Body Aches, Took It Easy at Home Today

Today I stayed at home, skipping my customary Saturday morning running race.  Yesterday all day I felt crappy, with a general sense of body aches and inflammation.  Today I spent time with my family and enjoyed watching sports on TV...later on I did do a little running in the house.  Hopefully, I'll continue to feel better tomorrow.  Maybe next week I'll see if I want to run a weekend race.  Oh, I did have an interesting experience while I slept in this morning.  I was dreaming (in bed) when someone knocked on my car window and woke me up...into another dream!  A nested dream, just like in the movie Inception...

Great Old TV Episodes...from the Avengers

DEATH'S DOOR, from the British spy/sleuth series The Avengers...starring Patrick Macnee (playing John Steed) and Diana Rigg (Emma Peel)...first aired in October, 1967 and I was right there, watching it in our living room that evening. A high-level, crucial conference with international implications is about to be held, but the man responsible for hosting it and holding the various parties together panics and flees as he approaches the conference door just before it begins.  Steed and Peel are enlisted to investigate the trouble, and it appears that the man has had a prophetic dream of the day at hand, with numerous small incidents coinciding with both dream and actual occurrence.  At the end of the dream, he is grabbed and forced through the conference door (see above picture) and, once entering, is killed by a falling chandelier...hence the panic in real life.  Of course, our heroes figure out the mystery, catch the bad guys and set everything straight...in their typically elegant, clever and witty fashion.  What stood out to me in this episode was the dream sequence, very reminiscent of that experienced by Gregory Peck's character in the classic 1948 thriller Spellbound.  But when I first saw Death's Door, I had only just turned eleven and it wouldn't be for a few more years before I got around to seeing the earlier movie. For special effects alone with the dream sequence I recommend this episode, but then again Macnee and Rigg were fantastic in every one of the Avengers episodes during this period.  I should know: I ended up buying their entire box set on DVD...

Weekly Short Story: Beyond the Wall of Sleep by H.P. Lovecraft

After Edgar Allen Poe in the nineteenth century and before Stephen King and a plethora of successful horror fiction writers in the past one, there was H.P. Lovecraft, who in the early twentieth century wrote a number of short stories and novellas in this genre.  His tales were marked by an extraordinarily detailed and diverse imagination, with his descriptions of bizarre places and entities reading as if from one who experienced it all firsthand. One of my favorite short stories of his is Beyond the Wall of Sleep...

In 1901 there is a man incarcerated in a mental institution who had killed several people on a violent rampage.  It seems that this man, who is uneducated and ignorant, has recurring dreams of vivid and bright intensity in which he is flying among the stars and pursuing his enemy who had wronged him...although in his waking life on Earth he has no such adversary.  Upon awakening from these disturbing dreams, Joe Slater is extremely violent and speaks incoherently of the wonders he has experienced.  An intern there, interested in knowing exactly what Slater is experiencing but unclearly expressing, has invented an untested telepathic device and decides one night to surreptitiously connect his mind to the dreamer's...

Beyond the Wall of Sleep brings up a common theme in fiction of different genres: that dreams contain aspects of objective reality and truth, and are not just one's own subjective mental constructions.  And in our time we're accustomed to the notion of "hitching a ride" on another's dreams through the movie Inception.  The author combined these two ideas to create a window to an interstellar battle, although his scientific knowledge was sorely lacking: at one point an observer from Earth notes a simultaneous event near the star Algol, which happens to be 90 light-years distant...

H.P. Lovecraft writes in a highly ornate literary language, but his stories in essence are more like ghost tales told around a campfire...it's in this sense that I read his literature.  He can get a bit carried away with his descriptive language and can also be somewhat frantic about his storytelling, but it does have the effect of riveting the reader's attention.  Also, reading Lovecraft stories isn't a very big investment of time due to their brevity. And they are all now available in the public domain...here's a link to Beyond the Wall of Sleep: [link]...

Commercial Dream Seepage

Last night, after an especially grueling shift of work processing Christmas season parcels and working overtime, I fell asleep in front of my television. For some reason, it was on H2 (formerly History Channel International) when I dozed off. I can't remember: did they really have a show on about history, for a change? But anyway, it couldn't have been all that exciting: apparently, before I knew it, I had fallen sound asleep.

I found myself having one of those interesting geographical dreams. I approached a place that had some kind of roller coaster ride going on. In my dream, I thought that it was familiar, but later couldn't place it: it was most likely just a composite of other rides I had experienced over the years. Anyway, I went into the little building where the ride's entrance was. A friendly, elderly gentleman (who seemed to be the ride's operator) greeted me as did a younger man. The younger man then suddenly began to go on babbling incessantly about some great deal he was offering, selling those old U.S. quarters from the 50 states. I calculated within my dream that $.25 X 50 = $12.50 (I wonder how many people can do that while asleep), so the deal had better be comparable. I was surprised when he instead asked for 99 bucks! But the dude was making clear that, not only was he selling every single version of these quarters, but was also putting them in a album with the official "Smokey Bear" logo on it. This began to seep into my mind as a confirmation that I was having a wacky dream. Moreover, this son-of-a-gun was not only bothering me with his heavy-handed, aggressive speaking reminiscent of some of those obnoxious fire-and-brimstone preachers (like John Hagee, ugh), but he was also keeping me from my ride! So I managed to arise out of my slumber. Only to find myself facing a TV infomercial (on H2, of course) featuring a different son-of-a-gun spewing out the same sales pitch, with the same overbearing manner, about the same coin album offer. With Smokey Bear on the cover. Surreal.

Still wondering whether I was still dreaming, I managed to get up and flick off that TV. In the process, I flicked off that salesman as well...