Murnau dream
I had a dream the other night that looked like F. W. Murnau’s Faust; it was silent, with very Germanic costumes and imagery, with a somewhat flickering quality.
It was set in this school where the students were boys, wearing these pointy hats with feathers in them, and the students– somewhat with the approval of the faculty– decided to perform some dark magical ritual to give themselves some kind of supernatural power.
One of the teachers told them how to do it. At midnight, they had to each dig up a body of an elite soldier from the Imperial Army of Central Bohemia, and cut out the heart. These soldiers had all died in a big battle sometime in the 1600’s, and were buried nearby. In preparation, the teacher was demonstrating the technique on a cadaver. (It was black and white so it wasn’t as gory as it sounds). The next thing I saw was the students later in the night with their bodies, trying to cut out the heart; it was sort of like a biology class doing a dissection. The teacher, played now by Emil Jannings, held up a thing that looked like an olive. The screen said “this is not a heart! It is a gall bladder!”.
The end.