Bizarre

When the Romgi and I were first married, we worked together at a call center. Our work day began at 6:30am, which meant we had to go to bed and get up early. I don’t know about you, but I hate the “Early to bed, early to rise” mantra. I’d much rather stay up until 2am and sleep until 10. Combine that with my poor self-discipline (which was even worse in those days) and it meant I usually didn’t get much sleep.

One day at Costco we saw a bottle of melatonin tablets, recommended for helping you sleep better. A quick summary of the Wikipedia article: mammals secrete the hormone melatonin during darkness, and some studies have suggested a link between increased melatonin levels and better sleep. It’s currently sold as a dietary supplement.

I think after we bought the tablets we went home and read the Wikipedia article, and picked up on the idea that melatonin can cause an increase in vivid dreaming. And no kidding – a few days were enough to convince both me and the Romgi that these were Weird Dream pills. The Romgi stopped taking them because the crazy dreams made him feel less rested. I took them for a while longer until I got baby-crazy, and the tablets aren’t recommended for use by pregnant women. (When I wean jr in a month I might try melatonin again. Maybe.)

Last night I watched a movie that was weirder than any dream I ever had on melatonin (or any other drug, for that matter).

Have you heard of The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus?

I don’t even know where to begin on this. Did you see What Dreams May Come? Pretty bizarre movie, right? Imaginarium is much, much more bizarre. What confused me more than anything was that so many people were involved in the creation of the movie. I could understand if one person had a melatonin-induced crazy dream and wanted to bring it to life on the big screen. But how do you convince other people that it should be done? How do you convince Christopher Plummer and Heath Ledger, and three big actors after Heath Ledger suddenly dies, to take part in your hallucination?

Guys, this movie was weird.

Right now the Bwun is watching an episode of Dora the Explorer where Boots has turned into Sleeping Boots and Dora has to teach rocks to sing so she can become a true princess and wake Boots up, and all I can think is – this makes sense.

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus does not.

You probably wonder why I watched the movie to begin with. One of the blogs I read, Where the Lovely Things Are, linked to the tumblr Mirrors & co. a few months ago. As I browsed the archives I found this fascinating still:

Now that I’ve seen the movie you’d think I could explain what was going on in this picture. No, not really. I might be able to recite the events that preceded the scene but it would be devoid of meaning.

Anyone else watched Imaginarium? Can you provide any insight, or should I just assume that the writers (and everyone else involved) had some heavy doses of melatonin before creating this?