It’s time for another installment of Lisa’s Weird Dreams.
This morning my alarm woke me abruptly out of the dream, so it’s fresher in my mind than usual. Now I know for sure that I do dream in color, and that I visualize extremely clearly when I dream.
I was reading a book I’d long wanted to read, a faded, drab-looking biography of a famous ballerina. (This is dream-fictional, not a book that actually exists.) I’d read somewhere that there were interesting references to Agatha Christie’s daughter in this book, so I’d picked it up somewhere, and was now finally getting around to reading it. After flipping to the index I couldn’t find any information on Christie’s daughter, save one listing for “Cook’s, Christie” which I knew was the one I was looking for and which had been left unfinished, without its page number!
But the book proved fascinating in its own right. This ballerina, lanky and intensely blonde (there was a series of photos), had been much sought-after for certain ingenue roles and as a painter’s subject, and she seemed to have affairs with all the men who used her as their muse. She was very insecure and thought each new man would bring her the life she’d always wanted. She adored food, the book said, and “a soup made of 2 cups milk and 2 cups water, mixed, could induce her to do almost anything — which ingredients are quite revealing into her essential character.” The ballerina apparently kept her looks for a long time, because there were photos of her from 1924 and from 1994 and she looked about the same; however, the earlier ones were mostly backstage shots from performances, and the later ones were by famous photographers or painters. One in particular, a striking shot, had her posed on a chair in simply furnished room that was painted vivid yellow.
At this point the book became Saveur magazine, and I flipped to another section. I noticed it was very clumsily laid out, with the text in one undifferentiated block, without font size changes or boldface or anything. There were photos, but the recipes were embedded into this text and were hard to find. A photo of very soft mashy looking butter made me seek out the recipe, which said, “Perfectly softened butter is the ideal accompaniment to many dishes. To blend properly into warm food, butter needs to be somewhat softened but never melted. In old days Irish housewives used this method to transform fresh butter into a mashed-up mess, the best topping we know of for steel-cut oatmeal.”*
Odd insights (?) from this dream:
1. Lots of yellow. Blondness and butter, and the yellow room.
2. Lots of dairy. Butter and milk.
3. Lots of text. Book and magazine.
*Actually, the texture I visualized is the slightly translucent, almost clumpy texture of butter that has been melted and is now slowly re-coagulating, either because you’ve stuck it in the fridge or left it out for a long time. Try it sometime and you’ll see what I mean, though I can’t guarantee this is really a good topping for oatmeal.
[This post was imported on 4/10/14 from my old blog at satsumabug.livejournal.com.]
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