Dreamlife Feb 25 - Robin

Type: Potpourri
People: Ziesel, Craig
Featured: murals defaced, a musical number, "The Clashing of Swords"
Note:  I edited this to include annotations below the dream if you care to know more.  This is a practice I will continue.  See here for an explanation.


In dreamlife, the longest and most vivid dreams are at the end of the sleep cycle. They tend to be about 45-60 minutes in length. Below are the episodes I recorded when I awoke at 4:45. I know there were more, but for my first night, I thought I did well.

Somebody—she was an overweight lesbian with a bad haircut—was giving me a haircut in a gym. As she was doing this, the gym wall was being painted by a team. There was a mural on it. Some was quite ugly and some was ok. They were painting out the ugly (Good choice, brain!).

The team was very efficient and I was quite impressed by their rapid progress (unlike my haircut which was going at a snail's pace). The supervisor was directing their movements and was clearly a bit of a fanatic but to great effect. After they finished, the supervisor laid off some of the crew, mostly the young girls. I gave them all a word of encouragement and told them with practice they wouldn't be the first laid off in the future.

*******

Then three nasty boys on a walkway on top of the gym wall threw paint down the mural, ruining their hard work. I was pissed. I took out my camera to get a picture of them so we could catch them, but they went running before I could do it. I laid chase. They were too fast and escaped.

*******

The foundation of school building was rotting. Ziesel was calling lots of people, telling them about this rotting section and the poor maintenance of the structure. I took a look and realized that it looked as bad as it did as it was in the process of being repaired and someone had sawzalled a bunch of bolts and nails. (A guy in the dream told me it took 2 days to do all that sawing.) The thing was shored up and safe. But Ziesel's calls led to the newspapers coming and reporting that schoolchildren were at risk. I was irritated with Ziesel for bringing on this mess.

*******

I was having a drink with my friend Craig—he was having soda because he ain't no Jack Mormon—in a bar looking at a mural we painted of which I was quite proud. As we were watching, a workman came and started sanding the mural. He was getting ready to paint over it. WTF? I was a little sad, but just shrugged.

*******

I was in a great hall with some sort of Parliament/Congress in session. It was in a fictional time/place. The group was divided between conservatives and liberals who were screaming at each other. But it was time to do the "matching" of the membership. Basically, a conservative was matched with a liberal of the same intellectual caliber and temperament. So, for instance, someone would come up who was really obnoxious and stupid on the right; they would match him with an obnoxious and stupid person on the left. What they did when matched, I do not know. Anyway, the way it worked is that a small group approved the match as they came up. The parliament members would shout agreement or disagreement about the match to try to influence the approvers. At one point a liberal woman was matched with someone she really hated. I spoke up for the conservative woman because she had integrity even if I didn't agree with her. That match was made (and somehow $5000 dollars was involved.)

I left the hall and this huge chorus of sounds emerged from the room (accompanied by an orchestral soundtrack). It sounded like a pitched battle where hundreds were dying. When I came back into the room, there was no bloodshed. I asked someone what all the noise/music was. He said it was the great number "The Clashing of Swords" that was played at this event. It was very dramatic, and now knowing that no one died, I enjoyed it very much.

I woke up with the men's chorus from Gotterdammerung in my head, so I suspect the music was similar to that.

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Annotations

Ziesel was my partner when I was in my 20s.  She was later an administrator at Merrill College, a teacher and is currently working at a bookstore owned and staffed by other friends.

Craig is a friend since grade school and, yes, he is a practicing Mormon.

Murals - Kresge has all these horrible murals that I wished were painted over.  I would like to throw some paint on them. The bar with the mural was very like the one in SF in the Palace Hotel that has the Maxfield Parrish mural.

Gym - We lived for a month in NYC at the General Theological Institute (housetrade).  Their gym had a running track at the top of the gym walls.  This was the gym of this dream.

The Great Hall - I was just reading Bill Bryson's book "At Home" where he talked about the evolution of halls to modern houses.  As well, I had recently seen Gotterdammerung that features the Gibichung's Hall.  The imagery for the halls came from those.  The right and left shouting at each other is straight out of the British Parliament's Question Time.