Dream Log: WW II Soldier in Italy

I dreamed I was an American Army private on a ship just off the coast of south-western Italy in January 1944, part of the force which was going to invade Anzio.

In real life, when the Allies came ashore on Anzio's beach on January 22, under the command of Major General John Lucas,  they spent days building up their position on the beach, unloading men and equipment, instead of taking advantage of weak German defenses and attempting to seize territory and expand their beachhead. The result of this was to allow German troops to rush in and surround the beach from high ground on all sides. The Allies didn't break out from their position on the beach until May, after having suffered tens of thousands of casualties. 

In my dream, Lucas had been replaced by General George Patton, who was popular with his troops because he had a reputation for getting relatively few of them killed. In my dream I was in one of the first waves of troops to hit the beach, and by the time we got there some were already far ahead, marching on the road to Rome, and we were ordered to catch up to them double-quick. A while later American tanks caught up with us, and took on as many of us foot soldiers as they could carry. I was on of the soldiers riding on the outside of a tank.

After less resistance along the way than we had expected, we arrived in great numbers in Rome on the 24th of January, to find that the Germans had evacuated the city and taken up positions to the north and west. While most of the invading force had little time to recuperate before pushing on beyond the city, I was stationed there more permanently. 

I was promoted from private to sergeant first class, and then a while later to second lieutenant. As soon as I became an officer, my lifestyle changed completely. My quarters changed from a warehouse, which I had already considered to be quite nice because it had been dry and clean and even fairly warm, to an upper-middle-class mansion which just a handful of us had all to ourselves. I spent my days in palaces, working mostly as an interpreter and translator, hobnobbing with international aristocracy and famous artists. 

All of this was definitely preferable to slogging through mud for days at a time, beaten eaten alive by fleas and mosquitoes while being shot at.

 

A crooked Major was stealing just as much fine art as was able to load onto trucks, using my name so that he could attempt to frame me if his business went south. It did, I was arrested, but soon exonerated. The Major had picked a fall-guy who was friends with way too many artists.

A beautiful young Italian princess fell head-over-heels in love with me. To my astonishment, her family approved of me. (Speaking privately to me, her father, the Prince, shared some remarkably enlightened concerns about aristocratic inbreeding and a too-narrow gene pool.) After we finished trouncing the Axis -- sooner than irl because Anzio and some other things had gone better than in real life -- I retired from the Army and married her, adding the new title of viscount to my Army rank of captain. In addition to our always being much more than welcome in the family's numerous homes, we were presented with a lovely little (compared to some. Huge compared to most) house of our own near Tivoli as a wedding present. Well, la-dee-da.

Up until then the dream had been fairly realistic apart from telescoping time. Now, however, things took a decidedly abstract-dreamlike turn, as the beautiful Princess and I -- the shimmering luxury of her long black hair! Her dark eyes smoldering with passion! Her ivory skin! Her form like that of a goddess! -- spent time in an activity in which we were ourselves, life-size humans, and simultaneously each of us a polished wooden tile about two inches long by three tall with a portrait of her or me or someone else done somewhat in the manner of the portraits on playing cards, and we would take ourselves and other people -- that is, we would take these little wooden tiles -- and arrange them in patterns which were symbolic and powerful and endlessly fascinating. Somewhat like tarot, somewhat like the Glass Bead Game. Unlike tarot, instead of interpreting the world, this activity shaped it, changed it. This went on for quite a while before I woke up.

Dream Log: Grunt Work in NYC Theatre

Last night I dreamed I was working in a New York City Off-Broadway theatre, something I've done a lot of in waking life. Many New York actors make ends meet, when they're not acting, by taking tickets and ushering, and so forth, in theatres. Besides the pay it's also a chance to see a show for free, and tickets can be sort of expensive.

 

In my dream it was my first time working in this particular theatre, and I had no idea what I was supposed to do. I was one of a dozen or so people who were given receipt pads. We were supposed to help out when the line at the box office got too long. We were all wearing the standard usher outfit: black shoes, black pants and a white shirt provided by us, with a black vest and clip-on bow tie provided by the theatre,

I started flirting with an actress who was standing around holding a pad like the one I had. Pretty soon we were snuggling and kissing. She was wonderful. Beautiful and intelligent and witty. Just made me sigh to be around her, let alone having her permission to touch her. She reminded me of a wonderful actress I knew once in real life in NYC, who, amazingly, seemed to like me a lot, and it seemed as if she and I were beginning a romance, but I managed to screw it up.

One man came in, got a ticket and went into the theatre, and then another one did, and then the show started. None of us seemed interested in watching the show, so there were only two spectators this evening, each prominent New York theatre people themselves. 

None of us standing around with our receipt pads had had to do a thing. But each of us still got paid a $20 bill. Judging from this evening, it did not seem that the show was a huge commercial hit. But I didn't know anything about it. For all I knew it might have been playing for years in that theatre already, might have made a fortune before winding down.

We were discussing what we were going to do with our newfound 20 bucks when the house manager, a beautiful young woman, looked like an actress, approached with a clipboard holding a form she was filling out, and asked each of us in turn what our major non-theatre job was, and what our biggest weakness was at that job. 

I replied that I test drove EV's for the manufacturer (in real life I haven't yet had been employed by an EV maker), and that my biggest weakness was not concentrating on what I was supposed to do. "Asleep at the wheel?" the manager asked me, and some people laughed. "No," I replied, "I haven't actually caused any accidents yet. Not that absent-minded. What I mean is that I'm supposed to be talking into a tape recorder the whole time about the vehicle's performance, comfort, user interface and so on, and a lot of the time I just forget to do that, and drive, and think about show business instead."

Some of the others decided to blow their earnings on dinner. I and the actress whom I had been hugging and kissing went for a walk, holding hands. It was a pleasant evening, brisk but not unpleasantly cold. We told each other our life stories, window-shopped, people-watched. A nice stereotypical beginning to an NYC showbiz romance. Then I woke up.

Dream Log: Young Doctors in Love

I dreamed that I was an intern in a show somewhat like "Scrubs," and that I fell in love with another doctor.

The hospital where we worked looked as if it might have been built in the 1920's or earlier: a lot of grey bricks on the outside, a lot lacquered wood and Parcheesi-patterned tile on the inside. The building was huge, and we doctors got a fairly good workout running from ward to ward.

I don't actually know anything about medicine, so there's nothing to tell you our actual work.

We got caught up in zany situations.

For example: a large group of doctors, nurses, orderlies and other hospital employees came around a corner in a hallway, and there in a small cafeteria were a bunch of thugs well-known and frightening to us. They were wearing brightly-colored zoot suits. We ran past them to a stairway door, but when we opened the door we saw that someone had reversed the staircase, so that the only way to go through the door was to jump one story down.

For another example: I met a gentleman out in front of the hospital who said that he was looking for my boss, my boss had some explaining to do. I assumed that he meant my immediate superior, and I directed the man toward his office, thinking that this might be amusing to watch. But the more the man talked about the man who had some explaining to do, the less it seemed like my superior. All of a sudden I realized that he was not talking about the supervisor of interns to whom I reported, but the director of the entire hospital, a man I found to be much more frightening and less fun, and so I literally ran away.

That evening, another intern and I were getting increasingly touchy-feelly, and then all of a sudden we were full-on snogging.

snog
/snäɡ/

informal•British
verb
verb: snog; 3rd person present: snogs; past tense: snogged; past participle: snogged; gerund or present participle: snogging

kiss and caress amorously.
"the pair were snogging on the sofa"

noun
noun: snog; plural noun: snogs

an act or spell of amorous kissing and caressing.
"he gave her a proper snog, not just a peck"

At this point we were not certain that anyone had seen us. We said sensible-sounding things about not letting a relationship interfere with our jobs, and how there were good reasons why such relationships were frowned upon and seen as unprofessional, and so forth.

I went home and went to sleep, and had beautiful dreams about her.

That's right: I dreamed that I fell asleep and had dreams. In the dreams she was naked in a rain forest.

The next morning, first thing at work, although I was supposed to be doing other things, I went looking for her. My heart was pounding. I was so afraid that maybe she had meant those things she had said about being "sensible." I had said the same things, but I had been completely insincere. I didn't care about this job or any job, compared to being with her. Being with her was fundamentally more important.

Then I rounded a corner in the hallway and there she was, looking a bit more disheveled than usual, which made her look even more heartbreakingly beautiful than ever. I assumed that there was no possible way that I looked completely normal.

Before I could do anything or say a word she was in my arms with her head resting against my chest. We held each other so gently yet were so closely entwined at the same time. Some lyrics from a Suzanne Vega song ran through my head: "Hold me like a baby that will not fall asleep." She said sweet things, and I heard and felt each word at the same time, felt it vibrate on my chest. I lifted her up and we snogged for a while, then I set her back on her feet and she put her head on my chest again and said that she loved me. I said it back.

The rest of the dream consisted basically of us holding hands, and occasionally snogging, and waiting for someone to officially tell us that we were in trouble. Occasionally we would make an attempt to do our jobs, but we just stared uncomprehending at computer screens, impaired because we were brand-new in love.

And then I woke up.

Dream Log: Love and Theatre in New York City

I dreamed that I was a young man in New York City some time during world War II, and that I had been drafted. I was one of a long line of men, most of us wearing knee-length coats and hats, moving from room to room in some enormous building full of varnished wood, as we were processed.

As a group of us were sitting in what appeared to be a lecture hall, with chairs bolted to the floor and desktops which folded away beside the chairs, I saw a women whom, in waking life, I knew thirty years ago.

Then suddenly it was the present day in New York City, I wasn't being drafted, the woman and I were still young, and we had just fallen in love with each other. She was a member of a theatre company, and got me an audition for a play she was starring in, a big-time play, a play on Broadway. I got the part.

After my successful audition I talked to an old man who had a cart on the sidewalk from which he sold fine reeds for reed instruments, mostly for saxophones. It was about the size of a hot-dog cart, and the reeds were piled up inside a glass case. Many of the best sax players in the city got their reeds from this guy, and he was wealthy, just from his income from the cart. He had long, wild white hair and a long white beard. I asked him why he never got a store and moved his business inside. He didn't even try to answer. Instead, he just shook his head and gave me a look that seemed to say: If you don't already understand why I don't want to move off of the sidewalk, I don't know how to explain it to you. It was a friendly look, not a disdainful one. Then he said, "Excuse me for a minute," and turned away and did some business with Branford Marsalis.

I've dreamed many times that I was in New York City. Many times before I lived there for a few years in the mid-1990's, and many times since. In some of those dreams the city has looked much as it does on waking life; in some other it has looked nothing at all like the real city. Last night it looked pretty similar to the real city, but much more beautiful. The architecture and the streets and sidewalks and staircases of stone or concrete were grander, and there was some sort of a sweet, mellow glow to everything. In real life the light in New York City can be very beautiful at moments, but in this dream it was even better. Better than this picture. This picture was the closest I could find to how things looked in the dream. It wasn't that everything looked expensive in the dream. It was something else:

The day after I got the part in the play, I was scheduled to attend a rehearsal which started at 1 o'clock in the afternoon, and I was running late, and I was downtown, and the theatre was in midtown, about 40 blocks away, and I was moving slowly, because I was carrying two 50-pound barbells which I had just obtained somehow. The terrain between downtown and midtown was a bit hillier than it is in real life, and there were some huge outdoor staircases to be climbed, and going up all of those steps with an extra 100 pounds was really difficult. It became more and more clear that I was going to be late.

After I woke up, I realized that in that sort of situation in real life, I would just have put the dumbbells down, written them off, and got on the subway, or, if time was really pressing, hailed a cab. But in the dream, none of those things seemed to be feasible. In the dream, the dumbbells were much, much too valuable to even consider putting them down. In real life, dumbells cost about a dollar a pound, sometimes less, and scale pay in a Broadway play, if I'm correctly informed, is currently $2,034 per week.

I was an hour and a half late to the rehearsal. (And my arms and shoulders were killing me by the time I got there.) I assumed I was going to be fired. However, the next day, the woman with whom I was in love went roller-skating around Manhattan with several other actors and two skating bears. This attention-grabbing behavior signaled that I was with her, and that if they fired me, they were going to have to fire her, too. So they didn't fire me.

Before that day's rehearsal began, this wonderful woman gave me a big hug and tried to explain to me that, although my new 50-pound dumbbells were really cool and all, if I were in a situation like that again, I could afford to just let them go. She wasn't really getting through to me on that point before I woke up. Then, of course, I knew she was right.