Saturday, October 06, 2012

A VARIENT ON THE FLYING DREAM


PATIENT: "Are you sure you want hear about this dream? It's kinda silly, and it doesn't make sense. I don't want to waste your time."

PSYCHIATRIST: "You're not wasting my time. Go ahead."


PATIENT: "Okay...here it is, but remember, you asked for it.

Okay, well, it was late afternoon in a city I'd never been in before. I had time to kill, so I figured I'd take a walk around...sort of get a feel for the place."


PATIENT: "People were just getting out of work. They poured out of the buildings and lined up at bus stops and turnstiles. Everybody was jostling everybody."


PATIENT: "I felt like I was getting in the way, so I looked for smaller streets to explore. I took shortcuts through alley ways."


PATIENT: "I knew enough about big cities to avoid the most dangerous looking places..."


PATIENT: "...but even normal streets struck me as a little odd. As it got darker and I got farther and farther into the labyrinth, I'd see fewer people. Oh, they were there, but I'd no sooner catch a glimpse of them than they'd turn a corner or walk into a door." 

PSYCHIATRIST: "So they were trying to avoid you?"

PATIENT: "Maybe, or maybe I was just out of sync with them."


PATIENT: "It was the same way with buses and subway cars. I'd arrive just when they were pulling out." 


PATIENT: "The whole time I had the feeling that I was being watched."


PATIENT: "But who'd want to watch me? I didn't even know these people."


PATIENT: "Later on I got tired of walking. Not only that, but I was hopelessly lost."


PATIENT: "That's when I stumbled on an old hotel with a restaurant on the bottom floor."


PATIENT: "There were people there, but they didn't think much of me. I could feel the hostility."


PATIENT: "But why, I kept thinking. What did I do to them?"


PATIENT: "I think they wanted to tear me apart, but were under some restraint that I didn't understand."


PATIENT: "It was all too much. In an effort to block it out, I buried my head in my hands."

PATIENT: "The instant I closed my eyes I heard a loud airplane engine and I flashed on a vivid image of an airplane flying over some kind of tundra. Don't ask me how, but somehow I knew that the plane was in trouble. It was out of gas and would have to make a landing in a field of trees." 


PATIENT: "I could also hear the ticking clock on the restaurant wall."


PATIENT: "The plane circled around once then came in low. The engines sputtered and stopped."


PATIENT: "It glided over tall pine trees. It was suicide to land in a place like this, but the pilot had no choice."


PATIENT: "As if things weren't bad enough, the landing gear got stuck halfway down. I could see the pine trees rushing up. I could hear screams. I had the sickening feeling that the fate of this plane would determine my own fate."


PSYCHIATRIST: "What happened?"

PATIENT: "What do you think happened? It was horrible."


PATIENT: "I looked up to see what was happening in the restaurant and I was amazed to see that everyone was positively jovial. It's as if they were relieved of a burden of some sort. They hadn't changed what they thought about me, though. I could see that."


PATIENT: "They surrounded me like it was a game they were playing, and I tried to reason with them. 'Look, I don't want to bother you, I just want to get back to the center of town. Does anybody here know where I can get a trolley?' "


PATIENT: "A crowd had gathered outside. "He wants a trolley! Get him a trolley!' they shouted.


PATIENT: "A flaming trolley was brought up."



PSYCHIATRIST: "Wait a minute! Hold the story there! Your hour's up and I have other patients."

PATIENT: "Huh? B-but what about my dream?"

PSYCHIATRIST: "It was a fine dream! We'll talk about it next time."

PATIENT: "But...but..."

*****************************************

Aaaaaargh! If the deadline wasn't hard upon me, I'd have shelved this story because it's riddled with flaws. I started with two completely unrelated ideas that I thought I could fuse: one about someone who gets lost, and another about a crashing airplane. Geez, what was I thinking? Any ideas for how I could have saved this?

6 comments:

Invisibules said...

DOCTOR: So you think you've made a story which doesn't work?

PATIENT: Yes, I took two unrelated ideas and tried to fuse them together, but it just doesn't hang together -- I failed!

DOCTOR: Interesting -- that's how it seems to you. Well I can tell you that -- it works very well indeed. You should be proud of yourself. There's a trolley waiting outside my office -- why don't you take it?

Eddie Fitzgerald said...

Invisibules: Haw!!!!!

Joel Brinkerhoff said...

Quite an interesting juxtaposition of unrelated images, each one is provocative in their own right but put in the context of your narrative they become more charged and sinister.

That last one of faces bordering the frame is fantastic! It reminds me of the scene of leering eyes that fill the frame as men look lustfully on the erotic dance in Fritz Lang’s "Metropolis"

gray eyes said...

I have no idea how you could have saved this, but this line:

"I think they wanted to tear me apart, but were under some restraint that I didn't understand."

is, I think, the most interesting part. It's a very dream-like feeling, so perhaps you could do something more focused on that?

yahaboobay said...


Hey, I stumbled on your site because I'm looking up Delsarte stuff (I've studied mime and physical theatre, I'm doing a talk about silent movies). Nice drawings over there.


Re: this story, make the two unrelated things related. The people in the city, their lives all hinge on the dreamscape of the narrator. Destruction in the world behind the narrator's eyes is a benediction in their world.

They bring him a burning trolly because they know that they have to imprint the man's subconscious mind with images of destruction, to save their world.

(yet, they have to destroy things in order to show him images of destruction... so they're actually destroying their world, so the cost/benefit has to be raised, to a schizophrenically cosmic level? i.e. Perhaps the plane in his vision was full of demons who would inhabit unborn children and cause them to be sociopaths).

The world you've created so far in very engaging, keep 'er going!

Eddie Fitzgerald said...

Joel: I know the scene you mean! It was great!

Gray Eyes: Yeah, I liked the part about the restraint too. I made it vague to simulate dream logic where you accept illogical explanations that you'd never accept when awake.

Yaha: The idea that people in a dream have a life of their own which they're desperately trying to save from destruction is an interesting one. It would make a great short story if there was a venue for short stories.