Time To Stop Dancing And Get Dressed

[G. S. Carnivals]

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In the dream our subject has entered into a new life, at least to the extent that she holds down a different job from her waking one. She had already informed me that for some five years she has worked as a secretary for a tool and die firm. (And could this possibly be your delicate touch? Tooling into oblivion.) However, her working day in the dream finds her as a long-time employee of a fashionable clothes shop. Like those state witnesses the government wishes to protect with new identities, she has been out-fitted by the dream with what seems to be a mostly tacit but somehow complete biography; a marvelous trick of the mind, this. It appears that the duties of her new job require her to change the clothes of the mannikins in the front window, this according to some mysterious schedule. She in fact feels as if her entire existence is slavishly given over to dressing and undressing these dummies. She is profoundly dissatisfied with her lot, and the mannikins become the focal point of her animus. Such is the general background pre-supposed by the dream, which now begins in proper. On a particularly gloomy day in her era of thralldom, our dummy dresser approaches her work. She is resentful and frightened, the latter emotion an irrational 'given' at this point in the dream. An awesome load of new clothes is waiting to attire a windowful of naked mannikins. Their unwarm, uncold bodies repel her touch. (Note this rare awareness of temperature in a dream, albeit neutral.) She bitterly surveys the ranks of these putty-faced creatures and then says: 'Time to stop dancing and get dressed, sleeping beauties.' These words are spoken without spontaneity, as if ritually uttered to inaugurate each dreaming session.       Thomas Ligotti - “Dream of a Mannikin” Added by: G. S. Carnivals on 08-30-2008 #305