I dream I'm inside a heroic Japanese anime with large-eyed youths and dragons. Suddenly my perspective shifts and I'm not *in* the anime, but watching it on a small screen leaning against a glass balcony in a huge Korean shopping mall.

After a while, I realize that the mall is itself animated when a line of electric blue letters hanging overhead seem to start twisting and shifting. The walls, the shops, the floor, all are part of a larger animated image, and so I step back and I realize I am watching this larger animation.

I hear a boy laughing and, stepping back more now, I see that this animation is being watched by a young blond boy and his teenaged older brother and the young boy has created the animation somehow to "trick" his brother. "Haha, I fooled you! It was all an animation!" he is telling him.

Stepping back again, I see that I am watching the conversation between the kids on a computer screen. So it's an animation within an animation within some kind of live action film. And it turns out that it's an edit screen in Finale Cut Pro and I'm dissatisfied with it because it's been shot on a single, unstable camera.

In the shot on the computer screen, the screen (in which the boys have been watching the animated Korean shopping mall inside of which there is a small screen with a Japanese anime going on) ... becomes an upright piano that he is playing as well. I decide I will edit the film by chopping it up and cropping some sections to look like it was shot on a multicam system.

I selecta portion of the video where the camera is moving rapidly from a shot of one kid to the other kid. I use the cropping tool to turn one of them into a closeup, but when I run the segment, the first kid keeps morphing into the second.

Then I wake up. CNN is on and North Korea has tested a hydrogen bomb... I wonder if this had anything to do with my dream. Also, while I frequently have dreams within dreams, this is my first dream of a film within a film within a film....