Dream: February 3rd, 2023

 

I’m on location for a film shoot.  It’s for an action adventure film starring Nicholas Cage.  He plays a solider that served during the American Revolution.  He abandons his post at a fort along the Hudson River.  He fights his way past his brothers in arms who are as large and brawny as Vikings.  He grabs a double barrel shotgun (an anachronism) with four shells and jumps into the river.  

The director calls “Cut!  Where is the songwriter?”  I discover that I’m under a blue tarp underwater.  The tarp creates a pocket of air where I can breathe.  One of the Viking stuntmen grabs me by the scruff of my neck with one hand and carries me over to the director.  The director says, “I need you to write a song for the soundtrack.  Follow me, I’ll bring you to your co-writer.”  I follow the director and he introduces me to a heavy set young man with a face that makes him look like a simpleton.  I shake hands with him and we set to work.

I ask him if he brought a tape recorder.  He said, “No.  I didn’t think we’d need one.”  I sigh and look around for one.  I find a Nagra reel to reel and one of the production assistants yells, “Don’t touch that!”  So I turn to the simpleton and I say, “It looks like we’ll have to write the score on parchment.”

We get in a rowboat with a lantern and we write the score for the song while in the middle of the river.  The rowboat lands near a mansion occupied by a young white girl and a young black man.  Both wear powdered wigs.  The girl says she’s practicing with her harpsichord and that she’d love to play the piece we worked on.  Before I can say anything, the simpleton agrees.  She plays it immaculately.  I tell the simpleton to take the score so we can go.

In the rowboat, I ask the simpleton if I can look at the score so I could make an addition.  He says, “Oh dear, I left it with the girl.”  I grit my teeth and we row back.  I ask for the score.  She insists on keeping it.  Restraining the urge to kill her, I ask if I can copy what we wrote.  She agrees to that.  I copy the score on parchment and, tugging the simpleton by the ear, we return to the rowboat.

We arrive at the shoot and settle in with the cast and crew in a colonial home.  The cook serves beef stew.  The simpleton grabs a fiddle and I grab a squeeze box.  We perform the song, which turns out to be “Two Suns in the Sunset” by Pink Floyd.  Suddenly, the cast and crew start staggering around the home retching and vomiting.  Eventually, they fall over dead.  Apart from the simpleton and I, only the cook survives.  He cries and says he mistook a poison in a small jar as one of the ingredients for the beef stew.  Neither I or the simpleton had eaten the stew.  The simpleton asks, “I suppose we won’t be getting paid for our song now, will we?”  I angrily chase him down the corridor and repeatedly deliver kick after kick against his ass.

As though I’m watching some film montage for various newspapers with splash headlines, one spins up that declares in large, bold letters, “Pink Floyd Breaks Up!”  I realize the simpleton and I were Nick Mason and Roger Waters respectively.  When I woke up, I saw my wife was still awake.  I said to her, “I don’t think Nick Mason is a simpleton, do you?”

- JJB