Wednesday, June 27, 2012

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.

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