A Memory and a Dream

When I was a boy, I caught a snippet of a TV show in which I saw a child speaking with a life-sized animatronic monster in someone's workshop, the monster having come to actual life in her dream. I remember the child going into the vast room and seeing the creature, at first hanging limp, come to life and speak intelligently. It was the kind of creature effect they used to use in films and TV before they had CGI: limbs moved by pistons and a face of plastic and steel covered in rubber.

I was leaving the house at the time, so I only saw a few minutes of this show, but it stayed with me. This grabbed my attention so much that I dreamed with it many times, repeating the scene so often in my mind's eye that I felt almost as though I knew the whole story. It is one of my memories--if I can call something so distorted a memory at all.

The image of the child speaking with the half-made animatronic monster, only partially skinned and yet fully alive, entered into my own dreams. There was something about this thing, at first built to have the appearance of life, and yet taking on true life and intelligence, that moved me deeply. With the usual power of dreams, the image of this TV show segment became both distorted and sharper. One of the tricks of dreams is that they return our memories not as they were but as we felt them. The most remarkable features become amplified, with additions that our fancies use to build the vision even more. I can still clearly visualize the scene as I saw it: in my story, the story that I dreamed, the character speaking with the monster is a little girl, and her older brother is building this creature in the basement for a movie. The creature comes alive and speaks only to her, when she is asleep. In my dreams, the monster is a mix of the Gmork from The Neverending Story, which had a profound influence on me as a boy, and a dragon. The girl is curious and a little afraid, the monster is terrifying and clever, and yet doesn't mean her actual harm. He is malevolent, but not to her. He wants to be completed. She was afraid that if her brother completed the monster, the creature would kill her brother.

This scene came back to me through the years, and I think it stayed with me because it became such a potent symbol of the imagination itself. The imagination, like the maker of an animatronic monster, creates something in the image of life which isn't quite real, but seems as though it is. And yet that false memory feels just as real as things that really happened. That image, like the monster in my dream, takes on a life of its own, the representation becoming a unique living thing in its own right. To me, the story was about wonder, a little girl who doesn't quite understand what forces make an animatronic "live", and yet in whose imagination sees beyond the machine to the true essence of the monster. To her brother, it only is made to seem real. But to the girl, even half-built (and obviously not alive), it is real.

I had tried to find the show through internet searches, but couldn't locate it. I didn't know what keywords to use. Was the main character even a girl? A boy? How could I express an animatronic monster coming to life in terms Google would understand? And yet I didn't try very hard. I wasn't sure I wanted to find the original source. I preferred my own story.

All of this would have remained a vague memory that came to me once every so often, but about a week ago Netflix recommended something new on streaming: "Monster Maker," an episode of The Jim Henson Hour which aired in the late 80s and early 90s. And there it all was: the half-made creature that seems to come to life, the child, the conversation no one else seems to see. But in this version there is no brother and sister, just a boy. The things they talk about are completely different from what I remember. The story is about an imaginative British boy wanting to work for a legendary creature effects designer who lives in his neighborhood. The plot is fairly mundane; the show says some wonderful things about the power of the imagination, yet its main arc hardly involves the creature at all.

As I watched the episode, I was struck by these differences. I was sure, despite having seen this program more than twenty years ago, that the things I remembered were part of a real show. As it turned out, I was only partially right. I had to face that the show I remembered, about the little girl and her brother, never existed. I had been wrong. I had misremembered. This was the real show.

Or was it? When asked about memories years later, people vividly tell stories of things that never happened. To them, they did happen. And if there is no proof otherwise, who's to say what really happened? Maybe other children, like me, came up with their own versions of that show, versions that became a thousand different, unique stories about children and animatronic monsters. If I had never found this program, the story I made up would have remained real to me. And part of me hopes, even now that I've been 'set straight,' that I'll still dream about my version. After all, it did exist, in a way.

In my dreams.