Sunday, June 10, 2012

skin punk

Good morning, everybody.


This entry is supplemental to this entry in my dream journal blog.

One theme that recurs in my dreams is of organized stalking and targeted individuals. You can look up organized stalking on YouTube. There are plenty of examples of it.


I think, though, that everybody has dreams of being stalked or being targeted. It's the same with me. I think this can relate to one of two things. Either I wish that I was so special that people had to "target" to keep whatever is special about me under wraps. Or else, there is something I don't like about my own personality, my "shadow side," that I try to avoid, but that follows me everywhere.


Also, I think anybody who knows even as little as I do about conspiracy theory knows that organized stalking and targeted individuals are supposed to be part of that plan.


Well, I think the reason the themes of organized stalking were so apparent in my dream last night was because in the book I'm reading right now (even though I didn't read any of it last night), Condominium, by John D. MacDonald, there are a couple of characters intricately caught up in researching conspiracy theories. There are also a couple characters who basically form a militia to protect their condominium against young people.


Whereas a couple of nights before, I had a dream where I was being stalked by young people, in this dream I'm being stalked by one person who might be more around my age and one person who is a bit older than I. This would be a compensation -- one side of my emotions is struggling with the fact that I'm becoming older, while another side of my emotions is struggling with the fact that I still feel like people treat me like I'm young. My dreams show me one side of the argument, then another.


I know, without yet having reached it, that the climax of Condominium. So I imagined a storm brewing over a beach in my dream. I have never been to Florida. So I just imagined some random beach scene from the East Coast -- namely Far Rockaway. I'm not sure why that is. 


Yesterday I went to Downtown Denver. I walked around down there for a little while and then headed into the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art. The museum currently has an exhibition of punk photography running. The photos are by Bruce Conner. The photos basically mainly show the punk scene in San Francisco during the late 1970s. 


One of the photos shows a person looking into the Mabuhay club. At first I thought the person was a man. But the person was a woman. The woman is wearing a jacket commemorating someone's service in Vietnam.


I took the bus Downtown. The bus had to stop for a couple minutes a couple of times because there were people in wheelchairs getting onto and off the bus. Some person behind me kept complaining about the people in wheelchairs. He even called them "p---ies" for being in wheelchairs, which I thought was odd.


So I think I combined these two images into the images of the wheelchair person in my dream. 


The person in the Adidas jacket came from two places. In the morning yesterday I went out to buy a paper. A young man, kind of tall and skinny, seemed to be heading out of my apartment complex at the same time as I, and he seemed to be going in the same place. It was a little strange, and it freaked me out a little.


But, also, a couple days ago, I watched the YouTube video below. This video talks about some designers working with sporting labels to create sporty fashions in preparation for the Olympics. The video mentions that designer Stella McCartney collaborates with Adidas.






Yesterday I also watched the Pedro Almodovar film La Piel Que Habito (The Skin I Live In). The complete film is available on YouTube. But for this entry, I'm just putting a link to the trailer that is on YouTube.






I'm not sure that my first dream had anything to do with the film. But the second dream definitely did. One of the pivotal scenes of the film involves two people having sex at the base of a tree. One of the characters, who is suffering from some major psychological issues, ends up biting the other character's hand to keep him from continuing to have sex with her.


I think my brain condensed ejaculation with the biting of the hand, making ejaculation into spitting. I then took this image and went walking all around town, spitting on the base of every tree.


I think that what this probably meant is that I was walking around town, advertising my sexual availability everywhere I went. But there wasn't anybody else out on the sidewalks. I was all by myself on the sidewalks. Everybody else was in a car. Everybody could still see what I was doing -- or at least I was worried they could. But nobody was close enough for me actually to do  it with them.


My third dream, the lobotomy dream, is also, I think, a reflection to the movie. In the movie, one of the characters gets a sex-change forced upon him. Actually, I believe that La Piel Que Habito, while I'm sure it's known as an update of the classic film Eyes without a Face, is also, in my opinion, one of the best forced-feminization stories of all time.


As I went through puberty, I began to have desires to be a transvestite. At the ages of eleven and twelve I began getting and wearing women's underwear from stores. I always fantasized that I'd be magically transported into a girl's body. But I never wanted to lose my own identity, my memory of myself as who I was as a boy. I thought that if I lost my identity, I'd lose my intelligence (whatever kind of intelligence I have).


I think that that desire not to lose my intelligence was actually related to a fear of castration. Losing my penis would be equivalent with losing my intellect. I don't think that's a fact of life, you know, that penis equals intellect. But it was just a part of my fear of castration.


The woman in my dream didn't look like the re-made woman in the movie. But she stood for the  woman, I'm pretty sure. So a person asking her if she wanted a lobotomy, and her telling the person yes would be the same thing, according to that fear of castration, as agreeing to having a sex change operation.


One last thing I'd like to say about La Piel Que Habito, even though it doesn't have to do with my dreams: one scene uses the Elliott Smith song "Between the Bars" really incredibly. Of course, the version used is a cover version. But the melody is really characteristic of Smith: very melancholy and nostalgic. It creates a perfect mood for that scene, which is kind of like a goodbye-before-death scene.


Here's a fabulous YouTube video with Smith's version:






And here's the Chris Garneau cover, which is used in the Almodovar film:






So, anyway, I was so moved, both by the scene in the film and my love for Smith's song that I spent, oh, god, maybe an hour or so singing that song, over and over again.


Dear god, when I think about some of the silly things I do sometimes...

No comments:

Post a Comment