Nightmare on the highway

It’s strange how my nightmares always take the form of great disasters which I always magically survive. What makes them nightmares, I guess, is the fact that others (unknown others) perish and I’m left with a feeling of loss and guilt.

In last night’s scenario the most absurd tragedy occurs on a highway. I have just abandoned my car in the middle of the highway, for no particular reason whatsoever (premonition?), minutes before some truck crushes into a bunch of cars and a van flies over head and (that’s where the absurd comes in) due to some bizarre chain reaction, a plane falls on the highway killing everyone…and all the while I’m standing in the frame of a building’s doorway experiencing this hell first hand. Before the plane crushes though, I see a woman coming out of the building heading towards the highway and an old lady with a crutch slowly making her way to the house adjacent: they both perish of course.

What’s unusual, though, in yesterday’s scenario is the fact that I’m given a second chance to save these two women. So the accident plays a second time in my dream. This time I get out of my car because I know what’s to follow and I walk towards the doorway and this time I’m trying to persuade this woman not to go towards the highway because this great tragedy will occur. And she resists, but I grab her and I hold her and I won’t let her go (and this woman suddenly becomes a cat that I’m holding). And then I see the old woman with the crutch and I try to explain to her – in English!?! – and she won’t understand, so I switch to Greek and she seems so relieved that at last someone speaks her language (so aren’t we in Greece?) and after I explain I take her by the hand (the cat still in my arms) and I guide her inside the building and up the stairs – a very slow ascent with her crutch and all – a painful ascent because I know that any moment now the plane will crush and the impact will destroy the front of the building and we might get killed and so I’m trying to keep the cat and the lady at the back of the staircase…and we finally make it at the top and we are saved….I think, because by then my psyche is so exhausted that it can’t take it any longer so it wakes up!

Oh man, Freud would be getting such a kick out of these dreams of mine…I mean they are so elementary…101 Psychology…to hell with this subconscious!

The making of…memories

The perfume of every single person I kissed and hugged last evening still lingers on my arms. I won’t wash it away; not just yet. I’ll let it rest there while I write this post…

Two days ago when we wrapped the film and everyone was happy and clapping and kind of emotional, I felt nothing. I wasn’t touched. But yesterday, with photos and video from the shootings playing on a loop against the wall, something began to stir in me. As if the present had to become past in order to reach me emotionally. Don’t know why this always happens with me. When everyone’s crying, saying farewells, saying “I’ll miss you”s, I find it hard to empathize. I can’t envision the loss because the people are still in front of me. It’s only later (sometimes much later) that their absence hits me…

It’s like back then…

So how come I feel nothing in connection to the fact of separation? How come no tears come to my eyes? Is it because I am still on my way back? Is it because I have still not experienced the loneliness and the alienation? Will it hit me tomorrow morning when I will be waking alone in unfamiliar (even though so familiar) surroundings? Do I maybe feel too numb to feel anything else? Or am I after all so able to land smoothly after my fall from one planet to the next? Can I re-adjust so fast and painlessly? No scars? How can that be? When is it that I start to miss? And what is it exactly that I will start missing? Voices? Colours? Smells?

People are made of flesh and bones.