Dreams are weird. Some people probably dismiss them as mere nonsense but, to me, they are very important. Dreams affect the way I feel when I wake up and have undoubtedly shaped me as a person over the years. They are the only things in life that are yours alone.
I recently had a dream that was an amalgamation of unrelated scenes, as most of my dreams are currently. The scene I remember the most clearly involves me watching part of Orson Welles’ final film—not his actual final film, whatever that may be, but his final in the dream world. His work is fictional but presented as fact. I remember seeing the film before (I don’t think I’ve ever seen an Orson Welles film in real life, though, but will watch Citizen Kane one of these days).
The scene in the film begins with an front exterior shot of a small, two-story, L-shaped house painted white with plenty of open windows. The house is situated in a wooded area, and a dirt road runs by just outside its front door. A convertible is parked next to the house, on the road, and in its backseat sit a mother and her mentally-handicapped daughter. The mother is talking with her daughter, trying to teach her something.
Suddenly, an elderly woman with a white afro emerges from the house, not through the front door but an entrance to the side, and begins yelling at the mother and daughter. The daughter starts yelling back and eventually jumps out of the car. The daughter then rushes the elderly woman and the two enter the house—you can see them fighting through the open windows. The daughter begins punching the elderly woman, and now a small crowd of additional people gather outside the house to watch the fight. One woman in the crowd starts repeatedly yelling, “Help, I’ve fallen and I can’t get up! Help, I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!”
A small team of men now arrives from the right, carrying one end of a giant beige hose. They stick the end through an open window of the house, and smoke pours out of the hose and starts to flood the entire structure. The daughter and the elderly woman stop fighting, exit the house, and stand back to watch. The house now catches fire, and a song begins to play. The fire quickly spreads to both stories and to the outer walls—the people outside makes no attempt to stop the blaze.
One man in the crowd approaches the house and grabs the bottom sill of an open window, and his hand catches fire. He continues to hold on, though, and his hand soon becomes black and ashen. He slowly lets go of the window—the fire has now spread to his entire body. Another man approaches the man-on-fire and offers a handshake. The two men shake hands in slow motion, and now the man-on-fire has an enormous head. The man-on-fire turns his head to the left, facing me, and now I ride off, down the dirt road, in the backseat of the convertible.
Another scene in the dream, which followed this one, involves me climbing to the top of a giant rock in a large, open, outdoor area on a sunny day, with several pathways around and people milling about. I don’t remember anything about the scene other than that, though.
I feel that simply reading a description of this dream is nowhere near as impactful as experiencing it yourself. The dream’s camera was panning around and zooming in-and-out, and the scene was progressing randomly but in a way that made complete sense. It was ethereal—Orson Welles’ best work by far.
I recognize some aspects of real life (whatever that is) that inspired the man-on-fire, most notably the cover art of Pink Floyd’s album Wish You Were Here, which is a photograph of a man shaking hands with another man who is, yes, on fire. There is also a cheat code for the video game GoldenEye 007 for the Nintendo 64 which causes every character to have a gigantic head, and I recently saw a clip of that in a YouTube video. On the other hand, I haven’t thought about “Help, I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!” in a very long time (shocking, I know).