Helena Heavyhole! Snakehead here!

{This has nothing to do with dreams, but I tried to post here yesterday and found to my dismay that Blogger was turning everything I typed into my choice of south Asian languages--I could choose from Tamil, Urdu, Malayalam, and several others that I can't remember now, but it wouldn't leave it in English. It sounds like a dream, but I swear I was awake.}

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Now for the dreams. I've had very few "movie dreams" (in which the dream is a movie), but I've had two in a row recently. The first one was extremely jumbled and irrational (an experimental movie?). There was a child version of Gael Garcia Bernal, and the movie was dealing with his relationship with his mother. At various points in the movie his mother was:

1) a young handicapped girl who somehow healed herself by The Power of [Love/ Magical Thinking/ Ambition/ Creativity/ whatever] to become a dancer (this featured a stop-motion transformation scene in which she moved forward and morphed from a tiny crippled dwarf into a beautiful, normal girl dancing ballet).

2) a somewhat homely young woman obsessed with the idea of being a celebrity. This featured a dream/imagination scene in which she entered a room and imagined herself being accosted by smarmy reporters; this was indicated by her saying in a forced deep voice [in the role of Smarmy Reporter No. 1] "Helena Heavyhole! Snakehead here!" [she being Helena Heavyhole and Snakehead being SR No. 1].

3) an elegant, attractive older woman headed to her job as curator of an archaeological museum in Mexico City. The museum was really beautiful, sort of an Art Deco reprisal of something Aztec, in white plaster with gold-leaved carved decorations. She was climbing up a set of shallow steps when it became clear that she was about to fall down stricken by a stroke. I think the other two portrayals of her came into play as she was falling down, in a sort of slow-motion montage.

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This morning's dream movie was a little more straightforward. Robert DeNiro was an aging Mafia godfather struggling to retain his hold on his gang. He lived in what appeared to be one of those historical museum recreations of a village (at one point he passed a blacksmith who greeted him--this was an obvious way of showing that over the years he had gained respect as the de facto head of the village).

Things are coming to a head, and Mr. DeNiro leaves his house somewhat incognito in a sweatshirt and baseball cap (it's obvious that he's showing he still has an ample supply of courage and daring by going out unaccompanied when mutiny is afoot). He passes the blacksmith and goes down the hill to a sort of family pavilion on the lake. As he approaches it, the light changes (golden glow and all that) and there's a flashback to Happier Times, a birthday party for his mother in the pavilion. When he gets there the flashback ends and reveals that there are some of his fellow mafiosi there waiting for him, along with a couple of hired Young Toughs (not mafiosi and the viewer immediately recognizes them as ignoble mercenaries willing to Do Anything for a Buck, No Honor, etc.). He has a brief, somewhat tense exchange with the mafiosi when the viewer becomes aware that there are two large barrels there that obviously contain explosives. One of the Young Toughs drops a cigarette on the water, and a layer of oil on it ignites. DeNiro starts to run away, knowing that the whole place is about to explode.

He makes it up the hill and hides behind a building while the lakeside pavilion and dock goes up in a huge explosion, then ducks into the nearest house. He follows some kind of circuitous route through plumbing/utility areas of the building, ending up in the home of a young mafioso (who isn't there but soon shows up). He conceals himself in various parts of the house before becoming aware that his daughter (played by Saffron Burrows) is arriving for a tryst with the young mafioso. To avoid detection he ends up having to take refuge in a tiny old Airstream type camper that's been converted into a bathroom. This young mafioso is obviously into interior decoration and has used lots of frilly valance type curtains in the camper/bathroom. He's apparently not as into privacy, though, because said curtains don't cover the windows at all, and DeNiro (now so convincing that the viewer thinks she herself is the one in the trailer/bathroom) has to scrabble around making makeshift window coverings of various seventies print pillowcases, which show a tendency to slide off the rods even when clothes-pinned on.

At this point my alarm clock went off.

{At some point I'm going to resign myself to being the one who adds all the actor/celebrity tags. For now I'm consoling myself that they were appearing *as actors in movies* and as such don't really count as Celebrity Dreams. Right?}