Thursday, 02 October 2008

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Last night I dreamt a pitch. (With luck it will be optioned.) Picture a boy playing with a toilet seat to no good end. His mother comes to rebuke him but his mother is not his mother! Remember Quantum Leap? This is exactly like that, except with a literary figure instead of Sam Beckett. (You know what I mean.) The literary figure inhabiting his mother's head? Edgar Allan Poe! Turns out that bloated fellow not wearing Poe's clothing wasn't Poe at all. Somehow or another, Poe had leapt forward in time into the boy's mother; and somehow or another, despite being all of two years old, he realizes this and screams, "Mr. Poe! You are not my mother!" Cut to the boy's 2nd grade play. His mother and father are in the crowd, and as he walks onstage dressed as Goofy, he spies his mother in the crowd only to find his mother is not his mother! She is Edgar Allan Poe! Again! The boy becomes flustered and nearly trips over his oversized shoes. His Poe-mother rushes the stage but the boy is already out the door and half-way down the hall. Years pass. His Poe-mother seems to have shook her Poe-self off. Until on the eve of his high school graduation, he looks across the kitchen table and realizes his mother is not his mother! She is Poe again! The boy darts from the table right into the sliding glass door. He regains consciousness sometime after midnight in the calm sterility of an American hospital. He finds this comforting until a figure emerges from a darkened corner. It's his Poe-mother! He tries to run but trips over the many wires glued and stuck into his parts. His Poe-mother approaches. He screams and— —and then I wake up. Why was Poe after me? Was he really after me? Or was it my mother he wanted all along? (Or a Freudian pun of such baleful provenance I deserve to be stabbed multiple times in painful places?)

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