September 28, 2001
Well, after 9 months away from recording these dreams, I’m back. Had a slew of interesting ones in the meantime, but for some reason I lost my motivation to document them. Until now.
Bizarre one. Might be the seed of a new script.
In the dream, I was tailing Stephen Gaghan (writer of Traffic) around inside a building that was alternately a mental hospital, a corporate headquarters, and a military research facility. He showed me a “plasma glove” top secret weapon that he’d seen when he was researching Traffic. I wore it and startled a few of the mental patients by sprinting down a corridor, leaping in the air, and firing off a few test shots (only at walls, not at people).
We speculated about who had conceived of such a glove. Gaghan urged me to find out, as the inventor might make an interesting subject for a biopic. I convinced myself (though in the dream I had no hard evidence yet about who had invented the glove) that the way to tell the story would be to explore the relationship between the inventor and one of his naïve test subjects – what if he fell in love with a young woman while knowing that his invention was filling the bones in her hand and arm with cancer, and that it would eventually have to be amputated? I saw him as a modern day Stanley Milgrim WHO HIMSELF IS FOLLOWING ORDERS FROM ABOVE to the point of exploiting a woman he loves to create something expressly designed to kill other human beings more efficiently.
In the dream, I actually got some commencement money. In the weird corporate headquarters that was sometimes a mental hospital, Gaghan and I were alone (the whole skyscraper had been evacuated, but we were exempt). I saw a tray of weed and cactus clippings and asked if I could smoke some. He said sure, and he’d give me plenty to take home, too. I gushed with gratitude and filled a bong bowl with what I thought was weed, only as I was smoking it I noticed it was cacti, no doubt hallucinogenic.
Then I woke up and realized, idiot, there is no such glove and inventor, so the story is not a biopic, but it could be fiction – satire! The military satire that Gaghan intended Traffic to be! And the “inventor” didn’t create the glove itself – he’s a psychologist, a modern-day Milgrim, whose job is to convince people that the glove is safe to wear. And what if they’re miniaturized and mass-marketed as the new tool of self-defense: better than pepper spray! Better than handguns! And what if he’s only pretending to follow orders so that he can later expose the completely unethical nature of this research, as well as dozens of other instances (some real like the Cincinnati radiation experiments, some fictional for dramatic and satirical emphasis)? And what if he triumphantly succeeds in making all this evidence public – his lifelong plan to expose the beast and rally the people to overthrow the government – and the masses just ignore it? He’s carted off to the military prison that supplied all the test subjects that he and his peers use in the early stages of research before moving on to a pool from the public. The End.
“A lot of aspiring revolutionaries whine about how they’ll infiltrate the Military-Industrial Complex and bring it down from within. Those fuckers are all talk, no action. I’m doing it. I’m a high-ranking…”