Last night I dreamt my friend Justin, a filmmaker, had a pen that talked. It couldn't say much, didn't have a big vocabulary, but you could have a rudimentary conversation with it. It was a large black pen, like a fountain pen, and its voice sounded like paper on paper.
A little later, instead of a talking pen, he had a talking dog. Again, it didn't have a big vocabulary. Medium-sized dog. Its voice sounded like a hoarse growl, kind of like when you try to speak but have no breath. It had these plastic things on either side of its torso, which made it sort of look like it had been opened and operated on, ribs and bone and organs visible, but it hadn't been operated on, and the things on the side were just fake plastic. Underneath them, it was just a dog.
For part of the dream, I was supposed to be getting married to this Japanese woman I'd grown up with, not an actual person I knew, just knew in the dream, named Norako. Then as the wedding approach, we realized we hadn't seen each other in decades, and didn't really know each other, so we decided to call it off, though we were embarrassed to do so. (I did know a Japanese girl briefly while growing up. Her name was Naoko. Her father was working in Pittsburgh for a year.)
Some time after that, I was supposed to perform in a play Justin had written. Maybe with the talking pen, maybe not. We had to travel on foot to the place where the performance was to take place, like itinerant performers. We were split into two groups, I was in the smaller group of about 5 people. We were kind of like an adventuring group. Justin was in the larger group. We got split up.
As my group got closer, we realized we hadn't had anything to drink for days, and were getting worried and started to look for water. We were in a deep forest at this point. Then, suddenly, we fell through a hole beside the path, which led to a muddy cliff, which led to a large creek. I remember thinking that the thirst thing should have been set up sooner. It had just been introduced at the beginning of this episode, and then was suddenly solved. There should have been nods to the fact that we were running out of water in earlier episodes.
Some time after that, we got to the building where the performance was to take place. There were many complicated staircases. Justin's group was due to arrive soon. I realized I hadn't started learning my part, and I was supposed to be the lead, and the performance was in a few hours.
It didn't feel like a cliche at the time. Definite real sense of failure, which meant that was the emotional state I woke up in. Not a great way to start the day.
When my group fell down the hole, right before that, a woman in the group had made a remark that following our feet had always led us to what we needed before, and hadn't let us down yet. When we fell down the hole, the "camera" stayed up at the top of the cliff for a moment, and after she'd fallen through, and after everyone else was already sliding down the cliff, she popped her head up, Wile E. Coyote style, and remarked that following our feet still worked.
The things on the dog were less like a costume and more like the flimsy plastic, shaped thing you might hang up on the wall for Halloween. Except instead of pumpkins, it was internal dog anatomy. And instead of hanging it on your door, it was attached to the dog.
The itinerant performers thing might have been pulling from the troupe in Floating Weeds, the first Ozu film I saw when I was studying Japanese film at Pitt with Keiko McDonald.
The episodes thing was about the way a lot of TV shows will introduce a problem then solve it in the same episode. It was always disappointing when shows did this, particularly shows with longer arcs like B5, which was probably the example I was thinking of.
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