It may be just a brain tumor

Sometimes in the early mornings I have the uncanny ability to lucid dream. It's quite an interesting phenomena which is consistently inconsistent. I'll explain. Sometimes I can prepare for it and feel my way into the dream. I get 50/50 results with the prep dreams. If it works I'm just laying in bed relaxed and I start to feel a series of physical sensations that alert me that I'm about to slip into dreamspace. And "slip" is actually what it feels like. Often it feels like someone is pulling the sheet I'm sleeping on off the end of the bed. As long as I stay relaxed the transition goes smoothly. If I panic, then I wake up. Other times it feels like someone is hugging me through my sheets. Mind you my eyes are closed... I should mention I live alone and there's no creepy secret passage in my closet... at least I don't think there is. The "hug" sensation eventually subsides and I'm able to get up and walk around dreamspace... pretty weird.

So we have the "slip" transition and the "hugging" transition and then there's the "oh yeah this is a dream, I didn't even notice a transition" transition. That's what I had this morning. I woke for a piss around 5 or 6 as usual and realized I only had a short time before my alarm was going to go off at 7. I was surprised when I found myself deep in a dream and fully aware.

The surroundings of the dream were a ranch house I assumed to be my aunt's. She doesn't live in a ranch house but dreamspace doesn't give a shit. The cool thing about this lucid dream is that woke in the dream to find myself watching a movie on VHS and I was actually enjoying it. I then realized that the content of this movie was entirely mine and if I could remember it when I awoke it may be a worth while screenplay. A bit of frantic searching ensued, searching for a pen and notebook to write down the details of the film. The movie continued to play while I searched for a notebook. I found one but most of the pages were written on and the other pages were stuck together or torn. I eventually realized the futility of writing my dream down in a dream. In fact that is often the way I discover I'm dreaming. It's when I catch myself trying to document something in the dream, usually with my cell phone camera. The phone/camera always fucks up in the strangest ways and that's the give away that I'm dreaming.

So here are the details of the movie in the dream... I just ask if someone out there is inspired to produce this film, they at least extend me the courtesy of inviting me to the premiere. Deal? So it turns out that Rebecca Hall is the main character in my dream movie. She plays a high school girl from the city who is sent to live with her cousin in the country side because she has been getting into so much trouble (with boys and parties, not terrorist plots or anything of that nature). I know, she's too old to play a high school girl... it's a dream, give me a break. Rebecca resents being sent to a new school but her aunt and uncle are trusting and allow her use of the family pick-up truck. I remember laughing in my dream when she delivers a line like this... "if I have to make out with one more redneck in that uncomfortable pick up truck I'm going to shoot myself"... something like that.

She is quickly in trouble for seducing local boys and gets a reputation. The aunt and uncle ground her and she's forced to come home after school everyday. Being country folk they have no internet or cable so Rebecca is forced to watch old VHS movies. Her cousin wants nothing to do with her. Rebecca enacts her revenge by staging a bunch of accidents that make it look like she's cursed. She hopes that the "country folk" will be so superstitious that they send her back to the city. Her cousin sells her out and she is no longer allowed to do waste time after school.

The aunt and uncle set her up with an after school job helping a local spinster in her bookstore. Rebecca hates it at first. The spinster is Lily Tomlin. The name of the bookstore, and the movie is Benign. I actually remember the logo on the bookstore sign and wrote it down when I woke up. Pretty crazy.

We soon find out that Lily survived a brain tumor after praying and promising to change her wild ways. So here we have the set up for a relationship to blossom between Rebecca and Lily. A patching up of things needs to happen with the cousin along with a final test/temptation for Rebecca to overcome.

The tag line for the film came to me as "some medicine tastes better than others" and I also wrote this down, "Movies don't cure her so books are the next remedy."

A bit of back story leading up to this dream is that I watched The BFG with Rebecca Hall two nights prior. Not her best roll... actually the film gets a big MEH. And the night before the dream I had spent three hours working on a writing project that was a screenplay I was turning into a series. I had just finished writing the pilot episode. Subject matter was completely different.

And finally... I have been experiencing an intermittent ringing in my right ear for the past few days. I'm actually experiencing it as I type this. Given the title of the dream movie and its subject matter I have to wonder... Could it be a tumor?

To which the answer I must defer to Arnold... It's not a tumor!

I fucking hope it isn't.