High-Concept Dreaming
Have you ever awakened from a dream that was not just vivid, but long and dramatic and exciting and so much fun you wanted to go back to sleep and dream more of it? And have you ever thought that your dream was so good, it could be made into a book, a movie or a TV show?
I have, on quite a few occasions, and at those times that I didn't go right back to sleep but rather attempted to write down the contents of the dream, I usually discovered one of four things:
(1) Upon further reflection, it was really dumber than the dumbest stuff that they put in movies or on TV.
(2) It involved things very personal to me that I would find totally humiliating if the world knew about them (Believe it or not, there are things too embarrassing for me to blog about).
(3) It involved things very personal to me that are of no interest to anybody else.
(4) I had awoken in the midst a storyline that, either asleep or awake, I could never find a good ending for.
I have had a few dreams like that lately. But last night, I had a dream that I am absolutely NOT ashamed to share and here it is (with a few post-waking touch-ups):
The place: a little-visited tourist attraction called the Hollywood Hall of Comedy. An attempt at a anamatronic wax museum with poorly-designed robotic re-creations of the Funniest People of All Time and one live one. She is Mabel Gable, a seventy-something former TV star similar to Carol Burnett (in the dream, she was Carol Burnett) who took on the job of tour guide for the Hall of Comedy and lives alone in the building's second floor. No one knows why she picked this life for her later years, but there is a good reason. When she's alone, some of the Comedy Robots become real, living beings and keep her company. Now, these are NOT figments of her imagination, and it isn't ALL the robots, but a few of them are inhabited by the spirits of their original sujects (and some of them will NOT stop complaining about how badly they made their faces). The owner of the place is a technologically illiterate carnival-owner type (oddly, my dream pictured him as Tony Danza), who owns several other tourist traps, and doesn't pay much attention to this one, since it maes a little money and the building's a historical landmark he can't do anything else with. But he does find one way to save money on operation. He cancels the maintenance contract with the people who made the comedy robots and found the cheapest robotics expert he could find. And that person is Annie McGalway (name is a feminization of MacGuyver, get it? Actually, this was my role in the dream; I do rarely change myself to a female in my dreams, but in this one I did). And the reason she took the job is that this nerdish semi-genius twenty-something lady is a frustrated comedian, and one of Mabel Gabel's biggest fans.
Of course, she discovers Mabel's secret. At first, the nerd in her wants to find a logical explanation; but in time, she dedicates herself to secretly upgrading the haunted robots so that the ghosts are happier with their homes. She also builds Mabel a team of robot maidservants to treat her like the star she really is. Things are going along quietly until a local ecological disaster: oil from a nearby oil field (there really are some in the Los Angeles area) has begun oozing in the neighborhood, and suddenly the fountain outside the Hall of Comedy's front door has become a tar pit. Danza the owner isn't going to pay to fix it - he doesn't own the mineral rights. Even the Historical Society that declared the place a monument come to the conclusion that the easiest way to fix things is to tear down the Hall and put in some oil wells. Only Mabel and Annie (and the ghosts in the machines) want to save the Hall, but it would require raising a lot of money. Annie's raring to go, and sets up a Press Conference for Mabel, not knowing the reason she had quit the business twenty years ago - an accident during a publicity event that most everybody thought was minor, but left Mabel with a fear of large crowds - especially crowds of the press. Terrified of meeting the media, Mabel sits in front of the tar-filled fountain in the middle of the night, then starts walking out into the black gunk. It wasn't clear whether she could have died in the tar pit, but her robot maidservants drag her out anyway.
That's when I woke up. Not too difficult to come up with more plot; maybe Annie substituting for Mabel and having a press-related accident of her own; trying to pass off the haunted robots as "specially reprogrammed" to put them to work; a pratfall with Danza in the tar pit would be almost mandatory, and maybe add a couple more Hall of Comedy employees - the place is just too quiet. But is that the (a) wildest (b) stupidest (c) most insane (d) most creative or (e) most commercially marketable dream you ever heard?
