"This was our dream, gleaned from going to the Rialto Theater and seeing movies."
--Vanity of Duluoz 16
The next five minutes of film become a murder-dream framed by going up the stairs past the crippled girl then back down past her again and out to day. Each new place Raven goes becomes another dream sequence: the window framing the Golden Gate Bridge where Laird Cregar sets the doublecross in motion, the code for phony money, all these dreams building, forming the bigger sleep of the movie itself.
Life as a dream-movie is an awareness Kerouac fully explores in Book of Dreams. "Fact, I like to sleep so I can tune in see what's happening in that big show . . . My dreams (like yours) are fantastically real movies of what's actually going on." 17 His preface explains, "When I woke up from my sleep I just lay there looking at the pictures that were fading slowly like in a movie fadeout into the recesses of my subconscious mind." 18 In a dream right out of James Cagney's White Heat comes, "I'M LIVING WITH MA AGAIN--there are gangsters downstairs, I'm watching one all the time . . ." 19 It's easy to make a film noir from his dreambook, "There's a big murder case going on and cops, detectives keep coming to Ma's house to check on evidence, I'm in my room when the cop comes with my book . . ." 20 which winds to its thrilling ending escape: "DRIVING WITH MY DETECTIVE PUBLISHER FRIEND down a dry sand road. . . I HAD A WHITE BANDAGE on my head from a wound, the police are after me around the dark stairs of wood near the Victory Theater in 
Lowell, I sneak away--come to the boulevard where a parade of children chanting my name hide me from the searching police as I duck along their endless ranks, keeping low . . ." 21
Dreams that become books become movies. Graham Greene wrote the inspiration, This Gun For Hire. Politicians and industrialists are ever eager to start another war, with some paid-off murder and marked bills. Raven, in a dark England setting resembling Richard Widmark in Night and the City, appears in a room, "His eyes, like little concealed cameras, photographed the room instantaneously . . ." 22 "Memories had never troubled him. He didn't mind death; it was foolish to be scared of death in this bare wintry world." 23 Raven finds the girl stuffed in a fireplace like Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue", but alive, rescues her from the doublecrossers and police, down night streets to the train tracks. "The lights went on in the city beyond the railway bridge, but where they were it was just a grey dusk and the sound of an engine shunting in the yard." 24 Hidden from the force in a tool shed he tells her his dreams, "I've been dreaming bad dreams lately" 25 and, "It seems your dreams mean things. I don't mean like tea-leaves or cards." 26 In the morning, a thick fog coming up from the river offers escape and the masked Raven vanishes to his doom. "It almost seemed as if Raven's act had had no consequences: as if to kill was just as much an illusion as to dream." 27 The book ends, war averted, looking out a train window as, "A mob of children went screaming down a street . . ." 28
In 1941, just a year before This Gun For Hire hit screens, an equally influential Paramount movie begins with a 
book and opens turning pages. The star of Sullivan's Travels, Joel McCrea, vows, "I'm going out on the road," only to end up in a Hollywood diner with Veronica Lake. Free, talking, taking time, she becomes his traveling partner, hopping a train from a freight yard like On the Road later on. Kerouac was to invoke their meeting for "The Mexican Girl" section of On the Road when he met Terry on a Hollywood morning, "In the gray, dirty dawn, like the dawn when Joel McCrea met Veronica Lake in a diner, in the picture Sullivan's Travels." 29 He needed to meet her, it had to happen, like Dean Moriarty.
Next page: "Hocus Pocus, lo and behold"
