Non-Anxiety Dreams
Feb. 8th, 2021 10:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tealinWhen I was a teenager, I had regular and extremely bizarre dreams – the most memorable being a giant eyeball bouncing around the Salt Lake Valley – but since leaving home, they have been so incredibly dull and quotidian that they're rarely worth remembering even on the rare occasions I do. My sister, on the other hand, gets massive epic fantasy dreams with plot structure and character development and everything.
Last night, I think I got one of my sister's dreams. Unfortunately I can only remember the end of it, but it seemed to have been something of a movie marathon; I think I was catching up on the 'last' Pixar movies, none of which exist of course. One of the earlier, barely-remembered movies was set in a futuristic version of Florida, which was all high-rise towers and elevated freeways rising from marshlands. I don't remember much about it as a film, but I must have been watching it with directors' commentary on, because there was a man's voice in my ear talking about the challenges of filming this tracking shot (like it was live action?).
Mostly I remember much later in the dream, when I was walking somewhere near the base of Mt Baker. It was a dark and rainy day, and only the nearer mountains were visible, but then we rounded a corner and could see the lower slopes of Baker rising into the clouds behind the foothills, very impressively – with the top lost in the cloud layer, it looked like it just went straight up. The striated slopes were evocative of Mt Erebus and Mt Discovery, and I marvelled to myself how obvious it was that they were the same type of volcano if you knew what to look for. I wanted to get a picture but couldn't get a good angle for the trees until we were farther along, at which point the clouds had cleared and the effect was lost.
I don't think the above was a Pixar movie, and I'm not sure the following was either, but if it wasn't, then it was a weird blending of movie and reality. The purpose of the marathon was to catch up on how Pixar was wrapping up their 'universe' – a sort of retconning of all their previous films into a loosely conjoined franchise, which the 'last' (five or so) were designed to climax and conclude. I don't know if the company was closing down or if they just wanted to hit the 'reset' button, but all the movies I'd just watched were aligning to a big payoff, and the last film was kind of happening in the background of my 'real' life (nothing at all like my real life). So it was night – I think the night after Mt Baker – and I was walking down a suburban street with my sister, and looked up, and silhouetted black against the light pollution, just barely visible, was a squadron of biplanes. Somehow I knew this was part of the Pixar thing, like all the characters from the different movies were flying their biplanes to the final showdown*. Then one of the biplanes started to sputter and it came down on the street not far from us; I ran over and shouted to my sister 'It's the Moose guy!' who had been one of the main characters in one of these hypothetical films, but as I got closer the plane and the character turned out to be a plastic toy a little bigger than my hand.
So, there you go, Pixar: Make a universe out of your films and tie it up by having everyone turn into plastic toys, thereby looping it around back to Toy Story, and making some blunt commentary on consumerism while at the same time playing directly into that consumerism. My subconscious will be happy with 2% gross residuals.
*This is not quite as nutty as it sounds; Pixar story boss Enrico Casarosa did a comic with a biplane in it, and biplanes were kind of his 'thing' for a while, especially when he was friends with my friend Tony and got him into doing comics..... long story.
Last night, I think I got one of my sister's dreams. Unfortunately I can only remember the end of it, but it seemed to have been something of a movie marathon; I think I was catching up on the 'last' Pixar movies, none of which exist of course. One of the earlier, barely-remembered movies was set in a futuristic version of Florida, which was all high-rise towers and elevated freeways rising from marshlands. I don't remember much about it as a film, but I must have been watching it with directors' commentary on, because there was a man's voice in my ear talking about the challenges of filming this tracking shot (like it was live action?).
Mostly I remember much later in the dream, when I was walking somewhere near the base of Mt Baker. It was a dark and rainy day, and only the nearer mountains were visible, but then we rounded a corner and could see the lower slopes of Baker rising into the clouds behind the foothills, very impressively – with the top lost in the cloud layer, it looked like it just went straight up. The striated slopes were evocative of Mt Erebus and Mt Discovery, and I marvelled to myself how obvious it was that they were the same type of volcano if you knew what to look for. I wanted to get a picture but couldn't get a good angle for the trees until we were farther along, at which point the clouds had cleared and the effect was lost.
I don't think the above was a Pixar movie, and I'm not sure the following was either, but if it wasn't, then it was a weird blending of movie and reality. The purpose of the marathon was to catch up on how Pixar was wrapping up their 'universe' – a sort of retconning of all their previous films into a loosely conjoined franchise, which the 'last' (five or so) were designed to climax and conclude. I don't know if the company was closing down or if they just wanted to hit the 'reset' button, but all the movies I'd just watched were aligning to a big payoff, and the last film was kind of happening in the background of my 'real' life (nothing at all like my real life). So it was night – I think the night after Mt Baker – and I was walking down a suburban street with my sister, and looked up, and silhouetted black against the light pollution, just barely visible, was a squadron of biplanes. Somehow I knew this was part of the Pixar thing, like all the characters from the different movies were flying their biplanes to the final showdown*. Then one of the biplanes started to sputter and it came down on the street not far from us; I ran over and shouted to my sister 'It's the Moose guy!' who had been one of the main characters in one of these hypothetical films, but as I got closer the plane and the character turned out to be a plastic toy a little bigger than my hand.
So, there you go, Pixar: Make a universe out of your films and tie it up by having everyone turn into plastic toys, thereby looping it around back to Toy Story, and making some blunt commentary on consumerism while at the same time playing directly into that consumerism. My subconscious will be happy with 2% gross residuals.
*This is not quite as nutty as it sounds; Pixar story boss Enrico Casarosa did a comic with a biplane in it, and biplanes were kind of his 'thing' for a while, especially when he was friends with my friend Tony and got him into doing comics..... long story.
