Thursday, February 19, 2009

My dreams know more than I do

I remembered, whilst rummaging for a piece of scrap paper to do my (food) calculations on [I didn't do them! I'm going to continue to try not to] a scrap of paper on which I had written the synopses of two dreams that I had wanted to write short stories out of. Maybe one day they will blossom into stories, but I quite like the synopses (even if the first one doesn't make a whole bucket load of sense.)

1) A girl, daughter of 2nd or 3rd generation Auschwitz survivors, who desires to have the experience of being in the death camp-- not to learn from it, but to be punished-- to be starved to death and worked literally to the bone. To garner some punishment she goes to Germany and dresses up as Gestapo/in Nazi uniform to provoke the government to arrest her. They do, but their punishments are not enough for her and they have no death penalty, so they send her back to the US for trial, where she cannot be accused of anything earning her the "electric chair" so she stays in jail.
[obviously, this is unfinished--it is a dream, after all. I vaguely remember there being an intense lack of closure, like being in the mollycoddling American jail was not enough pain for the girl. I've got some stuff to work on if I'm actually going to make anything of this eventually.]

2) A girl, just sitting at a piano, someone sitting on her left. Her mother comes in and hands her sheet music, stands on her right. The girl doesn't start, and explains that she doesn't play piano. The mother insists that she remembers the daughter playing excellently, and the girl goes on to inform her mother that when she did play piano it was entirely by memory, that she doesn't know the names of the keys or how to read music. The mother asks about the girl's two brothers, and she replies that none of her mother's children were child prodigies. The mother, almost in realization (but calm) says, "you never were very good at anything, were you?" The girl, just as calmly, hands the sheet music back to her mother and says, "no, I was enough."

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