go to sleep

Friday, sep. 22, 2006   |   0 comments

I made the mistake of buying an entire angelfood cake from the Safeway bakery earlier this week, and I have been eating it by the fistful. Angelfood cake defies being cut with a knife like a normal, civilized cake; try to saw off a slice with a blade and the angelfood just squishes defiantly. So I’ve been reduced to ripping off pieces of cake with my hand, like an animal, or King Henry the Eighth.

Another big event this week: I saw a sneak preview of The Science of Sleep. (Biggie thanks to Jonathan Wells, by way of friend Wendy, for the invite!)

What a beautiful, weird, startling, funny, and convincingly dreamy movie that was. But also, wow, so much sadder than I thought it would be. I’m not at all sure, because deciphering that movie feels very much like muddling through an actual dream, but was that movie about…schizophrenia??? Broken (as in grossly dysfunctional) hearts? Was it just a nightmare?

All I know is that when it ended, I felt as though I’d just woken up from one of those dreadful, chloroform knock-out dreams in which you do something terrible, irreversible. Behind your eyelids, you cry and cry, and then when you wake up, for the first slender moments before you regain true consciousness, you’re sure you’ve really gone and mucked up your life this time. Tragedy! Awfulness! Horror! A few cobwebby moments later, though, you piece together that it was just a dream, just a dream. It takes some effort though, you have to stop and think about it like a scientist. Did I flush my baby down the toilet? No because…that’s right, I’ve never actually been pregnant! Also babies don’t fit down toilets. And then, once you finally convince yourself that none of it happened, you feel so relieved, like you just out-maneuvered a real, life-destroying mistake.

So I don’t know, is that good? I can’t quite figure it out. But I do hope you go see it, if only so we can sit down and decode it together. (Oh and go check out some of filmmaker Gondry’s other videos and things, so great.)