faraway, so close (the value of dreams)
Every night I lie awake cutting and splicing shots together in my head. I glance at the clock every few minutes. It starts to reach that hour where it's either too late or too early, too hard to tell. This is how it gets on the days nearby. I remember the first time I dreamt about shooting; sometime days before a film school project I had a dream that we were there, in it, and it was becoming a disaster. A dream disaster, with it's own barely sensible logic. The floor opened up beneath an actress' feet. Water flooded a set. And then I had to wake up and realize I was going to have to go through it all over again. Luckily I have not dreamt about this shoot, yet. And I get my good moments in all this.
Producer Kyle's dog keeps us company and happy.
I grew up without any sort of organized religion. I am thankful for this. I had to plot my own course to make sense of the universe and came up with my own silly faith in people you can trust and the burden of responsibility individuals carry. But as a result I'm sort of vaguely superstituous. I like to think that all of us have a void that we need to fill with something. There's a great passage in Shelley's Frankenstein in which it's said that the good doctor spent his years in university reading the wrong books, passages on alchemy and necromancy when he should've been concentrating on actual medical texts. I always loved that. In elementary school I was bussed once a week to a gifted program and we were given an hour of free study in whatever subject we wished at the city library (where I would end up working in high school, and ultimately have dreams about the dewey decimal system). My friend Dave Lennstrom and I would rush to that section of dewey decimal that contained all the wrong books - books on sponteaneous combustion, poltergeists, UFOs, the paranormal. Yes, I spent my years in a gifted program probably reading Time Life's Mysteries of the Unexplained.
I suppose what I have always yearned for is a sense that the world is weirder than I experience it to be, or at least even more like the experiences that make me feel that there is an essential connectedness to everything. I want wild coincidence that defies odds. I yearn to hear about experiences that turned a person's hair white. I want proof that there are quantum possibilities that defy explanation, little strings hanging off the curtain separating us from the mechanism that runs the universe that can be tugged at. The funny thing is I do not believe a single one of these stories. The skeptic within me tears them to shreds. But I love them all the same.
I haven't had time to look at the news for days (I usually start my morning off with a survey of deplorable world affairs), but last night I had a dream about New York flooding and today my friend told me it had indeed rained something Biblical that night. I had a sense of total and utter deja vu today (they say it's merely a glitch in the brain; your subconscious reverses the flow of information into memory). It was so disarmingly specific. San Diego, watching a band play in their rehearsal space, having Tarin there with me, feelings I have about other people in my life, the knowledge that I'd sent a present to someone. My rational explanations cannot erase the strangeness of the sensation.
I rarely ever dream about people I know. I am even fascinated by nightmares. I am plagued by some; girlfriends of mine will tell you that occassionally I wake up shouting in the night, wild eyed, or sometimes I beg them to wake me up in a whispering voice. As the terror abates I feel as if I've been given something, a piece of a puzzle or a little sign to ponder over. Good dreams are even better, ones where I meet people I miss the best, and I never want to wake up on those days. I often roll over and try to wish myself back to sleep to resume them, but it never works.
They say that due to the construction of a film camera's shutter and a projector, that when you watch a movie projected on film you actually spend 1/48th of a second in the dark for every 1/48th of a second you see an illuminated frame. I do not find it coincidence that dreams are predominantly visual.
All that digression when I should discuss watching the band. Today I got to see them live for the first time, and not for long enough. If there is any alchemy in the world, it's the transformation of feeling that watching a performance can give you. Tarin and I left the practice space smiling, feeling pretty damned lucky to be working on such a beautiful song. One of the reasons I like videos, and am envious of musicians, is their ability to access emotions so immediately in such a a short amount of time. A good song takes me on an epic trip inside my head in the space of minutes. Just like dreams. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I wish the world and dreams were indivisible.
Producer Kyle's dog keeps us company and happy.
I grew up without any sort of organized religion. I am thankful for this. I had to plot my own course to make sense of the universe and came up with my own silly faith in people you can trust and the burden of responsibility individuals carry. But as a result I'm sort of vaguely superstituous. I like to think that all of us have a void that we need to fill with something. There's a great passage in Shelley's Frankenstein in which it's said that the good doctor spent his years in university reading the wrong books, passages on alchemy and necromancy when he should've been concentrating on actual medical texts. I always loved that. In elementary school I was bussed once a week to a gifted program and we were given an hour of free study in whatever subject we wished at the city library (where I would end up working in high school, and ultimately have dreams about the dewey decimal system). My friend Dave Lennstrom and I would rush to that section of dewey decimal that contained all the wrong books - books on sponteaneous combustion, poltergeists, UFOs, the paranormal. Yes, I spent my years in a gifted program probably reading Time Life's Mysteries of the Unexplained.
I suppose what I have always yearned for is a sense that the world is weirder than I experience it to be, or at least even more like the experiences that make me feel that there is an essential connectedness to everything. I want wild coincidence that defies odds. I yearn to hear about experiences that turned a person's hair white. I want proof that there are quantum possibilities that defy explanation, little strings hanging off the curtain separating us from the mechanism that runs the universe that can be tugged at. The funny thing is I do not believe a single one of these stories. The skeptic within me tears them to shreds. But I love them all the same.
I haven't had time to look at the news for days (I usually start my morning off with a survey of deplorable world affairs), but last night I had a dream about New York flooding and today my friend told me it had indeed rained something Biblical that night. I had a sense of total and utter deja vu today (they say it's merely a glitch in the brain; your subconscious reverses the flow of information into memory). It was so disarmingly specific. San Diego, watching a band play in their rehearsal space, having Tarin there with me, feelings I have about other people in my life, the knowledge that I'd sent a present to someone. My rational explanations cannot erase the strangeness of the sensation.
I rarely ever dream about people I know. I am even fascinated by nightmares. I am plagued by some; girlfriends of mine will tell you that occassionally I wake up shouting in the night, wild eyed, or sometimes I beg them to wake me up in a whispering voice. As the terror abates I feel as if I've been given something, a piece of a puzzle or a little sign to ponder over. Good dreams are even better, ones where I meet people I miss the best, and I never want to wake up on those days. I often roll over and try to wish myself back to sleep to resume them, but it never works.
They say that due to the construction of a film camera's shutter and a projector, that when you watch a movie projected on film you actually spend 1/48th of a second in the dark for every 1/48th of a second you see an illuminated frame. I do not find it coincidence that dreams are predominantly visual.
All that digression when I should discuss watching the band. Today I got to see them live for the first time, and not for long enough. If there is any alchemy in the world, it's the transformation of feeling that watching a performance can give you. Tarin and I left the practice space smiling, feeling pretty damned lucky to be working on such a beautiful song. One of the reasons I like videos, and am envious of musicians, is their ability to access emotions so immediately in such a a short amount of time. A good song takes me on an epic trip inside my head in the space of minutes. Just like dreams. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I wish the world and dreams were indivisible.
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