That was a plot device in Wim Wenders’ 1991 film Until the End of the World, a rather amorphous future-noir in which a bunch of disciples of Max von Sydow’s use a machine he has invented to record their dreams. Unfortunately this proves more habit formng than Tylenol PM, and soon no one is doing anything but sitting around watching instant replays of last night’s circus of the subconscious, barely rousing themselves to sing a valedictorian version of “Days” at the creator’s cremation…

I was reminded of that dream-recorder last night when I got around to watching a week’s worth of shows I had recorded. I don’t know about you but if it wasn’t for Tivo I would probably not see anything but cable news (“Everywhere is war”) and a few baseball games (subway series?). First I sampled the pilot of Studio 360 on the Sunset Strip (our friend David Handelman is on the roster of writers serving Aaron Sorkin) and found it as entertaining as advertised. Then I watched some short films that TCM had shown last week, including a couple early shorts by David Lynch.

It was great seeing TCM’s genial host, Bob Osborne, who is more comfortable introducing films starring Gregory Peck or Grace Kelly, grimace his way through the Lynch set-up. He looked like he was selling gum surgery. And indeed “The Grandmother” (1970), the longer of the two films, was the most horrifying thing I’ve seen coming out of my Sony since Bush addressed the UN. If I hadn’t been so tired I might have gotten up off the couch to get rid of the images of the vampirish little boy (half Brian Ferry, half Eddie Munster) who grows a monster grandmother to rescue him from the animal parents who alternately abuse and neglect him.

It wouldn’t be quite fair to say I have never seen anything like it; it’s a preview of coming Lynch attractions, most obviously Eraserhead. In the director’s subconscious, so close to his film world, the birthing process is monstrous, children are monstrous and the only thing more monstrous is the world they are born into. Eraserhead was the first film of his I saw; it played at midnight at the Roxie in San Francisco for months. I remember being so impressed that I took a girl I was seeing at the time to a screening. It was the beginning of the end of our relationship.

I erased “The Grandmother” and the equally horrifying but shorter “Alphabet” from my Tivo but I can’t delete them from my dreams.