The woman from the "Singles Over 40" ad stalked me last night
For some reason, I had a nightmare about the big-boobed brunette with the black bar over her eyes that's featured in a "Singles Over 40" ad that keeps popping up on my Facebook page. I was trying to negotiate the New York subway system, attempting to get to a production of King Lear starring my old neighbor Tom Savini (who created the original Jason makeup for Friday the 13th and who played the biker Sex Machine in From Dusk Till Dawn and had a part in Grindhouse) and the woman from the ad was suddenly chasing me. She was wearing a tight black sweater, just like in the ad, and the black bar that obscured her eyes seemed to float a couple of inches out from her face (rather than being pasted across it like a physical object). I don't really remember much of the dream other that that.
It's interesting how the subconscious works. That ad was one of the last things I'd seen before shutting off this computer and tumbling bedwards, and I'd seen it just after looking at Tom's profile (I'd only recently tracked him down on Facebook, after writing about him in a previous blog). I have no idea why the woman in the ad has the old-school-porn-style black bar over her eyes, as the other women I've seen in ads for that site do not. I don't think I was particularly traumatized by the ad itself (and Cthulhu knows, I'm generally something other than traumatized by big-boobed brunettes), as when I saw it, the ad mainly reminded me of browsing magazines at Tyler's News and Camera in Fayetteville, NC, when I was a kid and my grandfather would take me there before buying me dinner on Friday nights.
No, no, I wasn't looking at porn when I did that back then, even though I've already mentioned such black bars as being a feature of really old-school (i.e., before even my time) pornography. But back in the 70s, there were a lot of magazines on the stands devoted to professional wrestling, and along with the usual stuff about the big-name "wrasslers" (as my grandfather called them) of the day, such as Johnny Weaver and (of course) Nature Boy Rick Flair, they usually had a photo-feature about "Apartment Wrestling." In these photos and articles, hot girls in underwear (or sometimes less) would "wrestle" in "private sessions" for the benefit of "wrestling afficianados." Even then, I could tell that the photos were staged and that no actual wrestling had taken place, but my twelve-year-old-self was excited by them anyway, even though I was confused by why the women in the photos always had black bars over their eyes (and over their nipples when they tore off each other's bras). So that's what the Facebook ad reminded me of, and it wasn't a particularly traumatic childhood memory (indeed, for a moment it made me smell my grandfather's tobacco smoke and anticipate a meal of broiled chicken at the Greek restaurant he always took me to after buying me comics and monster magazines and Conan novels at that newsstand).
But in my subsequent dream, the woman was SCARY and I was desperately trying to get away from her. In a weird way, I think this is because I'd seen Coraline (which I recommend highly, whether you see in 2D or 3D) earlier in the evening, and the floating black bar over the pursuing woman's eyes was in some way a distorted id-reflection of the black button eyes in the movie (and in Neil Gaiman's original novel, his best work until The Graveyard Book).
Which, when you think about, is a really weird, and weirdly random, chain of associations. But that's the subconscious for you. Or at least that's mine. That's why so few dream sequences in films and TV shows are psychologically convincing; they're just never arbitrary enough.
It's interesting how the subconscious works. That ad was one of the last things I'd seen before shutting off this computer and tumbling bedwards, and I'd seen it just after looking at Tom's profile (I'd only recently tracked him down on Facebook, after writing about him in a previous blog). I have no idea why the woman in the ad has the old-school-porn-style black bar over her eyes, as the other women I've seen in ads for that site do not. I don't think I was particularly traumatized by the ad itself (and Cthulhu knows, I'm generally something other than traumatized by big-boobed brunettes), as when I saw it, the ad mainly reminded me of browsing magazines at Tyler's News and Camera in Fayetteville, NC, when I was a kid and my grandfather would take me there before buying me dinner on Friday nights.
No, no, I wasn't looking at porn when I did that back then, even though I've already mentioned such black bars as being a feature of really old-school (i.e., before even my time) pornography. But back in the 70s, there were a lot of magazines on the stands devoted to professional wrestling, and along with the usual stuff about the big-name "wrasslers" (as my grandfather called them) of the day, such as Johnny Weaver and (of course) Nature Boy Rick Flair, they usually had a photo-feature about "Apartment Wrestling." In these photos and articles, hot girls in underwear (or sometimes less) would "wrestle" in "private sessions" for the benefit of "wrestling afficianados." Even then, I could tell that the photos were staged and that no actual wrestling had taken place, but my twelve-year-old-self was excited by them anyway, even though I was confused by why the women in the photos always had black bars over their eyes (and over their nipples when they tore off each other's bras). So that's what the Facebook ad reminded me of, and it wasn't a particularly traumatic childhood memory (indeed, for a moment it made me smell my grandfather's tobacco smoke and anticipate a meal of broiled chicken at the Greek restaurant he always took me to after buying me comics and monster magazines and Conan novels at that newsstand).
But in my subsequent dream, the woman was SCARY and I was desperately trying to get away from her. In a weird way, I think this is because I'd seen Coraline (which I recommend highly, whether you see in 2D or 3D) earlier in the evening, and the floating black bar over the pursuing woman's eyes was in some way a distorted id-reflection of the black button eyes in the movie (and in Neil Gaiman's original novel, his best work until The Graveyard Book).
Which, when you think about, is a really weird, and weirdly random, chain of associations. But that's the subconscious for you. Or at least that's mine. That's why so few dream sequences in films and TV shows are psychologically convincing; they're just never arbitrary enough.
posted by Ian McDowell at 3:28 PM
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