Elton John and his movie alter ego Taron Egerton together, singing, in L.A. yesterday.

I'm interested in this because I actually watched the movie "Rocketman" last night. I rarely watch a movie — maybe once a month on TV and once a year in the theater — but I felt like seeing "Rocketman" because I'd blogged about Elton John's new autobiography yesterday and audiobooked 25% of it on a long walk. The book has much more depth about music and human relationships, and the movie has the visuals — all the expressive faces and, of course, the music itself, plus lots and lots of costumes. I know the movie got to me because:

1. It made me cry within the first 17 minutes. Later, I saw in the book that the very same thing made Elton John cry:

But I’d kept away from the set and tried to avoid looking at the rushes: the last thing you want is the person you’re playing gawping at you while you’re pretending to be him. But watching the film... I started sobbing during the scene set in my gran’s house in Pinner Hill Road, where my mum and dad and gran are singing ‘I Want Love’. That was a song Bernie had written about himself, a middle-aged man with a few failed marriages behind him, wondering if he’ll ever fall in love again. But it could have been written about the people who lived in that house....

What's so sad about that scene is that each character — his mum and dad and gran and he himself — are all in the same house, but each sings the song alone. They all want love, but they cannot give it to each other. Yes, that's corny and melodramatic, but there's a thorough and theatrical commitment to the melodrama, it does make some sense to say that even the cold, heartless bastards in your life, deep down, want love. You can know that and give them that and still understand that they're not going to give love to you and won't receive love from you.

2. That night, I had a dream — not the dream described below — that was something like a scene in the movie, which I won't describe because it's a bit of a spoiler. In my dream — and there's no movie spoiler here and no quote from the movie — I told some people off with the line: "You are no longer allowed to talk to me from inside my head." That seemed like an important idea to me in the dream and to me now that I'm awake. I'm not referring to the phenomenon of hearing voices in your head, which is a symptom of mental illness, but the very common experience of having your own thoughts and weaving in the imagined responses and interactions of another person. I don't think it would be possible or desirable to exclude everyone from your thoughts, but you might want to identify some individuals in your life who ought to be escorted out. You could still talk to them when they're actually there in real life talking to you. Just don't let them talk to you from inside your head. In the dream, the individuals I was talking to when I said "You are no longer allowed to talk to me from inside my head" were inside my head. That's what a dream is.