Survivor: Dreamland

STIPIMM: “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” by John Denver

It is a rare occasion anymore that I remember my dreams, so this morning, when I awoke from anxious dreams, I made sure to remember them as best I could. I thought I’d share one of them.

The setting of this dream was the reality show “Survivor.” It began with me and my team, called Fugali, at the starting line of a race for an immunity challenge. There were four people in total on my team: me and three women. I didn’t catch much about the other team, except that there were four of them as well. The women in my team were not smoking hot and clad in skimpy bikinis, as most of the young women on “Survivor” are; these women were “normal-looking” (which of course to me is hotter than “hot”) and clad in very non-Survivor clothes: jeans and T-shirts. I myself was wearing jeans and a T-shirt as well, but it didn’t seem a problem to us at the time.

Jeff Probst, the eternal host of “Survivor,” was there and called out the immortal words for our challenge, “Survivors ready? Go!” and we were off. The challenge consisted of a race through the jungle, not unlike the marathon trek the contestants had to take in the first episode of this season (24-hour trek through rain and night). But, for some reason, Fugali didn’t have too much trouble with it. We got though a mud obstacle (basically a pit) as though we were walking through water, while the other team got hopelessly mired in it. The rest of the race was easy, with no real obstacles until we reached the end.

The end was a hut with a large bamboo tower next to it. When we got on site, Jeff told us we had to climb said tower as a team. And so we did, each of us scaling one side of the tower until we got to the upper edge. When we got there, we somehow realized what we’d have to do next. On the top of the tower was a small platform, and at the middle of this platform was an envelope with instructions of what to do next. However, there was a caveat: if anyone touched the top of the tower (which was a small platform), that person would be forced to stay there for the rest of the challenge.

Well, we decided that one of the girls would sacrifice herself for the team, and she hopped up on the platform and opened the envelope. In it there were four problems of math and logic that would have left the usual “Survivor” contestants dumbfounded, i.e., they were very hard.

In fact, in thinking about them, they only made sense in the dream realm. I don’t remember them exactly, alas, but each of them were vastly different from the others. One of them asked us to calculate the “cone of influence” of the tower, whatever the hell that meant (I seemed to understand it just fine during the dream). I think that it had something to do with (believe it or not) four-dimensional space (as related by Stephen Hawking in “A Brief History of Time”) and how the influence of an event spreads out from it at the speed of light. Like I said, hard questions.

Another one called for us to take a matrix of the letters of our names (Chris; Carrie; Sharon; Karen) and convert it, mathematically into a matrix with the letters of the names of the other team’s members (Paul, Sam[antha], Grace, Bud) In words, change

C H R I S X
C A R R I E
S H A R O N
K A R E N X

into

P A U L X X
S A M X X X
G R A C E X
B U D X X X

using standard algebraic methods (note how many columns have letters in common, thus facilitating matrix math). What I don’t remember, however, is how the letters became numbers, or even if they did.

As for the other two questions, alas, I cannot remember them, just that they were unique and hard. Carrie, Sharon and I descended the tower as Karen took up her position, which was oddly hanging under the platform for the duration of the challenge. When we got to the bottom of the tower, I, being a misogynist, apparently, decided to go figure the problems out on my own. Now, any of you who have watched “Survivor” know that this would be a fatal mistake, and that I surely would be voted out next by my team for being such a self-centered jerk. But it made sense in the realm of the dream. Indeed, I think the other two split off to be alone as well. Apparently, Fugali was a team of loners.

So, I went into the hut and started working on the problems. And I got nowhere. I worked on each one of those bastards for god knows how long (in dream time, it probably wasn’t much, but it seemed like a lot). Meanwhile, I and my teammates are sweating the pending arrival of the other team. However, they never came, and I finally reached a point of exhaustion, having been thoroughly befuddled by the problems (gee, I can’t imagine why), but coming up with something approaching answers.

Another funky dream thing happened just then. My answers, like Moses on the mountaintop, became magically engraved into a bronze plate, which I’m supposed to place at the top of the tower. Perhaps Moses is the wrong analogy… it was quite like Joseph Smith, though no part of me would be contending that my answers were anything like gospel truth.

So, with my magically engraved plate (mounted on wood like an award plaque) in hand, I went back out to the base of the tower. There waiting for me were Sharon and Carrie, who each had their own answer plaques. They were quite a bit more excited than I was, and I soon saw why: Carrie had deciphered the questions and came up with the correct answers. Part of me was cowed by the ability of someone else to decipher these rubrics, but most of me was ecstatic that we were going to win the challenge. So, we scaled the tower and put Carrie’s plaque on the top of the platform. Jeff immediately raised his hands and declared, “Fugali! Winner!” We all got off the tower and celebrated. In particular, I was extremely turned on to Carrie after that. Yessiree… the rest of the dream shall remain my own private reverie, if you don’t mind.

Except that I want to comment on the fact that I was so turned on. Just as strong as any physical attraction for me is a woman who excels in doing something (mentally) that I cannot do or at least do as well. It’s one of the many things that attracts me to Bridget: watching her work in the theatre and hearing about her adventures and misadventures as director and acting coach simply makes me hot. She may not perfect at it, to be sure, but she has a natural excellence at working with actors that is just terrifically sexy. Without that, she probably wouldn’t be as attractive to me as a person as she is.

Bridget admitted something similar to this the other day, saying that she feels the need to have a boyfriend/husband who always excels in what he does. It sounds selfish on the surface, but it makes sense, too; both of us are attracted to the other in part based on our abilities, and any varnish on those abilities would possibly affect how we felt about the other. We both agreed, though, having both seen the other at their worst, that we’re able to look past the stumbles and focus on the larger picture. In other words, just because I mess up on a particular project doesn’t mean she looks at me any less as a filmmaker and a person; in like fashion, a mistake of hers doesn’t mean my image of her as a bright, talented director would crumble.

The only way, we decided, that our feelings could change is if the other failed and just gave up. Failure is an option, but surrender is not. In other words, it’s not the success of the other that we love and that turns us on, it’s the passion for the work. In both our cases, that has little danger of dying out anytime soon.