Stuff and Moonshine

 Took a mid-afternoon nap and dreamt about a ship on which a mutiny was being plotted. Any attempt to describe one of my dreams is a kind of lie, because I’m trying to impose a narrative structure, grounded in my waking knowledge of stories, on a lot of random and looping images, but let’s say that it was a scene from a prequel to Peter Pan about where Hook’s pirate band had come from, and how they ended up in Neverland, and my viewpoint kept switching between the amateur stage adaptation I was involved with, and the big-budget movie version made a few years earlier and now considered a modern classic, though at the time Hollywood had been rife with gossip that it was going to be a disaster.

The ship was passing over waters whose exotic sea life included at least one dinosaur remnant, and the mutiny’s chief architect — if this was a prequel he must have been Hook, though I can’t recall his appearance; perhaps Hook was a persona he’d yet to invent— was persuading the more sapient ones to enlist with him and attack the ship when the time was right. In the stage production, we were going to do these with puppets. The stretch of water had also, in an earlier age, been dry land, and the location of a legendary cave that went deep down into the earth. On deck, someone was quoting to a passenger a line of poetry about it that I could still recall when I woke:


I think the next line would have been something about said rats having done this without ever having seen the sun. Jim Broadbent was somebody in the movie. It all felt as though a dream intended for sovay  had been shipped to me by mistake.