Blue Cat, White Cat

For the past nine years or so, my dreams have been characterized by chronic repetition and unusual tedium.

Up until eighteen months ago, the dream that I could expect several times a week involved an empty parking structure. For the entire dream I would wander around the parking structure, and I wasn’t even looking for my car. Sometimes there were signs that people lived there, such as flower pots on concrete ledges. Sometimes I would pass by groups of anonymous members of my family - uncles, aunts and cousins - who had set up house in the parking structure and were busy making dinner or whatever. Nothing else ever happened in the dream and I was always bored.

About a year and half ago I started having a different recurring dream. This dream involves traveling during a family vacation. My parents and my brother and I are on a car trip that will involve several more days of driving. We never get anywhere; we’re always arriving at an intermediary motel in the middle of nowhere on the Pacific coast, climbing out of the car and unpacking, or we’re packing up and leaving from an intermediary motel. It’s very mundane.

A few days ago I began having a new type of recurring dream. These dreams involve watching really boring DVDs. In real life I woke up early Monday morning in Nicole’s living room. I studied for an hour and then I went back to sleep for an hour. During the hour that I was asleep I dreamt that I watched a five hour and forty-five minute movie from Netflix. The title of the movie was “The Stone Horse” and it was based on a few short issues of a notable (but non-existent) little literary journal from the early or mid 1960s, also called “The Stone Horse”. I don’t know how a few pages from a short-lived, unknown literary magazine could inspire such a long art film, but it was really boring. I was glad to wake up.

The following night I dreamed that I was watching a DVD about obscure New Wave bands from the early 1980s. In the dream, virtually nobody still remembered these non-existent bands, and I think it’s because of their uniformly low quality. The DVD included a lot of poor video footage from uninspiring gigs at small clubs and recreational facilities. The only band whose name I remember is “Blue Cat, White Cat”. Blue Cat, White Cat featured a blonde singer with a ponytail and a lot of energy. Nevertheless, they just didn’t have any interesting songs or imagination. I couldn’t believe I was wasting my time watching this DVD.