Dream Journal
November 5, 1999
I was Matt, hanging out with Jess. I was being sweet, and figured Matt then must have been behind us. Then the flow of the dream was interrupted. “Ben, wake up!”
When I return to the dream, I’m the girl, hanging out with Goth Joe from Jer’s band. We’re making videos centered on one small scene with angry music and multiple cut shots. Then we go to an empty small house and he wants me to make this puddle wetter. The floor is a mixture of carpet and earth. I scoop water from other puddles into the one in the main room. Goth Joe tells me to sit by it, roll in it, get sexy with it. He begins to film. “Ben, wake up!”
This time when I return to the dream he’s Trent Reznor and I’m a girl with a giant turtle. There’s infinite complexity that I’m missing. In the main room is a big orgy to 70s music. The blonde cat-like elf woman from Stardust is there. She goes to Trent and he drowns her in the bathroom.
Then I’m outside the building by some housing near a city river bank talking to this girl who said her mom knew about that happening, that she knows everything. Perhaps she was the original storyteller? Because my curiosity brought me back into the scene as I said “Then what?”
This time I’m Trent. The dead woman is on the ground and opens her eyes and looks at him. She asks why he did it. He grabs a knife from the table and slits her throat. As he began to do this, I promptly jumped out of him and watched from a more distant angle. “Benji, wake up!” I awaken.
References: Matt is in a band. Goth Joe and Jer are in a band. Trent Reznor is the lead singer in the band Nine Inch Nails.
Inhabitation: Here we see several different ways character inhabitation can play out.
At first I saw Matt hanging out with Jess. I jump into Matt, at which point I felt the main character was ME, meaning Matt must be behind me.
In the next scene, I’m the girl, who the action is now focused on.
After the next interruption, I inhabit the girl again. But then I jump out, seeing her now as the woman from Stardust, and watch as Trent drowns her in the bathtub. Finally, after stepping out of the rote to talk to the girl whose memory it is, I return as Trent since the girl was dead.
In this rote I’m inhabiting characters, but it doesn’t seem that I’m changing the plot. Rather, I’m curious about what happened and why.
These Characters: In this rote, we see how the original characters are populated with the closest matches from my own experience. Let me explain these characters so that you can see how they are all easily mistaken for the same. Matt is the dark, brooding front man in a band who plays guitar and sings. So is Goth Joe. So is Trent Reznor. Jess has medium-long blonde hair and plays a romantic role. So does the elf woman from Stardust. The characters in the story are who they are, but after each awakening and return my mind uses someone slightly different from its library of characters.
The story is continuous across the interruptions. The band guy has a blonde girlfriend. They’re making a music video, and he ask her to be sexy in it, but things go too far (the orgy) and he murders her. The characters change with each interruption but the story continues.
Stepping Out of a Rote: How interesting that I was able to step out of the rote and talk to the person whose memory it was, then return to it.
Rejected Action: As Trent begins to slit her throat, I find I no longer have any interest in being him and I jump out.