Thursday, December 13, 2007

Bizarre Waking Dreams of Mingus

In the dream, I am in Grade 4, in Elementary School, and the whole class has been assigned a presentation on a Charles Mingus composition (in my actual Grade 4 class, presided over by a hippie named Terry Hansen, we used to listen to popular music on his reel-to-reel and discuss the lyrics in a booklet he had written out for us, but I'm not sure the dream-class meshes with the real one). The title is obscure - I know it in the dream, but not when I awake; it's one of Mingus' poems set to music (not the lyrical version of "Fables of Faubus," because I remember thinking that in my dream). Whatever it is, it's supposedly on Let My Children Hear Music, tho' now that I'm awake, I don't recognize it in the track listing. The next day, I am late for school, and I have to find the CD. My father (in the dream only; there is no correspondence between the dream father and the real one) supposedly has the song on a CD - he has tons of stuff on Mingus, and he has a bio on Ken Russell in which Russell discusses (supposedly - this never happened) a film version he made of the Mingus composition (it looks strangely like the hardcover edition of Ingmar Bergman's The Magic Lantern, though - nothing in this dream is quite "right.") We can't find the song, though, and the majority of the dream is me climbing up and down the stairs in the building - not the actual one I grew up in, which is the usual setting for such dreams - trying to locate it. Finally I get off to school half an hour late, without the song, wondering if I'll get in trouble. I have some other Mingus-related material in my bag, but I'm not sure it will suffice.

Then I wake up, and have to get to the school where I teach. If I had any around, I'd listen to Mingus on the walk to work, but I don't!

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