I am not what you would call a calm sleeper. I tend to toss and turn throughout the night, waking up, and falling back to sleep over and over again. Sometimes I come closer to consciousness than true sleep, and during these times, when I'm almost in control of what I'm thinking, I tend to have my clearest -- and often, strangest -- dreams.

Last night, this happened to me, and the result is something that, while nil on actual TG content, I still felt compelled to share.

When I'm in this state of lucid, or at least semi-lucid, dreaming, I'm usually not actually in many of the dreams I have. Rather, my dreams tend to take on a more television or movie-like atmosphere, right down to the primary players being actors and actresses. This is how many of my non-TG story ideas tend to be born.

In this case, the kinda-dream revolved around an English Literature professor named Harold Twining, as played by the illustrious Liam Neeson. Harold has spent the last twenty years of his career working for a small university somewhere in Maine. Over the last couple of years, the school has begun to fail, losing students and faculty at an alarming rate. Rather than seeking a new job at a new school himself, Professor Twining has instead opted to spend his time focusing on writing -- a book of poetry and short stories he hopes will be enough, when combined with his academic papers, to carry him through the rough times he sees ahead of him.

The stress he is under at all times bears heavily not only on his own shoulders, but those of his wife Jane, played by Glenn Close. Jane has a career of her own -- though it is never explained in the movie what this is -- and is slowly caving under the pressures of keeping up her own work while taking care of her more often angry and reclusive husband, who despite his flaws she still loves.

While the movie is set in the modern day, the character of Harold is from the beginning set as out of touch with reality. He drives an antique car, wears rather stuffy clothing, and at no point in the movie is ever seen interacting with any piece of technology more advanced than a manual typewriter or radial dial telephone. His writing is all done in notebooks, on said typewriter, or a large chalk board he keeps in his office at home, where we see both the beauty of his creative process as he makes giant sweeps of the chalk as he writes, as well as the growing mania within him in the violence of his movements and frequent fits of rage.

Harold's creative efforts and emotional turmoil are spurred on to greater heights by his growing obsession with one of his own students, a young woman whose name we never learn in the movie and who has at most two spoken lines in the entire film, played in my head by Piper Perabo.

While the movie is paced to feel as though it covers a long period of time, it actually all takes place in the span of one rainy and overcast week. The film's color palette is largely greys, blacks, browns, and sickly greens, with the only actual color being in the characters played by Glenn Close and Piper Perabo, whose colors are yellow/gold/orange and blue/red/pink, respectively, extending to objects that are important to them or connected to them in some way. At one point Piper's character forgets a pen in her classroom, brightly colored and vibrant, that we see Harold take and insist on using to write with, its color slowly draining throughout the rest of its presence in the movie until it eventually matches his -- and the world's -- overall dull and sickly color scheme.

As the movie progresses, Harold's obsession with both his writing, and Perabo's character, grows more and more violent and depraved, leading to outright physical abuse of Jane near the end of the film, and marking the turning point. At the end, we see him finally try speaking to Perabo, only to be apprehensively avoided as at that point his instability is obvious, only to return home to find his wife gone and his manuscript nothing but a pile of ash in the middle of the driveway. In the end, the only piece of poetry or writing we're ever actually legibly introduced to in a large enough amount to be relevant is Professor Twining's suicide note, written using Perabo's pen, the last thing we see on screen before hearing the sound of a chair toppling and the snap of a rope drawing taut.

Not a very happy semi-dream, and without any actual dialogue since I tend to dream in tones and emotions rather than actual words, but it was powerful enough it had me laying in bed almost an hour this morning thinking about it before I could even get up.

It even had a theme song in my head, a piano and violin duet that was creepy and melancholy in the extreme. If I ever get where I can write out music for instruments I can't actually play, I'm calling it "The Broken Violin," because that's what it sounded like, a poorly tuned and amateurly played violin playing a simple, creepy piece being carried by the stronger piano. Other than that the only other music in the entire film was during a fight between Harold and Jane, when she would have been listening to a vinyl of Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb" when he arrived home and started arguing with her.

That's about it. This probably all reads horribly and doesn't sound nearly as compelling here as it felt in my head, but eh, I just got out of bed, and now it's out there so I won't have it weighing on me all day.

Melanie E.