White Noise

Date: 9/15/2022

I am watching/experiencing an adaptation of White Noise. It is a very loose adaptation, missing all the important elements of the novel. I can’t remember the plot, but here are fragments: The family is scared. They take a chute into a secret second basement where they end up in red and white capsules designed to keep them safe. I turn around in mine (labeled Dafyyd ab Hugh) so I can more easily talk to a younger sister. We sometimes leave the capsules, but go back whenever there is a strange sound. The son, Heinrich, is not in the basement, and has his own adventures. There is a gym with a talent competition. A band of three girls with identical bob haircuts, two playing acoustic guitar and one singing, all sitting cross legged on the floor. Heinrich is in love with the singer, and finds a chair so he can sit and watch. A second band. A boy kicking a soccer ball at a goal and repeatedly missing. The competition is sponsored by his father, so the boy wins. At the house, we glimpse an explosion in the background of a conversation. A man in a suit is annihilated. Inside, we can almost get a glimpse of something through a window. The house starts racing around town, but in a weird way. It never seems to pass anything, but the distance between it and other sites keeps getting smaller or larger. There is a building at the top of a hill. Stairs lead up, but get difficult to climb. Steps become so close it’s like a ramp. There are steps missing. I get to the top. The building inside is incomprehensible. There are no right angles and perspective doesn’t make sense. Rooms connect in unusual ways, or don’t have what they should. I find a narrow hidden staircase to a basement and descend. There are many people here. I talk to one and she offers me the opportunity to change my name. I remember the book and say KARL. She writes it down, but the four letters are little ghosts that fly away. When she repeats it, it’s just static. There is a stenographer recording everything that is said. I check her transcript, but I see that the text is appearing before she typed it. Upstairs I explore more rooms. One becomes a top down video game where I am collecting glowing blue pine cones. I break down a wall. I see my sister who is also going through rooms. She is collecting video cassettes, so we are not doing the same thing. There are many such explorations of rooms accessible through tunnels or passage ways. Eventually I stay by the main entrance, waiting for my father to join us. Peoples come and go. Cats appear. Sometimes the room doubles to be identical in both directions. Eventually I get out and go down a long road. The signs make no sense. A church is combined with something else (car shop?). Street signs are the same on every corner. This happens many times. Sometimes we’re back in the building before we leave. Eventually we exit into an abandoned mall with signs I cannot read, like they’re made by an AI. I find an empty room with boxes in the middle. The room fills up with more people. There is a presentation about a new drug called Citrine. The villain is introduced, a cross between The Rock and Paul Giamatti. Somehow this ties up loose ends and we leave again after a chat. I am a woman now. We pass a sign indicating that Musk and McCain are co-presidents of America. The sky is hazy yellow. We can see people on a beach in the distance. There was much more to the dream that I cannot recall. I remember being disappointed that this was my favourite book, but the adaptation left out all the central plot.