scary book and a nightmare

Just finished reading "Blindness" by Jose Saramago.
http://www.shelfari.com/books/50914/Blindness-(Movie-Tie-In)

Actually finished it a few days ago and… been having nightmares ever since. It’s the first time a book gave me bad dreams, I swear. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a powerful, awesome book. The writing is so exquisite that it draws you in from the very first pages. I won’t bore you with details about the plot, it can be read on Shelfari, I’ll just say that the basic concept is quite similar to that of Golding’s "Lord of the Flies" only with adults as protagonists. The writing technique makes the reader blind to all the details, so reading the book you become one of the victims of white blindness, you see and feel what they can feel and what they are told by the only person who kept her sight. It has a powerful impact on the way you imagine things and the feelings the book evokes. Apart from that, the psychological element of the story, the message the book conveys, are what makes the novel so precious and important. I am still trying to figure out what exactly it was, trying to find what makes us blind and what makes us see… trying to understand so I can become a better person.

The nightmare I had right after I finished the book was one of the most horrible dreams I have ever had. Incredibly realistic, too. The worst thing was that it was so impossibly persistant – I woke up in the middle of the night, sweaty, tired and scared shitless. I went to the kitchen, made some hot tea, drank it and after I came back to bed and fell asleep – the dream came back, like a movie, right at the moment where it stopped when I woke up. Scary. I saw myself in the middle of some bog or marsh, I could see no end of it, tall grass was everywhere as I was plowing throught it. There were car wrecks scattered everywhere and ruins of some buildings… the worst part was that there were corpses everywhere. Packed in the cars, rotting in the ruins, floating in the water… men, women, children, all dead. At some point I realized they all were murdered and that I was on this swamp because I running away from the murderers. So I kept running, hiding among the bodies, in the ruins, and running, running…

Someone told me once that I should write down all my dreams and then put them together into a book. I am not sure I would want to deal with those dreams ever again, though, so no, thanks. But, speaking of that. The person who came up with the idiotic idea to make "Blindness" into a movie, should be hanged by his balls on a rotten branch in some haunted forest. Seriously. The very point of the book was that you could NOT see how the people looked, how their environment looked, how the fact they could not see affected them. Making a movie, showing everything and giving the protagonists faces is killing this book and making the film into a bloody c-class horror show a la "Friday the 13th". I am not going to EVER watch this failure and I’ll say no more.

Anyway, I highly recommend the book, just make sure you don’t wake up all alone in your bed after you read it.

Ugh, now, to brighten up the mood – a short clip from the best stand up show ever: "Dress to Kill" by the guy I totally adore, Eddie Izzard:

HEIMLICH MANEUVER:

He’s awesome, isn’t he.