Blue_Opossum

Morning of March 8, 1969. Saturday.



Sgt Carter (played by Frank Sutton on “Gomer Pyle”, the television series) is aboard a small airplane (though unrealistically implied to be a jumbo jet) which looks more like the inside of a school bus (which is very typical of my dreams, even years later after I have actually been on airplanes). He is on the right side of my perspective (from the front of the “airplane” as I am “standing” and looking toward the back of the “airplane”) and perhaps on the second row back form the front. I seem to be disembodied or at least not interacting with the situation in any way, though it is not really like watching television because I am “there”.

Frank is suspicious and nervous of a person behind him on the row to my left, probably the very last row. Apparently, the people on the airplane have just escaped the devastation caused by the blob (though the town was not really devastated in the real movie from 1958) and down below are big shadows and small fires, though the other people seem cheerful including an unknown businessman in glasses on the first row to my left. The blob has the ability to change into different things (also unlike the movie where it remained a gelatinous mass). What is first seen as a person reading a newspaper is possibly the blob…that is, the “newspaper” ready to devour that person. For a time he sits in his seat covered by the “newspaper” (which now seems more like a cloth blanket with a newspaper design printed on it), seeming somewhat like a “ghost” wearing a “sheet”, unmoving. Frank does not directly look at any point yet somehow seems aware of what is going on behind him.

The scene is not resolved. Frank (as Sgt Carter) disappears but no explanation is given. The blanket/blob/newspaper, assuming it is “real”, may still be hungry, though it is quite small. For a time, it seems more like seats in a movie theater (though somehow ridiculously a “flying” movie theater - that is, the building with no implied wings) rather than on an airplane - then the “movie theater”/“airplane”/“school bus” is empty. Everything is quiet, though the newspaper is on the floor, fluttering, sticking out slightly to the right of the seat of the original “blanket man” (from my perspective). (From here, things go “frozen” for a time, then abstract hypnopompia.)



Probable influences:

“Peanuts” comic strips where Linus’s blanket is “alive” and attacks Lucy (cutout from 1965 and taped in a notepaper binder collected and owned by my mother)

plus

“Newspaper Blanket” by the Cowsills (I owned the 45 of; flip side of “Indian Lake”)

plus

the episode of “Gomer Pyle” where Sgt Carter acts this way on an airplane (heading towards a nervous breakdown, supposedly)

plus

the movie “The Blob” (1958 version)

equals true weirdness via pop culture overkill perhaps. Being cruelly and surreptitiously dominated by entertainment has never really been my goal; just endless meticulous self-examination. It is good to discover the synthetic sources of your own imagination, or make that, the dream self’s “mind”, which does not even know an airplane from a bus.