Sunday, December 09, 2007

The Dream Cycles: Of Telephones and Bombs



Firstly, no kittens were harmed in the making of this video (is is just cunningly spliced to look that way) but if you are of a sensitive nature, you might want to avoid this video.

This is the first in a series called "The Dream Cycles", based on my dreams. A recurring feature of my dreams are telephones which I cannot seem to dial, misdial or have to go through a convoluted series of codes in order to dial... They also feature animals in need of help, in this case kittens. I was trying to call a vet in New York State to bring some kittens in to have them looked at. Why in New Yorks State, since I live in Ontario, Canada, is anyone's guess.

The dream:

Of course, it is very difficult to translate something as ethereal as a dream into film using available footage and images. In fact, the dream was a little less "dark" than the video and wasn't quite the same but had all the elements I included, including the chicken.... There were actually more farm animals and people in it. And the mother cat was not attacking the kittens. And it was all in colour...

I found these two kittens, one of which had a deformed back leg and the mother had been locked away from them for some time... I don't know how long. So I decided to call a vet. I had a number but instead of written on paper, it was impressed in some sort of clay... like Fimo or something and it was in two parts. You had to slide the second piece of Fimo away from the bottom of the other piece. They were held together with a little post, and you had to swing the first piece away to get the second part of the number.

As well, even though when you looked at it it looked like a number or series of numbers, it was actually this elaborate story in sort of a storybook fashion. You had to read the story and press on the different things in the picture to "dial" the number". Of course, I kept missing the correct things and had to completely redo the number. Finally I though "Why are you doing this? You can just dial the number!". It turned out that doing the number via the "story" was only sort of a fun way of doing it.... sort of a game. So I start dialing the number which, although it was supposed to be in New York State, had a 416 area code.

Even then, I kept making mistakes and couldn't complete the call. Also, I had to keep going back to try and put the cats into a cat carrier but kept getting pulled away to do something else. Meanwhile, someone blew up my house.... Terrorists, I think.

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