ION McGREGOR IS the greatest sleeptalker in recorded history. In another age, the brilliance of his slumbered monologues would have seen him branded a spirit medium or a sorcerer, subjected him to persecution for demonic possession, or led to his being declared insane. But in this slightly more enlightened era, sleeptalking as sparkling as Dion McGregor's can only be celebrated. His dream-stories are so unique that a special word had to be coined just to describe them. And so, what you're about to hear are the somniloquies of DION McGREGOR.Unlike your average garden-variety sleeptalker, whose utterings rarely go beyond a few indistinct words here and there or perhaps the occasional semi-coherent mumbled sentence, Dion McGregor actually dreams out loud, verbalizing fully-realized miniature dramas of the subconscious. His clear articulation is underscored by the noises of the New York City street traffic outside his open second-storey window. The somniloquies of Dion McGregor are among the damnedest sounds you'll ever hear.
In one sense, Dion McGregor's dreams are not really all that different from those of us mortals. Like ours, the premises of his dreams are unearthly takes on real-life events and thoughts, their plots prone to labyrinthine twists and broad leaps of logic. The premise is always resolved (although, alas, in his case almost never happily so). But this is where the similarity to the dreams of ordinary people the dreams of Dion McGregor end. Quite unlike the rest of us, Dion McGregor narrated his dreams, in a fey, slightly distracted and sometimes insolent voice, the irregularity of his cadences only amplifying the hypnotic effect. Only Dion McGregor's dreams were incessantly tape recorded. And only Dion McGregor's dreams were the end-products of such an unbridled subvoluntary imagination.
McGregor's special brand of nocturnal emissions includes puns, rhymes, internal dialogues, made-up songs, sound effects, brogues and dialects, spelling games, existential dilemmas, chase scenes, violent arguments, and even nonsensical "tongues." The characters that inhabit his somniloquies include an ugly woman who'd been married 28 times, a woman with an orifice large enough to house a sideshow tip, an array of post-endangered animal species, various faded screen stars, and the perspicacious old Uncle Horace. His sleeptalking sessions conjure such fantastical scenarios as a cemetery for midgets, a martini eyewash, the Candy of Knowledge, a contest for cunnilinguists, a balloon ride to the moon, the Thumb Your Nose club (founded by Lenny Bruce), and a pastry table that starts its own food fight.
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DION McGREGOR DREAMS AGAIN