Dreams

I never lose in my dreams. I can be running in mud or water up to my knees, get lost, try to wake up and can't, get tied up, feel like I’m going to die, but I never wake up until I win. Maybe I'm running down an alley. Something is chasing me. It's a couple of ugly guys, driving a big combine. The blades are right behind me. I'm running out of breath. All of a sudden, I dance up the blades like Gene Kelly, doing a little dance on every blade. I grab the guys and toss them into the blades. Blood and gore hit me in the face and I wake up. Now that's a good dream, if you don't analyze it too much. I like the feeling of that gore hitting me in the face. I like being me and the combine and the blades, even the alley.  But the two guys?  Not so much.

Or maybe I'm carrying my own body around, eating on it. Across streams. Under bridges. There's a castle full of women, eating carry-out orders from a restaurant. I lose my body; find a stray dog in the basement. I awoke from that dream feeling too disturbed and elemental to understand the simplest rules of human behavior. I thought nothing is true. Everything is permitted.

Nowadays, I think most dreams are so straightforward they don't need free association to make sense. Suppose you're making love to a woman. You reach down and feel teeth inside her vagina. That's the old vagina dentata. I've had that dream a time or two. It's a good dream if you like to wake up scared.

Bergman

Turner Classic Movies has Bergman on all night, beginning at 9:00 PM Eastern with The Seventh Seal, followed by Wild Strawberries and Persona.

The Criterion Collection is releasing The Seventh Seal on DVD in a couple of weeks.

The Seventh Seal is the first Bergman film I saw. I saw it at a foreign film theater just off-campus when I was a college freshman in Lubbock. They ran And God Created Woman a week later, and I was hooked on foreign films until the '80s when, for reasons I can't explain, except for the films of Tarkovsky and a couple of other directors, I lost interest in them. Maybe it was because my directors had died off or petered out.

I think of Persona and Cries and Whispers as Bergman's masterpieces, but The Seventh Seal was my first encounter with the collision of idealism and naturalism in film. To my romantic 18-year-old mind, the knight, Antonius Block, and Death were fascinating allegorical figures. They were in the natural world, but not of it. As I grew older, I was drawn more and more to the rich natural world of Bergman's films, but, in the beginning, like Block, I imagined a life of the intellect was superior to a life of the flesh.