I had the most bizarre dream last night. I dreamed that I had gone to a sort of Truman Show sort of place, except everyone there had gone there willingly. Dad and Aunt Joanne had come, too, but they had come for basically the same reason someone would go to Colonial Williamsburg, while I had come to act (it was, I think, a television show). The whole place was set in, I think, Dickens' time, and I fell in love with a girl, another actress there. She looked a lot like Sara from "Picnic at Hanging Rock", but not quite. It wasn't her. For one thing, her chin was different, and she was a bit taller than Sara, and so on. She was playing a domestic of some sort, like a maid and a cook and who knows what else, all rolled into one. She showed me a few places in the big soundstage (one had cars, which seemed normal) and told me how awful it was there and how they wouldn't let anyone out.

Her supervisor was also apparently one of the actresses, and she was also MY supervisor because I was in that household, I guess. At one point I picked my jacket off a chair, which moved the chair out a bit. The supervisor (whom I will hereforth call the governess) demanded that I sit in the chair and eat the food that was on the table in front of it. I said, "Huh?" and the girl explained it to me: if you move a chair out from under a table that indicates that you are ready to sit down and eat, and you are obligated by manners and the expectations of polite society to do so. I sighed and ate some of the meat on the plate, then got up, tucked the chair in, and went with the girl (I never found out her name, or if I did I don't remember it) to a nearby house or shop, I couldn't really tell which it was. This made us late for a dinner party the governess was having, so she punished us by not letting us have any of the dinner, which was fine with me, since I had already eaten. For some peculiar reason, there was this sort of...commercial? from the show about the weather and how the weather was not cloudy but smiling, and then a big cloud blew down on a school, but stopped before it touched the roof and spilled up into a smile (with no features beside the mouth). Three boys in the school wrote on the window with ice, trying to hide their actions from the teacher. That bit ended, and I was sitting in the snow next to the governess' house. I think that was also some sort of punishment for not showing up on time. I wasn't allowed to go inside, but I opened the door and there, on the inside next to the doorway, was the girl, the one I fell in love with, gagged and bound to a chair. She looked at me, and I knew that was her punishment. Then I woke up.

You know, the governess kind of looked like Mrs. Appleyard from "Picnic at Hanging Rock", except without the silly Jiffy-Pop hairdo.


-eric "I have weird dreams" sleator
Fri 23 Jun A.D. 2000