Dreams and other movies

Do you find that when you eye a scene with a view to a photograph, that you think, hm, that would make an intriguing book cover? in fact it supplies the raw material for a novel or a poem cycle or something. Like today's pix. Henry James would have loved this -- you remember he used to say don't tell me any more, that's enough to be working from. Actually, I can see Mary Wesley making good use of this raw material. That's okay, it's not protected.

This Moslem couple, unusually, were walking holding hands.



Then they duck across into the shrubs



and he is joined by a couple of male friends and she strides ahead.



Later in my walk I saw her rounding the park, and he was now alone and strolling, evidently waiting for her to catch up.

So my imagination ran riot, of course.

I often wonder how people dreamed before they were influenced by movies and television techniques. I used to work in the tv industry, not as a hands-on producer, but I learned production in order to know what I was asking other people to do, always a friendly management technique. And I have for many years had my vivid dreams, often nightmares, influenced by the quick cut, the dissolve, the pan, the zoom, all kinds of rapidfire modern techniques of movies and video.

Just last night, I won't bore you with the plot, but I was in a group, there were establishing shots, then a quick zoom in to the face of the speaker, then a pan around the group to take in the other responses, etc. When I woke up, which I was glad to do, since I was never going to find the proper gate for my flight to Yokohama, I cracked up laughing at the production values that found their way into my very dreams.