December 25, 2016 (Sunday)

In the early morning hours I dreamt about E., who is not here for Christmas, which makes me sad. In my dream, she had changed her Facebook banner / background photo to a kind of psychedelic image, but the weird thing was that when you clicked on it, it didn’t just expand, but turned into a movie – of her singing underwater. I found it charming and riveting, and seeing her musical talents made me quite proud of her. I thought the dream might have been prompted of her having posted on Facebook (in real life) a Nujabes song / video. Nujabes was a Japanese producer, DJ, composer, kind of “rap” but kind of trippy, too. And yesterday I also listened to Debbie Milman’s interview with Tim Ferriss on Design Matters. Among other things, Ferriss talked about the time he spent in Japan. So, there were real life “ingredients,” as it were, to cook up this dream. But real life was absent in the dream insofar as she was underwater, yet fully clothed, eyes open, with equipment (microphone, e.g.) and a band. But underwater. When I remembered the dream later, a while after waking up, I initially felt charmed by it, just as I had been while dreaming it. But when it “sunk in” more – haha, nice turn of phrase given the buried-by-water aspect – it also kind of horrified me. In the (dream) video, I could zoom in on her face, I could stop the video or re-view it, and really watch – and I was fascinated, literally just wanting to watch it again and again. She’s singing in Japanese, although the audio part wasn’t something that came through too clearly in the dream. There was a moment when she’s unsure of the next line, quite a Patti-Smith-at-the-Nobel-ceremony moment, and she inches closer to the stand (a music stand with sheet music, underwater, …right) to read the next lyric, and a band member who is playing a saxophone (another real life dream “ingredient” perhaps prompted by A. telling us about the band that played at Ch.’s on Friday night) leans over, too, to get the music right. It was so detailed and life-like – and yet, because she was underwater, there was of course the suggestion of the opposite, or at least an other-worldliness. I think perhaps it meant that I think she’s swimming in someone else’s world right now, living and performing for that other’s world, not her own.