Remnants

            When a man falls in love with a woman in his dreams, he becomes addicted to sleep and by necessity sleeping pills, and allows his waking life to fall into ruin.

            A psychological drama with elements of the romantic and fantastical, this film follows relatively few characters on their descent into despair.  The real life sequences are contained to relatively few locations and could easily be completed on a modest budget.  The dream sequences are more elaborate and would require more costly effects, but could be executed through creative cinematography, made even more acceptable by their dream nature.

            Carl is a good-looking middle aged guy who wanders into a coffee shop where he meets an attractive younger woman named Susannah.  They chat, and without overt flirtation it becomes obvious that he’s enamored.  It also becomes apparent that he doesn’t remember things, about himself and about the world.  He was married, but doesn’t remember if he’s divorced or widowed.  He remembers that he’s from a specific place, but can only piece together where or why.  In fact his entire life is like patchwork to him.  Susannah is unperturbed by this and agrees to help him piece it all together.  And he wakes up.

            Carl is married with two children and a steady, albeit dead-end job.  His wife yells that his alarm is going off, and he rubs the sleep and the memory of Susannah from his eyes as he climbs out of bed.  He looks at his wife without the life of subtle smile that subdued his face when he spoke to Susannah.  He sluggishly forces his way through work in a daze, the idea of Susannah constantly getting in the way.

            The next night Carl struggles to go to sleep, and because he wants to sleep so badly, getting there is difficult for him.  He eventually manages to pass out, but his dreams are barren.  He wanders through a scrubland searching for the coffee shop.  A bus drives past him, on a road that wasn’t there before and Susannah gets off.  Then they are hugging.  He leans back and starts to say something, but he’s distracted by the sudden arrival of a hailstorm.  Susannah hands him and umbrella, and he realizes that it’s a dream.  He says so.  She smiles cryptically.  Carl’s arms begin to itch and he starts to rub them.  He rubs and rubs until…

            He pulls the blanket off.  He sits up.  Another day.  Another mundane day of work, and he coasts through it knowing that he is addicted to the dream girl.  He goes home again, after picking up kids from soccer practice, and being a typical family man.  He can’t sleep.  He tries and tries but he can’t.

            The next day, he sits in his cubicle and begins to drift off.  A knock on the cubicle door turns him around and Susannah enters.  He starts to say something but she holds a finger to her mouth silencing him.  She sits down on his lap and puts her face close to his.  She begins to kiss him, but he hears something… the sound of hail.  He stands up and looks over the top of his cubicle.  Through a plate glass window on one side of the room, he sees the storm brewing.  Coworkers look at it too, then back at him.  “Come on,” she says, pulling him back down.  Another knock on the door of his cubicle.  His face goes scared, afraid that someone will see the girl he’s snuck in.

            And he jerks awake.  His boss scolds him and then leaves.  The phone rings and he answers it.  Susannah.  He slaps himself across the face and wakes up again.  The phone rings again and he answers it eagerly, with a smile.  It’s his wife this time and she asks him to stop and pick up her prescription on the way home.

            Carl stops by the pharmacy to fill his wife’s prescription and finds his attention drawn to the shelf of sleeping pills.  He buys a bottle of them, with the same nervousness of a teenager buying condoms.  Carl goes home and pops the pills.  He falls asleep quickly, and is checking into a hotel with Susannah.  They go up to the room and he shaves while she makes the bed from a pile of linens in the corner.  They talk all the while, and they seem to know each other well, old friends.  She finishes making the bed as he walks out of the bathroom.  She walks towards the curtains to open them, and he yells for her not to, but she doesn’t hear him.  She opens them and he sees… a sunny sky.  He collapses into a new chair in relief, and she looks at him, perplexed.  “Don’t worry, hun,” she says.  “I read the weather forecast for today.”  Then she hears it, and she turns to look behind her.  A piece of hail, but not outside, in the room.  Outside it’s still sunny.  The room fire sprinkler is on, spraying hail all over the floor.  The alarm goes off.

            And Carl’s wife wakes him up.  He’s short and angry with her, but he gets up and then apologizes.  He goes to work, and again he can’t concentrate.  We lapse into a montage of him, sleeping at work, buying more pills, getting into fights with his wife, and falling more and more in love with Susanna.  Eventually we find ourselves in a large mansion where a party is going on.  He wanders away from the crowd into a billiard room, and finds Susannah sitting on the pool table, wrapped in a flowing, gown-like towel.  They talk.  They flirt.  He climbs onto the pool table.  The kiss passionately, and he begins to unwrap her endless towel.  The phone rings, an old rotary phone on the pool table.  The ring is his alarm.  He answers it and his wife yells at him to get up.

            He wakes up and yells at her.  Pissed and angry.  He gets out of bed, slams the bedroom door, and locks it.  She yells at him from outside while he goes to the bed-stand and pulls out the bottle of sleeping pills.  He downs the whole bottle and then carefully lies down on the floor.

            He walks hand in hand with Susannah on a beach.  Hail starts to fall, no, not fall, pound down on them.  She starts to cry out in pain.  He drags her towards the sunny stretch of beach ahead, and they begin to run, never able to escape the storm.  The hail pellets begin to fill up the ocean and it rises to engulf her.  She screams as she is pulled out into the sea, at least until a large piece of hail hits her in the forehead and she goes under.  He keeps running until he reaches a pier.  He ducks under it and shivers while hail tear away chunks of the wood.  He waits for an eternity until his arms begin to itch and he pulls of the sheets, the hospital bed sheets.

            He wakes up in a hospital facility.  A nurse, Susan, tends to him, and he immediately feels the parallel between her and his dream girl.  We montage again, as he withdraws from his sleeping pill addiction, undergoes therapy, and resumes a normal sleep schedule.  His wife never visits him, and he seems to have trouble remembering all of the aspects of his former life.  He also complains regularly of a pinching feeling in his inner elbow, which he is told was likely caused by the IV he had while sedated.  One day, he confesses these fears to Susan over a cup of coffee in the hospital cafeteria, and she says that she will help him get his life together.  He remembers the parallel and looks through the window.  Sunny.  He leans across the table and she lets him kiss her.  They sit back in their chairs and he smiles.  He winces because his arm hurts.  He pinches the IV in his elbow.  His eyes become scared and desperately he leans across the table to kiss her again.  The sound of hail.