There are a couple dreams of mine that are available on film. Astonishing, I know. But absolutely, 100% true. Twice now, specific images/places in my dreams have appeared in animated films.

This isn't like, 'I have dreamed of something like this,' it's 'That's the exact place I've been, except now it's animated instead of live. Somebody else has been there.'

It's weird and really cool, but I can literally show you what I've dreamed.

1. A long time ago, I had a dream in which these beings, I wasn't sure what they were, were moving through the sky to meet on an island in the distance. They were large, and long, and they looked like a thick line squiggling and looping through the sky. I thought they might be large, strange cranes.
The movie Spirited Away. Watch Haku in flight. Those creatures were dragons.

2. Just saw it on screen tonight. The Triplets of Belleville. (Excellent, by the way. French animated silent film. Highly recommend it.) This dream, the city view I refer to in the last paragraph:

We got on a long, ribbon-like bridge to get to the city heart. As we curved around, I got a huge view of the city. It was like it was on a coast/island; it was incredibly tall and crowded and everything was made of this old-paper-yellow stone. Beautiful buildings, a cross between Atlantis and Old England. There was a Big Ben-like clock tower, and others that looked like the Empire State Building and the Trans-America Pyramid. For some reason I assumed it was Seattle; NO, it was not Seattle, it was an amazing, surreal dream-city that was Definitely Not Seattle.

I'll direct you to the picture (the movie site is flash so you can't separate the pictures). The Triplets of Belleville site is here. Once you're in, scroll to the right to click on Gallery (the mickey mouse picture). Click on the picture last column, fourth one down.

That's it. Belleville. That is the city I saw as I was crossing that bridge in a bus. Except it wasn't animated, I was there and it was quite real. In one shot in the movie, when a bazooka missile goes flying through the air, I thought, Oo! Oo! Maybe they'll show the building that holds the crystal! And sure enough, as the missile flew up, it passed a building with a round blue glow on top. They must have kept the originating crystal on top of the building where the beam started as a sort of beacon. It was as though they had filmed the movie in San Francisco, I knew that place for certain.

I just remembered that it happened with Akira, too. Except it wasn't a specific image, it was Akira's power that I remember. In my dream I possessed it.

It's amazing to me. I don't know if this is normal. I have dreams, and then shortly after, I see my experiences on film, specifically animated film. It's fun, and cool, but I think it's also more than that, and I want to know what's going on when that happens. Beyond the simple answer of 'Well, all things are interconnected, reality and the mind are one.' How?

6:48 p.m. 2004-01-10�