My subconscious wants a director credit.

[Derleth]

Or it might already have one; I don’t know if these productions count.

I had two distinct dreams a couple days ago, both of them in the form of abbreviated movies complete with titles. These dreams are odd for me in both form and content, especially since I rarely bother to watch a full movie: The last full-length production I saw was the MST3K episode “Eegah!” and the last real movie I saw was The Artist in the Wilma.

First, a disjointed freshman effort:

The Captain’s Wife (Modern): A captain’s wife decides to go home a different way in her car. She quickly finds that nobody on the road will look out for her: Everyone is essentally driving while zombified. Nobody can, or will, react to changes. She has to safely get home. At the end of the film, we find that her husband has been taking their son to a camp where he’s been sexually abused by a counsellor, until one day when the counsellor has the kid penetrate him from behind and doesn’t notice the letter-opener the kid has. The kid plunges the letter-opener deep into the counsellor’s visual cortex. The counsellor flails around blind for a while before dying.

Not bad, necessarily, but the first part has absolutely nothing to do with the second and is really never resolved; it’s almost like the director was going for a Dark City plot and found he couldn’t make it to the end, so he dumped in some giallo nonsense and called it a day. I take no responsibility for my dream-director’s knowledge of human physiology.

Second, the more mature sophomore work:

When The Flames Burned (1950s B&W): An All-American Boy crashes the family car. Into the house. The rest of the film is him gradually regaining his family’s trust. It ends with him justifying the purchase of a new car, shown as a tight closeup on his face. Then we cut to the ‘new’ car: It’s the car he crashed at the beginning of the film, still in the living-room. Which is still on fire. He mentions that every male in the family was inducted into a special photo in a canyon. We pan to the spot on the wall the photos used to be. Also still burning. He killed his whole family and can’t accept it. The credits are drawn in the flames, using a cheesy visual effect where the flames morph into letters.

Better, certainly, at least in terms of telling one story all the way through. It’s a bit heavy-handed, but what can you expect from the director of The Captain’s Wife? And “inducted into a photo”? That doesn’t quite work as English, to my mind. Or, at least, to a part of my mind.

Well, neither of them are Un Chien Andalou, I’ll admit, but both have a certain appeal.

[Imago]

Okay, the second one is actually pretty epic.

[Sunspace]

I’ve had dreams like those: complete stories and everything. A few times I remembered enough to write and draw them in my sketchbook.

Once I dreamed in cartoons.

[Becky2844]

One night I dreamed about some teenage surfers and one of the guys was named Moondoggie. At the end of the dream the credits rolled, and then it read This has been a Walt Disney production.