Dream a little dream

One might have thought, after the scene in Living In Oblivion where Peter Dinklage lays down the law, that nobody would dare to put a dwarf in a dream sequence ever again. In fact, the meme still crops up on a regular basis, but if you do indulge in achondroplastic reveries, you’re expected to put big quotation marks around them. When David Lynch cast Michael J Anderson in Mulholland Dr, it wasn’t about dwarfs per se, it was a recognition lollipop to fans of Twin Peaks; and in any case, you weren’t supposed to know whether the whole thing was a dream or not. Similarly, the dwarf in In Bruges was an actor in a film, which is a bit like being in a dream, but not quite (which is the whole point of Living In Oblivion).

On this basis, Werner Herzog presumably thought he could get away with it in his latest, My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, because Lynch is one of the 12 (count ’em!) executive producers, so it becomes a cheeky nod to his colleague’s penchant, rather than a tired metaphor for encroaching madness. The fact that what he ended up with was more of a mid-level Coen Brothers effort than anything Lynchian is another matter entirely.

Moving media, David Mitchell (this one, rather than that one or that one) has a go in his most recent novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. The central figure falls asleep and dreams he is confronted by a hunchbacked dwarf wielding a leg of pork, although it soon transpires that it’s not a dream; and it’s not a dwarf; and, most disturbingly, it’s not actually pork...

A candy-colored clown

I think I stopped dreaming for a while, or maybe I was dreaming dreams that left no trace on the waking memory. Now I dream again, but the dreams are quite un-dreamlike, entirely feasible if sometimes a little implausible. In other words, rather boring. I recently found myself attempting to deliver a large mattress to a flat in Plymouth. It’s not something I’ve ever done, and I’ll be surprised if I ever do it, but it’s hardly the sort of thing that can only occur in the fevered imagination.

And on those rare occasions when my dreams do break free from the bondage of banal reality, they’re still pretty much empty of excitement. For example, last night, I dreamed I was on some kind of commercial time travel flight, where everybody was dressed in 1970s sci-fi chic (think Buck Rogers in the 25th Century). Potential for some kind of reality-defying adventure, one might think? Nah. Rather than meeting Tutankhamun, I occupied myself by filling in the landing card, but I made a mistake, and had to ask the stewardess for a new one.

So, tell me. How dull are your dreams?

Let's plow...

You know when you're dreaming, and something in the dream startles you so much that you wake up?

Well, there I was, back at school, as I so often am in my dreams; I'm sure many of you do the same thing. Specifically, I was on the path between the art block and the science labs, the one that led past the Goodfield block (named in honour of a headmaster who'd dropped dead on the tennis court, if I remember correctly). And, because life in dreamland is really just one big movie, there was a soundtrack; a not-desperately-good, defiantly 1980s cover version of the Stones' 'Miss Amanda Jones'.

And (maybe I should have realised I was dreaming at this point) I was dancing. Dancing madly to the music on the soundtrack, dancing up the path to the labs. I was still dancing as I went into the lower biology lab, vaguely remembering that it was also my form room when I was in the third year. There were some people in the lab, and they seemed to appreciate my moves.

"Go for it, Duckie!" called one girl. "Keep dancing."

And I caught my reflection in the mirror that seemed to be provided for the purpose, and realised I was dressed in a garish thrift-store outfit, quiff, jacket sleeves rolled up, that could only exist within the confines of a John Hughes movie. And yes, I was Duckie, lovelorn geek hero of Pretty in Pink. But...

"Bollocks," I thought. "The jangly version of 'Miss Amanda Jones' wasn't in Pretty in Pink. It was in Some Kind of Wonderful."

And that's when I woke up. Roused from my slumbers, not by subconscious fear or embarrassment, as a normal person would be, but by my own pedantry.

Funny in the head

When I'm going anywhere for any length of time, I always make sure I have at least two books with me. One of them can usually best be described as literary fiction: which means that it has appeared on a university syllabus somewhere; or a slice of it has graced the pages of Granta or the New York Review of Books or some similar publication; or the author is foreign, or dead, or has preposterous facial hair. I hate to contemplate a scenario in which I have both the inclination to read Don Quixote or Gravity's Rainbow, but don't have the opportunity.

I'm deluding myself, of course; it's the inclination that's the problem. Which is why I also pack something a wee bit easier, a bit less literary. The cover tends to be in brighter colours than that of the literary tome, and the author's name will be shiny, or embossed, or both. There may even be a positive mention from a mid-market tabloid.

Which is how, on my last trip out of town, I came to be carrying Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled, with which I seemed to have been stuck at the seven-tenths mark for about six weeks; and The Killing Joke, by Anthony Horowitz.

The latter ticks all those non-literary boxes: garish, glossy cover; "sheer enjoyment," squeals the Daily Mail; and the first few pages establish a scenario (unsuccessful, recently-dumped actor in a bad pub in North London) that seems interchangeable with the plots of Nick Hornby, John O'Farrell, David Nicholls and the like. We are in lad lit territory: a saga of urban bourgeois male disappointment and (one presumes) redemption. The plot kicks off when our not-even-anti-hero wonders where a particular (crass, unfunny) joke comes from; indeed, wonders whether jokes do in fact have origins. So we've got a grail myth of sorts, albeit made bathetic and small and insignificant for our small and insignificant world.

And then things go a bit odd for Guy. Jokes, of the most banal and formulaic kind, come to life around him. He slips on a banana skin, and finds a fly in his soup. He is stalked by an Englishman, a Scotsman and an Irishman, and his fate is determined by an individual's ability to change a lightbulb. On the periphery, a bishop discusses an actress, and a chicken, inevitably, crosses the road. It gets to the point that when you encounter, say, a woman suffering from elephantiasis, or someone else buying salami, you're desperately trying to work out what joke they've sprung from, wondering whether you've missed that particular meme.

This is weird stuff, well beyond the comfort zone of Hornby and his ilk. A couple shag in a hall of mirrors, in a scene that could have come from Pynchon or Vonnegut; the experience of being kept on hold by customer services is communicated by a phonetic transcription of Vivaldi ("DEE DEE DEE DEE DEE DEE DEE DEE / DUM DIDDLY DUM DIDDLY DUM DIDDLY DUM DIDDLY") repeated to cover the bulk of 15 pages, raising the spectre of Douglas Coupland.

And then I realise that Guy's travails in the world of jokes bear more than a passing similarity to the experiences that Ryder, Ishiguro's protagonist, has in The Unconsoled. Joke and dreams, after all, come from the deepest recesses of ourselves; dreams from the subconscious, jokes maybe from the collective unconscious (so there's no favouritism in the Freud/Jung wars, Frasier fans). Damn it, Horowitz and Ishiguro have pretty much written the same book: millennial Kafka; unsympathetic heroes leading lives well beyond our experience, but well within our understanding, even if we have to delve a little into areas we don't want to go. The only real difference between the two books is that I finished the Horowitz in a matter of hours, while the Ishiguro still glares balefully from my bedside table.

To paraphrase a legendary comic, albeit one not as funny as Freud, maybe it's the way they tell 'em.

When in robe

I'm in the midst of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled. I've liked his writing for a long time, but I've avoided this one: partly because at 535 pages, it's about 150 outside my comfort zone (I have no compunction about casting aside a book after a few chapters, but I'm sufficiently bloody-minded that if I do get to the half-way point, I have to keep on to the end, and 200+ is just a wee bit too dutiful); and also because this is the one that makes even devoted Ishiguro groupies raise their eyebrows and change the subject. The back cover quotes include "complex and ambitious" and "a work of great interest", which are often criticspeak for "tries too hard" and "brave failure".

Well, maybe, but it looks OK so far (currently, not quite half-way). Essentially, it's the story of Ryder, a concert pianist who arrives in an unnamed European city to play a concert. Beyond that, he seems at a loss about what his schedule is, although he's happy enough to fall into step with any suggestion made by his hosts; indeed, he seems perfectly at ease in any situation he encounters - it's the past and future that seem to present problems.

At first, you think Ryder's suffering from some sort of amnesia, rather similar to condition of the protagonist in Memento, existing in a permanent present. It's Kafka meets Jane Austen, where the greatest threat is social embarrassment. But things get odder when Ryder goes to a cinema showing 2001: A Space Odyssey - which for the purposes of this narrative stars Clint Eastwood and Yul Brynner. It's when Ryder fails to notice this that a new explanation presents itself. He's dreaming.

More specifically, it's that banal category of dream where every component is normal, but the order and context are just a little bit muddled. People Ryder hasn't seen since childhood accost him on the street, as if they've popped up fully-formed from the deepest recesses of his memory. He overhears conversations from several rooms away, which he couldn't possibly pick up in real life. Most telling, he finds himself at a posh reception in his dressing-gown and slippers. It's a classic dream scenario, the vulnerability of pyjamas-in-the-playground, the sort of experience that would result in abject humiliation in reality, but in the dream state only provokes a mild discomfiture, the sensation that something's not quite as it should be, similar to a familiar film suddenly being recast before your eyes. It also summons up the ghost of Arthur Dent, who in the TV and the movie versions of The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (but not, as far as I recall, the book or radio incarnations) wears pyjamas and a dressing-gown. Which brings up the question - is Douglas Adams's own universe (not to mention life and everything) just an extended dream sequence as well? Another character that comes to mind is Ivan Goncharov's idle anti-hero Oblomov, who gave the Russian language the glorious abstract noun "halatnost", literally "dressing-gown-ness", a state of intertia, apathy, daydreaming and general blaaah.

And somewhere in between the two come my own juvenile scribblings. When I was at primary school, we were supposed to keep a diary, detailing what we'd done at the weekend. Being a pathologically nerdy and anti-social child, what I'd done at the weekend usually comprised watching Play Away, reading half a dozen Ladybird history books and eating cheese on toast, which, frankly, didn't make great copy. So I'd concoct bizarre stories of aliens, zombies, criminal masterminds and general high-jinks, all of them ending with something along the lines of "...and then I woke up."

I'm not sure yet whether Ishiguro is going to reach for the same cop-out. I'll let you know when I get to page 535.

PS: Talking of Adams, this excavation of the long-lost Milliways computer game pulls off the scabs of the creative process; thanks to Dr Hocking for flagging this one up.

Psssh t'kooff

1.
Dr Richard Beeching's report of 1963, The Reshaping of British Railways, led to the closure of 3,000 stations and 4,000 miles of track. The results of its implementation on the British landscape were immense, not least the disused railway lines that still litter the countryside and suburbs, and the boost the so-called Beeching Axe gave to car ownership, road frieght and road building; where crossing the road had been a straightforward matter for pedestrians up to the mid-1960s, the increase in traffic necessitated the creation of more darkened, piss-stained underpasses.

Of course, the real question is, if Beeching's recommendations had not been accepted, what would Morrissey be doing now?

2.
I had a strange dream the other night. I needed to iron a shirt, but couldn't find the ironing board. It was only then that I remembered that (for some reason that must have seemed entirely sensible within the parallel universe of dream logic) I had left the ironing board on the footbridge at Petersfield station.

Favourite worst nightmare

A further refinement to my long and tedious quest to define the modern intellectual: you are an intellectual if you have a recurring dream about going into an exam for which you haven't prepared more often than you have a recurring dream about standing in the school playground in nothing but your pants.

In every dream home a heartache

Back from our second trip this year to Cambodia, again to Siem Reap, home of the wondrous weirdness that is the temples of Angkor. I had a brief "aaah-this-is-the-life" moment, thinking how delightful it would be to spend my life strolling between ABC stout at The Warehouse and palm wine at the Grand Cafe, with occasional detours to the neo-apocalyptic landscape that is Ta Phrom, a place that adds new levels of meaning to the phrase 'urban jungle'.

But of course that would be Ta Phrom without hordes of doughy Austrian tourists; and Siem Reap without the aching poverty. And I realised what I really want is an amalgam of places: not just Ta Phrom, but the best chunks of Barcelona and Hong Kong, leading onto the more interesting sidestreets of New York and Edinburgh and Tokyo and Montreal and Rhodes; with Niagara Falls and the North York Moors and the Pyramids a gentle stroll away. And a really good Lebanese restaurant and about 143 fabulous bookshops and record shops and a branch of Muji as well. And free wi-fi, of course.

Which leads, I suppose, to a task for the weekend, or maybe a meme, or whatever. What would be your ideal location, concocted from all the fun bits of places you've visited, or even places you haven't? And don't worry that you're leaving out the bad bits. Think of it as a conceptual bespoke travel agent, with metaphysical overtones. Or something.

Normal service will resume next week, probably with a pompous rant about Japanese books and French films and Canadian pop music and stuff.