Phish.net > Charts > Narration Chart: "Mockingbird", 1998-08-07

TREY: Welcome everybody on the Full Moon, very special… Thanks for having us by the way. Thanks for having us, happy to be here. Anyway, this is the full moon tonight, and it just so happens that I thought I would tell this story because it was a full moon the night that the person I was just singing about was climbing up the mountain I was just singing about. It reminded me of that because it was a full moon tonight.

So, anyway, on this particular night, our hero who I was just singing about, Colonel Forbin, was of course climbing up the mountain in Gamehendge there to try and find Icculus, and that’s gonna get the Helping Friendly Book. So, he’s climbing up the mountain anyway, and it was a well lit night. What happened on this particular night that was different from other nights when he had climbed the mountain was that he got up to the top, and he looked around and he saw, because it was lit up by the full moon, he could see the valley below him. He’s on top of this incredibly huge cliff hanging over this mountain with jagged brown rocks looking down into this valley below and caverns and everything.

He’s standing up there on this cliff and he looks down, and he sees that way off in the distance there is this beautiful little pond, kind of glistening. It was this blue pond. He knows that he’s supposed to go up there and find Icculus and all that stuff, but he decides on this particular day that he’s gotta change his plans. As he’s standing there, he looks up to the right and he sees that somebody has attached a zip line running all the way from the top of this mountain, all the way down and over this beautiful pond.

So, he’s standing there and he thinks, “Should I go up there and try to do all this stuff, you know, and find Icculus?” And he decides, no, I’ve gotta grab on to this zip line and go whizzing down, about half a mile from up on top of this mountain, all the way down, and just let go and drop myself into this pond.

So he looks up, and he starts to reach up with his hands. He sees the zipline up ahead of him, and he grabs onto it. He kind of rocks back and forth with it because he’s definitely nervous. It’s a long way down, and it’s steep, and he knows it’s gonna be fast. [mumbles and laughs] And, then all of the sudden, he closes his eyes and says, “It’s now or never. One! Two! Three!”

[A wailing, high pitched screeching sound that replicates the sound of zipping down a line.]

POOMPH! He lets go. But, instead of landing in the water, he lands in the water and he realizes that there is no water there after all. It was actually a huge, blue vat of Jello. So, he drops off the zip line, he drops into this vat of blue Jello, and he suddenly finds himself sort of floating around, stuck in the blue Jello. It’s at this point that he realizes, “there are no vats of blue jello in the valleys, up here in the mountains, I must be dreaming.”

So here he finds himself floating in the vat of blue jello. He’s sitting down there, and he’s floating. He says, “This can’t be real. I’ve got to be dreaming.” So he starts to think to himself, “What can I do to test whether this is all reality, or if I’m actually in a really bizarre dream?” During which he decides, he pulls his arm up out of the jello, and it starts to get stuck, you know his body is stuck in the jello. He pulls his arm out of the jello and decides he’s just gonna smack himself back and forth in the face a couple of times. That will see if he wakes up. If he wakes up, he figures he’s in a dream, and if he doesn’t wake up, it must be reality.

He’s still in the jello. It didn’t work. He didn’t wake up. He’s thinking there, “Oh no… What am I gonna do now that the smacking didn’t work.” [chuckling] So, anyway, there is he is floating. Then he starts thinking, and he thinks “Well, wait a minute. This could be a lucid dream.” For those of you who don’t know about lucid dreaming -- Mike here has filled me in, Mike here is a lucid dreamer -- that is where you get into a dream. This is real, this is… You get into a dream, and you realize that you’re in a dream state. The first thing that generally happens is that you kind of start to freak out, and you wake up. A lucid dreamer is capable of realizing that they’re in a dream state and staying asleep. Once this happens, everything around you becomes incredibly crystalline and almost more real than reality itself.

So, it’s at this point in the vat of jello that Colonel Forbin realizes that he must actually be in a lucid dream, not in a normal dream. As soon as he realizes it, all of the colors around him, and all of the sounds become much more real and much more sharp and defined. Images are sharp and defined. Since Colonel Forbin has actually studied up on lucid dreaming, he realizes that he can get anything he wants in a lucid dream. When you’re in a lucid dream, you can have anything you want.

There's a few little tricks of the trade. So, one of the things is if you wanna change scenery, all you have to do is turn around. So, he’s stuck in the jello, and he says, “That’s it. I wanna change the scenery.” And, he turns around. He looks in front of him and there in front of him is a beautiful banquet, laid out on a banquet table. It’s the most incredible… He hears the wind blowing, and he feels a cool breeze all around him. And, he sees food laid out in front of him. There's a huge comfortable chair, and he sits down in the comfortable chair.

Twenty hands come out of nowhere and start massaging his shoulders and then his body. He feels just incredible feelings all over his body. He’s just, he’s drifting, and he hears, he hears sounds emanating out of the walls. Then, he feels this stick going up through his body and out of his mouth, and he realizes that somebody has put him on this sensory spit. They’re turning him around on this sensory spit, and all of his senses are being bombarded, smells and feelings and sounds. Incredible.

He’s being turned slowly on the sensory spit, and as he looks in front of him he sees that part of the sensory spit is this banquet that I spoke of. Beautiful foods and incredible tastes and waiters dressed in tuxedos and white gloves walk out. They start to take grapes off the table, and they put them into his mouth. He eats the grapes, and he feels the incredible taste. He has desserts and cakes, and he just keeps eating and eating and eating. As he eats, he eats so much that he starts to feel really full, and he feels it in his stomach. He’s fuller and fuller because he overdid it on the sensory spit. He stayed on the sensory spit too long, until he was well done.

His stomach begins to grow, and it grows and grows. He realizes as his stomach grows that he’s turned into a giant ball. Eating all that food has turned him into an absolutely spherical ball. He realizes that he’s bouncing up and down on the floor. So, here is his bloated, sensory spit body, Colonel Forbin, bouncing up and down on the floor of this banquet room. What he finds is that he starts to bounce, instead of... Because he’s in this dream world, instead of slowly bouncing closer to the ground, he actually begins to bounce higher and higher into the air. So, each bounce is a little bit higher until, with each bounce, he finds himself drifting slower, slower, bouncing, higher, bouncing… Finally, the last bounce sends him careening off into space.

He just bounces off, right into outer space. Once he gets into outer space, he feels much better because there is no gravity pulling on his big, bloated belly. But, he’s floating out in space, and he sees stars going by and, you know, spaceships and what not and, um, weird little creatures and beings. But, there he is, in outer space, and he floats so far off the Earth that he can see the entire solar system around him. He can see Mars and Pluto floating around. He stays in our solar system, though. He didn’t bounce out of our solar system.

As he floats around, he sees himself floating around the Earth. He sees the sun blazing off in the distance, and he floats around the Earth. Soon the shadow of his round body starts to actually eclipse the moon, and the moon becomes blocked. His shadow is blocking the sun from the moon. Meanwhile, down on earth people think that there is an eclipse going on on the moon, but really it’s Colonel Forbin’s bloated dream body blocking out the sun. So if anybody happens to ask, you know the truth.

And, oh yeah, The Famous Mockingbirds flying around up there too.