I have to be hinges or else I would flop

This dream was entirely auditory; the visual field was a featureless black. I heard the sound of a small group of children singing -- I would estimate that it was a group of seven or eight small boys, and I knew that one of them was myself as a small boy. We sang:

I'm all made of hinges 'cause everything bends
From the top of my head way down to my ends
I'm hinges at bottom, I'm hinges at top
But I have to be hinges or else I would FLOP!

I knew that we were singing this under the direction of some sort of very old nonhuman entity -- probably some kind of "gray alien" type of being, though it was covered in a big hooded garment that made it impossible to be sure. (I want to emphasize that I didn't see this in my dream but was aware of it as a sort of mental image or visual memory. I find it odd that even in a dream there is a difference between a mental image and a "real" one.)

As we sang, we danced around, bending all our joints as the lyrics suggest, and when we came to "FLOP!" we instantly let all our muscles go lax and, well, flopped. Somehow we were able to do this without falling to the ground, because we had practiced it many times under this being's direction.

(I, the dreamer/observer, was not dancing or flopping. The dream was as devoid of kinaesthetic sensation as of visual. I was simply aware that my very young self had done those things. Overall, the feeling was as if I were listening to an audio recording in a dark room, and the sound triggered a memory which brought back all the rest.)

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The song we sang is one commonly sung by very young Mormon children, from a children's poem by Aileen Fisher, the difference being that the real song ends "I'm hinges in front, and I'm hinges in back / But I have to be hinges or else I would CRACK!"

Thee two versions of the lyrics suggest two contrasting ways of not being "all made of hinges." A hinge is a specific point of articulation in an otherwise rigid structure. If we were entirely rigid, with no joints, we would crack. If we were endlessly flexible, with no rigid structure, we would flop.

The imagery of the dream clearly draws heavily on Whitley Strieber's book The Secret School, where children meet secretly at night in a "children's circle" supervised by the Sister of Mercy, an alien who wears a nun's habit to conceal her true form, and one of the things they learn is to dance.

Some hours after the dream, I realized that the idea of flopping also reminded me of something in The Secret School, and I thumbed through the book until I found it. It is a scene (p. 203) in which the young Whitley feels that he has traveled into the future and is watching television:

I saw children playing on a patio. They had floppy clothes on and black helmets that reminded me of the ones we wore in the secret school. These kids had dolls that looked like the Sister of Mercy. They were moving their arms very quickly and singing in shrill voices. I found this incredibly alarming, and was glad when the scene changed.

Dancing aliens also appear in the film Communion, recently mentioned in my post "Owls, aliens, Sesame Street muppets, and the Duke of Earl." In the movie, Whitley tells his wife that when he was with the aliens, "they danced." She asks, "What kind of dance?" Whitley bursts out laughing and says, "The bossa nova! How do I know?"

In my July 23 post "Break on through to the other side," I mentioned that the Doors song of that name had been running through my head. I looked it up on YouTube and listened to it. One of the comments below the video said "Bossa Nova + psychedelic rock = perfect sound."

I only have the vaguest idea of what bossa nova sounds like. ("The bossa nova! How do I know?") When I hear bossa nova, I think the Pixies.

Man, I'd forgotten how good the Pixies were. Now I can't stop listening to this one -- a song about a UFO landing, on an album called Bossanova.

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I've just discovered that Aileen Fisher, the author of "I'm All Made of Hinges," also wrote this:

And this: