I’m usually a little suspicious of bloggers who share their dreams, as they (the dreams, that is, not the bloggers) tend to be an impenetrable mixture of the intensely personal and the outright surreal, but I had one the other night that didn’t have too much in the way of either of those things and was comprehensible to the point of being blatantly obvious.
I had travelled quite some distance – either from Tokyo to Hokkaido or London to Scotland, and far enough that I think I went by plane – to do what I thought would be a translating job. The location was a studio, not of the hangar-like, film set variety, but more like a music studio, on at least two floors and with a control room, mixing desk, and so on.
I was told that the job itself was to involve three people – possibly actors or possibly interviewees – each speaking alone. At a minute or two each, the monologues weren’t going to be particularly long, but I began to fret when I was told that my job would be to transcribe what was being said. Rather than translating, this was Japanese-to-Japanese, and when the first person began to speak, I realised straight away there was no way that my typing fingers – not to mention my brain – would be able to keep up.
With members of the production team sitting around me, I looked at the person speaking and simply sat there in shock with my mouth hanging open and my fingers hovering motionless above the keyboard. When the second monologue began, I found myself typing, but this time in English, which I knew wasn’t what they wanted and in any case, seemed to be either completely random or not related closely enough to what was being said.
At this point, I asked if it might be possible to hear another take, and was told to my horror that no, there was only one and nothing was being recorded. When the third monologue began, I effectively gave up and can’t remember what I did – I think perhaps that I began typing in Japanese but fell hopelessly behind and only cobbled together a couple of sentences.
To be fair to my imaginary employers, they didn’t seem to be angry, although I felt particularly guilty because rather than being just some random freelancer, I was apparently a favourite of one of their producer/coordinators and had been brought in specially for the job.
This is when I woke up with a momentary feeling of paranoia that the whole thing had actually happened, before coming to my senses and drifting back to sleep pretty much straight away. I had another and equally vivid dream after that, although perhaps mercifully, I can’t remember what it was about.
When I told M Jr II about this over breakfast the next day, he very perceptively remarked, ‘Daddy, I think you’re working too much.’
