And You Were There, and You…

Every Tuesday it’s English-language movie night at the Theatre Le Casino, so last night the three of us went to see Little Miss Sunshine. When our daughter’s English teacher asked her students if it would be suitable for showing to the class (8th grade, or quatrieme in the French system), one of the boys assured her that “it’s appropriate for f***ing six-year-olds.” He might have been overstating the case; still, we all enjoyed it immensely. Inspired in part by the movie, I had this dream:

I’m driving through the suburbs of some large-ish nondescript American city — Cincinnati comes to mind. It’s daylight, and I am alone. I’m not quite sure where I am, so I pull over and get out of the car. A woman comes up to me: I don’t recognize her, but she seems to know me. She tells me that Stacy’s house is just up the street. “How lucky is that?” I think to myself, though until that moment I hadn’t known I was looking for Stacy’s house. (Note from the waking world: Stacy had previously emailed me that she would like to write stories like Little Miss Sunshine.)

A meeting is going on at Stacy’s house: several wooden tables are set up in the living room, with maybe twenty people in attendance. Somebody says something like: “Thank goodness for emotions!” Everyone expresses enthusiastic agreement. I’m troubled by it. I say: “Why? Most of my emotions are unpleasant.”

I see Jason sitting at another table (I have no idea what Jason looks like). “It’s like Jason’s mystical experience,” I say. (Jason wrote about his mystical experience here.) The guy sitting next to me looks at me with a puzzled expression. He’s wearing a black see-through shirt decorated with some kind of floral needlework. I realize that his name too is Jason. (I think he was based on the uncle in the movie, the gay Proust scholar who had tried to kill himself.) “No, not you,” I say to this Jason.

I turn to the other Jason, the real Jason. “Your mystical experience in Chicago (I’m from Chicago). You transcended; you had an ecstatically happy convergence of realities. Most of the time for me it’s an incredibly dark convergence, very depressing. I don’t enjoy these experiences.” Jason seemed to see my point, as did the rest of the group.

And that’s the end of the dream, or at least what I remember of the dream.