Movie night

The March of the Penguins is a documentary about birds, right?  No.  It's an epic tale of romance and horror.

I watched the movie last night with my wife and then I developed the sort of headache that makes you wonder whether some of the charming early pseudo-scientific methods for curing depression might be worth the risk of partial brain damage.  Anyone with a tiny drill and an eagerness to make pressure-escaping holes in my head would have been welcome in my home last night.

In one of my subsequent migraine-induced dreams I was on the back of a motorcycle behind  a woman that I knew well and loved but whose relationship to me was so complicated I had no name for it; she was like a mother and a wife but bore no resemblance to anyone I know in reality.  Riding "bitch", the entirely inadequate equivalent to "shotgun" in a car, is uncommon for me; generally I do the driving. 

We were on a paved road on a street bike (for the uninitiated this term is used to distinguish it from "off-road" or "dirt").  We began in the city in normal traffic but within minutes we were riding through dusty canyons, the only vehicles around us were other bikes and although the road stayed paved, it began to undulate, requiring the reflexes and skills of a dirt bike track racer.  And then the jumps started.  There were arrows painted on the landing surfaces like you might find in a video game that told my riding partner what angle to set the tire.

My biker woman gamely posted and flexed and banked and I moved with her.  Just as I was remarking to myself how well she was doing,  how confident and trusting I felt,  the road narrowed, and split, and we had to choose from a confusing array of skinny asphalt tracks that ran through a sage-and-cactus  landscape.  Bikers whizzed all around us on different paths, though I noticed that many of them had stayed on a larger parallel road that didn't take them through the heart of the desert.

She turned left and right at angled intersections, and we curved and straightened, curved and straightened, slaloming like champions.  But no sooner could I breathe again, start to relax, then the tracks became an impossible-to-predict tangle heading downhill very fast, and suddenly we were going down a severly steep embankment that ended in a giant uplifted lip.

We sailed through the air over silver-green stunted shrubs, to her, "ooooh, shiiiit."  From the air I could see we were rejoining the main road.  Then the ground came rushing towards us, and she pulled the handlebars as hard as she could in the complicated pattern suggested by the landing arrow and I thought we were going to make it and then I knew we weren't and

I was riding shotgun in a minivan with my labmates on the way to a soccer game.  We were on a huge, multi-lane part of the autobahn, passing through a seemingly endless tunnel.  To our right, keeping pace a half-car-length ahead was an SUV packed with people.  I kept staring at this woman in the back seat, who, like her other two benchmates, was facing out. I felt certain I knew her, and then as overhead lights threw stripes of yellow glare over the rear window, I recognized my soccer captain.  My entire team was on the way to the game.  I waved frantically until she saw me, smiled, and made an elaborate hand gesture to indicate she would meet us at

speeding through europe from Germany to France on a train with a tall, beautiful woman, skin the color of peanut butter, long black hair, huge black-kholed eyes fringed by enormous lashes. I am telling her what I think of my sister's new housemate, when really all I want is to push this woman up against the velveteen back of the seat and kiss her, find out how she tastes; instead we stand, walk toward the door between cars, which whooshes open, and we step into

a vast white room, reminiscent of the scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey where I inevitably fall asleep so that even after seven viewings, I'm unsure what happens.

I am seated next to the woman from the train, on a huge rectangular table or maybe it's a couch, in any case it's big enough to sleep ten or serve forty, and all the room's contents are so white and the lighting so oblique that only the faintest hints of gray shadow delineate where the geometrically spaced squares that could be stools or tables or decorative posts end and the floor/wall/space begins

I am talking but my words are swallowed into the room, as if all the air has been sucked out; they float in space, with only the occasional deflection of the gravity wells between bodies to guide them; all that's left of human conversation is a whisper, words like the shadows cast by the ambiguous furnishings

So I kiss her after all, hard, and the air comes back, and the lights angle down so there are inky black shadows on the ground and the furniture is a dazzling enamel white and she pulls back, looks at me with a half-smile; I lace my hands behind her head and pull her into me again, and when I relax for a second, our lips part, and she says, "Took you long enough."

And then we get to the part of the dream that woke me up and made me so sick at heart that I went back to sleep and tried not to write it down or think about it really.  When I woke up it was still there, just as vivid, and I knew it wouldn't go away until I had written it all down.

The dream is in third person now, I am not me but the omniscient Me that has no ego, only observes, and the dream camera pans to the back of the room so the table/couch/bed where the beautiful train woman and I are lying down, talking, kissing recedes, becomes as incidental to the plot and the action as a decorative plant.

The corner of the room where the camera settles is vivid with color and slick, like a cartoonish  caricature of reality.  In sharp focus is a fat, balding man, sweating profusely in a Victorian style suit; he is squatting on the ground, rocking back and forth on his heels.  He is facing a baby bird.  The lining of his glossy black coat is red satin.  There is blood on his hands.  The baby bird is not much shorter than the man, but weak and half-dead from hunger.  It gazes at him with desperate need and expectation.  There is blood dripping from its beak.

The man speaks to the bird, alternately in a sickly sweet simulation of love and then in a cajoling sarcastic tone but it's all senseless, english words strung randomly together with no apparent meaning.  He seems clearly insane but his eyes glitter with malevolent  intelligence.  The presence of evil is strong; it smells of rotting flesh. 

The man cuts another strip from a heap of meat on the ground behind him and tosses it to the baby bird.  He laughs as the bird swallows and then comes back, angling his head up in the universal avian infant sign for "more".

The man reaches for a bucket and stands, towering now over the baby.  He pours a trickle of pitch-dark liquid into the upturned throat of the bird, then tips the bucket further till the liquid is a torrent and the baby is filling right to the brim.  The camera is directly overhead, so the world is the mouth of the bird and you can see the fleshy ridges of its throat, the frothy swirling of the liquid.  Red splashes overflow onto the ground and the baby is stock still, unable to move or breathe, while the toxic whirlpool settles into every part of its body.

The man steps back, sets the bucket down, becomes still, waiting.  The bird lowers its head, its eyes coming to rest on the mutilated, drained bodies of its parents discarded on the ground just behind where the man was sitting.  A switch of recognition flips in its tiny reptilian  brain and the baby opens its beak in horror, convulsing as if poisoned, and emits a terrible endless wrenching wail of grief and despair.

After that dream I did finally sleep again.  There was a castle made of white moonstone that glowed at night, and a woman who was half elf, half vampire, so she could only come outside in the moonlight; she wore a white lace gown and wandered bored and aloof  through a garden with luminous jewels for flowers.  The castle became a fortress and I was on a mission to get inside.  I found a secret entrance,  I solved the riddle of the password and the door swung open.

I woke, feeling like the the right side of my face and eye sockets were visibly pulsing.

I wrote.

My headache seems bearable now and I'm late for work.

I need a shower.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1IPrx-zC1Y&feature=related