Seattle Film Archives

Vice Magazine 'Dos and Don'ts' clearly categorizes telling people about your dreams as a DON'T.

I've often ignored this vice and think if Stephen King ever followed the rule, we'd be more than a handful of fine books short in this world. Here I go again.

Last night I dreamt I was in the Seattle Film Archive (which doesn't exist). Imagine the dusty smell of a used book store and the antiquity and superfluousness of a baseball card shop. I stalked a clerk at the store asking if they had any 16mm prints of von Stroheim films. I guess in this dream I was rich enough to be able to afford an item as rare as that.

Instead, I left the store with what amounted to a lobby card of Humphrey Bogart from some movie I'd never heard of. It was the size of a baseball card, which was on the brain because earlier in the day when I was Skyping with my parents I learned that my father bought all the boys in my family an old-timey baseball card circa 1920. The one I received, in all it's muted monochromatic glory, was Rogers Hornsby mid-swing. Bogart was dressed similarly though instead of striped socks, he shirt was striped like an escaped convict. The card depicted on the upper torso of his body positioned as he was peering out from around a doorway. A dense fog enveloped everything else in the picture, as if he stowed away on a tug boat headed out to sea. So, he was floating there in mid-air, like in a dream. Eugene O'Neill might have written a screenplay based on this card.

I hope to make another trip back to the Seattle Film Archives.