Northstar Autopsy (French version)

Dream #1: Northstar Autopsy

Share: The title of this dream was received in the dream, at the very end, when I was told that the title of the documentary was Northstar Autopsy.

Dream: The dream begins in Repentigny (the former city where I lived). I am in a bus with several people. It's like an organized group bus going to visit something. We are on the bus and are driving through a lower socio-economic neighborhood in Repentigny. There are several blocks of apartments and there are a lot of people sitting on their balconies. Some are smoking, some are watching, they're not doing much of anything really.

At that point, a narration starts, like in a movie, and I'm the one doing the narration. In this one, I'm commenting on these people who are on their balcony and I'm being judgmental towards them. I think they are not using their time well; they should be doing something instead of sitting on their balcony "doing nothing". I comment on what happens when a social class drops out of society. This is what I describe in the documentary and I'm about to go and visit some kind of industry with people. The whole organized group was going there.

In the bus, I am with my 2 older sisters and I talk to them about the documentary I want to make on this industry, which according to me, has special practices or something that I want to go understand and deepen. The bus continues and stops to comment on what is happening in Repentigny. We arrive at an industrial district, with industries of all kinds. The factory is on the right of the industrial boulevard. It is all white and has the beautiful air, of high technology if one wants. But around it, there are big fences, really high, at least 10 meters high, with barbed wire and signs that say: "no entry" or "place under surveillance". You can see that it is a protected place.

The bus arrives and before getting out, I talk to my two sisters. They tell me that they will not go inside the factory but will wait for me outside, and that as soon as I am done, they will take the car and meet me outside to leave together. To start my documentary, I take a note pad so I can write and look serious. And I put on a pink wig, something a little goofy. My intention is to see how the factory works and to put a bit of a "Patch Adams" spin on it. When you arrive at the entrance, you have to put on a sort of smock. My sisters are in the entrance and leave me, but just before, when they see the coat, they say to me: "Ah, don't put that on! I say: "No, no, it's okay, it'll be funny".

I'm a little late actually, as the group has already started (what I don't know yet in the dream is that all visitors had a microchip before entering the industry) so I hurry to enter the factory. I hurry to put on the coat and join the group and I don't have a chip given my late arrival. The person in charge of the group has already left and is giving explanations. I don't go through the same door as the group. They went through a corridor and I go through a kind of general entrance door and I hurry, I walk quickly to join the group.

The guided tour begins and she explains what the company does. The room where we are is white and really huge. It's like a big circle and it's 50 to 60 feet high. At the top, on the top floor, which is big and has to be at least 20 feet before the ceiling, it's all windows with people who can look down on what's going on, people supervising, etc. But what I find is that I don't see the same thing as other people, because I don't have the microchip. This chip changes people's perception. Except for one person who is next to me, as a kind of outsider, someone that in society, the majority of "normal" people would find weird.

But I'm interested in what he might have to say and it's like he wakes up. He has a chip, but he wakes up. He says to me, "Hey, do you see what I see?" He explains to me that he's on some kind of medication for his health (possibly on a psychological level, because you can see that he's a person who could easily be medicated if he went to a psychologist or psychiatrist, because he looks a little bit special, he's different from other people in the way he talks, dresses, the way he is, etc.), and then he says, "Hey, look what's there!"

At the place he points to, there are like garbage containers, big metal containers, and inside you see limbs, arms, things either cut off, burned or all twisted up that have been ripped off, like in a horror movie. Like limbs that have been mutilated; either they've been experimented on or they've had accidents at work, things like that. He says to me, "Do you want to go look inside?" It's disgusting. It's really, really full.

I say: "No, no, I hate to see that, I'm sorry, I find that... I don't like to see things that aren't beautiful like that, I can't look at them". He says: "There are like lots of arms, lots of things like that" and he describes what he sees. I look up a little bit and see what's in the containers. I say to myself, "Oh my God". At about the same time, I look down at my apron and I see that there is a lot of blood, bits of skin, stuff like that on my coat and I realize, "Oh no, that's why my sisters told me not to wear that," when I was in a hurry to get home. I realize that it's really not clean, that what's going on in that factory, it doesn't make sense. I had thought at the beginning that it would be funny to make a documentary, but now I realize that I am in danger, because people have a chip, but I don't have one, and that if people realize that I am awake, it would be bad for me.

I still decided to go to the back corridors, where there are for example fire escapes, mechanical rooms, etc., that you don't normally see as a tourist or visitor. It's not inviting. So I walk through these corridors and go to the outer courtyard in the back, and there I see workers working on things outside, and others who are on their "break" because they are so low on energy. Some of them have gone out to try to save themselves, but they don't have any strength left. They're leaning on the fence with one arm trying to climb, but they're really devitalized.

They are not zombies as such, but they are in a way, because they are as good as dead in fact. They have no vitality at all and I realize that they are trapped in this factory. At the same time, I realize that we are in a backyard in Repentigny, with the same people who were there at the beginning, who are on their balconies and watching. It's as if there was a poor neighborhood near the industry, in fact behind it. In the factory yard. They look at me and wonder what I'm doing there. I tell myself that they must not see me, because if someone sounds the alarm, it would be bad for me.

I try to come back to the group discreetly. I pass under the balconies of these people so that they do not see me too much and I am stressed. The general atmosphere of the nightmare is like a horror movie. I come back to the group and say to the outsider, "Listen, I have to get out of here right now, before people realize that I don't have the chip, because I've seen the conditions of the people back there and they are prisoners, we have to get out of here as soon as possible. At this point, the marginalized person stays with the group. It's as if he's not awake like he used to be. He doesn't understand why I'm stressed. He stays there. So I say to myself, too bad, I can't do anything and I go away.

At the exit, there was a friend of mine from university. I asked her, "What are you doing here? Why are you working for this factory? She answered: "Oh well, they recruited me, they thought I was doing a good job and they hired me. I have good conditions, etc.". I tell her: "Listen, I have to go back. She asks: "Aren't you with the group? I tell her: "No, no, no, my sisters are waiting for me. I have to go back". She says: "Ok, then I will deactivate your chip". I said, "That's kind of the problem, I don't have one. She says, "Oh, the security is going to come to you. So I said, "Well that's it, that's why I really want to go. So she says, "Look, go ahead, try to get out as best you can. You'll have to climb over the fence. I won't be able to cover you, but I'll slow down the security.

So I hurry, I run, and at that moment my son is there. I ask him, "But Nathan, what are you doing here? He answered: "Well, I'm here, I was waiting for you daddy, outside". I said, "Okay, come on, we have to hurry, we have to get out of here. So we run to the fence and I say to him, "Okay go ahead, climb, climb, we'll go, we'll get there together. The fence is really high.

When I got to the last fence before the barbed wire, I pulled really hard to rip the fence off and in a few strokes, I ripped it off. I said to Nathan: "Okay, you go first, I'll hold you and then we'll do the same thing, but we'll go down the fence on the other side. But you don't have to look down. You just have to go down quietly, one step at a time, I'm going across too. So I cross the fence and I say, "Keep going, keep going, we're going down. We still had about 1/3 of the fence to go down and Nathan was looking down. This made him dizzy and he fell down. He hurt his leg. It's not broken or anything, but he's on the ground and he's crying, he's in pain.

I really hurry down the fence and pick him up. I say, "Come on Nathan, it's okay. We're going to take care of your leg, but we really need to get out of here, okay? I carry him, I pick him up and by great timing, my sisters arrive at the same time in their cars on the side of the road. I told them, "Okay, hurry up, we really have to go. I put Nathan in the car and sat down. I said, "Okay, we have to get out of here as soon as possible. Don't wait because security is coming for us.

Then we hit the road and it's really special. It's as if we are going to be teleported and leave the car, Nathan and I. But just before that, it's like we get to the end of the road and the scene ends. Like in the movie The Truman Show, as if it was all a set and at some point there was an end. And that by going there, you could see the reality behind the set. At that moment, I realized that in fact, all around the factory, the industrial setting that we had seen at the beginning was not real. It was like images that were projected by the factory to make it look like a real place, but the factory was all alone, in the middle of a wood or an infinite forest. It was really big. Miles of forest.

So when we came by bus, everything we had seen: the city, the other neighborhoods... it wasn't real. It was only forest after all. So I said to Nathan, "Listen, I think we have to get out of this forest as soon as possible, because there are people who will come and get us, so we have to run. So we run together into the forest and I hear that there are 2 guards who order to release the wolves. There are about 5-6 wolves that are released, in the distance, but they run really fast. I then tell Nathan that we really have to run as fast as we can. Then, even though in the logic of the dream he should have had a sore leg, no, he was running. We were running together.

Then there was a family of deer. Some of them had run away, but there were still 2 deer left; like a father with his son, which was similar to us in the family model at that time. The father deer and his son were running, but as if to protect us. They were running diagonally behind us, so that the wolves would catch them instead of us. Finally the wolves pounced on the deer. We don't look back, because we have to keep moving. Then finally, we get out of this place.

At that point, it's like I have an outside observer's perspective. It is as if this part of the dream ended there; we had managed to save ourselves. I then saw from above (as if from an aerial view in "camera" mode), 2 Native Americans in the forest looking at the dead bodies of the deer and going like, "Oh no, why..." They are really sad that the wolves attacked the deer. The Native Americans seem to be the only people tolerated in this forest. They do a ritual of thanks to the deer and the scene ends like this.

In the next phase of the dream, I finished my documentary about this industry. I know it will be controversial because there are people who won't believe it, but I want to tell what I experienced, what I saw. The documentary plays in the cinema. Then I see the poster of the documentary and it is called Northstar Autopsy. On the poster, it's as if we see half a face, a bit like the character in X-Men who is called Mystique, with blue skin and orange hair, who is like a chameleon, able to transform herself into all the different forms she wants. She only has to touch the person, or touch the object, and she can change into any shape. So the character on the poster gathers to that, but on her face, we also see a bit like barcodes, traces of surgery or high-tech scientific experiments, like a kind of human before being tampered with by an industry. The documentary is going to be presented in the cinema and it is like the premiere of the film.

The documentary plays in 2 parts in the cinema and there is like an intermission. The first part of the film is kind of like the one that was just told (this dream). At the intermission, people are talking and I see a lot of my friends from college who came to see the film. They're having a beer and they're talking, "Yeah well, do I agree, do I disagree, is it true or is it exaggerated?" But basically, they're actually rationalizing. They intellectualize the documentary and don't really take it as if it's true. They see it more as a movie and they criticize it, like some movie critics do.

So I went to some of the groups, and I said, "Look, no, no, this is not a film that I made, it's a documentary. We took actors because we're not allowed to go and shoot at that plant, obviously, it's under heavy guard and everything. But we tried to reproduce what happened as faithfully as possible. It's not an exaggeration, no. Some people doubt it and some people really agree. But it's really polarized, about 50/50. There are as many people who take it seriously, as there are people who say it can't be done, that we live in a society with laws, etc. Those are the two views that are in conflict.

After the intermission, in the second half, I had decided (to make people understand the reality of what had been experienced in this industry) that the documentary would cut off at a point where the ending was unresolved, with no credits or anything. And at that point, people would come in, like medical authorities and security people that I had paid, to take people out through a somewhat questionable corridor. As if to make them experience the moment when they would not be allowed to leave anywhere else but where they were told. Everything looked serious with security guards, people dressed in white with coats, who looked like medical or scientific authorities. It was to make them experience what the workers were experiencing in there. As if we were taking them out of the theater through emergency or alternative exits.

Finally, when they arrived outside, people realized they were in the back parking lot outside and they were reassured. But during transit, these people had experienced the fear that factory workers might experience while working. The film presentation ended like this.

The next day, I saw the review in the newspaper and the headline was: Northstar Autopsy, a documentary that is not unanimously accepted. It said that the audience was polarized between the skeptics and the people who said that it was true, that something had to be done to stop this industry.

Share: When I woke up, obviously, I was really stressed. I didn't feel well. This dream is long to tell but it all happened quickly, like an action movie.