All's fair in love, war and movies

I dreamt that I was a male soldier in a war.  I was advancing up a stairwell under fire.  A head poked out over the top banister.  I fired.  The body tumbled down the stairs, landing at my feet, face up.  I saw it was a dear friend.  I had shot him through the left eye.

I picked up the body and cradled it, flooded with shame and remorse.  When I put my head to his chest to see if he still lived, I heard a ticking.  Not a heartbeat, more like a clock.  I ripped open his shirt and saw the enemy had cut out his heart, replacing it with a bomb.

Just in time I tossed the body down the stairs behind me.  It exploded before it even hit the ground.  The concussive wave knocked me over.  Debris rained down.

I pushed down my awareness of the nature of the explosive confetti that covered me, the walls, the floor.  I kept moving.  Up the stairs.  Toward the objective.

At the top of the stairs was a cobblestone street.  I was girl, about 13, in a nightgown.  The director called, "Action!" so I pushed open the door of the Italian restaurant and took a seat next to my step-mother in a cheerful yellow booth at the back, next to the bathroom.

The shot was two and a half hours of me pretending to read the menu and order pasta and red sauce in slow motion while the special effects crew wrangled the flying equipment that was supposed to bring other actors floating gently in from stage left.

Instead they crashed and dropped, hovered and slid.  Finally the director called it a day, completely exasperated.  Arnold Swarzenegger patted my shoulder as he walked past.  "Good job," he said.  "A total pro."  He'd been on the other end of the steel cables and harness for the last couple of hours, attempting to Peter Pan into the scene without success.

I rose, now grown, invited him to have a drink with me.  We settled into a couch in the far corner and a friend brought two shots - one blue and one red.  As Arnold downed the red, my friend whispered, "a total send-up of the Matrix."  The liqueur turned his eyes bloodshot.  

I had loud, vigorous sex on the couch with Arnold Swarzenegger, while extras and crew wandered past tidying up the set.