Southern Gothic Dreams IX

This one is a little different. It was a dream I had in Jerusalem during my first trip to Israel. I can still remember it with great clarity, but I don't know what it means. I stumbled onto my Israel notes the other day, and thought I'd share. It was a weird dream but, fortunately, I wrote down two snippets of dialogue from it, so I will quote directly from my 2009 Israel notebook when necessary.

Bear in mind that I don't normally see movie stars in my dreams, so the cameos in this one are far from usual in my dream world.

In this dream, I was Matthew Broderick, and I was watching Matthew Broderick in a movie at the same time. The movie was a docudrama about my attempts at getting a movie I'd written financed in Hollywood. For some reason, the sets had already been built before the film received a green light, and the movie was going to take place in a hospital.

In my mind, I knew that no stars had been signed for the film, but I knew Dustin Hoffman was on set for some reason, so I took my script over to him, where he stood chatting in a hallway with two other gentlemen. They were out of my line of vision, but I understood they were Hollywood power brokers, and friends of Hoffman's. When I finally caught his eye, I said to Mr. Hoffman with no small amount of nervousness in my voice, "I've got a script I'd like you to look at. I've written a script I want you to read. Read it, and explain it to me, because I don't understand it."

Dustin Hoffman looked at me with incredulity. He was shocked and offended, and he was silent for a moment. In that moment, he was suddenly no longer Dustin Hoffman. He was now the chief administrator of the hospital that the movie was to be the focus of. I was suddenly no longer Matthew Broderick, but a surgeon asking him to green light the shooting of the documentary about rhe hospital we both worked at. And this was all playing out on a television screen as I both watched it and participated in it.

Hoffman walked over to the two mystery men, and showed them the script, and his face turned red. He shook the script and then he threw it at me. He made it clear there would be no movie, and my requests were in vain. I became outraged, and asked him why he thought he was the sole power in what should have been a democratic process.

He looked at me then and said the following in a way that only Dustin Hoffman could : "There is no democracy of three here. There is no democracy! It's a TYRANNY! A tyranny of ONE!"

And then I woke up.