Your Strangest "Golden Era" Dream

[LizzieMaine]

I don't mean ambitions or aspirations, but actual rapid-eye-movement deep sleep dreams with some connection to the Era.

What prompts the query is the one I had early this morning, in which I was the producer of a television series called "Beat The Barrymores." The format of the program involved studio audience members competing in their choice of indoor sports against their choice of John, Lionel, or Ethel Barrymore. The episode depicted involved a contenstant playing racquetball against Lionel, who was very spry despite his wheelchair.

I don't have any idea where this all came from, but I'd definitely watch a program like that.

 

[Stearmen]

No surprise here, I have had many dreams where I am flying some Golden Age airplane. They are so vivid, I can feel the stick or yoke in my hand and even smell the fuel and oil. I was born to late!

 

[2jakes]

My mother was very homesick for her mother & the house she grew up in.
So I started an oil painting of my grandmother’s house for my mother .
I didn’t have detailed photos of the house itself, just of family photos taken in the 40s.
There was bits & pieces of the house but not an entire scene to go by.
But since I lived there when I was 2-4 years. I tried to rely on memory.
But it was the dreams that helped the most.

The painting was completed several years ago.

I recall dreaming on an almost daily basis during this period when I started the painting.
I would be back in time when the cars had running boards & my grandmother was
very young. I remember the inside of each room. The spots on the ceiling caused
by the rain leaking through in one of the bedrooms.
The checkered board floor in the hallway. The candle stick phone on the corner.
The outside porch or veranda where my grandma tended to her flowers & plants.
Odor of leftover coffee grinds that she applied to her plants. The aroma of the
gardenias that she would water in the mornings with a green hose. The crackling sound
of the car tires on cobbled stones (there was no paved streets back then.) The loud
horn of the ice truck making a delivery. How they were able to keep the blocks of
ice from melting on an opened flat bed with just a tarp for cover was always
something that I never quite figured out.

I remember waking up & writing down or rather sketching down so I wouldn’t forget
and applied it to the canvas. It took a long time, but never gave up until I was
satisfied with the way it looked. The morning sun rays dancing on the leaves, grass,
fading fence posts, & white stucco walls.
Nothing is so frustrating as painting a white facade on white canvas.
But I learned about reflections & colors to give the illusion of white .
The best compliment was when my mother recognized the house. I didn’t tell
her what the painting was about.
She cried because she felt like she was “looking” through a window of her mother
& the house she knew as a kid.

Everyone that knows about the house thinks I copied it from photographs
because it looks just like the house.
They don’t understand that I mostly did it from my dreams.
I didn’t add anything to make it prettier, I kept it real as the way it was in my dreams.

I haven’t had many dreams about my grandmother or the house lately.

But it sure came in handy that time.


p.s. I once had a dream in color !
(the colors were very vivid as in a technicolor movie when there’s a
night scene & looks so blue at night.
No drugs or hard drinking was used either. )

 

[Fading Fast]

I don't mean ambitions or aspirations, but actual rapid-eye-movement deep sleep dreams with some connection to the Era.

What prompts the query is the one I had early this morning, in which I was the producer of a television series called "Beat The Barrymores." The format of the program involved studio audience members competing in their choice of indoor sports against their choice of John, Lionel, or Ethel Barrymore. The episode depicted involved a contenstant playing racquetball against Lionel, who was very spry despite his wheelchair.

I don't have any idea where this all came from, but I'd definitely watch a program like that.

Okay, that is quite a dream. Any idea where it came from? Any historical connection between the Barrymores and game shows? Were you thinking about both recently? That's just quite a developed and not-immediatley obvious dream.

And if the show was airing today, based on Drew Barrymore's David Letterman appearance some years back, the term "indoor sports" might have to be explained carefully to Drew if this is going to be a family show.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I have no idea where it came from. John made some pretty desperate movies and radio shows in the last couple of years before his death, but I hadn't watched or listened to them lately. I did view a long CBS 50th Anniversary special from 1978 a few nights back, and there were some dire game show clips included, but nothing quite so bizarre as mine. John, of course, had been dead for ten years by the time TV game shows were becoming popular, which I'd imagine would have added to the production difficulties.

 

[Fading Fast]

I have no idea where it came from. John made some pretty desperate movies and radio shows in the last couple of years before his death, but I hadn't watched or listened to them lately. I did view a long CBS 50th Anniversary special from 1978 a few nights back, and there were some dire game show clips included, but nothing quite so bizarre as mine. John, of course, had been dead for ten years by the time TV game shows were becoming popular, which I'd imagine would have added to the production difficulties.

I'm in the camp that dreams have no mystical powers and are just a conflating of subconscious thought, old memories, random associations, etc., that pop out during sleep. Yours was a good one - lot of random associations going on there.

(Tangentially related thought.) It's interesting to see what a long and successful career Lionel had despite being in a wheel chair in an era when even the President of the United States felt the need to hide it from the public.

 

[Stanley Doble]

A few days ago I had a dream that involved roller skating on a wide boardwalk at a beach side amusement park in the twenties. Easily explained, as I had just watched a Harold Lloyd movie with a similar setting, although there was no roller skating in the movie. I have never roller skated in my life.

 

[AmateisGal]

I think my most vivid Golden Era-related dream was in college. I was in a concentration camp in Germany and was a political refugee or something along those lines. I remember there being some kind of uprising. But the thing that still gets me to this day was that at the end of the dream, the credits rolled just like in the movies. Never had that happen before or since.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I've had dreams with reel-change cue marks floating in the corner of the scene as actual tangible objects. Haven't had one since film gave way to digital though.

 

[Big J]

I had a dream where I was shoveling coal on a steam train. I didn't enjoy it very much. I guess that could have been in the golden era. It was very hot and sweaty, lots of sweat in my eyes.

 

[CONELRAD]

I once dreamed that the ghost of Al Jolson visited me in my sleep and transported me back in time to 1920s Hollywood, where we proceeded to frolic across the rooftops of stucco covered movie studios and Art Deco styled skyscrapers in our effort to soak up the local color.

I was the producer of a television series called "Beat The Barrymores." The format of the program involved studio audience members competing in their choice of indoor sports against their choice of John, Lionel, or Ethel Barrymore. The episode depicted involved a contenstant playing racquetball against Lionel, who was very spry despite his wheelchair.

I'd watch that.

 

[ChiTownScion]

I don't mean ambitions or aspirations, but actual rapid-eye-movement deep sleep dreams with some connection to the Era.

It's a recurring dream, and perhaps that ought to frighten me. The Flying Elevated Train.

Chicago, Boston, and New York all have former elevated rapid transit lines that usually met their demise due to construction of subway lines. In Chicago, the Garfield Park line bit the dust in the early 1950's due to construction of the Congress Street (Eisenhower) Expressway, and the Humboldt Park, Stock Yard, and Kenwood branches were abandoned about the same time. And of course Manhattan lost its Third, Seventh, and Ninth Avenue Els during the era as well.

In my dream, I'm on an elevated train (sometimes as the operator) where the tracks suddenly end due to demolition. The train simply leaves the tracks and flies through the air until it reaches another still remaining section of track. Sometimes, there are no tracks, and the train simply rolls down the middle of the street- without any accident or catastrophe, or even plowing up the pavement: perhaps landing on streetcar tracks, but I have no idea how power is maintained. No one aboard is ever terrified or even surprised by any of this- it's all taken in stride in a That's Life In the Big City fashion.

I leave it to the Freudians to figure out what it all "means," but I always have fun on such rides.

 

[ChiTownScion]

I think my most vivid Golden Era-related dream was in college. I was in a concentration camp in Germany and was a political refugee or something along those lines. I remember there being some kind of uprising. But the thing that still gets me to this day was that at the end of the dream, the credits rolled just like in the movies. Never had that happen before or since.

My World War II dream, well, I wish it were more romantic- like Gregory Peck piloting Flying Fortress, enduring flak and strafing fire from Me-109's or such. But instead, I find myself as a company level German army officer on the Eastern Front. My men have inadequate winter clothing, and each moment is a blinding Russian blizzard. I've long ago given up my own meager rations so that one of my wounded soldiers can have a bit more. We're starving, losing limbs due to the cold, and every ounce of my energy is spent either trying to survive or cursing the higher ups who had the gall and stupidity to do this to good men and good soldiers. We never face the Red Army in combat: they're out there trying to survive just like us.

Damned if I know where that comes from. My Dad fought the Germans. He respected the average German soldier as a formidable professional adversary, but hated Hitler and his gang. One too many viewings of Peckinpah's Cross of Iron, perhaps?