A Dream of No Significance

I had another of those dreams where the camera of my imagination pulls back to reveal that the action so far has actually been a movie I've been watching on TV.  In this case it turned out to be one of those sixties sub-Hitchcock thrillers that badly wanted to be North By Northwest (1959), but weren't.  This one starred Rock Hudson, (as many of the real ones seemed to), who, at the film's climax penetrates the villains' headquarters, located in a New York office block, by blacking up and wearing an Afro wig.  At which point my dream self asked 'What is it with these sixties Hollywood movies and blackface?'  Upon reflection, I'm not sure what he was talking about - awake, I've thought long and hard about the subject and can't actually come up with a real example of a major Hollywood star blacking up onscreen.  The closest I could get was David Niven blacking up for the 'hilarious' climax of the seventies British movie Vampira.  In terms of sixties mainstream Hollywood product, all I could think of was Keenan Wynne donning blackface in Finian's Rainbow.  To be fair, there is a serious purpose behind this - Wynn plays a white bigot who, thanks to the magical properties of a leprechaun's stolen crock of gold, is forced to experience life as a black person.  (Yeah, I know, they could and should have hired a black actor to play the black version of the characters.  But they could also have hired actual Irish actors to play the Gene Kelly and Petula Clarke roles, but instead we're subjected to 'Oirish accents' far more offensive than the blackface - and don't get me started on Tommy Steele's bizarre performance as a cockney leprechaun).  

Which isn't to say that there wasn't racism in movies in the sixties - it just wasn't as blatant as having white guys put boot polish on their faces and give caricatured performances as supposedly black characters, which had been common even into the fifties.  Even more offensive was when they cast actual black actors who were then directed to give demeaning performances portraying the usual  submissive, lazy and dim black stereotypes.  Getting back to the matter in hand - I'm still trying to figure out just why I was dreaming of Rock Hudson in blackface?  Where did that image come from?  It isn't as if I'd been thinking about either Rock Hudson or blackface in the run up to this dream - so what triggered it?  Was it some kind of analogy for the fact that Hudson was forced to spend his career pretending to be something he wasn't, that my subconscious mind had dredged up?  (In order to protect the box office, studio executives made sure that his homosexuality was kept secret from the public, hidden behind a series of fake girlfriends and wives).  

But of late my dreams have featured a lot of stuff that I hadn't consciously been thinking about of late.  A couple of girls I had known when I was younger, but haven't seen in decades turned up in recent dreams - both still looking incredibly young. I have to say, I liked their dream equivalents more than I liked the real thing - one girl, who I had known as a student, was a lot less flaky than I remember her being.  The other, who I once worked with, was a lot less highly strung than she was for real.  In fact, in the dream I got along with her a lot better than I had for real, (I hasten to add that we were friends, but tended to rub each other up the wrong way a lot of the time), to the extent that she even asked for my email address - I wrote it on a piece of cardboard for her.  I knew was never going to contact me using it, but I appreciated the gesture of her asking for it.  In retrospect, I have to say that when I thought about those two dreams it occurred to me that, while I recognised both of them, their dream versions actually didn't look exactly like the real thing.  The one from work, in particular, I realised, bore a striking resemblance to the actress Nicola Cowper, who I'd recently watched in Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1988).  To be fair, the real girl was of similar build to Cowper and sometimes sported short hair, (although it was curly rather than straight, as it was in the dream).  I still have no idea what significance, if any, their appearances in my dreams had, especially bearing in mind that I hadn't really thought about either of them in an age.  It just reinforces my opinion that dreams, despite what some might want us to believe, have no real significance whatsoever.