor or guard for a shot of IV valium to calm me and produced my arm with protruding white tube like veins telling him how easy my veins are to inject as they are so prominent. I get a shot which I watch go into my white vein but it makes no difference.
Then the 3 of us are in a hotel for the night. I am quite resigned to the lethal injection tomorrow but in the end decide to get out and run off, maybe climb out of the window. In the end I go to the basement where there is some kind of rave going on and graffitti on the walls (it reminds me of Berlin which I have recently visited).
The dream ended there.
Cambridge Film Festival 2006
The “film festival website”:http://www.cambridgefilmfestival.org.uk/ is worth looking at plus the reviews, some by me – somewhere.
The King and Down in the Valley
Here are two suprisingly similar films, both about a ‘charming’ stranger who comes to down (I meant to type town, but comes down also seems right) and disrupts and exploits the weaknesses of a family – Baptist evangelicals in the case of “The King”:http://www.channel4.com/film/reviews/film.jsp?id=147379, and a down at heel Californian family in “Down in the Valley”:http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/down_in_the_valley/. This male stranger starts off attractive, charming, mysterious -almost with no background, seductive, offering something authentic in the face of a not-quite-functioning family/society. In both, the target, at least initially, is a rebellious or would-be rebellious teenage daughter, but a brother is drawn in in both films – though with very different consequences.
Guns and weapons figure large in both as property of both the father (the menace of American force behind the veneer of civilisation and/or religion) and in the hands of the outsider who uses them more appealingly but with no less, or actually, more destructive effect.
This outsider is ambiguous, offering energy and a relationship to teenage children that parents/fathers/step-fathers can’t seem to, but he ends up offering or delivering something quite unambiguous in its destructiveness – a devil in The King, and a disturbed, disowned and hurt young criminal in the Valley.
more battle dreams etc
Some war dreams with fighting and a sense of doom.
Also I have a new flat, some public housing somewhere – quite unEnglish, a block of flats, painted white in the sunlight. I had to climb on an old lady’s mantle piece to mount the stairs to the higher floor where I lived.
Before I went in, outside in the evening sunshine is a woman in a wheelchair who I don’t recognise. She says she is Beatrice and this feels like a reunion. She is there with her children who have grown older to welcome me to my new flat – which is kind of half way between two places. I see that she has only one leg (she has been married to at least 1 if not 2 Africans – in real life). But when she gets up I see that she has both and that it was my imagination.
finnished
Just a few weekends work and its done.
In a way this was very easy to build because the materials were of such good quality – even the nails.
