The Dream Of The 90s Is Alive In Twin Peaks
Note: What follows was written in August 1993 as the introduction to a long and rambling collection of thoughts, theories, and symbologies which in November 1993 became my first contribution to the Internet when I uploaded it to the Twin Peaks archive, then residing on an FTP server in Australia.
Just after midnight on November 11, 1990, I wrote the following in my journal: “Tonight I am going to try to dream of BOB. I am going to try to let my unconscious mind piece together information and sensations from Twin Peaks and see if I can come up with anything.”
Earlier, on Saturday night, the killer of Laura Palmer was revealed to be the BOB-possessed Leland Palmer, her father.
I fell asleep listening to the Twin Peaks soundtrack.
The dream.
I’m in a cafe, sort of outdoors. I hear talking about some woman using a weird bank account to buy strange things. I keep trying to leave, but new things happen outside. Glows and other things.
I am embarrassed that I keep returning every time something happens. I think that people are laughing at me, but I have to come back.
The cafe becomes one side of the brick-floored, outdoor mall area of my college. More and more people are coming out to sit along the edge.
Out on the mall, by Henry Moore’s “Large Two Forms.” People are heading off toward the dorms to play the electric guitar. My friend Jack and I are listening, with the crowd, to the music from Twin Peaks that is floating in the air.
Jack becomes Leland Palmer, and we become the only two people who can hear the music.
He cries.
I comfort him.
I try to get him to come with me toward the source of the sound, but he won’t. It hurts him.
“In here?” I ask him, pointing at my head.
“In here,” he responds, pointing to his own.
I am out on a dark road. Leland is with me. Cars pass, right to left, along an intersecting road up ahead. Voices from inside them. I’m acting like events are happening for the second time. I know what’s next.
The passengers in the cars are yelling things I’ve heard them yell before. That’s how I know what’s next.
I’m waiting for the right car.
Off to one side, a woman is killing herself. “Just another normal night in Twin Peaks,” I think to myself.
I turn left onto the intersecting road. Leland is no longer with me. I am approaching another left. Cars are turning onto it. One car turns onto the road, but I don’t see it continue on the other side of a large bush. As I approach the road, the car is coming out again, having somehow turned around.
For some reason, I remember that the first time this happened, the car didn’t turn around and come out, allowing me to attack.
There is a man driving the car, a woman in the passenger seat.
I scream something and run toward the car, breaking through the side window as I lunge toward the woman.
I woke up, feeling that at the end of the dream, as I stalked the car, I was playing BOB. That was why Leland had disappeared: BOB had left him for me.
Forward into December. On December 4, I wrote the following: “On this past Saturday’s Twin Peaks, Leland Palmer was caught, BOB left him, and Leland died. Upon Harry’s asking ‘Where’s BOB now?’ we were shown a strange, off-color scene in a ditch that began with a crashed car, its windshield broken.”
This made me recall my dream, in which I thought I was BOB as I crashed through the window of a car.
That night, I tried to re-dream that dream, in the hopes off seeing and hearing things I hadn’t caught the first time. What were the voices in the cars saying? What did I scream as I crashed into the car window?
I didn’t succeed.
But I did have a dream that included the following words: “Hell isn’t open just for those being sent there. It’s open to anyone who wants to join.”