At her funniest, musician/actress/performance artist Ann Magnuson skewers pop and celebrity culture like nobody else. And there’s a lot of that skewering on her new album, Dream Girl, Magnuson’s third LP following the strangely underrated The Luv Show and Pretty Songs & Ugly Stories. Magnuson will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Dream on.
Magnuson: I’ve had wild and crazy dreams all my life. I am told that everyone dreams but not everybody can recall the details of these surreal nocturnal adventures. Those of us who do recall them only remember a fraction. What I do remember, I write down every morning; a practice I started back in the 1980s as a writing exercise, many of which ended up as song lyrics or spoken-word pieces on Bongwater records. I’ve worked dreams into my performances and recordings ever since.
I’ve had intense and lucid dreams since I was a small child, and many of them were nightmares. I had night terrors so often that my mother forbade me from watching my favorite horror and sci-fi TV programs: The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits and Chiller Theater. So I got sneaky and would tell mom I was going to play at a trusted neighbor’s house, where I would promptly convince the kids we should watch The Outer Limits. I needed my fix.
I think horror films convey dreams probably better than any other genre. But while there have been many dreamy films by great cinematic explorers of the subconscious (Bergman, Fellini, Jodorowsky, Polanski, David Lynch, Guillermo del Toro … the list seems endless) none—not even my beloved monster movies—can fully capture the spectacularly vivid, three-dimensional mind-boggling realm of psychedelic fantasia that awaits us when we slip into R.E.M. sleep.
I could post any number of sensational dream sequences from any number of films (classic or obscure) but have instead chosen my favorite episode from the original 1960s TV show The Outer Limits. This one gave me nightmares for years. It still does! Even with the cheesy special effects—or maybe because of them—“The Zanti Misfits” is scarier than anything the most expensive CGI house can dream up today. Plus, it features a young Bruce Dern! I personally think these psycho Cootie Bugs portray Jung’s concept of The Shadow brilliantly. Enjoy!
Full episode on Hulu.
