The Laughing Girl: A Dream
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I worked in a large brick room with high windows. My job was to file blank cards that were placed on my desk by the chief dispatcher, a very thin girl with white skin and blond hair. She laughed constantly. Her boss was a heavy, grey-bearded man in a black suit. A gold watch hung on a gold chain directly over his navel. He had thousands of blank cards which he studied for hours. At certain periods of the day the boss, the girl and I would run outside and chase each other around the building and down the brick streets. We put on black robes and laugh ed every minute of the chase. Then we returned to the office, sat on our high stools, and continued filing blank cards. It was midafternoon when I picked up a card with a picture of my '51 Willys jeepster station wagon. "Look!" I shouted. "What's that?" the girl asked. "It's my jeep, let's move. It will pull a trailer, we can carry our cards with us." |
We all agreed and loaded the jeep and a trailer full of blank cards. The jeep ran perfectly. (This was an actual car which I owned and whose motor I had never started in ten years.) We took off on a road that I had travelled for years. We sang and laughed. The boss was so big that he kept opening the door to hang outside. We came to a place where trees grew in the center of the road and where the road narrowed. Trees were scraping the jeep on both sides. The boss tried to shut the door but found that the front seat was too tight for the three of us. We were laughing all the time. We stopped and loaded the boss in the trailer. As he was cold, we covered him with our robes. He rode well with all of the blank cards. The road widened, but only for a minute when it ended so abruptly that my brakes hardly stopped us from plunging over a precipice as deep as the Grand Canyon. No way to turn around, no way to release the trailer. We could only back up. I put the jeep in reverse and found that it performed much better, faster and smoother. |
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We raced through the trees. The boss was standing up and dancing around in the trailer and pointing out which trees to miss. The girl was on the hood of the jeep laughing very loud, the boss was throwing blank cards at her, and she was passing them on to me to file in the glove compartment. Finally we reached a large turn-around area. "Let's go that way!" the boss yelled. "O.K., you drive." I told him. "I don't know how," he responded. "I can" said the girl, still laughing. "Drive then," I told her. We drove very slowly along a flat dirt road going north. Barren land. It was going well, the three of us in front again, the three black robes flapping in the wind like great medieval banners. The road narrowed and we were driving along the face of a large rock wall. The cliff dropped straight down on the driver's side. I could not shut the door because the boss was taking up most of the seat. "Look out for the edge!" I yelled. It was too late, the jeep turned over. The boss and I jumped out against the wall. The girl? She continued laughing as she went over the precipice with jeep, trailer, and all the cards flying in the wind, black robes trailing behind. |
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"My God," the boss, in a state of shock, was frozen, and I had no immediate reaction. Everything was black. No day, no night, until finally, out of the blackness and at the end of a long, dark labyrinth, we found a door with two small holes giving light. We opened great doors to look up at what seemed to be an endless stairway. It took us several hours to reach the top of the stairs. We stepped out onto a platform to see below us a view of something I, or the boss, had never seen before. It was a cemetery, not an ordinary cemetery, but a cemetery of living monuments where each corpse was simply lying in state. The boss and I walked down the exact number of stairs we had recently climbed, the boss behind me. "Where is she?" I asked. "Over there, I see her." The boss was quite positive. Now I wore an overcoat and carried in my mouth a locket with an agate on each of its four sides. As we approached the cemetery I saw that it was filled with mechanical monuments. A great egg floated off into the distance. There were eggs filled with tiny skeletons playing unfamiliar music. A boat was passing another boat filled with babbling idiots. There were capsules filled with little people singing in high voices. |
This Bosch-like cemetery continued as far as we could see. Trains filled with ugly little people screeching at one another, birds on wheels, people on animals, animals on people. Pink, blue,white, violet dominated. Horses on rafts floating on little pools of glass. Paper blowing in the wind. We walked through a horror machine. "Where is she?" I asked. "Over there, c'mon," the boss boomed out. We walked over a white bridge held up by some strange creatures. Finally, we found our friend. She looked the same as ever. She was stretched out on a wooden table and surrounded by celluloid windmills. She was white and seemed to be asleep. Three poles flew our robes and they flapped hard in the wind while the celluloid windmills turned furiously. In complete shock I looked over at the boss. He was not the boss, he was I. I was the boss working for me. At this moment the girl on the bier winked and laughed so loud that it turned completely dark. I looked into the next card after the jeep and it was a picture of the laughing girl. The girl leaned over my shoulder and asked, "Who is that?" |
Commentary on The Laughing Girl
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So many dreams abstract themselves into busy collages. They remind me of newsreels of the past that have two or three important incidents that can be recalled, but the spaces in between are cut like a censored film. The Laughing Girl is not one of those cut, flash and peek dreams. It is not altered or fabricated to form a story, but is an example of a pure, direct experience of perfect recall. It was written in the morning immediately after rising. As for the imagery in the dream, it relates to archetypal images that flash from actual experiences of my past and present life. These form visions passing through the labyrinths of my night journeys. When I was young I lived in a beach town with an amusement zone. I will never forget the laughing woman above the door of The Hall of Mirrors with her insane repetitive laugh and how my friends and I chased each other through the maze of mirrors laughing at every dead-end we encountered, or the way we chased each other through The Fun House laughing all the time. We ran past the cigar store with the wooden Indian and the celluloid windmills into the Penny Arcade where Little Egypt, the Gypsy fortune teller, was in a glass case. She sat all day long ejecting cards, which we read, but tossing them in the air, we immediately forgot our fortunes. |
On the darker side was The Giant Dipper, a roller coaster to remember. I am one of three survivors of probably one of the most gruesome roller coaster accidents in history. I was sixteen years old at that time, and I can hear the screams to this day as we went over the precipice. From that time I developed an intense fear of high places and became terrified of death. Only after many years could I neutralize this fear of death through many visits to Mexico where death is part of life. There the Day of The Dead is humorous as well as being celebrated as a sign of reverence. I made assemblages, drawings and paintings about cemeteries and fiestas for the dead. Actually no one really died in this dream. The laughing girl wondered who she was, the boss became me, or I became the boss. This is one of the mysteries of metamorphosis. However, I was sad because of the death of my 1951 Willys Jeep. This poor machine worked very hard for me, carrying me to all those cemeteries in Mexico that helped destroy my fear of death. To see it go over the edge and fall like the cars on The Giant Dipper roller coaster was a requiem to a great vehicle. The truth is, however, that the old jeep is still running. I sold it to a friend on the beach in 1978. |