perverted leadership

Good morning, everybody.

This post is related to this entry in my dream journal.

In my second dream, I had a really hard time getting a strap for my backpack pulled up my right arm. The strap was too tight.

This image was directly related to an experience I had as I woke from my first dream. I had a sharp pain underneath my left shoulder blade. I wasn't sure what it was. But it hurt like crazy for about thirty seconds. Then it stopped.

This pain -- which was very much a part of my waking life, not a lingering image from a dream -- I mean, I was sitting up and rubbing my back -- is indicative of a heart attack. But I think the pain was psychosomatic rather than real.

The reason is, two nights ago, I watched the David Lynch film Blue Velvet. I also watched some bits and pieces of the film, as well as the special features documentary on the film, last night. At the beginning of the film, the main character's dad has a heart attack. He feels the pain in his neck, not in his shoulder.

It struck me as scary that he'd feel the pain in the neck. Probably because ever since, in early 2011, I got jumped by a group of kids (who did spend a lot of time punching me in the base and at the back of my head, as they were all the way around me in a circle, and just punched whatever part of me they could reach), I've felt like something bad will eventually happen to the base of my brain, and that I'll end up going insane or doing something really bad and violent because I've had my amygdala all screwed up or something.

So, for some reason, I think, just to keep myself from thinking about a heart attack being related to a pain in the neck, I removed the "heart attack pain" down from the neck to the shoulder blades, by using my own body.


Or -- maybe I had a real heart attack. I'd assume it's not unheard of for a 34-year-old to have a heart attack.

Another image from that second dream, the "sperm pipeline," comes from that first scene in Blue Velvet, too. The father is out watering his lawn when he has his heart attack. There's a kink in the hose, which, I guess, is supposed to be a metaphor for clogged arteries.

But I translated the image so that the hose becomes a pipeline -- a kinky pipeline, but with no kink in it -- and so that it carries sperm instead of blood. I'm not sure why, other than because it was a sex dream. Part of it may have to do with the fact that, when I first watched Blue Velvet, I thought that the ear Jeffrey found was a condom, like a used condom that had been left on the ground. I think the movie would basically have been the same if Jeffrey had just found a used condom instead of an ear. The movie seems to be about coming to terms with sexuality.

The other thing I think is interesting, though, about that sperm pipeline is that the two men who are having sex with each other in order to keep it running -- much just have so much sexual potency! I don't know what to say about it. Like with a lot of things in my dreams, while I'm in the dream I just seem to take things for granted. But when I woke up, I was just amazed with how much sperm those two guys were creating. Wow!

I think part of that might have to do with the fact that I was reading The Ship Who Sang, by Anne McCaffrey, last night. The Ship Who Sang is basically a series of short and long stories following the career of a woman who, born with extreme birth defects, has her body implanted into a spaceship. One of the woman's (Helva's) missions is to carry 300,000 embryos to various pioneer planets throughout the universe. That's obviously a lot of babies. So I think I translated that image into a "baby pipeline," or a "sperm pipeline."

The orgy, I think, also comes from another story in The Ship Who Sang. In this story, "Dramatic Mission," Helva is assigned to carry a group of actors to a planet that has no performance art of its own. In exchange for the humans teaching these aliens how to act (they perform Romeo and Juliet, of course), the aliens give the humans a new, secret form of energy.

But there are all kinds of scandals and intrigues on the trip over to the planet. And at the planet, the way the humans interact with the aliens is very weird, almost like a non-bodily transfer of energy -- which seems very much like an orgy in some more spiritual sense. So I think these scandals and the weird alien interactions combined and touched ground in my dream to make just a plain old orgy.

I think that the dream ends with what I at first expect to be a performance of Jesus Christ Superstar, but which ends up really being a performance of a musical for the cartoon Superbook, is due to my having read this story about the acting troupe as well.


But I'd also say that it's due to Blue Velvet. Near the beginning of the movie, a radio gives the station identification jingle, which sounds to me very much like a melody that might be heard in Jesus Christ Superstar. While I was watching the movie, I didn't quite articulate it to myself that way. But I did tell myself, That jingle really sounds like something from the late 1960s.

I actually think Jesus Christ Superstar isn't such a stretch for my imagination. The entire time I was watching Blue Velvet, I kept thinking of how much it must have been influenced by another film which used the song "Blue Velvet," Scorpio Rising, by Kenneth Anger. I'm not actually sure whether Lynch was influenced by Anger's film, to be honest with you. But the visual tastes seem to be a lot alike at times.


But what I didn't think of was that, the way Lynch plays with time periods and styles in Blue Velvet is a little bit similar to the way that Andrew Lloyd Webber plays with time periods and styles in Jesus Christ Superstar. In addition, Jesus Christ Superstar has a theme very much like that of the "Dramatic Mission" story in The Ship Who Sang: a bunch of people going out to some distant place to perform a classic story.


Here's the original opening for the Japanese version of Superbook, which is pretty hot.

And here's the opening for the American version, which is also pretty cool.

What also struck me as interesting about the dream was that the people toward the end of it recognized me somehow as their leader. But they had my intentions all mistaken. I had seen a cute girl. I didn't want her to think that I was a pervert because I was watching an orgy. So I backed up from the orgy so the cute girl would think I wasn't watching. Then everybody else watching the orgy just thought I was getting bored. So they decided to stop the orgy.


It's strange that I was in such a leadership position. But I also think I wasted my leadership in that instance.


I didn't want the girl to see me watching an orgy. And I was embarrassed because I was wearing girls' clothing. It was probably girls' clothing, too -- like for young girls, not for women, just given the pattern and the ruffles and so forth. Now, I did, apparently, want to watch the orgy. And I did want to wear the girls' clothing. But I didn't want the cute girl to see me doing all this stuff. The people I was hanging out with took this as their cue to stop it all.


But I think my problem is that, in actuality, I should want any girl I would be with to see all the perverted aspects of myself. If a girl can't deal with that stuff, then both she and I would be much happier understanding that far ahead of time. And people who look to me as a leader will, I hope, take me as being less of a sanctimonious prig if I can just accept myself for who I am and not be shy about advertising myself to the girls I like as being who I am.


Even in my dream I was, first of all, shocked that these people were looking at me as a leader and, second of all, regretful that they took my embarrassment as a sign of boredom. They seemed to carry out an action I didn't want them to carry out because they misunderstood the signals I was giving them.


I think that relates this group of people directly to the three "insubordinate identities" in my first dream. The fact that all three of these women are naked is, again, likely from Blue Velvet, from the scene where Isabella Rossellini comes walking through the lawn naked.


But the women also look a little bit robotic. I think they actually also come from an episode of the 1980s version of Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy, where Astro meets a part-robot detective named Sherlock Homespun. The detective has hair very much like the hair of the women in my dream.


Also, last Saturday, I went to the art gallery at the Arvada Center here in Colorado. The gallery is currently running an exhibition called Faces, Places, and Spaces. One of the works, by a woman named Marie Gibbons, is a series of masks, each showing a kind of mood or developmental stage of a person. The masks all seem to show the same girl going through these stages, although the girl may look vastly different based on the mood.

But one of the moods is called, I believe, "Limitation." In this mood, the girl has some kind of mechanical disk instead of an eye in her right eye socket. I think that this image -- an image of a partly robotic woman -- helped to create the image of the female identities in my first dream.

violent disease

Good morning, everybody.

This post is related to this entry in my dream journal.

The most obvious image for me is the image of the severed hand. This comes directly from my having watched the film Blue Velvet, by David Lynch.

The movie's plot basically begins driving forward when the main character of the film, Jeffrey, finds a severed ear in a field. Jeffrey takes puts this ear in a paper bag and takes it to the police station.

There are a number of views of the ear throughout the film. The ear looks pale and bloodless. I think that's why the hand in my dream appears, even though layers of skin keep getting peeled and peeled away, never to get down to a level of pink flesh. I'm sure that the paper bag in the film translated into the plastic bag in my dream. But I'm not sure why.

I think part of the reason the severed ear was translated into a severed hand was due to the fact that I was reading about Aimee Copeland, the woman who has been in the news recently because of her fight against a flesh-eating bacteria. Aimee Copeland lost both her hands to the illness.

In the dream, the severed hand is exhibited in connection with a disease where a person's body burns up from the inside. Actually, in the dream disease, the heart locks up -- stops functioning altogether -- and then the body burns up from the inside. I'm not sure about the heart locking up. But the burning up from the inside sounds a lot like a description people give of what happens to a person on the drug bath salts, which has made the news a lot recently.

The biggest bath salts news seems to have been a case in Miami where a man has been accused of chewing off a large portion of another man's face. The man was originally said to have been on bath salts. However, when I looked up "bath salts" in the news just now, I was surprised to find that the man accused of this crime appears to have tested negative for the bath salts drug. It appears the only drug he was found to have tested positive for is marijuana.

Whenever I read the news and I find stories about people who've just gone completely crazy and committed all kinds of weird crimes, I tend to obsess over it. I wonder if I'd be capable of doing those kinds of things.

And when I overexert myself, I get really way too touchy and irritable, to the point where I sometimes wonder if I'm going a little insane. A few of my recent dreams have dealt with the subject of overexertion and being overly irritable. I also think this trait has been at the top of my mind because the book I just finished reading, Future Shock, spends a lot of time talking about the overexertion people of the present day might feel by being in a world of accelerating technological development.

I'm pretty sure that the weird images I had, first of flying in the air but not really being in a vehicle, and then of driving through the street but not really being in a vehicle, came from my reading last night in the book The Ship Who Sang, by writer Anne McCaffrey. In this book the main character Helva is born with serious birth defects. Like the many other people born like her, Helva is put into a mechanical shell and wired up to a spaceship. Helva is, in effect, the spaceship.


I think that my dream is kind of a way of imagining the flight of a vehicle like a spaceship or a car, from the "point of view" of the vehicle, as a way of trying to understand what the character Helva may have felt like. But I'm still feeling my own body -- which is why I'm having a hard time doing things like holding on to my notebook and so forth.


What I also find interesting -- even though I have no idea where it comes from -- is the recurring image of gossip in my dreams. I'm not sure why that appeared so strongly. I don't seek out gossip in the news. But I always tend to read sensationalist news. And that's kind of the same thing as gossip. So maybe that's what it is.

failure shock

Good morning, everybody.

This post is related to this entry in my dream journal.

The image that has stuck with me most from last night's dreams was the woman in the red dress. And what really struck me about her was just the way she had that, while most of her dress was very tight and form fitting, her left shoulder had a huge puff of fabric coming off of it.

I've lately been thinking of adding drawings, either to my dream journals or to my dreamday journals. Maybe this woman would be a good place to start. So I'll think about adding her in tonight or tomorrow or something.

Anyway, I know I've seen a dress just like that somewhere recently -- possibly from a blog I frequently look at --  Dust Jacket Attic -- or one of the fashion channels I frequently watch on YouTube.

The woman obviously stands as a goal or an end point in my dream. I can see her clearly, even though she's far away. And I can see her as if with my eyes, not in my "mind's eye," or my imagination. She's a performer, and she's glamorous. So maybe she's an ideal that I'm trying to attain. I think the second dream is all about keeping a clear eye on attaining my goals.


The only thing that keeps me from thinking the woman at the end of the island is totally an ideal is that my family is down there, too, and that I am going to watch my nephews perform as well. There are a lot of people on my walk down to the end of the island that seem to want to block my path or throw me off the path. But I have to keep a focus on my goals -- which aren't unattainable ideals, but are practical, and even have something to do with my family.


I'd like to know what my goals are, first, though. I used to think I knew what my goals were. But I think I got majorly distracted from my goals over the past few years. So, maybe my nephews in my dream are really aspects of myself -- elements that are coming to life again, starting out as little children, growing up from that point -- maybe under the guidance of that ideal performing woman.

The screen of job in my first dream is also interesting to me. The fact that it's just some huge, clear screen floating in space makes me feel that that screen is actually something like lenses on my own eyes, and that I just think the lenses are a big screen floating in space. In that case, the lenses would be something like Google Shades.

I think the idea of Google Shades, which I always like to think about anyway, was also at the forefront of my mind. I submitted another short story on the Smashwords self-publishing website. This story, which I call "Blind Relationships," takes place in the present day, with a series of flashbacks going back roughly ten years. But the end of the story actually takes place ten years in the future. A woman is interviewing two other women. But she is recording the interview via a cellular device that's basically a part of her eyeglasses. The idea comes straight from the concept of Google Shades.

So I think that this image brought the idea of Google Shades back into my dream, and that I was "using" Google Shades in my dream without really knowing it.

The other image from the first dream that really interested me was the "milk bomb." At first this bomb looked like some kind of metal canister. But then it looked like a Pillsbury biscuit canister, the kind that you pop open and then just lay out the ready-made biscuits on a pan to cook.

Here's a pretty good video of a Pillsbury can popping open.

But why the heck did the bomb turn into a Pillsbury container? And why did it shoot out milk instead of biscuits? I suppose the milk coming out the Pillsbury container in my dream was probably some sort of sexual image. That seems pretty obvious. I guess the bomb was some kind of symbol of my being sexually weak or impotent -- or just powerless and pathetic in life overall.

I probably do identify with the man in the dream who threw the bomb. And I expected the bomb to be something big, something real. But it just popped open like a Pillsbury container and got milk all over the place. Gross.

It's also weird, I think, that the man who threw the bomb is dressed in scrubby clothes and seems to be a complete lunatic, even though it also appears that the man is working with the men in the business suits, and even appears to be their friend. I think they wanted to invite him to lunch, but he was too obsessed with whatever work he was doing to go with them. Then they said something that he took as an insult, so he decided to throw his powerless bomb at them.

All of that obviously has to do with me. I overwork myself. And then I get myself into an emotional frenzy where I take everything the wrong way. I alienate myself from my friends -- and co-workers! -- because I take everything they say as an insult. And even though I don't get violent, I do get overly rude and angry. But I really genuinely feel powerless, unsafe, unprotected, and completely ineffective in life.

I think that this personality trait was at the top of my mind yesterday because I was reading something similar to it in Alvin Toffler's book Future Shock last night. In Future Shock, Toffler gives a description of the mental development of someone who has been overexposed to high-information environments such as war, disaster, or foreign cultures. The progression goes from one of being irritable, to being unable to make rational decisions, to finally withdrawing from life altogether and being completely apathetic.

So, reading such a mirrored aspect of my own personality traits, I was a bit surprised. And I think I carried some sort of visual metaphor for my feelings about Toffler's statement, and how it compared to my own personality, into my dream.

I think the women in my first dream come from my reading in msnbc.com about a couple of girls in Corpus Christi, Texas, who had been shot while they were out at a park on Saturday night. One of the girls was killed. The other was in critical condition. One main focus of the article seems to be that the girls had recently come out to their friends as a lesbian couple. But there didn't seem to be any evidence that the girls were shot as part of a hate crime.

A memorial to the girl who had been killed was photographed in the msnbc article. The beach can be seen in the background. I think that's why in the dream I imagined myself on a dock over a river like the Hudson River, and why I imagined myself talking to girls and waiting for girls.

I also have a connection to Corpus Christi because, even though I live in Denver, Colorado, a lot of my work recently has had to do with people near the Corpus Christi area. So I think my thoughts about my professional life in New York connected with my recent work's influence near the Corpus Christi area. But I can't say, really, what the connection would have been beyond all that.

UPDATE -- I also just saw this article on the TechCrunch site. The photo in the article looks a lot like the image I had in my first dream of the hollow space below the skyscraper, where the crazy Pillsbury bomber was standing.

I would consider this a coincidence. I don't think it was anything I pre-cognized in my dream. If it wasn't a coincidence, there is a chance that someone in my apartment building was listening to the news really early in the morning. I probably heard the news report through the walls while I was sleeping and incorporated the thoughts into my head.


Interesting in this video, too, are the orange traffic cones and orange and white striped barrier poles, which could give you an idea of the way those objects looked in my second dream.


Also -- I would just like to say that my thoughts go out to everybody in Greece at this time. My thoughts go out to everybody all over the world. Man, the world is having a tough time right now. Everybody is. But let's all do our best to get through it.

disintegrative pressures

Good morning, everybody.

This post is related to this entry in my dream journal blog.

I think the source of imagery for the three planes crashing in my dream is the movie Assault Girls, a role-playing game-themed film by the director Mamoru Oshii.

Mamoru Oshii is probably best known for his anime  film Ghost in the Shell. But he also directed another RPG-based film, called Avalon. I think Avalon is more of an adventure film with RPG themes. But I think that Assault Girls really is a film that could be thought of as its own genre -- the RPG genre.

It struck me while I was watching the film that it had the same exploitative quality of a "pink film," or a sexploitation film. I think this film has, like a pink film, formed a style based on the themes it wishes to exploit -- really, to the exclusion of any other sort of plot device that might connect it with another genre, say, with an adventure film -- more completely than any other film.

I don't think this will be remembered as the definitive RPG film. But I would say it would be the prototypical RPG film. In fact, I was thinking that this genre, the genre of the RPG exploitation film, should be called "grey film," a tongue-in-cheek reference to the "pink film," and also an homage to the character Grey in the film.

But this film is from 2009, and I'm sure that whatever terminology has sprouted up around the film has taken strong root a long time ago.

There is also a potential of nostalgia and fun in the "grey film" genre, I believe, that's exemplified in certain moments of Assault Girls. Mamoru Oshii did, after all, direct the cartoon series for Urusei Yatsura, which is, in my opinion, one of the funnest and most nostalgic cartoon series of all time.

It might not be easy for people to see how an RPG film could give people nostalgia. And I don't play RPGs myself. But watching my family members play, I see how much fun they have being part of their online groups. They do have fun in that RPG world, and they do form memories about which they very possibly could be nostalgic.

Anyway, Assault Girls is about three women and on man involved in a virtual reality role-playing game. The characters all (except for the man) have some mode of transportation. The modes of transportation all fly.

But towards the end of the movie, all three flying devices crash. The mode of transporation of one of the women is actually her own body, which transforms into the body of a giant raven. The woman who can turn into a raven is always crash landing, making huge dents with her body into the earth.

The other main aspect of these two dreams, the warning, I think comes from my having read Agatha Christie's novel N or M? This novel is set a couple years into World War II. It was actually written at the same time, in 1941. The main characters of the novel are Tommy and Tuppence Beresford. They're a married couple in their forties, and they've had an on-and-off career as spies, including during World War I. They're put back to work to unravel some sort of Nazi plot that is being developed for the attack of Britain.

Tommy and Tuppence have two children, Derek and Deborah. The two young people are off contributing to the war effort, and they have no idea that their parents are working to prevent the invasion of Britain. In fact, they think that their parents are rather doddering old folks who need to be patronized and cared for. But Deborah gets perilously close to the danger her parents are involved in at one point in the novel, and at the end of the novel, there is a rather touching scene where Tuppence prays that Derek and Deborah make it through the war without getting hurt.

So I think I took Tuppence as the older woman figure and Deborah as the younger woman figure.

I'm not sure why the aircraft had names like they did. One thing I think is that it could also be related to N or M? Agatha Christie is most known for her detectives Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple. In the Wikipedia entry on Agatha Christie, Christie basically says that she never got her two main detectives together in one story because of the way their personalities conflicted.


However, I'm sure this isn't a new idea, but it seems like maybe Tommy and Tuppence Beresford could be like a compromise combination of Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple. 


Christie wrote surprisingly few books involving Tommy and Tuppence. But the books were written all throughout Christie's career. I wonder if, from a quasi-psychological standpoint, Christie didn't need both a male main character and a female main character to express whatever kind of integrative process she was going through in the creative act of writing her works. The Poirot character could be the animus figure, and the Marple character could be the anima figure.

But maybe, at certain points in Christie's creative life or real life, or both, Christie found that this integrative process had reached a phase, kind of like a completion phase, where the animus and anima could come together. For some reason or another, the animus and anima couldn't come together as Poirot and Marple. But they could come together as Tommy and Tuppence.

Somehow -- I'm not sure how -- this idea may possibly relate to the strange way in which the aircraft are named in my dreams.

The aircraft in my dreams are like X-15 rocket planes, planes which actually rocketed up into the lower levels of outer space. I think the X-15 has always been my favorite aircraft, just because of its rocket propulsion, its high speeds, and the way it just went high up into the air and came speeding back down. It all seems scary as hell to me, and I couldn't imagine being an X-15 pilot. But I like the X-15 a lot.

In 2008 I actually read the Periscope Film edition of the X-15 flight manual -- mainly for psychological reasons, oddly enough. I had been reading a lot of Bruno Bettelheim's work at the time. In The Empty Fortress, Bettelheim mentions how some of his autistic patients identified themselves with fantasy cars, and even made detailed descriptions of these fantasy cars.

It seemed to me that in the working of mechanisms, like cars, there is always some sort of active equilibrium that needs to be maintained. I wondered -- I'm not sure why -- if I could try to look at the functioning of some of the most high-tech mechanisms I could think of -- fighter jets and so forth -- and see if I couldn't determine some sort of system balance that would equate to a psychological system balance.

So I read the Periscope Film editions of the X-15 flight manual and the SR-71 flight manual. I'm not sure what I retained out of either of those manuals, other than a very basic idea that everything seems aimed at a balance of pressures and distribution of fluids and gases, as well as a maintenance of electrical integrity, throughout the entire systems of the planes.

But whatever I've managed to retain from my studies of those planes, I suppose that, because of my studies, both the X-15 and SR-71 have stuck with me as psychological symbols ever since.

The thing is, though, that the three planes in my dream have pipes sticking up and out of them. This would mean, as far as I can tell, that the very complex system of distribution of pressures, which should all be inside the plane, has busted and worked its way outside the plane. Of course, that's no good. And that could be a symbol for my own life -- a kind of warning I'm trying to give myself.

Interestingly, though, I think those pipes also have to do with the Alan Turing doodle that Google was running for a couple days. I didn't actually play the doodle until yesterday morning. And then I only played it once. By the time I got through the game, I understood what I was supposed to do. I was going to play again. But I had a few other things to do. So I was going to come back to the doodle. But then I shut my computer off and went and took care of the things I wanted to do outside for the day.

When I got home in the afternoon, I didn't want to turn my Internet on. I figured the Turing doodle would still be on Google this morning. So, anticipating being able to play the game, I think I dreamt about the pipe-like connections between the circles that make up the points of action for the game. Of course, the Turing doodle was gone this morning -- ugh! Oh, well.

a homeless house arrest fairy tale

Good morning, everybody.

This post is related to this entry in my dream journal.

Both these dreams have a theme which I think is common to literature. But I'm not sure what the common parallel is for this theme in America.

The theme is, of course, of taking the King's daughter for a bride. In this case, however, I'm taking the King's daughter for a girlfriend in both cases. And instead of it being a King's daughter, it's a President's daughter.

I would suppose that in America, as well as all over the modern world, the parallel to this theme would usually be taking the daughter of some extremely wealthy person, like the head of a global corporation, as a bride. But I'm pretty sure that the father in both dreams is supposed to be the President. In both dreams the father arrives with a whole squad of vehicles -- which I would think of as a motorcade. And in the first dream, the father even walks up the steps of the mansion with what appear to be a retinue of bodyguards.


I'd like to mention that the theme of bodyguards must also come from this video, by the megagroup Girls' Generation. I mentioned this video in my last post, as well. But at the beginning of the video, you'll see the girls surrounded by bodyguards.

Now, I kept thinking about making the joke in the comments section for this video, "Where's the part where they follow me until they love me?" But I figured either that that joke had been said a million times before, or else that the joke would lead to a whole bunch of useless anti/pro-Lady Gaga arguments which tend to sprout up on the comments section of just about any music video you can imagine on YouTube. So I kept the joke to myself.


The joke was a little more than a joke, since I'd be perfectly happy having Girls' Generation or Lady Gaga following me until I loved them. It wouldn't take very long in either case.

The whole video of Lady Gaga's Paparazzi does take place in a big mansion, too, which I think is interesting. The mansion also looks kind of like the White House at the beginning of the video, in my opinion. That might heighten the idea of the President theme in my dream.

Also, when I was at Pride Fest in Denver this week, one of the performances I loved was called Pride Idol, which was a karaoke contest for kids eleven years old and younger. It was a lot of fun.

But one of my favorite performances was by this boy who had his hair dyed blue, wore huge, blue, star-shaped shade-glasses (where, instead of there being lenses, there are strips of plastic like half-closed Venetian blinds), and tons of necklaces of metallic blue beads. This boy sang Lady Gaga's "Paparazzi," and he kept the lyrics that said, "I won't stop until that boy is mine." I thought that was great!

But I don't think the mansion in my dream really was based on the White House. I think it was based on the front of the Schwarzman branch of the New York Public Library, the big one with the lions in front of it.

The mansion in the dream was also related to the convent in the Almodovar film Entre Tinieblas (Dark Habits), especially at the end of the movie, where the view is from the outside at night, into the best preserved and decorated room in the convent. I watched this movie last night, so the images from this movie were obviously at the top of my mind.

Now in the dream, I was sleeping in front of the NYPL with a pile of blankets. In other words, I was sleeping like a homeless person on the streets. Now I'm pretty sure that the NYPL is careful about not letting  people sleep in front of the Schwarzman building. But other buildings, especially churches, are more permissive.

The side room in the dream, though, I think, is reminiscent of the New York Palace, one of my favorite buildings in New York. The left (north) wing of the New York Palace contains a little museum. The only time I went there was when they had a Jane Jacobs exhibit. I admired Jane Jacobs a lot at the time. But the exhibit wasn't so great.

But in the dream I am made to go into that side room and act like some kind of tour guide. I'm supposed to give some kind of talk -- I'm not even sure what -- about some place I know nothing about.

The first thing I think of again is the Schwarzman building. In 2008, I helped organize a presentation given by a global corporation. That evening, the corporation was also putting on a little party inside the Schwarzman building. I think that, in my role of organizer, I had to act like I knew what I was doing. I'm not sure if I knew what I was doing. But I suppose I did a good job. But I suppose that was also one of the times in my life where I felt like I could handle a lot more responsibility than I'd previously thought I could.

The Schwarzman is a kind of big symbol in my dreams, even though I seldom dream directly about the building. I first moved to New York in 1998. I spent a whole lot of my time inside the Schwarzman, studying mainly Sigmund Freud, George Bernard Shaw, Karl Marx, and William James. As time wore on, I ended up needing to study at other places, such as the Bobst Library of New York University.

But, especially once the economy started to tank, and I found myself with a lot of downtime, I went back to the Schwarzman building. And the place again became a center for a lot of my most important studies. But even though I was studying some of the most important literary figures of recent history, and even though I was in one of the most famous buildings in the world, I still felt like a little, poor, anonymous speck in life.

But -- even though my perception was false -- on the night I was at the Schwarzman, attending the big corporation's party, I felt like something had come around for me. I was in a building that (sorry, Mr. Schwarzman) I considered to be mine, and I was with a lot of wealthy people, enjoying a party for a big corporation. In some ways it was against a lot of the things I thought I believed in. But in some ways it was like a first step toward something I thought would be an attainable goal in my life.

I don't really feel anymore like that goal is attainable. And I think that's part of the reason I'm a homeless person, sleeping on the steps of the Schwarzman.

Now, the dream has a whole dynamic of the rich father coming up to me and telling me that I need to go lead a tour group  , and my actually going and trying to do it by throwing out questions which I hope will lead people into telling me enough that I can get an idea of how to improvise a speech that will make me look like I know what I'm talking about.

At first, when I woke up from this dream, I thought that I had been pretty original and clever in the dream. Unfortunately, though, I will say that most of the dynamic of this dream comes from the David Cronenberg film eXistenZ, which I watched a few nights ago and mentioned in a previous post.

Almost every film can, and probably has been, compared to a dream. So I made a pretty common judgment when thinking of eXistenZ as a dream. The two main characters in the film, a man and a woman, show two different ways of getting through dreams. One way is the kind of naive way, which I think I mostly take, where you just see and react to everything that happens. A lot of people -- a lot more than I ever would have guessed! -- actually seem to be able to reflect on their dreams and make creative and critical choices within their dreams. In eXistenZ, the man is the naive character and the woman is the thoughtful character.

I think in my dream I, admiring the woman character, wanted to try to be like her. So I tried to use a somewhat thoughtful, critical approach to my unknown situation.

But I think my approach to this situation also comes from waking life. In both of the positions I held in Equity Research, I was required to do a lot of research by phone -- calling up industry or government representatives all over the world and trying to get an idea of market trends from them -- sometimes about things that I knew little or nothing about.

My approach would often be to talk to these people, listen to the terminology they were using, and take any sort of reading material suggestions they would give me. I'd go through the terminology, go through the reading material, and brush up my own talking points with this material so that, the next time I got on the phone with somebody, I sounded a lot more like I knew what I was talking about -- even though I probably didn't. I never thought of myself as having learned more. Rather, I thought of myself during this process as honing more and more finely the presentation I was giving of myself to the people with whom I was conversing.

But I think this approach to things actually comes from one of the films I watched all throughout my childhood, Fletch, starring Chevy Chase.

In one of the scenes in this movie, Fletch walks into a dinner ceremony where he suddenly has to act as the Master of Ceremonies. He doesn't really have any idea what he's doing. And, of course, we as the audience can see he's doing a hilariously terrible job. But he somehow seems to fool the audience in the movie. I think I subconsciously took that aspect of Fletch as a strategy for my own personal life, from childhood all the way to the present.

I think there's one last image in the first dream that I'd like to discuss. The father figure in the dream is a "President image," I really believe. I believe that a King image must be taken up, in some, but not all instances, at least for Americans, by a President image. But I think the father figure in the dream is also a head of a corporation. I think he comes from the film The Man Who Fell to Earth, by Nicholas Roeg.

In this movie, David Bowie is an alien trying to get back to his home planet. He needs to get enough money to build a spaceship to take him home. So he uses a bunch of alien inventions to make money on earth. But the person who helps him run his company does a pretty bad job, and the company ends up getting taken over by another person, who looks very much like the father figure in my dram.

The David Bowie character, considered kind of a risk to the person who takes over the company, ends up being imprisoned in a series of rooms in a mansion for a number of years. He can have whatever he wants in the rooms. But he can't leave them.

Of course, as a paraphilic infantilist, an adult baby, I have a fantasy of being trapped in rooms, never allowed to leave them, but being given anything my babyish desires might imagine.

But I also have a weird fantasy, which I call the "hedgie fantasy." In this fantasy, I'm supposed to be some kind of genius hedge fund manager. But I have to hide my identity from everybody on the street. But my genius shines through, and everybody hates me, just because they can tell what I'm capable of. Eventually I have to hide myself from the world, isolate myself in a series of rooms. I'm incredibly rich, incredibly talented, maybe even incredibly powerful -- but I can't go anywhere, because in the outside world everybody hates me for my talent. This fantasy is very similar to The Man Who Fell to Earth.

I think that one of the reasons Aung San Suu Kyi is such a powerful figure in my mind is because she underwent house arrest for such a long time. The idea of a gifted figure like Suu Kyi being put under house arrest falls very much in line with my "hedgie fantasy."

So, all of those images combine in my dream. I'm not sure how to untangle all of it, though.

There's only one other image I'd like to discuss today. It comes from a commerial on YouTube. The commercial is for the Superfly album Mind Travel. The lead singer for Superfly, Shiho Ochi, is standing before a projection of an image of a desert road. Images of Superfly music videos are being projected onto Shiho Ochi's clothes.

The idea of "mind travel" reminds me of astral projection or remote viewing. So I think I imagined myself projecting out onto the desert road on the cover of/in the commercial for Mind Travel. But, again, I'm not sure how this pieces together with the "President's daughter" fantasy that makes up the "plot" of this dream.

generations' fashion

Good morning, everybody.

This entry is related to this entry in my dream journal.

The most obvious influence on my dream is the music video below, which for the song "Paparazzi," by the Korean megastars Girls' Generation.

I think a lot of the styles from this video (stripes, shiny, form-fitting one-piece outfits, fluttery skirts, etc.) condensed into the dream. I think the girls in my dream also echoed the look of two of the girls in Girls' Generation. But I can't say for sure.

When I was younger, I also liked girl megagroups. But I always liked them in a kind of ironic way. Now I really genuinely like them. What the heck is going on with me? Are they getting better? Am I getting less cranky? Am I just -- getting old, so I want to live out my youth again, only this time with no irony? Anyway, I like Girls' Generation.

The colors of the second outfit -- that weird kind of color halfway between copper and brown, I think came from the work of fashion designer Triton, which was on display at the Sao Paulo Fashion Week, and which the ParisModesen channel posted to YouTube yesterday. The clips of Triton's line are at the end of this video.

The colored hair -- purple -- came, I believe, from my lingering memories of the good time I had at the PrideFest. Also, it comes from a video I posted a few entries ago, also from ParisModesen, about hair dying fashions.

I'm not totally sure what my first dream is all about. I think part of it has to do with the fact that, especially on YouTube, whenever I try to comment on things, I'm always trying to use little bits and pieces of foreign languages. This usually means Japanese -- which is pretty tricky to speak correctly. But I try anyway. And I'm sure I always sound like a fool.

The "robot" might be Google Translate, which I actually do use sometimes, when I want to say something serious in a different language, but which I steer clear of when I'm just trying to toss some expression out of my own head.

It would be easier just to put a little effort into learning the basics of the languages I like. Right? Oh well.

orange and purple leadership

Good morning, everybody.

This post is related to this entry in my dream journal.

I also have some updates to some dreams I've had over the past few nights. I'm a slow thinker. So it usually takes a while for some image associations to my dreams to occur to me.

But -- actually, one of the main images of my dream connects to one of the images I wanted to mention in my updates. In the fifth and seventh dreams of today's dream journal entry, there was a tall, beautiful, black man. In the fifth dream, the man helped me find my way. In the seventh dream, he kept feeding me all kinds of sweet food.

I think this man is associated with the man who acted as MC at the Center Stage at this weekend's PrideFest in Denver. I can't find the guy's name right now. Anyway, he was really good, really smart and funny, and he seemed really kind. He's one of those MCs that really make you feel like he's guiding you through the show.

I liked him a lot. But -- he wore a lot of purple. He first wore a purple, sleeveless t-shirt and blue jeans. Then he wore an outfit with purple pants and a shirt like a tuxedo vest with long, purple tails -- so, like the vest of a tuxedo and the tails of a tuxedo's jacket all in one. It was pretty hot.

During the kid's karaoke show, the MC had a young boy up on stage with him. The boy went back stage one time and came out wearing a purple gown, like a graduation gown. The MC had a little exchange with the boy, something along the lines of, "Are you getting into my clothes again?"

And -- even more to my taste -- one of the little girls doing karaoke came up on stage wearing a pink tutu and a pink leotard. After the girl's performance, the MC said, "I need an outfit just like that!"

Of course, I agreed -- except that I would have liked to be wearing a diaper under that outfit as well.

Anyway, after all this purple, it's not surprising that I had the purple diaper and t-shirt dream in this dream entry.

But in this group of dreams, the man acts as something of a leader to me. In one dream, when I myself am trying to be a leader, and I've lost my way, I'm guided without anybody knowing. I think my admiration of the man's crowd-leadership skills (and sense of humor) made me see the man as a leader teaching me to be a leader.

I think the reason that the man appeared as the guy who was going to feed me cupcakes "or else" was probably because I saw him as a man who was so unabashedly himself, while I was still stuck in my shell. I think that eating the sweet food just means allowing myself to be a part of the sweet things in life -- like love. If I didn't open up and accept the sweet food, the man was going to spread my secret, which, obviously, was that I liked the sweet food.

Although, one thing I'll say about the image of the sweet food, is that this definitely comes from this entry in the blog Dust Jacket Attic, showing photographs of sticky date pudding. The sticky date pudding looks pretty much like the little cakes in my dream.

Another thing about being over-fed sweet food is that it is probably a compensation, or a balancing out of the theme of not eating at all in this dream journal entry.

Usually, Jung says, when you have one theme pronouncing itself really powerfully in a dream, you often get the opposed theme pronouncing itself really powerfully in a following dream. That's not always the case. Nothing is "always the case" in dreams or in waking life. But I've noticed that sometimes Jung is right about the idea of compensation.

Of course, another dream I had involved cooking way too much food. The food was fish. And I think that part of this might be my body's reaction that I've been (bachelor, terrible, terrible) eating way too much canned tuna fish lately.

But I think it might also come from this news article, which one of my friends sent me, which describes how a woman in Korea, eating a parboiled squid, had some of the squid's spermatophores shot into her mouth and embedded in her gums. The woman ended up being okay, of course. But it was kind of a gross story.

But this connects the food to sexuality, I think. I think that, if I were equate the food in my dream to my sexuality, I'd say that I probably am "a closed down shop" that "isn't expecting much business," but when I get excited about new business, I prepare too much food. Then I don't really do anything with myself, and all the food I made just sits there and rots. It's a waste of my energy -- physical and emotional. But it's all my fault. Because I don't open up my closed down shop.

I think the hitchhiker in my sixth dream is an interesting image. But I don't know what he means. Last night I browsed around through Alvin Toffler's futurist/sociological work Future Shock. There are a lot of really great things about the book. But I think the hitchhiker image came from a section in the book where Toffler mentions how many young girls in the 1960s hit the road and traveled by hitchhiking.

I personally equated this idea with an idea of Friedrich Nietzsche (I can't remember from which book -- maybe Ecce Homo?) that wanderlust is equivalent to sexual potency. People who have a great desire to travel are often very bold and powerful sexually. Of course, this was an argument made to prove that Kant, whose travels never strayed beyond his afternoon walks around Gothenburg (?), was a prude. And that argument, of course, was made to prove that Kant's philosophy was no good.


But I think that the sexually bold woman (in Nietzsche's scheme of things) in Toffler's book became the hitchhiking boy in my dream. Also sexually bold, the boy just latches on to any old car that passes, assuming it will "give him a ride," which can be taken sexually. Although, I do have to say that that image reminds me of one of my favorite movie scenes, from Back to the Future, where Marty McFly, on his skateboard, latches on to the back of a pick-up truck for a ride.


I'm not sure why we end up killing the boy. But there's obviously a development from the boy being killed to the girl stopping the yellow taxi cab and getting in. I'd say that the boy stands for one aspect of my sexuality and the girl stands for another. I probably need to let the one aspect of my sexuality go and take on the other aspect. 


But the girl seems very much like she's in a horror movie. And I get involved in that "horror movie" atmosphere with her. I'm not sure what that means. Well, I think I have some idea, though. In another passage of Future Shock, Toffler mentions a survey which showed that the one of the top criteria by which girls judge prospective boyfriends is whether they own a car.


So the boy is a hitchhiker. Like me, he hitches rides -- except that I "hitch rides" on public transportation: the bus. The boy is thrown off the bus and killed. Then I find myself in a car. But it's still not a car of my own. It's a car I pay to use by the mile. It's a taxi cab. And it's driven by my mother. But for some reason, this is good enough for the girl to get into.


But the girl "feels sorry" for me and my mom. Why? Probably because I have to get rid of the taxi cab as well. If a car can be seen as standing for my own identity, then I'm in an identity which is *not* my own. I need to get rid of this paid-for identity, which my mom is driving, i.e. in control of, and I need to get an identity of my own. But this would likely be a painful experience for both myself and my mom. Hence the reason for the girl "feeling sorry" for us both.


The final image I'd like to discuss from these dreams is the image of the bottles. A few days ago on this blog I mentioned a "fight" (wasn't much of a fight, on my side) that I got into in 2006. A group of kids gathered around me, right in the very nice Manhattan neighborhood of Gramercy Park, and took turns taunting and hitting me. 


One of the kids actually hit me over the head with a wine bottle. He must not have hit me hard because, even though it really hurt, it didn't stun me or knock me out, and it didn't break the bottle. Anyway, I think the image of hitting my boss over the head with bottles came from this image, which remained at the top of my mind since I'd mentioned it on this blog.


But the bottles I want to smash by dream-boss' skull in with are PET bottles -- plastic bottles. The worst a plastic bottle would do is annoy the heck out of somebody. It would be ineffective as far as knocking somebody out, not to mention killing them, would go. 


But I think these bottles also stand for space station modules. I think I, like a lot of other people, have been interested in China's Liu Yang, the first Chinese woman to go into space. Yesterday I watched the docking of the Shenzhen space capsule with the Tiangong 1 space station on YouTube.

This event, as well as the mention in Future Shock of modularity -- building things like homes and offices and what not, in a modular, changeable way, made me think of one of my favorite space companies, Bigelow Aerospace. They manufacture what used to be called inflatable space stations but are now referred to as expandable space stations.


These space stations are modular. The modules can interconnect with each other, thus building, I believe larger and larger space stations. I think the concept of the Bigelow space station modules is pretty well explained in this YouTube video.

I'm not sure why the space station modules changed themselves into PET bottles that would be completely ineffective at injuring my dream-boss. But I'm pretty sure they did.

Now -- I'd like to discuss a couple final images from some previous dreams. In the second dream of this dream journal entry I was being interviewed to work for a company called Orange. Upon waking, I couldn't think of why I'd dream of a company called Orange.

Well, yesterday, while reading through Reuters, I found this article on piezoelectric power generation. Piezoelectricity is basically a characteristic in certain materials that causes them, when compressed or vibrated, to give off an electric charge. This charge can be stored in batteries or used to charge small electronic devices.

I remembered reading about novel electricity generation concepts, including piezoelectricity, about two years ago. In my trekking through some of these ideas, I happened upon the company Orange, which was working with the company Gotwind to make an electricity-generating boot called Power Wellies. The boot doesn't use piezoelectrics, but a kind of electricity generation attained through temperature differentials -- i.e. the difference of the temperatures inside and outside the boot.

I had totally forgotten about the little excursion I'd done into research on these Power Wellies. And I can't honestly say, even now, why I dreamed I was working for the company Orange. But this is, I'm sure, the company I was dreaming about.

One more update on the color purple from my purple diaper dream from a couple days ago. This is, I think, just a coincidence. But it's interesting to note that Aung San Suu Kyi, a person I admire immensely as a leader, is wearing purple during her Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

And one last update. A few nights ago, I had a dream where I was standing out on a runway, watching an SR-71 landing. Again, I think this image is just coincidental. But the heat-view images in this video, of an Air Force "space plane" landing, have very much the same color scheme as that of my dream of the SR-71 landing.

rainbow eXhibitioN

Good morning, everybody.

This post is related to this entry in my dream journal blog.

Yesterday I went to PrideFest, the annual festival put on by The Center, a non-profit organization that provides support and advocacy for the LGBT community in Colorado.

I do have to say that I was a little wary about going to PrideFest. But my horoscope in the paper copy The Denver Post told me to get out and have fun. And... I hate to admit it, but I do listen to horoscopes.

Anyway, the reason I was afraid to go was because I've gone to the Gay Pride Parades in New York City a few times, and they've always been miserable. Maybe it's just the location. Everything takes place down in the Village, where the streets are all cramped and packed. And that kind of environment makes me really claustrophobic.

To be honest with you, I stopped going to parades of any kind in NYC after a while, just because the crowds were so dense and so unruly. People seemed to be out to make everybody else's time a bad time. It was kind of miserable.

So I was nervous heading over to PrideFest. But I can honestly say that yesterday was one of the best days I've had in a long time! PrideFest was relaxing and fun!

The event is being held in and around downtown Denver's Civic Center. The event runs through the weekend. So there is also stuff going on there today.

But it's a lovely event. All around civic center are your usual fair-like booths, selling food, art, clothing, etc. I spent a lot of my time walking around those booths when I first got there -- not so much to look at the booths as to look at the people. Everybody was dressed up colorfully, in rainbow skirts, with rainbow-colored hairstyles, wearing pink wings, rainbow wings, makeup, body paint -- you name it. It was really an eye full!

I had planned to go there and really download as many styles into my memory as I could. But I think it's been such a long time since I've actually gone out looking at people, that my memory was all flabby. I didn't pull too much in.

After walking around at the booths for a bit, I went to one of the concert stages. As far as I could tell, there were four concert stages: a Latino stage, a country music stage, a dance stage, and the center stage, where all the main events were held.

I went to the Latino stage. I watched a guy named Daniel Galindo perform some of his own songs. I liked his musical style a lot. I looked for a website or any info on Daniel Galindo. But I couldn't find anything. I know that he's performing today at noon as well, if anybody gets a chance to see him.

After that I wandered around a little bit more before heading to the Center Stage. I stayed there for pretty much the rest of the day. The first performance I watched was Pride Idol, a karaoke contest for kids under the age of eleven. There were actually a lot of really good performances in that show. I had a lot of fun.

After that, Denver's Drag Queen Nation gave a performance. By that time, the Center Stage audience was packed. Drag Queen Nation's performance was great! A different girl would come out on stage and give her performance, lip syncing to some popular artist and doing a lot of sexy dancing. A lot of people in the crowd -- including me! -- were dancing as well.

My favorite performers were the first girl, who wore this kind of gold lame leotard (I think); a girl who wore a red spandex full bodysuit and a red wig and did some Nikki Minaj; a drag queen and drag king (?) duo who did a Shakira song; and a woman named Victoria Sexton, who came up on stage with two sexy boys and did some really hot dancing.

But my absolute favorite was a girl named Alessandra Stiletta, a super-skinny girl wearing a blue wig, a black tank-top with blue and pink designs, tiny jean shorts, and bright pink lipstick. She did a really sexy and powerful performance! I can't find it on YouTube yet, but here's another nice video of hers.

After that I headed away from the Center Stage. I was about to go into the Dance Stage. But there was actually a line to get in. So I just headed home.

So I think that obviously the girl in my last dream, the girl with the black corset, pink wings, and pink hair, was a combination of a lot of the style that I was so happy to see at PrideFest.

But I think another source for the colored hair in my dream came from this YouTube video, from the ParisModesen channel. The colored hair the girl in my dream had was a lot like the hair coloring patterns you see in the Jean Paul Gaultier segment at the beginning of the video.

Another image that I think came from PrideFest was -- myself in the second dream. In that dream I'm wearing Pampers Underjams, diapers which, for girls, have a largely purple color scheme, and a purple t-shirt.

This partly came from the fact that I was going to, but I did not, wear diapers to PrideFest. A lot of times I just don't feel like being a baby. I just feel like being my regular, old, grody boy self. But I looked around at PrideFest to see if I could find anything adult baby or sissy related. I couldn't find anything. That may simply have been because I wasn't looking hard enough.

Anyway, at Center Stage, during the Pride Idol performance, there was a group of young women -- I'd guess around college aged or thereabouts -- watching the performance, too. They were all kind of butchy-looking, with short hair done up in boyish mohawks, jeans, and so forth. But I was really attracted to them. I mean... I like girls in general. And for each girl's look, there's probably some girl who has that look whom I'll be attracted to.

But there was one girl there wearing a purple sports bra and wearing her bluejeans loose, so that the purple waistband of her underwear showed over them. She had platinum blonde hair with black roots. She just looked really hot. Of course, I would have been happy if she'd taken me home to be her little boy or her little baby forever. But I wasn't going to bug her.

Anyway, I think I appeared in my dream wearing a purple t-shirt and purple diapers specifically so I could be that girl's little baby. We would match, I guess, if I were wearing purple, too!

I think my step-grandmother (who I like a lot and who is very kind) stands, in my dream, for all the insecurities I heap on myself that prevent me from showing myself as who I really am -- even at events where everybody else is showing off who they really are!

But there is another image that influenced this dream. It comes from the Pluggers comic strip, which you can follow on GoComics.com. Actually, like an idiot, I'd forgotten all about this website until this morning. Now that I remember, I'm going to have to follow some of my favorite comic strips on this site.

Anyhow, in yesterday's cartoon, the joke was that Plugger females get their perfume from the samples in magazines.

It's kind of interesting to see the GoComics version of this cartoon. In the paper copy of the Denver Post, where I first saw this cartoon, the image was in black and white.It's interesting to see how the actual color scheme of the GoComics image is purple, like in my dream.

But the cartoon obviously contributed to that statement my grandma made about the boy who'd left behind all his fashion magazines, which all smelled like perfume.

I obviously had a lot of dreams -- a lot of imagery to think about -- last night. But I can't get to it all. The only other thing I'd really like to discuss right now is the pools in my third dream. Those pools definitely come from my having watched the David Cronenberg film eXistenZ.

In one scene in the film, the main characters are taken out to a series of ponds that serve as a breeding ground for aquatic animals that eventually become components for a virtual reality game system.

I like these aquatic animals -- it seems like they are the last really slimy, ugly, gross images that occur in Cronenberg's movies. After eXistenZ, Cronenberg's films -- though still awesome -- seem to lose a lot of that slimy ugliness that's so enjoyable.

I think I wanted to bring these animals into my dream. But all I seemed to get were "ponds" that were more like swimming pools or industrial tanks or something. And even though there were supposed to be animals present in the tanks, I'm pretty sure I never saw any.

Themes from eXistenZ also resonate through my fourth dream, the hospital dream. I walk through a bunch of areas called "exhibits," which is obviously an echo of "eXistenZ." And I stab a needle into a boy's back, which is an echo of the image of people getting "ported" (having the virtual reality system plugged into their backs) in the movie, as well as of images in the movie where people actually get needles poked into their backs.

shadowed by projections

Good morning, everybody.

This post is related to this entry in my dream journal blog.

My first dream is another dream involving organized stalking. Organized stalking is, or was, when I was following things, one of the main ideas in current conspiracy theory. It's the idea that people organize themselves in groups in order to follow other people around, for some reason or another.

The conspiracy theory idea is that organized stalking is a method of mind control, some kind of CIA operation to see how to shape and control people's minds. A lot of conspiracy theorists say that there is some sort of ultimate CIA link to all the groups of people following other people around. The person being followed around is called a targeted individual.

Regardless of the fact that CIA mind control programs have been documented as having existed (and when Clinton was President, he apologized for mind control programs done on people in the 1960s and 1970s), I'm not sure I believe in any of the theories about organized stalking. But I think it shows up in my dreams over and over because it's a theory that meshes well with my own psychological complexes.

In fact, one of the reasons I followed conspiracy theories for a while, and occasionally still follow them, is because I find that they match with a lot of the darker aspects of our collective unconscious, in terms of really powerful authority figures, people out to get people, ultimate links to ultimate evils, and so forth. In an age where religion seems to be in its death throes, things like conspiracy theory may step in to allow the human psyche some realm in which to express archetypes and symbols and what not.

But even if there isn't some big conspiracy surrounding activities such as organized stalking, it's pretty obvious that currently people have been using technology, social media, to conduct activities that would look very much like organized stalking, such as flash mobs for robbing stores.

One phenomenon of the flash mob robberies is that they are often accompanied by group beatings. A mob might end up attacking one person in the streets or in a park while that person is alone, or while the group of people targeted is far outnumbered by the group of people in the flash mob.

This kind of hits home for me personally, even though I know for certain that what I'm about to talk about has nothing to do with organized stalking or flash mobs. Mostly it has to do with my own stupidity.

On New Year's Day, 2011, I walked through Prospect Park after having visited with a friend. It wasn't very late at night at all, but the sun was down. Still, Prospect Park had become (for better or worse) a place where people feel safer and safer to walk around or jog or bike at night. But on that night I was attacked by about ten kids. They all just grouped around me and beat the crap out of me. I'm really small and skinny. So it was pretty easy for them to do.

Like I said, it was my own stupidity for walking through the park at night. But the event allowed me at least to sympathize with some of the people who were absolutely on record as being victims in a flash mob beating.

And I think the event stuck with me even more, since I don't really like myself. I don't feel wanted in the world. I feel like nobody in the world thinks I deserve to be around. I really give myself a working-over with self-hatred just about every day of my life. I project all my self-hatred outward, so that I feel that I don't really hate myself, but that everybody else hates me. Having a group of people beat me down just confirmed it.

Actually, I do have to say that I've been in very few fights in my life. Because I'm weak. I purposely keep myself very skinny. So I just don't get into fights.

But the only fights I can think of have been where big groups have fought against me. The one I just mentioned is one. The other was in 2006 where a group of scrubby guys confronted me right in the Gramercy Park area of Manhattan. And the other was in 2003, where (this one was all my fault) a bartender, then three kids, then an entire bar full of people, got in a fight with me.

Those are, I think, the only three fights I've been in in my entire life. And they were all... not fights so much as they were me getting my ass beat down.

But I think the ideas of conspiracy theory and of organized stalking have recently been at the forefront of my mind because of two books I've just read: Condominium, by John D. MacDonald, and Murder on the Orient Express, by Agatha Christie.

In Condominium, one of the characters involves himself very deeply in conspiracy theory, to the point where his studies of conspiracy theory shut him out of the rest of life altogether. Another character in the book organizes what could basically be thought of as a vigilante militia to protect the condominium he lives in from some kids hanging around the area.

I'm hardly a kid anymore. I'm 34. But the way this character is drawn in the book, I feel like I know him in the personalities of people whom I've lived around over the course of my adult life: people in their 50s and 60s who look at everybody under the age of 40 with jealousy and suspicion -- violent, vehement suspicion. Seeing that character brought to life by MacDonald brought my own resentment of real-life versions of that character back to my mind.

In Murder on the Orient Express, of course, the murder victim actually is followed around by a large group of people. The murder victim in Orient Express really could be thought of as a targeted individual who is the object of organized stalking. Of course, he committed a crime that deserved his punishment. But it really shook me to see such a blatant presentation of organized stalking.

The theme actually reminded me a lot of the Fritz Lang film M, in which the Peter Lorre figure is first the object of organized stalking and then becomes a defendant in what basically amounts to a mob jury of vigilantes.

I think my own fears of being followed come from two things. One is the idea that there is some "inexpressible guilt" I have on my conscience that "everybody else" knows I must pay for. The other is the idea that I have some "great potential" in me that "everybody else" wants to keep down.

These two ideas, I think, compensate each other. The truth lies somewhere between, obviously. I'm a normal person with normal faults. I think if I could accept myself as a normal person, I'd probably lose a lot of the paranoid fears that inform my dreams in such a way that they involve themes of organized stalking.

But I think the idea of some "great potential" informed a lot of this dream. At the beginning of the dream, I've apparently finished one task, and now I'm waiting for word on my next task. This gives the idea of me being on some sort of assignment, of being part of a larger goal: of having, in other words, some great potential.

So, while I'm waiting, I do a strange thing. I begin to fly. I do this, though, by stepping on a stone. I then fly up through the air and around a tree's canopy.

A few nights ago, I had a dream in which I was assigned a "task" of spitting on trees. I had to spit on the root crown of the trees. I don't know what this means. But it's obvious that in that dream, my concern was with the base of the tree. In this dream the concern is with the canopy of the tree. So there is a balancing out of themes, which, according to Jung, happens a lot in dream cycles.

But what also interested me in the dream was this image of flying by stepping on a stone. I think one obvious interpretation of that image would be that I was "using stepping stones" to "rise up in the world." Unfortunately, I'm so ill-equipped for the social processes of this world that I think using just one stepping stone will allow me to fly as high as I want in the world.

But I think the image of the "stepping stone" also comes from the video below. The video shows a captive test for the new Sierra Nevada Corporation Dream Chaser space vehicle. The test was, as far as I could tell, to determine some of the aerodynamic characteristics of the Dream Chaser's structure. But you'll notice in the video how the vehicle is lifted off from and dropped back onto something that looks like a giant mattress. I think I translated this mattress into a "stepping stone" in my dream.

The views of the Dream Chaser being carried over the Jefferson County landscape (which is, incidentally, my landscape -- where I'm living right now) reminded me a lot of some of the other spaceflight-related dreams I've recently had. The fact that the Dream Chaser is basically picked up, wheeled around a bit, and then dropped back down to earth, also reminds me of the flight pattern I take around the canopy of the tree in my dream.