DREAMLAND Creator Ryan James Coyle
Lost Coast Avenger: What is Dreamland?
Ryan James Coyle: Dreamland is a flea market at nighttime which has only cool stuff. Also there are bands.
Lost Coast Avenger: Why did you start Dreamland?
RJC: Once I went to a flea market and bought a box. On one side of the box was a poster for the original King Kong movie. On the other side was a movie from the same time that everyone had forgotten about called The Babes in the Woods. The picture on this side was of two children leaning on each other in the woods with leaves falling on them. I had no practical purpose in buying the box, and I remember thinking that I didn’t need it and that it would only take up space in my small apartment. But I liked it a lot. I liked the babes in the woods. So I bought it. Eventually I wrote a song called The Babes in the Woods and they played it on the radio a bunch in Los Angeles. So I guess the point is that things which are not practical are sometimes the only things that really matter. I also don’t like getting up early, though. So I bought a ton of lights and extension cords and made Dreamland at night. I basically just put everything that I like together and it came out as Dreamland. Oh, also, when I went to HSU, there was no Dreamland. I would have loved it. So maybe I’m partly trying to make my past self happier.
Lost Coast Avenger: What was your ultimate goal when you created dreamland?
RJC: To make everybody happy. To create a practical outlet for everything that I find worthwhile in life.
Lost Coast Avenger: What’s the future look like for Dreamland?
RJC: I’m hoping to debut crazy new stuff each time. At this next one you’ll be able to send Dream Mail directly from Dreamland that comes with its own old, colorful, unused postage. Soon I also hope to unveil a new form of recorded audio—not a record or cassette or CD, but something different. I’d eventually like to have a ferris wheel.
Lost Coast Avenger: Dreamland, why the name?
RJC: I was thinking “Fantasyland” and “Wonderland” and stuff. Then I remembered this old cartoon that Amber showed me, where these two nice, poor kids go to sleep in beds with holes all in their sheets and everything. When they go to sleep, though, they go to Dreamland, and there’s mountains of candy. They get everything they want and they’re really happy. That’s what I wanted my flea market to be like. Then I checked to see if anything else was called Dreamland and there was an amusement park at Coney Island that burned down around 1911. It had all this crazy stuff like freak shows and lions and a lion tamer with only one arm and incubator babies. It had incubator babies because incubators were just invented then and not yet allowed in hospitals. When it burned down the lion escaped and the police had to shoot it, and everyone was yelling that somebody had to save the incubator babies.
Lost Coast Avenger: Are you orienting dreamland to the community, because you want to be involved?
RJC: Yeah, I like the Humboldt area.
Lost Coast Avenger: What inspired you to create such an event?
RJC: Disneyland. Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. All that kinda stuff.
Lost Coast Avenger: What would your dream lineup for dreamland be?/ In other words who would you love to play at dreamland?
RJC: My dream lineup would be Os Mutantes opening for The Beatles and The Velvet Underground. But in real life I’d like to get The Lemons.
Lost Coast Avenger: What improvements would you like to make since the last dreamland?
RJC: I want there to be lots of cool candy that you can buy for a quarter. I had this gal from a candy place on board for a while, but she didn’t end up doing it. I also ended up getting the pizzas myself. It’d probably be better if there were someone there making food. And more colored lights. We can never have enough colored
lightbulbs.
by Benji Aguirre
