Monday, June 28, 2010

My Strange and Awesome Karate Kid Dream

I recently saw the remake of The Karate Kid with Jackie Chan, and enjoyed it quite a bit. In case you haven't seen the movie, I won't say anything about the movie other than what's in the trailer. One of the winking nods to the original was Mr. Han (Chan's recasting of Mr. Miyagi) not catching a fly with chopsticks, but rather killing one with a flyswatter, then using chopsticks to pull it off of the wall and throw it away... a main plot point in the dream I had last night.

My dream was fairly brief, and a bit of backstory was implied, but not shown in the dream itself: Mr. Han now runs a martial arts school. One of his students is a teenaged girl from a culture not very... how shall we say... "women's studies friendly". (It was unclear where specifically she was from - maybe Iran, maybe an African village. My dreams are ambiguous like that). She had an overbearing father who was waivering between supporting his daughter at the school, and pulling her out to have her veiled, executed for being alone with a male non-relative, circumcised, what have you. Mr. Han, sensitive to her plight, does what he can to keep her healthy and free.