About About Schmidt

Last night I spent a small but significant portion of my life watching a late night movie on TV, rather than going to bed at a time when normal people are sleeping deeply. The movie was called About Schmidt, a movie that was pretty big at the time it came out, starring Jack Nicholson as a recently retired insurance guy, whose future seems uncertain and whose life up until that time seems to have little meaning. Good movie.

He does some soul-searching, trying to make some meaning out of his life, which he feels has had little impact on anyone at all. Throughout the movie he writes to his new foster child Ndugu, a little Tanzanian boy that he begins to sponsor through a worldwide children's charity after seeing a commercial. (Incidently, during the actual commercials, they ran a very long Christian Children's Fund ad several times). It is through these letters to Ndugo that Schmidt really lets out his inner thoughts, since he rarely can do so with the people around him, who generally don't understand him. In the end, he finds a glimmer of meaning in his life which makes all the difference.

My self-conscious, however, has apparently deemed the movie imcomplete, and so it has continued the movie in my dreams as I slept. Schmidt goes on to remarry, this time to a woman with a love for life, who Schmidt relates very well to. Schmidt also takes up the electric guitar in my dream. His is the only apartment on the top floor of the building where they live, so this is where he and his new rock band play every day. They're not bad. But the man who lives downstairs, a stuffy young thirty-something guy who represents the Schmidt of yesteryear, can't handle the racket of Schmidt's rocking out. He says whoever is playing that sound is an "abomination." So Schmidt turns himself completely into an abominable sasquatch (not snowman - I don't know why). But he is abominable, and enters the man's apartment in order to scare the piss out of him. He doesn't roar or anything, he just talks to the man, explaining that he is abominable, and that the man ought to be terrified of him. The man was terrified, in a rather subtle sort of way. Good job, Schmidt.

And good job subconscious. Way to make a good story even better. My brain is awesome.

Vikings are ugly

Vikings are uglier even than pirates.

kee-HOh-tay

Twice in the same year now we see the evidence of ignorance with respect to the existence of Don Quixote, heroic character of legend, subject of the great Cervantes' magnum opus El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha, considered by the literary world to be the first modern novel, and thought by many to be one of the most important literary works ever written. The year's first case is well known: a young man with dark hair (pictured below), likely to be of Greek decendence, was reported to enter the home of a certain reader of the Quixote, where the dark-haired man glanced at the book's cover, then said quizzically, "Don QUIX-ote?" As any moderately aware person will tell you, the name Quixote comes from the Spanish name Quijote, pronounced "kee-HOh-tay." This man, however, said "KWICKS-oat," as though it were the name of a cereal for children. Then the dark, hairy man poked fun at the reader of the Quixote for believing the novel was widely known, at which point the reader suggested that the man go outside and ask the first four people he met whether they had heard the name Don Quixote before. The dark-haired man did so. Three of the four people questioned simply confirmed their knowledge of the novel's existence. The fourth answered by breaking into song, singing "To Dream the Impossible Dream," the well-known theme song to the famous Don Quixote film Man of La Mancha. The reader was vindicated.

The second case of ignorance was of a similar, albeit less extreme, nature, wherein the young man in question (also pictured below), apparently from some obscure town in the Arizonan desert, was altogether unaware of the pronunciation of the novel's title character. He was also previously unaware of the novel's existence, reporting absolutely no former knowledge of the book or its author.

A common thread between the Quixotically ignorant has been found. During seemingly unrelated conversations with each of the previously mentioned young men, each professed a significant disbelief in the moon landing of 1969. Witnesses spoke to the young Arizonan in his own Provo apartment, where he reportedly made the comment, "I'm not sure I believe we did it." Months earlier, in the midst of a similar conversation, the dark-haired Greek allegedly commented, "There's a lot of evidence out there that it didn't happen."

The following images represent the only photographic depictions currently available for these two young men.

Making sense of the nonsense

Having rethunk what I had pre-thunk, and thinking there may be more thinking to be thunk than originally thunk, I think I will rethink my pre-thinking. (This post takes another look at yesterday's Robot me).

Yesterday's dreams, along with the accompanying post, have inspired more curiosity to my mind than has been precedential. So together with a few modos de pensar presented to me by some of my more inspiring school classes, I have considered and reconsidered some of the implications and nuances of the dreams I have, the memory I have of those dreams, and the notes that I make based on those memories. And now, in one of the deeper and more thought-provoking posts this blog has seen (and it is suspected that there will be very few of its kind), I present the thinking that I have recently rethunk.

As I read the dream in its current written form, I can see areas which are not perfectly consistent with my memories of the actual dream. There are some inconsistencies in there, but not because of any intent on the narrator's part to deceive or misrepresent. Take, for instance, the part of the ugly robot in the garage, and the boys that built it. During the final song, I remember a confusing mixture of singing and music, as well as pauses in the music where I would hear the words "hot dog." The words seemed to have been intended as part of the song, and yet were so distinct from the rest of the song that they are the only words I remember. There may not even have been other lyrics at all. In my previous post, I assign the music to some background source, and the words "hot dog" to the ugly, jumping robot. But the boys may have been singing as well, and the music may have been coming from the robot itself, or may have not come from any one source, but may have simply emanated throughout the dream, penetrating everything. The way the dream is written, however, is the way in which I have made sense of it, putting it into some sort of intelligible narration. Thus the dream, as bizarre as it remains, takes on a more logical format.

And perhaps that is the key to the inconsistency. Written narration looks for logic and pattern, and can often be represented by the classical plotline, with exposition, rising action, climax, and denouement. Even when the classical model doesn't work, a more broken up, realistic plotline model can be drawn. But written narration seems to have no support at all for the dream sequence format, which knows little of logic and pattern, or even the erratic, meandering sequences of real or realistic life. So dream falls apart in the presence of narration, and vice versa.



Another example of the dream/narration inconsistency involves a conscious omission in the narrative where words just can't make sense of the nonsense. My own swirling mass of intangible, ephemeral memories on the matter only just come close. I'll attempt it in words anyway. I left out the part where, after suggesting that I learn to do flips (from either acrobatics or something like it), Angelina Jolie takes me around to another part of the garage and shows me how. But not by doing any flips. Or martial arts. Or acrobatics. We are both sprawled out on the ground, with our stomachs down, propped up on our elbows, with our heads close together. Like two kids taking a close look at an anthill. And she is showing me some color-coded wires, explaining what each color represents. Somehow, understanding the wiring down on the ground was directly related to me learning to do flips. Each of the four wires represented a concept related to it, though in retrospect, if I could remember the words she used, I think the concepts would prove to be bizarre and imaginary ideas. At least three of the four would be. She said she couldn't remember what the fourth stood for. As it turns out, I don't think I ever learned to do flips in the dream.

The third and final major inconsistency that comes to mind is that of the severed head, which toward the end of the narration turns out to have arms, and the ability to swing around from tree to tree, much like a monkey. He was in fact very much like an animal, ever since coming "alive" again after his beheading. The severed head was never able to talk, and would bite people based on a seemingly animalistic instinct, rather than out of premeditated, human maliciousness. The inconsistency evolves around the fact that the current narration doesn't quite depict what was happening with the severed head. He was only a head at first. The girl with the ninja sword had most definitely chopped off his head. Only his head. The head of a man. While showing the head to the family, I had to hold his mouth shut to keep him from biting them with his sharpened teeth, already making him seem like more of an animal. Then he was swinging around with arms disproportionate to his seemingly large head. Toward the end of the dream, he had shoulders, arms, and a torso in addition to what was originally just a head. For a brief moment in the dream, this was confusing, but I seem to remember "reminding myself" that he had been cut in half after all, not beheaded. I think I was lying to myself. I even seem to remember him having the majority of his body by the very end, missing only his feet and part of his lower legs, as though he had only lost his feet. And yet he was still quite animalistic, like a household pet. Then he swung down and picked up the ugly robot's face, a humanesque face drawn onto a paper plate, with little folded rolls of masking tape on the backside, and secured it to the ugly robot, giving it life. The ugly robot then dances around and says "hot dog," evidence of a very limited vocabulary, yet a vocabulary greater than than that of the now animalistic severed head/body.

I don't think that each individual dream or detail of a dream has significance unto itself, outside of context. But I do tend to think that certain ideas or patterns will be found by looking at several of an individual's dreams. It seems fair to think that overwhelming thought patterns or fears that an individual has would be made manifest in dreams, though they may mask themselves with bizarre or unpredictable images. I just recently saw a movie with Angelina Jolie as a character who gave counsel. That she was the image chosen to represent the character in my dream is easy to understand. But the purpose of the character itself is not so easy, nor is the fact that she couldn't quite explain to me what she was trying to explain. Why would my subconscious mind linger on something like that?

I enjoy remembering so many of my dreams lately, and hope to see them in the future under a more enlightened point of view. But if not, at least they make for good stories.

Robot me

So here's the latest in my subconscious stream of sleep sagas.

My first memory is of standing near the produce at the grocery store, where I witnessed the murder of two people. A girl stood nearby. I think she had a ninja sword in her hands. I could see into the laundry room just a few feet away (you know, the grocery store laundry room), and there were the two men, lying on the floor, side by side, with no heads. At least not attached. One man the girl hated, but the other was apparently her boyfriend, and she seemed pretty sad about having killed him. I looked at the head of the boyfriend. It looked back at me, then shut its eyes again. I looked away, then looked at the head. It looked back at me. Woooooh. Creepy. So I picked up the head and took it home with me. I showed the family, and warned them that the head liked to bite people. He had sharp teeth, too. But we had fun with the head. Soon it had grown arms and could swing around the place like a monkey, so I didn't have to carry it everywhere. Okay, Flash Forward.

I was a robot, built by a normal suburban family. They were normal, and they lived in the suburbs. I was tall and had cool features, like the ability to jump around the room with out getting tired and the ability to get a sore throat at times.

One day I was in the garage jumping around the room without getting tired. My little brother Michael was practicing parking the car on the driveway outside. I could tell because the garage door would get pushed inward every few moments, splintering the wood on the inside. Angelina Jolie, a member of the family, had just got home and was walking through the garage when she suggested that I study up on martial arts or acrobatics, so that when I'm jumping around all energetically I might throw some backflips in there. It seemed like a good idea for a change. I was always studying stuff like world history and the behaviors of modern societies (in my attempt to become assimilated to human society). I got a sore throat. Topanga from Boy Meets World came over and asked Angelina if she could use the restroom. That was pretty weird. She took a really long time, too. I didn't see her for the rest of the dream. Flash Back.

The head, which now had half a body, was swinging on some trees outside. He swung down to where some boys had been jerryrigging their own robot outside of their garage. It was an ugly robot, and it didn't have a face yet. The head/half-body swung down and taped the face to the robot, completing the project. The robot, which looked like scrap metal assembled haphazardly together, started jumping around the garage, as the boys sang along to a song playing in the background. At key moments there would be a break in the song lyrics, at which time the robot would chime in, saying "hot dog." The boys were delighted. Their robot was a success.

Haiku of truth

Pensive I sometimes
look while secretly thinking
of nothing at all