Double Dreams Starring William I. Newman, Ph.D

Yesterday morning I had an interesting experience -- two quick dreamlets back to back, separated by a short waking period, starring the same character.

First, I dreamt that my friend William came and started to tell me about the grindingly difficult qualifying exam his students had to sit (he's a professor of astrophysics at UCLA).  To show the awesome amount of work they had to put in, he held up his hand with the thumb and forefinger parted a couple of inches, to show how "thick" the exam was (I guess in my dreams Ph.D students still take pencil-and-paper tests).

Then I woke up, made a brief trip to the bathroom and came back to bed.  I soon fell asleep and dreamt again, and this time I was standing by the long edge of a narrow table or counter when William came in, wearing what looked like a white sailor's cap, sat down on the other side, and silently fixed me with an intense gaze.  I was perplexed and uneasy at first, thought maybe he was trying to weird me out for a joke, but then realized he was drawing me.  I cooperated by keeping the same quarter-profile facing him even as I moved along the edge of the table.

This double appearance of a character in two consecutive dreams reminded me of the time when I nearly woke out of a frustrating dream but through an act of will was able to #go_back_into_the_dream to resolve the situation, and in the process "doubled" myself.

As for William himself, he was an original member of the little group I once organized in the L.A. chapter of Mensa for the purpose of meeting once a month to dine and watch Korean movies together at my downtown flat.  I dignified it with the important-sounding title of "The Korean Cinema Lovers Society" (but only for personal reference^).  It was quite a diverse group at first, the membership including, other than Prof. Newman, an IT tech and his librarian wife, an Asian "tiger mom" and her young daughter, an ancient Jewish couple who I thought were married at first, but no, it turned out they were living in sin^ (they still send me holiday cards every year💖), and even a porn producer (it takes brains to produce good porn^;  come to think, my therapy group also included a porn producer, but he made gay porn -- before dying of AIDS).  As time went on the Society went the way of many such informal groups -- it gradually petered out, became smaller and smaller, and on several occasions William was the only one to show up^, but we kept it up for quite a while before life matters intervened.

In A Different Timeline, Maybe

Many years ago, not long after graduate school, I once went out with this girl -- let's call her Lisa -- whom I got to know through a show I had at the Simard & Halm Gallery on Melrose Avenue (it's long gone now).

She was the daughter of a well-to-do German lady who was supposedly of noble(!) heritage (they still have those in Europe, at least nominally).  The mother had asked the curators for an interview with the artist, probably expecting the artist to be a mature man of Christian/European extraction, based on the subject matter and style of some of the paintings in the show, and the fact that my last name, Suhr, looks German.  So if that were the case, mother and daughter must have been surprised to see a young Asian guy show up, but maybe they were all the more intrigued by the unexpectedness of it, and anyway they were super nice to me;  and as things worked out, the daughter was about my age and single, so we ended up going out.

We started out with a movie date.  And although I can't recall what our original selection was at the time, for some reason we ended up going to see "Eddie Murphy Delirious" instead, a performance documentary of Eddie's stage routines.  Well, if you know anything about Eddie Murphy's standup, you know it's gonna be full of all sorts of expletives casually thrown about, and forbidden lines crossed and recrossed, all in good humor.  Good luck^^

The movie had been released quite recently, but it had quickly developed something of a reputation for its riotous full-bore-ahead, anything-for-comedy style;  so poor elegant Lisa, you can fairly well imagine her shock...  To be sure, I myself hadn't expected anything quite so wild either, but still, I wasn't offended at all and anyway it was all very funny.  But afterward when we came out, all Lisa said was "That was not a movie" -- presumably meaning that she'd found it vulgar and offensive, not at all like the classy films she was used to, and she was not at all entertained by it.  I was maybe a tiny bit annoyed by her reaction to what I'd found simply hilarious, but anyway that certainly didn't keep me from "parking" on the way back to her house.  We talked a while, then we started "necking" (do people even still use that term any more? it was old-fashioned even back then) in the car -- until we were interrupted by a policeman who thought we were suspicious (this was in a ritzy area of L.A.).

Well, soon after that first date I had an opportunity to attend a "lecture and simultaneous magic show" given by this psychiatrist in his Bel-Air home;  it seems he was a well-known personality in the local L.A. chapter of Mensa.  Imagine my surprise when I saw Lisa and her mom there -- turned out, Lisa was a Mensan (as was I).  Long story short, I was already having second thoughts about Lisa, and I had gone to the meeting with this other girl from my job who I thought I might have better luck with (not to mention more in common with).  Her name was Melanie.., or maybe it was Melody...  Anyway, so I sat us to the front of Lisa and mom, and all throughout the psychiatrist/magician's presentation made a show of being real close with Mel.  And it worked.  Lisa dropped me forthwith, and I was free.  

At the time I felt pretty proud of myself, thinking I'd gotten away with something really cool, having manipulated Lisa into "voluntarily" doing something I wanted her to do, even as she thought it was what she wanted to do -- you might even say it was a bit like a plot device from some convoluted K-drama romcom (and this long before anyone had ever heard of K-dramas);  but that was then, and now I'm feeling pretty s̶h̶i̶t̶t̶y̶ guilty about it.  It reminds me of the proud Monkey King, Son O-gong (Ch. Sun Wukong), the central character from the classic Chinese novel Journey to the West, who flew on a cloud to the edge of the world and back, and thought he'd won a bet with the Buddha, only to realize he'd only been spinning around in the palm of the Buddha's hand.

But still, I can't help it -- now and then I catch myself imagining the seismic shift the course of my life might have undergone, if I'd managed to successfully court Lisa and married into German nobility!

To be honest, I'd very probably be long since divorced, due to "irreconcilable personal differences".  It's just obvious.  But would I then have been able to keep whatever aristocratic title I might have acquired from the marriage?  Probably not.

EDIT:  O.K., I'd forgotten about this other incident wherein I was also an underhanded egotistic scheming rat jerk.  But at least that time, nobody got hurt.

Another Old Photo

taken inside my old flat.

I miss the collection of books, music and movies that filled it before it became necessary for me to move back to Korea after a lifetime in Los Angeles.  But after spending a fortune to have all my artwork professionally packed and insured and shipped off to Korea, I simply ran out of budget and couldn't afford to have all the other stuff sent along, too.

Many of the LPs were part of my father's collection, but the rest were all my own, collected over the decades.  Now when I look up the books I used to own, it's shocking how rare and expensive some of them are.  Some are long out of print and can't even be found.  I found a used copy of The Circus of Dr. Lao by Charles Finney with the famous hallucinatory illustrations by Boris Artzybasheff -- the edition I used to own -- offered for sale at AbeBooks at $600 USD.  Another edition (also used) was listed at $2000!  As for the movies, aside from the usual classics and popular favorites I had also accumulated all sorts of lesser-known and obscure titles, artsy experimental films and cult favorites on DVD, now all but impossible to track down.  And hundreds of older Korean movies, also no longer available.

Speaking of which, for the longest time I had little interest in Korean culture (aside from a few favored Korean restaurants) and had no interaction with the larger Korean community in L.A. unless strictly necessary.  Then, in 2003 I came across a newly-released Korean movie called A Tale of Two Sisters (directed by Kim, Jee-woon and remade in the States in 2009 as The Uninvited), gave it a try and I was hooked!  It was beautiful, complex, scary, mysterious and bittersweet -- even the soundtrack was wonderfully poignant, and remains among my favorite compositions to this day.  My eyes were opened to a whole new world of cinema (and by extension... yes, to Korean music and drama series as well😏) and I started collecting Korean movies left and right.  And not satisfied with just watching them by myself, I started going over to my friend Evelyn's house every few weeks with a few Korean DVDs to watch with her (she was an Emmy-winning script writer;  she spent a great deal of her time watching all sorts of movies in any case, both for her work and for personal pleasure... R.I.P., Ev).  I even formed a group with local Mensa members that met downtown once a month to have dinner, walk over to my place and watch Korean movies.  Some of those movies were hard-to-find small productions and simply can't be found any more, whether online or as DVD.  I guess I'll never stop missing them.  They were a big part of my life.