Having a bout of vivid strange dreams here in the Golden State…

A couple nights ago (early morning actually…it’s when I usually have my most vivid dreams) I dreamt I was a student again, this time in a small private college. There was just one large, long, oldish red brick building with tall windows and a huge grassy courtyard in front. 

I was taking some sort of business accounting course, and failing miserably at it. My usual approach to class time was to hide the fact that I just wasn’t absorbing the material by parroting what the professor, who was also the college headmaster, said in his lectures. But I understood none of it and I was sure that was going to catch up with me soon. I was feeling intensely guilty the whole time for faking it and I finally just admitted to the professor that I was out of my depth and I wasn’t going to continue with it anymore because I hated myself for faking it.

And instead of working on the problems we’d been assigned, I began to draw. The professor came over to my desk, looked at my drawings, said I should keep doing that instead of the business course I was in, and assigned me some art projects. Then he said his college needed to offer art classes and wondered why he hadn’t done that long ago.

That dream ended with my feeling intensely happy about the change in direction.

This morning I dreamt I was producing a crime/mystery movie for Alfred Hitchcock with Cary Grant in it. I’d assembled something like a pre pre pre production proof of concept around the script but instead of doing a bunch of storyboards I used clips from other movies and voice overs to give a sense of what a film based on that script might look like. It was just to get approval from Hitchcock to spend the money to continue with it.

In the movie, Grant is supposed to play an investigator with a major power company, assigned to investigate what appears to be a huge theft of power and money from the company. But it gets dicy. The powers that be think this guy can be duped into believing the whole thing is just a big mistake and there is no theft, when in fact it’s a huge cover up of missing millions and power being diverted for secret organized crime activity and the board of directors is party to all it it in exchange for kickbacks. But the FBI is getting suspicious and they need this guy to give them a clean bill of health to maintain the cover up. Unfortunately he won’t, and the pressure on him gets…dangerous. 

Hitchcock comes into his office, obviously dog tired from exercise. I come in and I can see he’s already busy on the phone and I apologise profusely but tell him I’ve finished with the movie. He misunderstands…it’s only that proof of concept I’ve finished…and tells me to get a screening ready for the investors.

I leave the office appalled, pretty sure that we didn’t want to be showing this proof of concept to the investors. And we didn’t actually have Grant on board yet. But I’m told yes, that’s exactly what Hitchcock wants, and I need to get Grant on board.

The dream ends as I’m describing the script to Grant, and he’s saying no, it’s just like North by Northwest again and he’s been there done that, and I’m telling him no, it’s not really like that because he’s not playing someone dragged into it by mistaken identity, he’s deliberately involving himself because it’s his job, but he’s playing someone who is determined to get to the bottom of things, because that’s his job after all, against a lot of very powerful people, some of whom are his bosses, just as determined to stop him from doing that but without alerting the feds that there really is a big crime going on.

I wake up while carefully going over the differences between our script and North by Northwest with Grant, who remains skeptical.