Sic semper tyrannis.

The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities, that makes it seem inconceivable that other ways are viable, that removes the sense that there is an outside.

⎯Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind

Dream Archive 7: Death Mask

Tom and I were planning to remake a film called Death Mask. I don't know what it was about. It could have been one of the following (taken from IMDb):

Death Mask (1998) Wilbur works in an old carnival and shows some gruesome things to the puplic. He covered his face because he had a sadistic father who burned his face. Everybody makes jokes about his scars and when the new boss fired him, he go to an old swamp-witch who gives him a peace of wood from a hanging tree and Wilbur makes a mask from this piece of wood and put all his anger in this mask. When he puts the mask on, everybody who looks on this mask commits suicide. He has created the Death-Mask.

Death Mask (1984) Haunted by the drowning death of his own daughter, a police investigator embarks on an obsessive 10-year hunt for the identity of a dead boy, to the detriment of his family life.

Halloween Night A.K.A. Death Mask (1988) A kindly old grandfather is actually the leader of a murderous satanic cult which sacrifices its victims on Halloween.

The Death Mask (1914) A silent film starring Sessue Hayakawa. No plot summary available.

Dream Archive 6: Special Collections

Three nights ago:

Adam and I were sneaking around in part of a museum which was supposed to be closed to the public. We came to the Special Collections area. Adam wanted to see a particular book they had there. It was a piece of propaganda written by an old Middle Eastern general who declared himself king of a certain country. The book was very small, only a little larger than a matchbook. We had to turn the pages with a little pencil they gave us. The book got larger as we read it. We discovered that the museum had inserted notes to the reader between the book's pages. One of the notes was printed on a greeting card. When we were done looking at the book, the woman behind the counter said, "Now I'm going to play you a song. It's by the Velvet Underground." She started the song, which was the same one that had been in my head all day (in the dream), and then began to recite the names of the songwriters, musicians, and everyone involved in the song's production. She also gave very specific details about the time and place it was recorded.

Then Adam and I went to Philadelphia. It was very beautiful. I kept pointing out locations where they had filmed It's Always Sunny. We ended up at a show where some famous guy was playing his music live. He had apparently done the soundtrack to a popular video game. He was playing film clips on a screen during his performance. He got really involved in projecting the film clips, so I had to take over playing the music, which I knew for some reason.

Two nights ago:

We were playing some kind of festival. It took place on a hill by a river. We had a horn section. Erich and I were hanging out with the horn section on a concrete platform set into the side of the hill. There were low concrete walls surrounding it. We were looking down the hill towards the river. We saw Adam talking to some rather young-looking girls. We all fell asleep, and when we woke up, the sky had darkened and everyone was gone. 

Last night:

We were on tour. We stopped at some kind of punk commune in a trailer park. I was drinking two beers at once. I walked towards a gas station and saw a cop car pulling in. I quickly put the beers down and kept walking. The cops got out and came towards me. I thought for sure they were going to arrest me for drinking in public. Instead, they walked past me to where Adam was standing. The female cop told him to get on the ground. Adam said no. I tried to signal him to do as she said, but it was too late. She took out her taser and tased him for about ten seconds. He doubled over. She turned around and started walking towards me. I looked at Adam and saw a "fuck you" look come into his eyes. He stood up and said, "Not enough. Need more." The cop turned and looked at him. He said, "Need more electricity." I thought he was just taunting her, but apparently when you've been electrocuted as many times as he has, you gain special powers. He collected a cloud of energy Dragonball-Z-style and set all the cars and the gas station on fire.

Dream Archive 5: The Thing, the Dream Thing

My brother saw something in the sky. It scared him very badly. It scared him so badly that he wouldn't talk about it. It looked like this:

Dream Archive 4: Living Statue

Walking through Hollywood, I met a woman who was paid by a movie star to put on a muscle suit and stand outside his house all day as a living statue. Apparently she was supposed to be a statue of him. He paid her enough that she flew in every morning from some other part of the country and flew home every night.

Dream Archive 3: Washington Monument

Visited the Washington Monument. It was apparently hollow and made of thin, very hard plastic about half an inch thick, with a grid of tiny holes in it. There was a door on each face. Inside, four stairways went down into a shallow rotunda. You could look up the whole length of the monument. More stairs spiraled up, allowing you to climb to the top. At the top, you went outside onto a huge rocky slab set at a forty-five degree angle. You had to scramble up the rocks in order to get to the very top. The very top was above the clouds. You could gaze down at the ground, which was apparently several miles below. A great ocean filled the horizon, and massive tsunami waves crashed over the monument at regular intervals. If you flattened yourself onto the ground, you could avoid getting swept away by them. Everyone was afraid of the waves, but they went to the top anyway to see the view. The stairs on the inside of the monument were littered with old junk and machine parts from the early days of the United States. The parts seemed to be complex, but were made of stone and wood.

Dream Archive 2: Control Room

§here was a great city and we all woke up there it was filled with shadows and halogen and tungsten bulbs and moonlight (so many moons) and we could hear the howling in the distance where the mountains rose from the landscape and the water buried the shaft where some of us fell into the night which went for miles and we were transported through the pipes and hallways to a high castle filled with machines which ran the length of the world where we could look down on the landscape and see the twisted trees and the huge crocodile statues bending and reaching toward the place in the West where the light streamed down on the great city swallowed in mountains and where he told us he had made the world and he had complicated plans for what would happen there and the light shifted all day and the earthquakes rumbled and the storms were made in a huge chamber and the people roamed about in fear and confusion trying to find the ones they (we) had lost but he was made of shadows and his plans were wrong so we killed him and fled the control room and found a place which felt familiar and there was a house there with an open door and hollowed-out pumpkins and gourds with light inside that flickered in the darkness and we could see what we wanted but we were afraid to go in.