drain-o dreamin'

ft. cowboy celia

Photo by Alex Lion on Unsplash

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Howdy Note: Today’s dream is interpreted by my dear friend and former fellow fellow Ann Friedman fellow Celia Mattison! It’s a crossover episode, babey!

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Read my Guest Star Movie Diary here.

Dear Cowboy Celia, 

I am writing because I have had a dream. This is not a particularly rare occurrence for me, some might say it is the thing I do best? Worst? Okay-ish? Anyway, this dream is odd because it combines a series of elements that feel strange even for my dreams, which are, often, as strange as they come. These elements just appeared, and then I woke up, and my mother called, and I told her, and there may have been a feeling or two but I still can’t parse them. 

So. My dream. 

It opens in a deserted home improvement store. I am in my body. Well, I am in a body, but I am more comfortable in this body than I am in the body I occupy in my waking life, and I am looking at lawnmowers. They are all the push-mowing kind. There are five or six and they all look worn out, used. It feels almost mid-apocalyptic? As in we’re not quite there, to the end that is, but we’re getting there. I know I have to pick one, but I don’t want to. Probably because I have nebulous, neither negative or positive, feelings about the chore of mowing. Or maybe something else. I hope you can tell me. 

I close my eyes and when I open them I am in a field in my hometown. There is a billiards game in the middle of the yellowed, long grass and a woman who I know is my mother but is definitely not my mother is playing and sinking every shot. There is also a random Native man that everyone (who is everyone? I don’t know!) keeps saying is my father. When I say no, I think I would know who my father is, they look at me sadly and I give up. I tell a friend often that until someone accuses me of being a Pretendian (etc.) that I will never know if I’ve made it, etc. The random man and his friend, who looks oddly like that man who is/was my godfather, decide they are going to do a ceremony in the trees past the field but I am not invited. Why? They cannot say, but my attitude is a start, and there will be knives. Do I have a knife? At home, I think. Pah. They leave for the woods and I am left with my mother. 

She lets me sink the last pool ball and the world around us starts dissolving like it is going down the drain. My cellphone rings. Hello, hello? It is my cats. One named for my conception of the universe and the other after an author who flipped my brain inside out, though his nickname is that of a little old man. I cannot see them but I know they are both orange, which isn’t true, but in that moment it cannot be any other way. When am I coming home? When? 

Yours in dreaming, 

Down the Drain 

Dear Down the Drain,

To quote a friend: thank you for the so-called gift of your dream. It did not occur to me, when Howdy proposed we swap newsletters this week, how difficult it would be to interpret another person’s dream. I usually know what my dreams mean, but that’s because they’re my dreams. I have never been accused of being in touch with my subconscious, but even I can figure those out.

Most of my writing is about movies, and the dream is one of the few things movies are usually unable to persuasively capture. Dream sequences are almost always corny in a way that was put best by Living in Oblivion (1995): even the most experimental director can’t help but cram narrative and careful art direction into what should feel unstructured. So while reading your letter, I imagined it as a movie to see if I could find a narrative into the jellyfish goo of a dream.

Your dream opens in decaying suburbia. The American suburbs have always been a potent place for horror. I think of the marvelous Night of the Hunter (1955), Robert Mitchum’s hands perched on a porch railing, his LOVE tattoo visible across the knuckles, and the lullaby that opens the film: “fear is only a dream/so dream little one, dream.” Mitchum’s Harry Powell is a deceiver, similar to your not-father and not-godfather, who makes his victims doubt themselves. Powell is far more sinister than I hope the men in your dream were, but I suppose you would only know for certain if you ventured into those woods.

In your dream, there are two places you cannot go, the woods and your home. First, the woods. They are obviously unknown and dangerous but they also seem to be, to you, undesirable. The two men who venture into them hold vague roles of authority, but it’s an authority you are correctly suspicious of. The woods are the thing that people have told you to want: public confirmation that you are a Great Native Writer™. That conscripted identity will be the flashlight to get you through the thicket of the public eye. But, like Powell, the woods are deceptive. There are rituals and rules here that you can’t change and won’t be explained to you. 

So next, home. Pick your ancient culture of choice and I guarantee there is a fable about homegoing. The companion to that story is the one where a wanderer finds their home unrecognizable or no longer desirable (for modern examples, see the three movies Saoirse Ronan received a Best Actress Oscar nomination for: Brooklyn, Lady Bird, Little Women). You can imitate your home—you can sink pool shots like your mother—but you have outgrown it—do you even like pool? You can see the deficits of the home—the rusted lawn mowers and the resulting unkempt grass—but do you want to mow it? Your home and your past as a writer is still part of you but you do not need to stay there.

You are being told that you must go back to where you started, get your knife, and use it to carve a name into the trees. But your cats’ phone call is a reminder that there is more for you. You do not need to do any of the things that you used to do even if they have earned you money and bylines and weird emails from strangers. Writing was once your gift: don’t let it become a burden. And your cats? Your cats are as orange as the dawn because there are still so many choices for you left to make.

I am sending you movies about being lost, and a dream of a future that you make for yourself.

The Green Knight (2021)

Columbus (2017)

Where Is The Friend’s House? (1987)

See you in theaters,

Celia

Fancy a trip to Dreamland, pardner? Send your best to sadboyhowdy@gmail.com!