Japanese Nightmare

I woke up from disturbing dreams at about 7AM. I decided I wanted to remember them, and have been trying to store them while lying in bed in a half-sleep. It's all a bit fuzzy... I'd returned to Japan to collect some award or a prize, but not connected to my being an ESL teacher. I think, in fact, that in portions of the dream I was the singer Randy Newman; I think I gave a brief concert. Afterwards, however, I ended up somehow lost, stuck at a garage in the city where cars were being taken apart and put back together - some odd quasi-industrial, quasi-scrapyard space where a young Japanese man was excited about showing me things. But he left me alone for a long time, and I wanted to get to the airport, so I wandered off. I ended up in a department store, but the Japanese there were regarding me with a great deal of suspicion and fear; they had me picked up and taken into custody by three black police officers (one woman and two men), who had a brief conversation with me in an office, established that I was allright - though the process was unsettling - and turned me loose. Somewhere during these phases of the dream, I heard about some foreigner being dismembered, but I paid no mind. I set out to find the train station, conscious that I hadn't picked up souvenirs for anyone yet. Strangers - including fellow foreigners - weren't particularly helpful when I asked where the train station was; one woman was flat-out hostile. A current co-worker of mine, Will, suddenly appeared in my dream, and gave me directions; however, instead of finding the train station, I found myself walking on the train tracks -- it was some sort of overhead light-rail, closer to our Skytrain than the Japanese trains. Soon a train was coming, and I was running on the tracks away from it; then I was leaping from rooftop to rooftop. Finally I ended up in some sort of weird gondola, not knowing where I was or what was happening, only able to see the blur of the landscape as I was carried into some other industrial scrapyard and deposited on the ground...

...where a large machine, like some huge piece of farming equipment, ran over me. My point of view shifted to a space in front of the vehicle, so I could see myself being run over. Workers ran over to me, but I was a mess of blood and guts (I could also see, oddly, that I had become a Japanese person, myself - as in, the pile of blood and guts on the ground was now Japanese). I was still alive, but the workers took out knives and began to cut me up. I could see my severed head, blubbering, dying. The dream ended with my point of view, perilously unattached, shimmering in the air above my body parts, watching a worker throw my severed fingers onto a pile of other dismembered fingers. The thumb, with the meat at the base, looked oddly like a chicken thigh.

Bizarre Waking Dreams of Mingus

In the dream, I am in Grade 4, in Elementary School, and the whole class has been assigned a presentation on a Charles Mingus composition (in my actual Grade 4 class, presided over by a hippie named Terry Hansen, we used to listen to popular music on his reel-to-reel and discuss the lyrics in a booklet he had written out for us, but I'm not sure the dream-class meshes with the real one). The title is obscure - I know it in the dream, but not when I awake; it's one of Mingus' poems set to music (not the lyrical version of "Fables of Faubus," because I remember thinking that in my dream). Whatever it is, it's supposedly on Let My Children Hear Music, tho' now that I'm awake, I don't recognize it in the track listing. The next day, I am late for school, and I have to find the CD. My father (in the dream only; there is no correspondence between the dream father and the real one) supposedly has the song on a CD - he has tons of stuff on Mingus, and he has a bio on Ken Russell in which Russell discusses (supposedly - this never happened) a film version he made of the Mingus composition (it looks strangely like the hardcover edition of Ingmar Bergman's The Magic Lantern, though - nothing in this dream is quite "right.") We can't find the song, though, and the majority of the dream is me climbing up and down the stairs in the building - not the actual one I grew up in, which is the usual setting for such dreams - trying to locate it. Finally I get off to school half an hour late, without the song, wondering if I'll get in trouble. I have some other Mingus-related material in my bag, but I'm not sure it will suffice.

Then I wake up, and have to get to the school where I teach. If I had any around, I'd listen to Mingus on the walk to work, but I don't!