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Let’s see if I can describe this…
In the dream, your lifespan in years was something that was part of your corpus like your kidneys or your corneas. You could donate years to other people.
And I was part of a roving squad whose mission was to identify potential suicides and somehow persuade them to donate the years they’d be missing out on after they offed themselves to one of my incredibly rich clients.
One of the potential suicides had changed their minds because of something I’d said during the sales pitch! I’d given them a reason to live!
So, I was caught in a real bind: On the one hand, yes, I was tickled that, apparently, I am articulate enough to give people reasons to live!
But on the other hand, my incredibly rich client would be royally pissed. possibly even try to seek vengeance.
In the second part of the dream, I was wandering with one of my boys through a kind of low-production-value museum, labeled—as every museum in my dreams is labeled—“The Brooklyn Museum.” The boy was very young, five or six.
We’d paused in front of an exhibit on distillation. There was a plaque identifying the exhibit as having been made by a Mexican restaurant that (in the dream) I was very familiar with.
The exhibit had been made out of sheets of typing paper on which someone had scribbled with colored pencil; the distillation pipes were made from straws. The pictures were of a series of houses and commercial buildings. Low production values like I say, but the concept was good; you could turn a little plastic valve, and the distillation process would begin.
Oh, look! You can do it! I said to the boy. Want to?
But he was being sullen and uncommunicative.
Want to? I repeated.
He shook his head.
What’s wrong? I asked, and he told me some other little boys had been making fun of him.
And I grew exasperated. So what? I said. What does it matter if idiots make fun of you?
And then I woke up.
###
First part of the dream would make an excellent Philip K. Dick/science fiction-type short story, yes?
Start with whatever it is the Protagonist sez that makes the potential suicide want to live.
End with the rich client’s vengeance—which would almost certainly have to be extracting years from the Protagonist’s life.
I could probably polish it all off in 6,000 words or less.
###
Yesterday was fine.
Went vox with a handful of my favorite people, which is always reassuring: You haven’t forgotten all about me even though I’m an exile in frozen-est Trumplandia!!!!
Went for a short (two-mile) tromp. It was very, very cold, and even though I’m not running a fever, I am coughing and easily become exhausted.
In the evening, I tried to watch Tenet.
Am I a complete idiot, or does Tenet make no sense whatsoever? I mean, it’s not just an awful movie. I literally could not figure out what its plot was supposed to be!
###
So, what is the one thing one could say to a potential suicide that would make them change their mind?
Don’t pull that trigger! Why, next week, you could be killing Hitler! (Or Putin, or Netanyahu, or…)
In the dream, your lifespan in years was something that was part of your corpus like your kidneys or your corneas. You could donate years to other people.
And I was part of a roving squad whose mission was to identify potential suicides and somehow persuade them to donate the years they’d be missing out on after they offed themselves to one of my incredibly rich clients.
One of the potential suicides had changed their minds because of something I’d said during the sales pitch! I’d given them a reason to live!
So, I was caught in a real bind: On the one hand, yes, I was tickled that, apparently, I am articulate enough to give people reasons to live!
But on the other hand, my incredibly rich client would be royally pissed. possibly even try to seek vengeance.
In the second part of the dream, I was wandering with one of my boys through a kind of low-production-value museum, labeled—as every museum in my dreams is labeled—“The Brooklyn Museum.” The boy was very young, five or six.
We’d paused in front of an exhibit on distillation. There was a plaque identifying the exhibit as having been made by a Mexican restaurant that (in the dream) I was very familiar with.
The exhibit had been made out of sheets of typing paper on which someone had scribbled with colored pencil; the distillation pipes were made from straws. The pictures were of a series of houses and commercial buildings. Low production values like I say, but the concept was good; you could turn a little plastic valve, and the distillation process would begin.
Oh, look! You can do it! I said to the boy. Want to?
But he was being sullen and uncommunicative.
Want to? I repeated.
He shook his head.
What’s wrong? I asked, and he told me some other little boys had been making fun of him.
And I grew exasperated. So what? I said. What does it matter if idiots make fun of you?
And then I woke up.
###
First part of the dream would make an excellent Philip K. Dick/science fiction-type short story, yes?
Start with whatever it is the Protagonist sez that makes the potential suicide want to live.
End with the rich client’s vengeance—which would almost certainly have to be extracting years from the Protagonist’s life.
I could probably polish it all off in 6,000 words or less.
###
Yesterday was fine.
Went vox with a handful of my favorite people, which is always reassuring: You haven’t forgotten all about me even though I’m an exile in frozen-est Trumplandia!!!!
Went for a short (two-mile) tromp. It was very, very cold, and even though I’m not running a fever, I am coughing and easily become exhausted.
In the evening, I tried to watch Tenet.
Am I a complete idiot, or does Tenet make no sense whatsoever? I mean, it’s not just an awful movie. I literally could not figure out what its plot was supposed to be!
###
So, what is the one thing one could say to a potential suicide that would make them change their mind?
Don’t pull that trigger! Why, next week, you could be killing Hitler! (Or Putin, or Netanyahu, or…)
