I almost always remember a good part of my dreams, but lately they’ve been particularly strange and vivid. Last night I sailed through a cold marsh from mainland China to Korea in a floppy little boat, with the texture of a silicone oven mit, the size of a canoe and full of backpacking tourists (it took about fifteen minutes and I was back by two thirty in the afternoon). The night before I was in a massive, dimly lit parking garage with a crew of sorority girls playing some frosh game that I didn’t understand. The ground was coated in this sticky sap, and the girls rushed to paste it all over their team jerseys to give them some sort of competitive advantage.
In the 80s, my dad made short experimental films in school; my favourite is a commercial he filmed on Super 8. A man at a party goes looking for a beer, opens a fridge, and is transported to a frigid, desolate wilderness. He wanders through this empty tundra for what feels like hours to the tune of repetitive, hypnotic new wave synthesizer and the film has this funny effect where, just as you’ve completely forgotten how he got there in the first place, he trips on a bottle of beer in the snow and finds himself transported back to the party. It’s clever and feels a bit absurd, and more than once I’ve found myself wandering around the same landscape in my sleep. Sometimes I trip and find an object too, other times I realize I’m in my dad’s film and just feel a little smug.
lexgill.com 