The Jeff Stream Presents: The Jeff's Dream
There's science fiction in my sleep
There are several fascinating posts that I’ve been eager to write, but this week has not been conducive to linear thought or sustained attention. Instead, do your best to enjoy reading about a couple of weird dreams I had last Sunday night.
A platoon of human conquerors coast through the cloudy, swirling atmosphere of an alien planet they’ve just entered for the first time. Inspired by 1972’s Solaris, the ocean of mist allows us no glimpse of what it hides as we skim its surface in our hovering jet-skis. Orange-yellow billows of Maxfield Parrish architecture flow between horizons underneath a golden sky.
Far ahead, we can spy the outlines of a hulking creature likewise suspended above the clouds. It’s protected by an exterior shell of thick white bone with stacks of rib-like striations delineating separate anatomical sections, like a segmented horseshoe crab of geological proportions. Beneath the skirt of this structure can be observed hints of a glistening, soft purple flesh. As a birdlike creature flies past at some distance, a tentacular limb shoots out from beneath the carapace and entraps its prey in mid-air. Alarmed, our soldiers shoot at the thing, causing it to plunge down into the miasma below.
The unseen predator can now attack us at any time, sending a wave of paranoia through the group. Our commanding officer, a sadistic asshole, turns to us with an expression of furious glee. “Alrighty - if we’re gonna destroy it, we need some bait. Sorry!” He pulls out his gun and shoots my scooter, knocking it out from under me and causing me to tumble into the depths.
My sense of rage and betrayal are boundless. Fortunately, I don’t have far to fall - after about 10 feet or so, I land unharmed on a surface of wooden flooring. Looking up, I’m surprised to find myself in an old-fashioned, well-worn domestic interior, with wood-panelled walls and dusty brocade drapery. There’s a shelf of books in front of me, and I can tell from the spines that they contain information about this planet, its geography, its life-forms, etc.
I’m about to pull out a volume when two teenage girls appear behind me. I’m shocked to discover that there are other humans on this planet. They explain that they’re the remnants of a previous expedition, and they’ve survived as long as they have by sheer chance - the rest of their group has been picked off one at a time by the creature. They warn me that, if I want to survive, I’ll need to stay careful and observant. They gesture for me to follow them to their encampment - but it’s already too late.
In an instant, two thin purple pseudopods shoot into my eyes from an uncertain distance. Everything flashes white as the predator’s gelatinous extensions penetrate my head and force their way deep into my body. I understand vividly that their acidic poison has already started to liquefy me from the inside, rendering me into nutrients as I experience every painful second of my dissolution.
That’s where I woke up, with the abruptness that only nightmares can provoke. I pulled my feet away from the edge of the bed in case the purple slime tried to reach up and pull me out. I fell back asleep soon enough, and eventually wandered into dream number two.
This time, the setting was a satirical film from the 1970s - undoubtedly influenced by watching Jules Feiffer’s Little Murders a couple of weeks back. I was a character played by the actor Gerrit Graham - a smug, douchey cosmopolitan type whose overwhelming sense of privilege can’t mask the fact that he’s an utter weirdo.
Not incidentally, for years Graham has played an oversized role in my interior cinematic universe. I first encountered him as the Blofeldian principal of a rival high-school in the underrated early-’90s Fox TV series Parker Lewis Can’t Lose. With his bug eyes and cartoonish demeanor, I found him utterly transfixing. Since then, I sit up with fascinated delight whenever he turns up in something unexpected - as the glam rocker Beef in Phantom of the Paradise, a guerrilla street performer in De Palma’s earlier Hi Mom!, an unctuous swinger in TerrorVision, a sleazy TV actor in Old Boyfriends. He’s an ubiquitous that-guy presence of the ‘70s and ‘80s, but always as the strangest guy in the room. I actually ended up becoming lightly acquainted with him about 25 years ago, briefly stage-managing a play he was directing in the Hudson Valley. I had drinks with him a couple of times and was surprised at how normal he was in person.
So back in the dream I/Gerrit Graham/Gerrit Graham’s character was pacing around in a medical waiting room as his/their/my wife was undergoing some sort of absurd but unspecified cosmetic surgery nearby. The office was located in a sort of rambling Upper West Side townhouse that had been subdivided into various medical units - there was nothing remotely glamorous or futuristic about it, yet it was clearly set in a heightened version of the Me Decade, as if I were dreaming a kind of dystopian Annie Hall.
Impatient and anxious - presumably in the hopes that my movie wife’s surgery would successfully render her a more successful marital showpiece - I wandered into an adjacent waiting room, where I was quickly descended upon by a small crowd of young men in lab coats. “You’re here! Thank God! We’re late! We need to get moving!” Despite my protestations, they took my the elbows and hauled me into a consultation for an impending procedure.
As they pulled down wall charts and chattered all at once about the groundbreaking operation I was about to undergo, it became clear that they were preparing to turn me into a woman. But this wasn’t to be a typical “sex change” - oh no! The breakthrough was that it was reversible. The experiment would prove that men could become women whenever they wanted, and vice versa - a breakthrough for civilization!
It was clear that the film’s vision of comedy was to show Graham waking up to stare down at his newly enhanced chest before doing a shocked take to the camera - the panicked indignation of a late-century alpha male. But around here I stood aside from the character I was playing and looked up on the scene with a kind of bemused curiosity. Who wouldn’t want the ability to experience life beneath someone else’s skin, sans repercussions? Yes, it could, in its very ‘70s way, herald the next stage of the Sexual Revolution - but it could also open up new frontiers in empathy. What would it be like to become the thing you love?
I slowly drifted away from the Graham character as he was strapped down onto a gurney and imagined myself looking into a mirror with a completely different face and body. I slowly emerged into consciousness asking, Is this still me?
That’s all for today. Armchair Freudians - have at! Shouldn’t be too hard.