I'm in line for a film festival. The guy supposedly selling us tickets isn't. Just dithers, looks for supplies, talks on his phone. Seems to be trying to set up a cashless system--in the last five minutes!

I'm here to see a feature called "Colquoon" or "Colohoun". Look for it--there's the list on the wall. Just want to be sure; no point in starting a social protest over nothing. Yep, there it is--starts in two minutes. Check my wallet. Twenties, a ten, a five, a one. I can't pay EVERY possible price exactly. Fine. I'll overpay a few bucks if I must. But I want my ticket NOW.

So I hop up and sit on his counter and say "It's time. I got cash. It's legal tender. Says so right on it--you HAVE to honor it as payment." The guy surrenders--starts to do his job at last. We shove bills at him. He says "Everyone grab a ticket and if I get the film name wrong, swap them. The festival staff won't check anyway, once you're in the building." I tease him: "Then I'll go sample a few minutes of every film with my universal ticket, thanks."

He snorts. "Prepare to cry! Today is all tearjerkers." What a film connoisseur.

Oh well, I'm head of the line, so I may miss the previews & titles, but I'll catch the feature. No need to run. I hop in a wheeled deck chair--odd but comfortable--and zoom through the lobby feet first, fast as a bike, down the multiplex hall...

Rolling toward Colcoun.

NEXT DAY

Page from Fisher Girls; composition after Ithel Colquhoun's The Boat

My housemate Alder shows me an article on a "forgotten" surrealist who's been "rediscovered": Ithel Colquhoun!

Forgotten? I know her work, and name (even if I never could spell it right; who could?) She inspired some of the illustrations for my epic dream Fishergirls. But that was in the 1990s; I've barely thought of her in this century. Until last night!

Why'd my dream play games with the name of a misspelled surrealist painter? Well... Yesterday, I noticed my recent dream Roadie fused paintings by two Surrealists who I first saw in my teens, in a coffee-table book, Fantastic Art: Paul Delvaux (who I recalled, but misspelled, because the book-editor did) and Robert Vickrey a couple of pages later (who my conscious had forgotten completely).

Roadie by Wayan, after Paul Delvaux's Chrysis

When I dreamt Roadie I speculated it was trying to show me cryptomnesia is real (cryptomnesia: detailed memories the unconscious knows that the conscious has lost. Cryptomnesia challenges theories that memory stores only summaries or general lessons, not details.)

This dream, I think, is confirming my speculation by also displaying cryptomnesia--misspelling a different surrealist! Except this one's a name I'd ignored for thirty years but would see next morning. And I don't think it's chance that the dream portrays a struggle to get past that gatekeeper into a sort of Corridor of Time to see "Colquoon"; I think it's telling me "It took work to get past that clown you hired to enforce your silly ideas of linear time. So appreciate it!"

This dream seems to treat cryptomnesia (picking up detailed past-data) and prediction (future-data) as equivalent. Not miraculous, just hard work that my dreams will do for your sake, O Beloved Readers (or maybe just to show off, thank you Dr. Freud). Yet science treats cryptomnesia as rare but real, and prediction as utterly unreal--delusion, superstition or fraud.

Think I'll stick to my dreaming mind's opinion they're heads and tails of the same coin. It ought to know; it's the one doing that work. Critics and gatekeepers just nag and lag!

Maybe by next century they'll face facts--it's turtles surrealists all the way down.

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