The Dream Oscars

In a good night’s sleep you have about five big dreams, usually all concerning the same question. Each one contains a Philosopher’s Stone – an insight previously unknown to you that you can use to transform your waking life from base metal into gold. What treasure! What potential!

Each night as you fall asleep you teeter on the verge of bringing home the gold. After ninety minutes of deep sleep, the first dream is – well, let’s say the first dream is ‘screened’. The first dream of the night is usually the most vivid and surreal. Imagine the excitement down in the basement of your deep unconscious – maybe tonight’s the night! Picture this. Your dream director paces in the dark:

‘Maybe tonight’s the night!’

‘Maybe tonight’s the night to bring home the gold. Maybe tonight we’ll screen the dream of a lifetime. Maybe tonight she’ll finally get the message. Maybe tonight we can pull out all our best stops. Maybe tonight it’s Dream Oscars all round! What’s the theme for the night?’

‘The theme?’ echoes a rumbling voice from the Script Development Department in the depths of the dark unconscious. ‘We thought we might have another look at the self-esteem question tonight. We laid some good foundations with the power issue last night, so we’re ready to take a fresh look at self-esteem.’

‘Ah, big one,’ replies the dream director, one eye on the clock. ‘We’re ten minutes down and the clock’s ticking. Eighty minutes and we need the first dream up and ready to go. Order up the early life memories please – run a combined search on “power” and “self-esteem”.’

The familiar staccato splutter of modems firing up to download the memory neurons of the brain mingles with start-of-shift coffee.

The dream director taps her microphone. ‘Metaphors department, you in yet?’

‘In and rolling. We’ve got a good round-table blitz group in today. Should come up with some crackers tonight. I hear the Puns and Wordplay Department has a top-class crossword puzzle expert on the job tonight. We might be up for the Dream Oscars with tonight’s screenings.’

The dream director drums her fingers on her desk. ‘Seventy-five minutes and counting. Casting department, you on board? We need a big cast for tonight: the best you can, we’re going for the Dream Oscars. Theme is self-esteem and power. I want people from waking life, people from the past and a couple of  characters from fiction. Stick to theme, but think extremes; even go as far as caricatures. Oh, and we’ll need two extras. Make-up are standing by to archetypecast the extras.’

At ninety minutes exactly the first dream is screened and recorded for posterity in the Unconscious Memory Archives Department. At the same time a copy is sent, as always, to the Conscious Recall Database but with no expectation of success as the IT technicians are still chasing the dream deletion virus that entered the system at the same moment in history as the Industrial Revolution.

After the screening, brief congratulations are exchanged and then all heads are down to create the second dream. This time conditions are tighter. The deep sleep interval between dreams decreases as the night goes on and the dreaming periods get longer. With less time for creativity and production and longer stories to shoot, it’s no surprise that dreams closer to morning tend to be a little more mundane.

By morning the film crew are partying and retiring to doze at the Back Burner Inn for the day. You stir, fleetingly in contact with Conscious Recall Database, battling the dream deletion virus to archive the data over to the permanent conscious memory store. Somewhere between dreaming and getting out of bed a partial victory is declared, a dream or two are remembered and the still vigilant dream director wonders, before hitting the sack, if her movies have worked their magic.

Extract from The Dream Handbook, Jane Teresa Anderson.

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