20 October 2020

High School Polyamory/Retconned Death/幽靈海灘/Star Wars: Dune

I was a teenager, standing with my girlfriend in a school hallway by some lockers, making out passionately.


As we stopped to take a breath, a lovely girl approached us. She was clearly attracted to my girlfriend, and my girlfriend to her, so they French kissed right in front of me.


I wasn't angry or jealous; I only wanted my turn at kissing this girl. But when I leaned in, she stopped me, making it clear she wasn't interested in my tongue. Respecting her bounds, I took an amicable step back.

My girlfriend and I were soon approached by another girl.


(She resembled an older, bespectacled, brunette version of Ponyo from the eponymous anime.)

She wanted a kiss from me. I didn't find her attractive, but I didn't want to leave her dejected, so I slipped her some tongue.


* * *

My father showed up, alive. Though I knew he was supposed to be dead, no one else remembered his death.

I don't often have bad dreams, but this was certainly one of them.

* * *

I visited my local food bank to receive a hamper. Unlike in reality, the food bank was the size of a hotel. Thousands of people had come to receive food, but there wasn't enough staff to serve them in a timely manner, so tempers began to rise, with visitors cursing out the workers, some of whom began suffering nervous breakdowns from the abuse heaped on them.

The dream then shifted focus. It was the '80s, and a boy was standing over a cliff overlooking a large lake. A prepubescent white kid, he was dressed only in swimming trunks. He either jumped or fell in, dashing his head against the rocks on the way down. With a bleeding head wound, he floated onto the shore of a local beach, where he was spotted and dragged in by beachgoers. This boy, who was white, suddenly was black, and his head was missing. It was implied his head was eaten by the ghosts haunting the beach.

This beach belonged to a small park only a couple acres in size. Prior to the 1920s, it had been used as a graveyard for Chinese immigrants, though by the 1930s, it had ceased to be used as a burial ground; only a pair of turn-of-the-last-century cremation ovens left outside to rust and a handful of water-eroded graves stood as testament to the original purpose for this plot. All this was related to me by the ghost of a Chinese woman who had died in a fire; her burns diminished as she told me the story.

* * *

When Denis Villeneuve said his Dune would be Star Wars for adults, he meant that literally; the script for his movie placed Dune inside the SW Universe. The Bene Gesserit were an all-female Jedi splinter group; Duke Leto and Poe Dameron were one-and-the-same character; the Harkonnens had a fleet of TIE fighters.

One absurd image from the dream has stayed clear in my mind: a TIE fighter, chained to the moon, desperately trying to take off but failing, repeatedly chipping its panels against the stony ground. No, not the moon of Arrakis or any other world from Dune — Earth's moon; the big blue marble hung right up there in the sable sky.