I love dreams where the detail is so deep it feels real
Many of my friends were at my house, visiting for some event. The One True b!X as usual was grumpy and I could tell he was getting restless (waiting for the event?) and could leave at any moment, thus triggering a mass exodus. I was trying to figure out what we could do to keep everyone's interest. Then we were in a tenement area getting ice cream from an outside ice cream stand: a video was showing how a famous Early American artist from Michigan named Oliver or Oscar something didn't paint in the usual 'folk art' manner of the 18th century but more in the style of the Impressionists. The Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) had digitized one of his paintings and had 'adjusted' it so at first it looked kind of folkish then gradually it unscrambled and it turned out to be a gorgeous impressionistic view of the marshy flats where one of the rivers met its lake (either St. Clair River to Lake St. Clair or Detroit River to Lake Erie). Apparently Oliver or Oscar had also invented a marsh 'reaper', a cylindrical toothed iron device that usually just lay at the bottom of shallow marsh canals. When a flat-bottomed boat passed over, the reaper was close enough to the surface that it would scrape the bottom of the boat, causing the reaper to either drag along the bottom of the canal or rotate and bring up jetsam from the bottom.
Next thing I knew we were in a wharf district located in one of the flats regions. There were tremendously long low warehouses on the wharves but we ignored them and took a boat down one of the canals and observed Oliver/Oscar's invention firsthand.
Then we were up on the wharf gawking at one of the warehouses which turned out to be a storage unit for the DIA. At first there were few windows - that was the office/special storage section. Then a world of wonder opened through the windows before us: racks upon racks of clothes, paintings leaning against walls, statues placed randomly throughout. And it wasn't organized as all clothes, then all paintings, then all this and all that -- everything was jumbled together higgledy-piggledy. The first thing we saw was a statue or mannequin of Allison Janney dressed in her most iconic costume from The History of Soul: a filet crochet sweater in contrasting colors and a matching cap. Weirdly the cap had been cut in two so only half her head was covered.
Everyone was moving down the windows, oohing and aahing at the wonderful artifacts. Then b!X pointed at a dress hanging high that was billowing in a breeze and he asked the tour guide how they could set up a fan so that dress and no other was in the fan's air flow. As the tour guide shrugged, the dress billowed violently and a bear pulled its head out of the skirt and dropped back down to its paws. Everybody in our group jumped, a few screams were cut off, but the bear just shook his head and ambled down the aisles between the clothing racks. We rushed to see where he went but the next section was paintings in racks and on the floor -- including many by Oscar/Oliver -- and the bear was nowhere to be found.
Next thing I knew we were in a wharf district located in one of the flats regions. There were tremendously long low warehouses on the wharves but we ignored them and took a boat down one of the canals and observed Oliver/Oscar's invention firsthand.
Then we were up on the wharf gawking at one of the warehouses which turned out to be a storage unit for the DIA. At first there were few windows - that was the office/special storage section. Then a world of wonder opened through the windows before us: racks upon racks of clothes, paintings leaning against walls, statues placed randomly throughout. And it wasn't organized as all clothes, then all paintings, then all this and all that -- everything was jumbled together higgledy-piggledy. The first thing we saw was a statue or mannequin of Allison Janney dressed in her most iconic costume from The History of Soul: a filet crochet sweater in contrasting colors and a matching cap. Weirdly the cap had been cut in two so only half her head was covered.
Everyone was moving down the windows, oohing and aahing at the wonderful artifacts. Then b!X pointed at a dress hanging high that was billowing in a breeze and he asked the tour guide how they could set up a fan so that dress and no other was in the fan's air flow. As the tour guide shrugged, the dress billowed violently and a bear pulled its head out of the skirt and dropped back down to its paws. Everybody in our group jumped, a few screams were cut off, but the bear just shook his head and ambled down the aisles between the clothing racks. We rushed to see where he went but the next section was paintings in racks and on the floor -- including many by Oscar/Oliver -- and the bear was nowhere to be found.