When you keep a dream diary and are diligent about it your dream world rewards your attention and your wanderings in the dream world become active and rich. There was a time several years ago when I was keeping a dream diary with entries almost every morning. Now my amateur writing career is all on various decentralised social media platforms. But I’ve begun to keep a dream diary again. I’m not paying quite enough attention to it for my dreamland production company to reward me very often. But I did dream last night, or I should say in the wee hours just before waking.
So this morning I’m up early and I happened to read about the Oscars and about the film which won Best Picture, Nomadland starring the great Francis McDormand. I watched the two trailers. The first had a bleak tone and the message was that these Americans are on the move not toward anything but away from everything; these ’nomads’ are going ‘anyplace but here’ in America but never leaving the bleak and homeless land of no home and no hope and no future that America has inexplicably become. The second trailer had an almost sickly sweet tone of “nostalgic Americana” with folky guitar music and sunsets and flashes of the only two actors, apparently, in this movie, aged and aging McDormand and another favourite actor of mine, aged and aging David Strathairn.
It feels almost eery how the trailers and the IMDB User Reviews of this movie dovetailed with my dream.
From my dream diary
April 26/21
I have arrived at a friend’s country place for a visit. He is older than me but in great shape and he’s happy. I ride a bicycle along a country road, almost a path. It’s in the woods, rich deciduous woods. A railroad crossing. The bar comes down and the bell dings, a train is coming.
I’m visiting two friends, a man and a woman, in New York City. We are walking back to our separate digs. Perhaps I carry an empty bottle that held the wine we had shared at some friendly quiet bistro. We do not talk. The evening is quiet, the air is still and cool and sweet. We pass by a tennis court where some shadowy people are playing. Maybe one hails us with a remark I do not understand or acknowledge. We part the ways in silence. I watch her walk away. A man says to me, ”New York City is incredibly gentle.” The city is quiet. The great buildings are all around me. There are deserted walking paths. I slowly wake with “Autumn in New York” playing on a piano.
Commentary:
In real life New York City is dissolving into deadly chaos. Rapes and murders are up by magnitudes. The dream had the air of all the movies about New York City when it boasted itself as “the safest big city in the world” just 20 years ago. It’s a dream of longing for death.