Darwin and the ill-fated dissidents
I dreamt about Darwin and a group of his friends who were political dissidents. This was a long, complicated dream including numerous characters, many of whom were young female students of Darwin. He had been a teacher at a university. Many of the student characters wore fanciful masks that resembled comedie de l’arte costumery, but they all depicted mice or other small animals. Darwin and his friends did not wear masks. Only young women wore masks, but not all. Otherwise the women usually wore dark, 19th Century gowns with white lace collars, while the men wore suits. The dream presented a history of these various dissidents. I remember various episodes but not the sequence.
Scene A. Darwin and about seven of his friends met at a theatre to attend a lecture or play. The group consisted of three or four couples and two or three single women. All had been politically active. Darwin himself had been imprisoned for political reasons for more than two decades immediately after his voyage on The Beagle. It wasn’t until after he was released that he married and began developing his theory of evolution. His wife (Emma?) was also known as a political activist. This scene occurred later in Darwin’s life when his work was becoming famous. They all seemed happy and were telling funny stories about their experiences, though in this public meeting they remained on guard. The scene was given in its historical context with some narrative voice-over, though the narration was indistinct, occurring more as flashbacks or flash-forwards than as actual narration. It revealed that Emma would be assassinated because of her activities. I briefly saw her being stabbed in the back. Darwin himself would outlive her and get into more trouble later on, perhaps being imprisoned again.
Scene B. This scene occurred toward the end of the dream. A young woman spent years writing her thesis about the lives of political activists in the 19th Century. She had bobbed blonde hair. In an alternative version of this scene, I was the young woman who wrote the history in a single manic episode as a letter to another character who had been imprisoned. Or was I in prison writing to someone else? Having finished the letter I realized it was hundreds of pages long, too long to expect a mere acquaintance to read, so I decided not to send it. This scene contextualized the rest of the dream as a series of remembered or recorded entries.
Scene C. Three young women were confined to an asylum for the insane. They marched around in a line, two wearing animal masks and one not. It was unclear whether they were required to march around as part of their prison routine, or whether they were causing a disturbance. They were all more or less sane and had been confined purely for political reasons. The woman without a mask resembled Kathy (?) from Waterloo-Wellington Rainbow Chorus: dark hair, taller than the other women, lean, vivacious, with black-rimmed glasses, a cancer survivor.
Scene D. A large group of dissidents, mostly men, were on trial for treason. Several of them were Darwin’s friends from affluent families, but most of the men were working class and wore working class clothing. Some were condemned to death and were promptly hanged. I saw a blue rope tied to a man’s feet. The hangman pulled it to pull him through the trapdoor.
Scene E. Several students met around a table drinking coffee. The blonde writer from Scene B was there with five or six others. They were in a 20th Century greasy diner with a neon sign outside. This scene occurred before the blonde woman wrote her thesis and before anyone got into trouble. However, Darwin was present and he had previously been imprisoned but was free at this time. One of the characters was a middle-aged man, a eunuch who was developmentally delayed. He had a round, pale face and was pudgy and looked like Matt Lucas. He would be imprisoned later, and may have been the one to whom I wrote the manic letter/thesis. The group would all split up and go their separate ways after finishing school, but all would end up in political trouble.
Scene F. A fragment. One of the women wearing a mouse mask also wore a silver-embroidered 17th-Century court costume. She had just killed someone with a rapier. It felt like a Shakespeare tragedy. Matt Lucas was also wearing a costume like this in the previous scene. He was a wise clown like Feste (though simple and sad). The woman in this scene was one of the characters in the asylum later, still wearing a mouse mask.