Screenwriting : Mapping the Unconscious by Geoff Hall

This year, I’ve been keeping a Dream Journal. It has helped me keep tabs on what is happening in the depths of my emotional and spiritual life.

Remembering dreams is quite a task. I found that if I woke up and used those initial minutes of consciousness, I could recall more detail of the dream or dreams. Of course, sometimes I had more than one dream and that became a bit of a trial, that in writing one, I would forget a lot about the other.

Over time, my keeping of the journal has become a whole lot easier. My memory is sparked and focused by writing it down. I wonder how many writers in the Stage 32 community keep a dream journal?

I have found that my recurring dreams are generally trying to get me to resolve some inner issues from past traumas, that have been left unattended or hidden and compartmentalised, so as not to focus on them.

Some it is true, are really strange, bizarre activities during my sleeping hours, but instead of writing them off as meaningless, I learned, through reading about Carl Jung’s work that actually I was being asked to pay attention to my dreams. My unconscious deliberations were asking my conscious mind to pay attention.

I also found that some of the dreams were a call to action, that they were the seeds for a bigger, more expansive story. This was the case with the screenplay, ‘Seeing Rachel’ and the novel ‘0w1:believe’.

And so, I thought it would be great to share one recent dream with you in the Screenwriter’s Lounge.

Here we go with this conversation piece.

8th September, 2022

A Fritz Lang kind of dream, set in a post-war, post industrial Berlin.

I was with Geoff C (a life-long friend) and anther colleague who had presence but was never seen, face-to-face. We were in an asylum. The décor was shiny and clean, the walls covered with light green Perspex. We had decided that we wanted to escape this asylum.

At one point I left Geoff C and walked across a corridor and into a large room. A row of dental nurses, replete with bright shiny chrome dental chairs and equipment. I feigned looking for someone. (Always look like you belong in the room). I came to the end of this room which had an open fridge like door – again, chrome predominated the design.

I shrugged, turned back and exited the room to find Geoff C in the corridor with the other guy. The asylum was crowded (very popular), so we had to push past people to make our way to an exit. Security Guards were dressed in dark overcoats and Homburg Hats. We had plenty of people in the corridor between ourselves and an exit. All the people were coming in to the asylum and we were the only ones trying to escape.

The asylum was designed around well-organised blocks with windows overlooking a courtyard, which were recreational, green spaces; privet hedging, benches and a large oblong pond and fountain. People were sat around the courtyard. Inside there were no Wards, only Apartments, no padded cells, just comfortable surroundings. Very inviting if you liked living in a Mental Institution.

I don’t recall anyone talking to another person in the courtyard. There was a pavement/sidewalk to one side, full of people coming in off the streets – the huddled masses.

There was a large gap in the wall. Unguarded. We made our way through the throng – all bumping and barging into us as we made our escape.

Beyond this opening there was another pavement which had a few people walking along it, but nothing like the crowds in the asylum. Dribs and drabs. n the other side of this walkway, there was a drop of about four feet onto a stretch of derelict ground and on the other side we could see the rendered walls of the backs of houses, like the ones we saw in Berlin after the wall came down.

Nothing holding out any promise after the clean, ordered, clinical design of the asylum. In there, there were no Victorianesque screams echoing through the corridors.

We bustled our way through the throng and saw a couple of Homburg Hats near the exit. We kept plenty of people between ourselves and the Hats, which had come out of nowhere.

Then crossing the pathway, we dropped down onto the derelict land and made our way to a gap between the backs of the houses. This architecture looked like it had been redesigned by a Military Committee!

Then on to another pavement/sidewalk, where there were a few people to be seen; all were going the opposite way to us. We walked along the front of houses which had their windows blown out and areas where the rendering had been blown off the walls. We felt out of place. The atmosphere was eerie. Would we see any more Homburg Hats?

Then. A large metal window frame of a warehouse, with a centrally-hinged window amidst the other fixed panes of glass, with no glass in them. (Space-Time in my dreams, did its usual flipping and we were then on the other side of this window. Inside of the warehouse, above us was the open pale blue-grey sky. Sections of walls adjoined the side of the building, rubble beneath our feet. There seemed no spatial logic to where we were.

Back to the sidewalk; and a small clutter of people, again walking the other way to us, either looking for a place to live or heading to the asylum.

A Homburg Hat behind me, taps me on the shoulder. There is a couple of sonic-pulses as he does this. I look him in the eye, past his spectacles. (A face I knew from a Hitchcock Movie; a villain, insidious blandness, tight-lipped curses).

I turned quickly, and tried to make my escape with Geoff C and our associate. Bumping in to people again.

I woke up, thankful for not being incarcerated in the asylum, but unnerved by the Berlin-like devastation. Was this the only place you could escape to, from the asylum?

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Do you keep a dream journal? Do you find it helps your screenwriting?