My Dream Diary: Calabash Choad
Feb. 20th, 2008 06:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexandraerinI have this problem with falling asleep during the day, which makes it harder for me to fall asleep at night, which makes me more likely to fall asleep during the day. Because of the nature of my work, I wouldn't honestly mind sleeping during the day if I could get a solid eight hours in, uninterrupted. However, for some reason--perhaps owing to the number of extraneous sounds which can intrude upon my subconscious--my daytime sleep is fragmentary and riddled with bizarre and often disturbing dreams.
I've been told (by friends I routinely tell my dreams to) I should keep a dream diary, as people would find my dreamscape an interesting place. Actually, I was told this by friends who pretty much know it doesn't matter how bizarre the dream they've just got done describing was, I can top it with whatever the last dream I remember happens to be.
The dream started off and I was the new Batwoman from DC's 52, the lesbian heiress one. Mercy Graves (Lex Luthor's amazonian Woman Friday) was trying to sabotage a landmine disarming demonstration at a local elementary school. No, not a protest against landmines... a demonstration for (elementary) school children on how to disarm them. The land mines in this case were kind of oblong plastic cases that opened like a clamshell, then popped up about a foot in the air and exploded. They only went off if they were physically opened, so they weren't really "landmines", per se. People would bait them by putting a dollar or something protruding out from it, and then victims would spring it trying to get the dollar.
From what I can infer, these devices were being left around town and somebody decided it was better to teach children how to disarm them (by removing the hinge) then to teach them to avoid them and report them to the authorities.
Mercy was sabotaging the demonstration because the children of crime lord Paul Giamatti (yes, my subconscious just grabbed an innocent actor who happens to be Italian and made him crime lord of Gotham City. I am a bad liberal.) were in the class and would be killed in the blast.
So, as Batwoman, I had to undo the sabotage without being seen. Because Paul Giamatti hated Batman so much that anybody in a bat-family costume would send him into a killing rage. If I used my Batwoman-gained knowledge to have the demo called off, he would have insisted on pressing forward with it. There was a big fight between me and Mercy, and in the end Paul saw me and I had to hit him with an amnesia inducing batarang, and then hit all his goons with regular batarangs to knock them out. I missed two of them, but they were pretty nice about it because they both agreed it was better everybody got knocked out than Paul went on a killing rage.
Then I had to make my escape over the towering rooftops of Gotham, because this was apparently on the 87th floor of the elementary school. Here we ran into a problem, because rather than being a third person comic/cartoon style view of rooftop action, this par of the dream played out realistically from my/Batwoman's point of view and I am terrified of heights. I managed to cling to an extrely tall (remember, 87th floor) black marble pillar that was sticking out of the ground for no particular reason and slide down a couple floors where I could slink back into the building through a window.
There it transpired that I wasn't Batwoman, I was actually Batman. And I wasn't actually Batman, I was the stuntman playing him in the original Tim Burton movie. Except the action that had just unfolded wasn't me doing the stunts, it was footage from a VH1 style "remember" show, about how big that movie had been. And the next clip was talking about how everything connected to it turned to gold, especially Jerry Seinfeld's originally minor role of giving audio instructions ("This is the end of side 1") for the soundtrack recording, which had controversially only been released in casette tape format. They showed a mention of this from Seinfeld (which did not, in fact, exist in 1989), of George congratulating Jerry for being "some kind of tape instruction given master" and Jerry going "I know, can you believe it? They're talking Grammy!" and then they cut to the clip of him winning a spoken word Grammy for it.
Apparently, instead of just reading the line he was given, he used the space to improvise a vaguely Dr. Seuss-style tale about people who marched across snowy fields to try to escape from annoying holiday drumming, and all the strange creatures they encountered, which included a "Calabash Choad who rode on a toad" and "Rondo the Blondo with his borrowed Bond-o", all of whom pulled out some kind of drum and bothered the exiles further. In the end, the implication was that the sound of their own marching in time, swish swish, through the snow drove them to keep marching until they died of exposure, but Jerry wisely let the very end of the story get lost in the fade out so the listener had to draw that conclusion for themselves. It was that subtlety which won over the critics and netted him the Grammy.
At this point, a more conscious part of my brain thought "Wasn't this supposed to be the soundtrack for BATMAN," and I jerked back into awakehood.
I've been told (by friends I routinely tell my dreams to) I should keep a dream diary, as people would find my dreamscape an interesting place. Actually, I was told this by friends who pretty much know it doesn't matter how bizarre the dream they've just got done describing was, I can top it with whatever the last dream I remember happens to be.
The dream started off and I was the new Batwoman from DC's 52, the lesbian heiress one. Mercy Graves (Lex Luthor's amazonian Woman Friday) was trying to sabotage a landmine disarming demonstration at a local elementary school. No, not a protest against landmines... a demonstration for (elementary) school children on how to disarm them. The land mines in this case were kind of oblong plastic cases that opened like a clamshell, then popped up about a foot in the air and exploded. They only went off if they were physically opened, so they weren't really "landmines", per se. People would bait them by putting a dollar or something protruding out from it, and then victims would spring it trying to get the dollar.
From what I can infer, these devices were being left around town and somebody decided it was better to teach children how to disarm them (by removing the hinge) then to teach them to avoid them and report them to the authorities.
Mercy was sabotaging the demonstration because the children of crime lord Paul Giamatti (yes, my subconscious just grabbed an innocent actor who happens to be Italian and made him crime lord of Gotham City. I am a bad liberal.) were in the class and would be killed in the blast.
So, as Batwoman, I had to undo the sabotage without being seen. Because Paul Giamatti hated Batman so much that anybody in a bat-family costume would send him into a killing rage. If I used my Batwoman-gained knowledge to have the demo called off, he would have insisted on pressing forward with it. There was a big fight between me and Mercy, and in the end Paul saw me and I had to hit him with an amnesia inducing batarang, and then hit all his goons with regular batarangs to knock them out. I missed two of them, but they were pretty nice about it because they both agreed it was better everybody got knocked out than Paul went on a killing rage.
Then I had to make my escape over the towering rooftops of Gotham, because this was apparently on the 87th floor of the elementary school. Here we ran into a problem, because rather than being a third person comic/cartoon style view of rooftop action, this par of the dream played out realistically from my/Batwoman's point of view and I am terrified of heights. I managed to cling to an extrely tall (remember, 87th floor) black marble pillar that was sticking out of the ground for no particular reason and slide down a couple floors where I could slink back into the building through a window.
There it transpired that I wasn't Batwoman, I was actually Batman. And I wasn't actually Batman, I was the stuntman playing him in the original Tim Burton movie. Except the action that had just unfolded wasn't me doing the stunts, it was footage from a VH1 style "remember" show, about how big that movie had been. And the next clip was talking about how everything connected to it turned to gold, especially Jerry Seinfeld's originally minor role of giving audio instructions ("This is the end of side 1") for the soundtrack recording, which had controversially only been released in casette tape format. They showed a mention of this from Seinfeld (which did not, in fact, exist in 1989), of George congratulating Jerry for being "some kind of tape instruction given master" and Jerry going "I know, can you believe it? They're talking Grammy!" and then they cut to the clip of him winning a spoken word Grammy for it.
Apparently, instead of just reading the line he was given, he used the space to improvise a vaguely Dr. Seuss-style tale about people who marched across snowy fields to try to escape from annoying holiday drumming, and all the strange creatures they encountered, which included a "Calabash Choad who rode on a toad" and "Rondo the Blondo with his borrowed Bond-o", all of whom pulled out some kind of drum and bothered the exiles further. In the end, the implication was that the sound of their own marching in time, swish swish, through the snow drove them to keep marching until they died of exposure, but Jerry wisely let the very end of the story get lost in the fade out so the listener had to draw that conclusion for themselves. It was that subtlety which won over the critics and netted him the Grammy.
At this point, a more conscious part of my brain thought "Wasn't this supposed to be the soundtrack for BATMAN," and I jerked back into awakehood.
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no subject
on 2008-02-21 01:03 am (UTC)no subject
on 2008-02-21 01:36 am (UTC)no subject
on 2008-02-21 01:41 am (UTC)When I'm only half-asleep, I have terrifying semi-dreams where I'm conscious of my surroundings but every little sound is translated into something menacing trying to get into my apartment/bedroom/head and I wake up short of breath, afflicted with lingering sleep paralysis, and paranoid for the rest of the day.
no subject
on 2008-02-21 01:43 am (UTC)I also have the weirdypants dreams, problem being that alarms or waking up drive them out of my head basically immediately.
no subject
on 2008-02-21 02:51 am (UTC)no subject
on 2008-02-21 02:52 am (UTC)