in the middle of the end of the road

Good morning, everybody.

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

One thing that I'd like to mention right away is that the beautiful sky imagery in the second part of the third dream comes almost from a NASA video I saw on YouTube. About once a week, NASA puts out a "Science Cast," which gives a little glimpse of some of the science NASA works on. This could be anything from astronomy to satellite technology to atmospheric phenomena. The Science Cast I watched last night was all about how the electromagnetic storms this July caused aurora borealis-like effects to spread all over the world.

I think this video heightened a lot of the mystic feeling of my dreams.

What I'd mainly like to think about, though, for this post, is the interaction I had with my great grandmother and my grandfather. Against all rationality, whenever I have dreams involving my great grandmother and my grandfather, I always think that they're actual interactions with them. My great grandma died three years ago, and my grandpa died four years ago.

In fact -- I've always kind of hated to admit this to anybody -- but one of the reasons I feel my life has taken the path it's taken lately is because of a dream I had with my great grandma in it. This dream occurred just a little over a year after my grandma had died. It seemed to precipitate me ejecting myself from my job and putting myself into a position where I had to come back home.

My thought -- well... let's say... I'm pretty agnostic in general. I think, depending on what mood I'm in, you could assume that my beliefs are mostly based on a physical world and nothing more. Don't ask me why.

I obsess over religion sometimes. I love the old Theosophy of Charles Leadbeater and Annie Besant. I also obsess over not-quite-spiritual writers like Charles Fort. And I think of Carlos Castaneda as real philosophy. (Geez, that's a lot of Charleses, ain't it?) But I still have difficulty, almost all the time, believing that there's anything beyond existence other than the physical. That said, I still let mystical fancies play in my head almost nonstop.


"WTF?" you may be asking. Trust me, I ask the same thing. I WTF myself about once an hour.

One of my mystical fancies is that when my grandma died, she went straight to whatever the next plane of existence is. She didn't look back. She wanted to go. She was ready to go. She had people in the other world that she wanted to be with. And she didn't want to have to worry about this world anymore. So when she left, she left. That was my idea. And it was probably wrong.

So when my grandma died, I wasn't so surprised that I never saw her. Over the few months after my grandpa died, however, I had a couple of dreams about him. (Keep in mind my grandpa died a year before his mother, my great grandmother, died.)

It seems like he started out in those dreams with a very low level of intellect, like his spirit was really impaired by whatever the death process had been for him. But he was still trying to make contact from those worlds. Later on, I fantasize, he had much better ability to make contact. But he was still unable to keep himself mentally or "physically" (in terms of appearance) stable -- at least in the realm where he could interact with me. Once he got behind some wall, an invisible wall, which I saw as being the boundary of the other world, he was himself again, mentally and physically. But I personally could barely hear him!

Like I said before, I didn't have any dreams about my great grandmother. And I just figured that was because she'd headed out of this world and didn't look back. In spite of how much she loved all of her family in the living world, I think she was tired, and that she really wanted to be re-united with the people who had left her behind.

But one night I had a dream where I was at my great grandmother's house with my mom and my sister. My great grandmother rose up out of the floor and started yelling and screaming at me. I can't remember now what she wanted. But the feeling I got upon waking was that I needed to come back to my hometown.

At that point in time the dream did nothing for me other than fill me with a gnawing anxiety. I couldn't come back home. I was working a good job, a steady job, and I had a career that had a future. I felt terrible, of course, for not being able to be back home with my family, for not being able to see, for instance, my nephews grow up and go through all the important events of their lives. But I felt like I was fulfilling my own life's goals, and not just that my family understood this, but that they were proud of me for it.

Nevertheless, I've had this tendency all through my life, when I get the instinct that I need to make a change in my life, not necessarily to control the change, but to let my current life situation decay to the point where I need to make a change. There have been exceptions to the rule. But, to a large degree, I seem to let myself decay into change lazily, instead of taking an active role in the transitions in my life.

So I ended up quitting my job and losing all my money, etc., etc., until I was basically forced to come back home. I've harped on this one single event in my life enough throughout these posts. But one basic thought at the back of my mind all this time was that, if I did get back home, that I'd have some direction, some kind of answer, from my great grandma, on why she wanted me back home, what I was supposed to do.

As it turns out, I'm out here, I'm back home, and I feel even more lost, more confused, more afraid, more paranoid, than I did even while I was in New York! I miss New York terribly -- even though I hate the place -- and I want to be back there so bad. But I'm stuck here now. I'm not just stuck here. I'm stuck here in a situation where I'm not even sure, from month to month, if I'm going to be able to keep up my level of living. Okay. Enough of that.

So last night I got a surprise visit, not just from my great grandma, but from my grandpa. I'm not sure what the dynamic of things is -- why I helped my grandma around the house, and we had an interesting conversation, while my grandpa directly gave me information regarding the afterlife.

But my grandpa seemed, for the most part, normal, while he spoke with me. This might be the first time I've seen him in one of these "speaking with the dead" type of dreams where he's seemed normal. I should say that, from the time I saw my great grandma in a "speaking with the dead" dream, she seemed normal.

The information my grandpa passes me is that he woke into an afterlife, and some details on that afterlife. I take that information to help me not be afraid of death. I think about passing along this information. But I don't want my information to conflict with, or distort, other people's experiences, if they've had experiences like I've had, where they've interacted with my grandpa or great grandma after they've departed.

But at the same time -- especially with the earlier dreams I've had -- I've felt like I really should talk to people about the dreams I've had, like I should tell my mom, or my step grandmother, my grandpa's wife. I've gotten to a point, on a couple of occasions, where I was about to tell my mom. But it's really hard. I just -- I'm afraid. I don't know why.

Partly, I'm conflicted. Any psychologist will tell you that you probably aren't speaking to the dead. And I believe that. The world is what it is, physically. And I could -- well, for instance, I dreamt of Mr. Rogers one night and Michael Jackson another night. Do I think I really saw them? Of course not! So why do I think I saw my great grandma and my grandpa? Because I miss them. That's all. I didn't really speak with the dead.

So why would I tell my mom, who I know believes in all this stuff, that I spoke with my great grandma or my grandpa? Why would I upset her by telling her something I know to be an impossibility? It just seems cruel and absurd.

Now, obviously, crossing over the bridge in the second part of my grandma and grandpa dream is obviously a kind of analogy for my own passing into the afterlife. Which is kind of scary, especially with that freaky dog that unleashes Fortean torrents of rain upon me.

But the third dream also involves my death. So that's kind of scary, too. I'm walking toward some place out in the plains, apparently to get rid of teddy bears, which I associate in my mind with ancient Greek maidens sacrificing their dolls to Artemis as the maidens reach puberty.

But I'm turned around by a wise woman who holds five knives in her hand. I feel like the five knives almost certainly stand for the five of swords in Tarot. But I'm not sure what the five of swords would mean in Tarot, or what it would mean for a woman to be holding those swords -- or what it would mean for a woman holding the five of swords to be followed by near total darkness and death.

I should say that I'm not certain I die in that dream, or even that I'm injured. But I'm in the middle of a very narrow road. I've turned around from the task of sacrificing my dolls to Artemis. I see the light of my city in the distance. But it's not light enough to guide my way. I'm trying to find a bridge so I can cross a river I can't cross by wading. And, while searching -- by feeling -- in the dark for that bridge, a truck either nearly hits me (as I seem to sense it in the dream) or actually hits me (which I may have been too shocked actually to feel).

I'm lying on the ground, under a wheel, in what appear to be death linens. And I hear a woman screaming. So I obviously assume that I'm dead -- that I've been hit by the truck and killed. So that's a bit distressing. But I've had death dreams all my life, and I'm still alive. I don't think I'm going to die. I think that most of the time death dreams symbolize a transition.

What I'd guess is that, at the crossing of the bridge, I'm at the end of the road. I'm making a transition in life. But I'm completely in the dark. I have no idea where I'm going. I don't know if I'll make it across. But then -- bam! -- the transition hits me! Regardless of what I want, regardless of what I can do, my life makes a change.

That would be wish fulfillment, more than anything else -- just because I want so badly to have some sort of direction just take over my life. I really -- what I really want more than anything else, is not to have made the mistakes I've made in my life. I think that's why I keep turning back, turning back, in all my dreams. Maybe what this dream is saying is, "Quit turning back. All your mistakes have already been made. If you keep trying to turn back and undo your mistakes, you're going to find yourself in a great deal of pain."

oh you pretty failure

Good morning, everybody.

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

I have a feeling that a lot of my dream imagery comes from having watched the films Village of the Damned and Children of the Damned over the past couple of nights. This would, I think, especially have influenced the imagery of the second dream.

The main image influenced by the films would be the image of the woman crashing and flying off of her bike. In the dream, I assumed the woman has died, even though it's not totally certain that the woman has died. In fact, the woman even says, through the "narration" she's constantly giving me in the dream, that she didn't even get hurt that much. But she doesn't get up.

Village of the Damned is, of course, a classic science fiction movie. It was made in 1960, and is based on John Wyndham's novel The Midwich Cuckoos. The basic idea of the movie is that a town in England, Midwich, is hit with some kind of cosmic beam. The cosmic beam impregnates every woman in the town capable (by 1960 standards) of having a child.

The children who are born as a result of this impregnation are possibly not human, or are possibly super-human. The children are super-intelligent and can use telepathy to force people to do things. But the children are void of emotion, and they seem to have only a primitive concept of humanity and justice. As a result, they seem to be selfish and ruthless. If they are hurt, they generally retaliate by making the person who'd hurt them, even if they'd hurt them unintentionally, in a similar way.

So in Village of the Damned a person driving a car down the road almost hits one of the children who, in a moment of carelessness, rushed into the street from a blind corner. The man stops in time only to bump up against the child and give her a good scare. But all the children retaliate against the man by forcing him to get into his car and drive into a brick wall.

Actually, in another scene, right at the beginning of the film, a police officer who is riding his bicycle into Midwich is stunned by the same cosmic ray that has put everybody in the town to sleep. The police officer faints and falls off his bike. So... that's a pretty dead giveaway to the image in my dream.

Children of the Damned is the 1963 follow-up to the Village of the Damned. In this semi-sequel, individual children in different places throughout the world have been conceived by means, possibly, of a cosmic ray -- or simply by means of an extremely improbable (so the geneticist of the film says) evolutionary sport. The children are all discovered by a UN-funded IQ test.

The children are all brought to London, where the heads of the countries the children live in decide that the children will either be used as top-secret weapon makers for their own individual countries, or else that the children will be destroyed as dangers to humanity.

But the children, learning of these plans, get together and hide in an abandoned church. They defend themselves against the adults who try to use them for destructive purposes. But, in defending themselves, they often have to kill the adults. One of the few adults who actually cares about the children pleads with the children to stop killing.

The children apparently have an uncanny ability to regenerate themselves. So they make it appear that they have reflected upon the man's plea. They put themselves at the mercy of the UN, assuming that the UN will destroy them in some way. I assume the children feel that if they can be "killed," be assumed dead, then come back to life, and go into hiding, that nobody will bother them.

The military powers have worked themselves into such a frenzy over the perceived threat of the children, that they have set up a tremendous destructive force against the children. But when the children surrender, the UN leaders sympathize with the children. Even the military powers decide to put their force in abeyance. But an accident causes the military to attack anyway. The UN leaders and the children are all killed.

In one scene of the movie, the child from England is being escorted to a place where he will be held until the military can figure out what to do with him. To escape, the child creates a distraction by having one of his escorts drive his car into the back of another car. While all the adults are distracted, the child runs away.

So I think both of those car crash scenes influence the scene in the dream where the woman crashed her bicycle off the road.

The modular house comes, I believe, from both of the films as well. In Village of the Damned, the children are all made to live together in the schoolhouse, where an eminent doctor has taken on the responsibility of teaching the children. Of course -- what I love is that he only teaches the children stuff like nuclear physics, and he only asks them questions like whether they think they come from another planet, or how psychic they are. He doesn't try to improve their moral sensibility at all!

In Children of the Damned, the children all escape of their own accord into the abandoned church. Like the children in Village, the children in Children sleep on makeshift beds and basically fend for themselves. And, in both movies, the children's final dwelling place is blown up. The movies both end, however, with a sense that the children's lives aren't finished. In Village, the final view is of the eyes floating out of the flaming wreckage of the building. And in Children, there is an implication that the children may die, but that they will regenerate themselves.

I think that the motif of the destruction of the final dwelling place as, perhaps, a metaphor for the destruction of the body, combined with a sense of the indestructibility of the soul, combined to make the image in my mind of a modular house, a house that could be picked up or dropped off any time. People live wherever, go wherever. People are permanent. But the housing is transient -- transient but stable.

It must have been hard for me to reconcile this in my mind, though. So I had to leave the woman along the side of the road, either dead or alive, I'm not sure. What's weird is that the woman either lives or doesn't live. But what remains permanent, in my dream, is the modular house. When the woman crashes off the side of the road, she stays there. The modular house, however, reappears at the top of the hill. And now, instead of hearing the woman, I hear the man, the husband, who may also be me myself, speaking. Strange.

I would say, however, that the idea of the modular house doesn't just come from Village of the Damned and Children of the Damned, but that it also comes from the Alvin Toffler book Future Shock, which I read a few weeks back and which seems to promote a vision of the future where objects will become more and more modular.

As I understand him, Toffler argues that buildings and homes will be modular. The world will trend away from "permanent" buildings and toward "modular" buildings. But the trend will also be toward an overall sustainability. Buildings and homes will be more modular, but by being more modular, they will be more flexible. This flexibility will be more sustainable, in the long run, than the environment of "permanent" buildings that just loom large and then rot away.

The one last point I'd like to bring up regarding Village of the Damned is something that I don't know anybody has spoken about before. But it seems pretty obvious to me that the title Village of the Damned, obviously a change from the title of the novel on which the movie was based, is a nod to the work of paranormal investigator Charles Fort's book Book of the Damned. The "Village of the Damned" would be, in a sense, the village in which take place phenomena that Charles Fort would call "damned," or not accepted by the canon of science.

In this sense, I think it's worth mentioning that the prototype of the children of Village of the Damned and Children of the Damned can be found, not in Charles Fort's Book of the Damned, but in his book Wild Talents. This book, like all of Fort's books, is well worth reading.

Of course, any literature or art that has as its subject super-gifted children always reminds me of the David Bowie song "Oh You Pretty Things."

The final thing I'd like to mention about this dream is the fact that Laurel Nakadate is in it. Nakadate is one of my favorite contemporary video artists. She has a great movie called The Wolf Knife, which I'd suggest you see if there's any chance that you can see it. But her whole body of work is really incredible. I had the opportunity, while I lived in New York, to see Nakadate on a couple of occasions. I liked her a lot. We're just about the same age -- she's a  bit over a year older than I. And she's really cool.


When I've had the opportunity to see artists, I've always tried to make a point of asking them questions. And my asking them questions is stored in my head as a kind of interaction with the artists. I don't necessarily interact with people at all, in general. So, as far as my life goes, these are pretty valid interactions.


Anyway, it seems like whenever I review my "interactions" with Nakadate, I'm always struck by how stupid I was around her. One instance was where I mistook certain sounds in her film The Wolf Knife for being one thing, when they obviously were something else -- I think even after Nakadate had expressly explained what those sounds were.


The other was where Nakadate asked the audience to ask her a question, but a question in only one word. Someone asked a one-word question that I can't even remember. But Nakadate didn't think it was a good enough question to end on. So Nakadate asked the audience for a question again. I couldn't think of a one-word question right then. And Nakadate said (to the audience, but I felt like it was to me directly), "Come on? Are you really going to let that question be the one? Are you really going to let that happen?"


Of course, I knew almost immediately afterward what my question would have been. I've known and, for some stupid reason, agonized over it ever since. "Clementine."


But for some reason my brain -- didn't freeze up -- it "fatted over." It just gelled and glopped. I didn't feel nervous or scared or shy when Nakadate demanded a one-word question. I just felt lazy and distracted and sullen. I can't even tell you why.


There's also a scene in the film The Wolf Knife where a girl is disappointed in an old man she likes because the man had decided to stop teaching and spend his days smoking pot. It seems like the girl doesn't mind whether the man is old or young, or attractive or unattractive. What really matters to her is whether the man has his life together, whether he can take care of himself -- and, maybe, her. But the man obviously can't, and this is a disappointment to the girl.


I think Nakadate is an occasional character in my dreams because she stands for somebody looking in on the disappointing aspects of myself, like the girl was disappointed with the man. Since I obviously personally made a fool of myself in front of Nakadate on a number of occasions (though one can obviously assume that I personally didn't even register in her perception one way or the other), it's an easy move for my mind to transition that girl's disappointment onto Nakadate.


The disappointment I feel in these situations is generally the disappointment I've spoken a lot about in other posts, so I won't speak too much about it here. It's basically the fact that, over the past year, I've managed to kick myself down the stairs professionally, again and again. Nobody has done it to me. I've done it to myself. I'm not sure what the hell the issue is. But I've done it. When I reflect on that, I often feel like that old man in The Wolf Knife, just kind of pathetic.

the secret of my flower

Good morning, everybody.

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

There were two main images that struck me in last night's dream: the grey aspect of the young man, and the weird "lingerie" attached to the cowgirl boots.

The cowgirl boots are white leather. The strap attached to them is a crepe-like lingerie material that is pink at the edges and white toward the center. That color style is common, I think, to lingerie and, I believe, to women's clothes in general. Then, in the center of that strap, is a flower.

I can see a lot of influences from my waking life on the lingerie itself. The lingerie somehow reminded me, as I woke up, of an image in the Pedro Almodovar film Que He Hecho Yo Para Merecer Esto?, which I watched a few nights ago. The film is about a working-class family in Spain. The father is a taxi driver, and the mother does all kinds of cleaning jobs.

There are a couple of children in the family, both boys. The younger boy is only about eleven or twelve years old, but he apparently carries on all kinds of homosexual relationships. A woman living across the hallway from the family works as a prostitute and is one of the wife's best friends.

One night, the older brother says he'll give the neighbor 10 pesetas (?) worth of heroin if she'll try to attract his brother. So the neighbor takes the younger brother home after he has come home too late (from a romantic adventure) to have dinner with his own family.


The neighbor makes dinner for the younger brother. The neighbor also gets dressed up "special" for dinner -- wearing an item of lingerie that's supposed to make her look like a bride. But it's mostly a white teddy with pink fringes and a veil over the crown of the head. This white and pink piece of lingerie influenced the image of the weird lingerie in my dream.


The flower itself I think comes from the cover for the soundtrack for the movie Magnolia. Of course, the main image on that cover is a big magnolia flower. Yesterday I spent a little time singing some songs. One of the songs I sang was Aimee Mann's "Save Me," which is one of the main songs in that soundtrack.

Speaking of flowers, I would like to say that the image of the fading from pink at the edges to white at the center isn't just an image from clothing or familiar to clothing. One flower I love, the dogwood flower, has, for some species, a fading of pink at the edges to white at the center.


But this year -- I'm not sure why it was this year -- I've noticed a lot of varieties of roses out there with a pattern of fading from a darker color at the edges to a lighter color at the center. Many fade from pink to white. But there are some that fade from red to yellow or even orange to yellow. I'm sure that's a usual pattern with certain rose varieties every year. But for some reason it didn't really strike me as being a pervasive thing until this year.


I'm not sure why I had cowgirl boots as an image of my dream. But I would say that, for all the Jung I've read, one of the very few things I always have in my mind is the idea Jung had that footwear in dreams is often an image relating to a person's ability to adapt socially to the world around him.


My overall goal for the dream was to find women's clothing. The boots are really nice. And if footwear is thought of as a person's basic contact with the world, the place where our feet hit the ground, then maybe what the dream is saying is that my worry could be less about finding lingerie and more about finding a way to identify socially in the world around me. I'm really not sure.


What's interesting though about the boots being connected by the strap, which is supposed to be lingerie somehow, is that the strap is centered with a flower. If the flower is a symbol for a vagina, and the vagina is right in the center of this strap, and the strap is, like I said in my entry, about a meter long (maybe it was longer than that), then it's possible that either side of the strap would go along my inner legs and that the flower would become my vagina.


In other words, I think this weird piece of lingerie, rather than being a piece of lingerie, is some kind of sex-change device (I mean, not really, but metaphorically). But what's strange about it is that the most concrete things about it are the boots. But does that mean that the social adaptation makes the sexual identification, or that the sexual identification makes the social adaptation?

I could easily see the two sides of the strap as something like the aorta (?) arteries, the big arteries that flow down the center of our legs. These arteries are essential to life, or at least essential to the legs, I'd guess. Anyway, if a big artery like that is blocked, or if it stops functioning, a person can die. That's pretty obvious.


So, in this dream, if the flower is at the center of these straps, and the straps flow down to the boots, does the "blood" from this center, this "vagina," create the social identity? Or, because the cowgirl boots, the most concrete, most identifiable part of this outfit, are so "real," do they stabilize, and thus stand as responsible for or the creators of, the feminine arteries that lead up to this "vagina?" I really don't know.


The other aspect of the dream which is interesting is the grey man. The grey man seems like he's either insane or on drugs. He has that quality in common with two other characters from my recent dreams. One is an old man in the fifth dream of this dream journal entry. The other is Mr. Rogers himself, from the second dream of this dream journal entry.


I think that in both of those dreams I was pretty at a far distance from the man. In this dream I start out at a distance from the man. I try to avoid him. But he eventually overtakes me, grabs me, and tries to have sex with me.


Why is the man grey? I think this is partly in reaction to my own reflections on some of my other dreams. In one of the dreams, I'm a woman. I'm in a room where no lights are on. The only light comes from the moon. It makes everything, including myself, look blue. In another dream, I've met Michael Jackson in a basement storage or janitorial area. The fluorescent light is so dim down in that room that everything, including Michael Jackson, looks green. In this dream, a lot of the environment is grey. So I think I made the man grey, to match my thoughts about the other dreams.


But the fact that the man is grey reminds me also of the concept of the "classic grey" alien, probably the most popular face for the modern conception of what an extraterrestrial being would look like. In that case, the attempted rape scene in my dream would be something like an attempted alien abduction.


But I don't think the scene is anything like a reenactment of an actual abduction. Rather, what I think is that the alien in my dream stands for an alien sexual urge. This "alien," or unconscious, instinct, which is really just a part of myself, grabs a hold of me and tries to get me to have sex, or unite with it. I break free of the instinct and basically tell it, "No means no!"


What's interesting, too, is that the alien doesn't, for instance, pull down my pants. Instead, he lifts up my shirt and strokes my stomach and chest. He's pressing himself against my back, and probably against my bottom, too. But he doesn't necessarily seem too worried about having sex with me right away. He seems more interested in seducing me. And he seems to want to do so by stroking my stomach and chest. This doesn't mean, of course, that if I'd been motionless, or too weak to push away, that he wouldn't have eventually pulled down my pants and screwed me...


But after I tell the alien I'm not interested, he follows me, yelling after me the whole time. I think part of the reason for this is that the alien instinct is probably my shadow instinct. That's another one of the few Jungian concepts my feeble mind has been able to carry along with it through the years. The shadow is the part of ourselves that we don't acknowledge, because it is the stuff about ourselves we would feel ashamed to acknowledge. The grey of the alien in my dream may come from his character as the shadow.


So the shadow was trying to integrate with my conscious. That's actually a good thing, a healthy thing, when the shadow and conscious ego integrate. But when I don't allow the shadow to integrate, he follows me, like a rude guy on the street, following a girl who spurned him, calling her a whore, and so forth. Of course, he's not calling the girl a whore so much as trying to pull her down from what he sees as her pedestal, so she won't think she's "too good" to have sex with him.


That's a pretty silly tactic men use. But the alien, as my shadow, proceeds to use it with me. He's trying to pull me down from my pedestal, or break me out of my shell, so that I won't try to integrate with whatever is embodied in my fetishism, and I will try to integrate with him.


But for some reason, the alien has been trying to get me to integrate with him by stroking my stomach and chest -- in other words, my upper body. He follows me to the place where all the women's clothes are. And when I finally pull up the weird lingerie, which I think is an article of clothing that is finally good enough for me, it's completely related to my lower body. The most concrete thing about it is the footwear. The rest of it is a system that basically connects the crotch to the footwear by a lingerie equivalent of arteries.


So I break away from the alien after he tries to seduce my upper body, and I go to a place where I find a new lower body. That all seems like a pretty easy dynamic. But I guess there are still parts -- as always with my dreams -- that I don't understand.

quantum marriage

Good morning everybody.

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

The idea in my first dream of the father choosing between two men to decide who will marry his daughter comes a lot from this music video for "Milik Siapakah Gadis Ini," which is by the Malaysian pop artists Jinbara and Fiq. The video shows two blindfolded guys in love with the same girl. At the end of the video, the guys take off their blindfolds and see the girl standing before them.

It's pretty easy to see how the squares come from the images of film in this video.

But I think that a lot of the images from this dream, as well as images from other dreams come from my reading in Brian Greene's book on Superstring Theory, The Elegant Universe. The theme of The Elegant Universe, as I understand it so far, is that the concepts of relativity physics and the concepts of quantum physics don't reconcile with one another. So a search has been going on in the history of physics to reconcile these two theories. There's also a documentary of The Elegant Universe, which is pretty entertaining, and is on YouTube.

Greene begins his book with a short discussion of what we know about the various particles of the universe so far. He then moves into a discussion of relativity physics, giving a whole lot of really interesting discussions to illustrate the ideas of relativity. After this, Greene moves through a discussion of Newtonian physics, to help us understand the ideas of gravity. Greene then explains gravity in terms of relativity -- again, giving a lot of really helpful visual examples. Greene then moves on (and this is where I finished my reading yesterday) to various concepts of quantum physics.

One image from the book that struck me was the idea of the photon clock, which Greene represents as two mirrors set parallel to one another. A single photon will bounce from mirror to mirror, and, since the speed of light is constant, time can be measured by the bounces of the photon from mirror to mirror. Greene then uses this photon clock idea to illustrate that time will appear to be the same for two photon clocks, one at a fixed standpoint and one moving at a constant velocity.

This is a really weird image to fix into a dream about two laundromat owners vying for a woman's hand in marriage. And I'm not sure how the heck it fits in. But it definitely fits in.

An image from the second dream that comes from The Elegant Universe is the "second ending" of my dream, where I imagine myself passing out of the building altogether and ending up in the next place I'm supposed to be immediately.

This comes from Greene's funny situation of the H-Bar, an allegorical bar which illustrates some of the various aspects of quantum physics. In Greene's H-Bar, ice cubes pass through glasses and people can walk through walls. Obviously, that led me to the "second ending" of my dream, where I pass through walls myself.

The final image I can see obviously coming from The Elegant Universe is just the simple word "quantum," which led me to think of the television show Quantum Leap. I'm not sure why I thought of Marilyn Monroe or the Marilyn Monroe episode of Quantum Leap. But I did.

One last image I'd like to discuss from my dream. Last night, before going to bed, I read the first 40 pages of The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert Heinlein. The book takes place on the moon in the year 2075. The main character, Manuel Garcia O'Kelly, is a computer technician sent to the moon to deal with a computer who is a bit of a practical joker. Once up on the moon, Manuel forms a friendship with the computer, who he comes to believe is alive. But Manuel also gets caught up in a Socialist-type revolution taking place among the 3 million or so colonists of the moon.

In one scene of the book, a miner talks about how much harder it is getting for miners to locate ice under the surface of the moon. (Apparently there's ice under the surface of the moon.) But the miners are still getting paid the same for the ice they bring up. In other words, their profits are all going away.

I think this passage from the book influenced the image of the "water table" in my third dream from last night. I can't say why it's in there. And the image in my dream is definitely not about ice. It's about water. The water could potentially flood the building. The room itself reminds me, now that I think of it, as a strange distortion of an Ancient Egyptian tomb. When I think of Egypt, I think of the Nile. Again, I think of flooding and heat, not of ice. But the "water table," or level of water, reminds me of the ice level idea in the book.

surrender at a deadly moment

Good morning, everybody.

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

A lot of the images in all the dreams from last night come from my having watched the Wong Kar Wai film Fallen Angels last night.

The dream image I feel is most influenced by Fallen Angels is the image where the woman is laying on the bed and wants the man laying on the bed with her to rub her vagina. One of the two interweaving stories of Fallen Angels involves a young, attractive hit man who is given his orders by a young, attractive woman. The woman falls in love with the man. But the woman and the man never have any contact with each other, other than, I believe, through instructions given over the fax.


So the woman carries on a fantasy relationship with the man. She goes out to bars and imagines him with her. Then she comes home and masturbates while imagining being with the man. The film shows a few scenes of the woman masturbating. The scenes are extremely sexy. The woman is very attractive, and she really seems to be enjoying herself in her fantasy.


So obviously I'd have a dream related to that scene. I've watched Fallen Angels a few times over the past few years. And the masturbation scenes have always been among my favorite movie sex scenes ever. Obviously I'd want to recreate something like that in my own dreams. I'm not sure why the idea of abortion or miscarriage comes into play in my dream, though.


The idea of jumping into a river, then being sucked along by a huge ship, comes from my reading of Neal Stephenson's novel The Diamond Age. The story takes place in a futuristic world where nanotechnology enables people basically to construct whatever they want. The basic plot is that a ludicrously wealth man, Equity Lord Finkle-McGraw, wants to give his granddaughter a present that will help break her out of the conventional mores that her father and mother are bringing her up with.


So Finkle-McGraw has a top-notch engineer named Hackworth create a high-tech book that employs living actors (communicating with the book remotely) and pseudo-intelligence. The book adapts itself to the reader's (always a little girl, according to the programming of the book) situation and teaches the girl how she can best prepare herself for real life. It's basically a primer for life.


But Hackworth decides to make an illegal copy for his daughter. He makes the copy, but he then gets mugged. One of the muggers takes the book and gives it to his little sister, Nell. Hackworth is punished for having betrayed Finkle-McGraw. He is sentenced to ten years' labor. His sentence gets him involved in some sex-ritual colony that liberates Hackworth's unconscious so that he can create these high-tech books on a much broader scale.


But before Hackworth goes off to serve his time, he makes another, different primer for his daughter. Now Finkle-McGraw's granddaugher, Hackworth's daughter, and Nell all have a primer. The three girls end up going to some special school together and becoming friends. The book kind of explores their lives as a result of their own personal circumstances and how they've learned from their primers.


When Hackworth gets out of prison, his daughter, Fiona, joins him on his search for a character who apparently wants to destroy the nanotechnology system that everybody lives on. His name is the Alchemist. One of the places Hackworth goes is a ship that also serves as a kind of virtual reality theatre. Just before the beginning of the show, somebody is thrown off the ship. Fiona jumps into the water and saves the man. Hackworth is stunned by his daughter's bravery.

Ugh... I guess that's kind of the longest-winded way ever of saying that my image of jumping into the water and then being dragged by the current of the ship comes from the image in The Diamond Age of Fiona jumping into the water and saving the man from drowning.

What interested me about the dream is that I was pretty certain that I was going to die. But what I ended up doing was kicking off of the ship. I didn't escape the drag of the ship. Instead I just kept myself from being sucked under the ship. I was in the ship's tow all the way until the boat stopped. Even when the ship stopped, I was afraid that I would be sucked under and chopped up in its propeller blades.

I would say that in general, from day to day, I wonder how the heck I'm going to get through life. I do feel like I'm getting sucked under the water. And I don't know how I'm going to make it. Financially and emotionally I feel this way.

I look back on at least the past year of my life and wonder how I could have been so feeble-minded as to have gotten myself into this position. And it really is all my fault, all my doing. I know I would have been fine if I would have just kept going along the same way with my life. So why didn't I keep going along that way? Why did I make the decision I made -- which was really tantamount to jumping out of a boat and throwing myself under a ship?

The dream seems to tell me that I'll survive, that even though I feel perilously close to being sucked under the ship and killed, that I'll actually find a way to kick off of the ship and "go with the flow" until the ride's over. But, in some ways, I feel like this is more wish fulfillment than anything else. Because nothing in my actual life seems to indicate that that's even remotely possible.

But everybody in the world feels this way nowadays. It's just the way things are. And I'd rather not dwell on it. The fact is that riding in the drag of the boat was a pretty cool experience! It was actually a lot of fun.

Another image from that dream that I think about is the image of walking out of the ride with the big crowd of people. In this case I'm walking with the crowd, not against it. There are a few people who walk against me. And there is one guy who isn't even walking in my direction until he figures he can trip me up by doing so. But in general I'm walking with the crowd.

This is an interesting compensation for my other dreams, where I'm either being paralyzed by a crowd or moving against a crowd. In yesterday's dream journal entry, for instance, one of my dreams involves needing to fly over a crowd so I can move quickly in the opposite direction; and another dream involves a group of kids needing to get on stage but being hindered by construction workers moving at right angles to the kids.

One thing I need to think about is this dynamic in my dreams. Not that it's the biggest deal in the world, but it's a little strange. Why do I, or the main characters of my dreams, often have their paths interrupted, not by people moving in the opposite direction, but by people coming from something like a perpendicular angle?

And why is there such an emphasis overall, with these "opposite direction" dreams, of huge crowds? The crowd in my "museum stalker" dream from yesterday really made me wonder this. Because the crowd was just so unbelievably large. A lot of people, obviously, come to a museum to see a really good exhibit. But this crowd of people was enormous! And everybody was here to listen to the tour guide. But so many of them were so far away from the tour guide. How could they even have heard him? It's just really weird.

But it's interesting that in the ship dream from last night, I went with the pull of the boat, first of all, and then I went with the crowd. What's also interesting about that is that the woman in the water with me tells me that if you go too deep into the water, you can't swim against the current. It's not until the woman tells me that that I  see the big ship and then get sucked up into the current of the big ship.

I'm not sure. I guess what's being said is that if you get involved with big things, you kind of have to go with the flow with those things. You can't swim against it all. So if you don't want to go with the flow, you better not get involved in the first place.

In the "biking in India" dream I had a few days ago, I made a choice to go my own way. When I did, I was no longer able to get back on the path -- a path I clearly saw -- with my friend. I had a choice of basically standing completely still, or else turning with the people in my path and taking part in the ritual of the river.

It's an interesting idea, I think. It does say basically the same thing as the ship dream. If I'm going to get myself involved in something else, then I have to just go with the flow of whatever's happening. I can't pull myself back to where I was. I just have to go with the flow of whatever new choice I've made.

This, I think, relates as well to my reading of Charles Dickens' novel Little Dorrit, which I finished up last week. One of the characters, named Pancks, is a kind of assistant for a wealthy man named Casby. But Pancks basically does everything for Casby. Dickens compares Pancks to a little tugboat towing a great ship through the Thames -- and then goes on, through the rest of the novel, to metaphorize Pancks into a tugboat. So the fact that the ship is towing me along so effectively is probably due to Dickens' metaphors on Pancks.

Again, the idea is that I've set myself up, with some choice, to be towed along, or at least required to go with the flow of this choice. Well, I know my choice pretty well. All I have to do now is determine what flow I'm in, so I can go with it, I guess. Right now I don't feel like I'm in a flow at all. I feel like I'm sinking in quicksand.

i know where i'm lost

Good morning, everybody.

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

I think the theme of this dream is a continuation of the theme of being lost. In particular, I think it's related to the second dream of this dream journal entry, where I get lost while out biking with a friend in India.


I would actually like to mention quickly that the image of biking -- something I don't do on a normal basis (I'm more of a walker) -- probably comes from my reading this entry in the Busan for 91 Days blog, a really fun blog by two guys who are spending 91 days touring through Busan, South Korea. In the linked entry, the guys talk about not having rented bikes for their day of touring, and kind of regretting it.


These two dreams have in common the idea of being lost, not necessarily by location, but from people. In both cases I know where I am, where I want to go, and how to get there. My sense of being lost comes from my sense of being separated from people. In the "biking in India" dream, I'm separated from my friend, who is on a different path than I'm on. In the "city in a mall" dream, I'm separated from my family, though I'm not sure how I got separated from them.

But in both of the dreams, I know where I'm going. I even have an idea of how to get back to the people I've gotten separated from. In fact, during the dreams, I seem to feel that the endpoint of my travel is reconnecting with the people I've gotten separated from.


In the "biking in India" dream, my friend and I have just finished travelling through a desert with no, or very poorly constructed, paths. I don't get "lost" from my friend until we find ourselves on modern concrete paths. And when my friend and I get on diverging paths, I know exactly how to manage my travel so I can get back on the same path with my friend.


In the "city in a mall" dream, I'm with my family (whoever they are) while we're on a train -- not in control of our movements -- and when the train detours -- when we get physically lost. It's not until we have arrived inside the mall, our destination, and a completely constructed area, with direction signs all over the place, that I get lost from my family. Again, I know where my family will be, and I know our plans for the day. I know how to get back to my family, within the framework of knowing my location.


But in both dreams I never actually meet back up with the people I'm lost from. In the "biking in India" dream I know how to get back to my friend. But I'm slowed to a standstill when crowds and crowds of people walk out onto the path, heading down to a river to take part in some kind of religious ceremony. In the "city in a mall" dream, I'm actually standing in front of the hotel where I believe my family is. But I'm pretty sure I don't go in. I find out my family isn't going to the museum. So I think going to the museum by myself.

In the "city in a mall" dream, I hesitate before reuniting with my family. They are at their endpoint. I don't want to be at that same endpoint. They want to stay in the hotel and rest for the rest of the day. I want to go to the museum, like we'd planned on doing. But I know if I go up to the hotel room, I'll have a hard time coming back down to the mall-city and going to the museum. I'll be stuck in the hotel room with everybody else.

So in the "city in a mall" dream, I make the choice not to reunite with my family. I don't necessarily choose to stay lost. While I was searching for my family I was "lost" from them. But now that I know where they are, I'm not lost from them. They are where they are and I am where I am.

At this point, I'm turned away from my endpoint, but I'm no longer lost, perhaps. I'm wandering, maybe: directionless. Within a very structured landscape, where a person always knows (like the mall arrow tells him), "YOU ARE HERE," and where a person always knows how to get to the next place, I don't know where my final place will be, where my resting place will be, or at least when I will return to it.

In the "biking in India" dream, I can see my friend -- we can see each other! -- while I'm lost from him. My friend doesn't know how I'm going to reunite with him, even though I do. I focus on reuniting with my friend. But I'm suddenly stopped by a religious ceremony. So, whereas I hesitate to reunite with my family in the "city in a mall" dream, I am involuntarily stopped from reuniting with my friend in the "biking in India" dream.

The fact that I'm stopped by a religious ceremony is also interesting. There are crowds of people heading down to a river, possibly to wash themselves in the river. I don't know very much at all about religion in India. I know, from watching Satyajit Ray movies, that people wash in the Ganges River for religious purposes. I think that's how Apu's father got a sickness and died in the second movie of the Apu trilogy.

But I also think that the image of washing in the river comes from this music video. The video is from the Malaysian pop groups 6ixth Sense and Saujana. The theme of the video seems to be some post-apocalyptic world, where the survivors are all drawn together and inspired to re-shape their lives through religion. After making this choice, many of the survivors wash themselves in the ocean.

I watched this video the day before I had the "biking in India" dream. So I think the dream was largely inspired by this video.

But I think that the commonality in the endings of these dreams is that I end up being turned away from the people I was trying to reach. In the "city in a mall" dream, I become a wanderer, at least for a little while. I go to the museum myself -- or, at least, I stand in front of the entrance to the hotel, pondering whether I should go to the museum. I guess I'm at a standstill, just like I am at the end of the "biking in India" dream.

But in the "biking in India" dream, I'm stopped right in the middle of what I might go see while I'm at the museum. In the "city in the mall" dream, I simply think about turning away so I can go have a cultural experience. In the "biking in India" dream, I'm right in the middle of the cultural experience.

What really strikes me about the "biking in India" dream is that I have the choice -- obviously, I woke before making any choice of this sort -- but I have the choice of no longer worrying about my friend, and of simply taking part in whatever this "washing in the river" ceremony might be. What if I were simply to stop trying to move my way through this crowd, which is all travelling perpendicular to my path? What if I were to turn and move in their line of travel? What if I were to go wash in the river with them?

Well, it seems pretty obvious that I have a choice I can make at the end of the "biking to India" dream. There's likely no way I'll ever catch up with my friend. We're on two different paths now. My goal this entire time has been to catch back up with him. But it won't work. Now I can make the choice to stand still and do nothing until I can begin moving along the path again. Or I can make the choice to take part in the ceremony. The choice seems pretty obvious, even though I didn't get to make it.

At the end of the "city in a mall" dream, however, the choice doesn't seem so obvious. I'm at a standstill, just like in the "biking in India" dream. But it's not a standstill that I have no control over. I've stopped myself. And the choice I have to make is fourfold, really. Do I go up to the hotel room? From there, do I stay there, or do I come back down and go to the museum? Or do I go directly to the museum? Or do I just take part in whatever's going on in the general social space of the mall, like I could have chosen to do with the general social space of the "biking to India" dream?

I don't know. I never seem to end any of these entries with any feeling of certainty at all. I always end lost.

new personalities from the past

Good morning, everybody.

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

The main images that stuck with me from these dreams are the images of seeing people from behind cracks in walls. In the first dream I saw the security guard from behind a thin, glass structure, which I think was meant to be a gap in the wall of a larger structure. And in the second dream, I see the young man through a gap in a wall as he speaks with my friend.

I think both of these images come from the Church of the Light, which was designed by the architect Tadao Ando. Below is an image of the church from the Wikipedia page on the building.

Light comes through the gaps in the wall. The gaps form a cross shape, to symbolize, I suppose, the cross of Christ. In my dream, figures hide behind the gap. Both of these figures stand for some kind of moral aspect of my psyche. In one case, the figure behind the gap is a security guard. In the other, the figure behind the gap is a diligent student. In both cases I feel like a less worthy person because of the signals I'm receiving from the person behind the gap.

But it's also interesting that in both cases, I'm "called out" as a result of the feelings I receive from the people behind the gaps. In the first dream, the person behind the gap makes me feel so uneasy with where I am, that I decide to leave the place. Upon leaving the place, I expose myself as being a transvestite, wearing nothing but women's clothing in a busy part of town. In the second dream, the person behind the gap is used to spur me on to become a diligent worker.

The figures behind the gaps may stand for something in my own personality that is coming to life, as well. I believe there are representations of the Immaculate Conception, where the Virgin Mary is impregnated with Jesus, where the impregnation is shown as a beam of light.

So the cross of light in the Church of the Light could just as easily be the light beam of the Immaculate Conception, foreseeing Christ's redemption of humanity on the cross. At the same time, it could be the light of the Pentecost, looking back in memory to Christ on the cross. But in both the Immaculate Conception and the Pentecost, there is an element of the birth of a new personality. In the case of the Immaculate Conception, the new personality is Christ. In the Pentecost, the new personality is the changed personalities of the disciples after they've been invested with the personality of the Holy Spirit.

I think architecture plays a big part in my first dream because on Saturday I spent a couple hours in my local library looking at a book (I can't remember the name) of twentieth-century architecture. A lot of work by Tadao Ando was in the book, including the Church of the Light. But another work that was in the book, and that has always impressed me is Phillip Johnson's Glass House. Below is a photo of the Glass House from Wikipedia.

I think this house inspired the imagery of some of the glass buildings in the "NASA museum" of my first dream. I find it interesting that the NASA museum of my first dream is composed of small buildings, all of different styles of architecture -- although all the styles seem to be distorted in some way. It like the NASA history museum is more a museum of the history of architecture.

I think this might be partly because I do think about stations. I think I, like a lot of people, would like to see a lot more people living and working in space a lot sooner than current time frames seem to anticipate. And I think of space stations in terms of homes, in terms of being living spaces. So I think that what I'm seeing in my dream, as a history of NASA, is a history of the space station as a home.

But what I think is also interesting about the first and second dream is that I encounter these figures behind gaps in museums. Both places are museums. Why would these encounters need to occur in museums? I mean, I love museums. And a lot of my spare time, while I was in New York, was spent in museums.

Lately I've found, as I've been back home, I've been going back to the places of my childhood. We lived in a lot of different homes as I was growing up, but almost all in Colorado. So it's not necessarily easy for me to go see every house I've lived in. But I have been able to go see a few of them.


I've been reflecting on my life lately, trying to figure out what I need to change in myself in order to be a little better in the situations where I've kind of screwed up really badly over the past year or so. I'm not sure if I can change myself. But for some reason, I've felt like going and seeing the places where I'd lived growing up, I might be able to get a better idea of how I can change myself. I even thought, while I was out walking around yesterday, that these neighborhoods have become for me something of a museum of myself.


So maybe I've started to see, behind some gaps, some walls in my psyche that may be opening up, gapping open, some new elements of my personality, or some old, neglected elements of my personality. I'm not sure. But that could be a part of it all.

cut-out men, cut-out food

Good morning, everybody.

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

One thing I'd like to say before I start this entry, though, is that -- I've lately been doing drawings for my dreams. I want to do as many drawings as I can. But for the time being I'm seeing about two or three drawings a week being my goal. As I get better and faster at drawing, hopefully I can get to the point where I'm doing a drawing a day.

But one thing I'd like to offer is -- if anybody who reads my dream journal knows of a dream from my journal they would like me to draw an image from, please let me know. You can comment on this post, or you can comment in the dream journal itself.

The main image that struck me from last night's dreams was the image of me, possibly as a woman, eating the skin of a potato. I think a lot of the food-related dreams I've had lately are largely based on my terrible eating habits. I think a lot of these dreams just come from whatever's in my stomach coming back to haunt me. It's not like I eat a lot. In fact, I hardly eat anything. But all I eat is junk -- the cheapest food I can find, is usually how I determine what I'll eat.


But the image also comes from the Czech film Sedmikrasky (Daisies), which I watched last night. The film is by the director Vera Chytilova. The film follows two girls through something like their daily life. The girls are searching for excitement and, I guess, love. They don't really have any idea how to find it, or even how to search for it. So what they mostly end up doing is getting in trouble and torturing the men they attract.

The film is really, really good -- one of the best films I've seen in a while. It has a lot of interesting visual ideas. But two themes throughout the film are the girls constantly eating, eating all the time; and the girls always making cut-outs of things from magazines.


In fact, at one point in the movie, after the girls have eaten all the food in their apartment, they decide to start cutting pictures of food out of magazines and eating the pictures of the food. That image of the cut-out food being eaten inspired my image of the potato skin being eaten in my dream. And I believe that in my dream I was imagining myself as the brunette girl in the film.


I think one thing I was struck by, all through this film, was the absence of a really tough kind of guy. The guys the two girls always kind of lead around, torture, then drop, seem to be intellectual, wealthy, kind of malleable guys. The tough guys one might see in the film are cut-out figures, like the muscle man figure the blonde girl cuts out of the magazine.

I think Chytilova said about this film that it was about two people at the point in their lives where they have the most potential to be creative, not being given any teaching on how to be creative. This lack of cultivation of creative impulses turns the girls' creative impulses, if I understand Chytilova correctly, into destructive impulses.

Part of the reason for the guys who are in the film and not in the film might be the idea that the people who would cultivate creative impulses would be more of these intellectual, wealthy kind of guys. At least these guys would look at themselves as beacons of creativity and intellect.


So maybe Chytilova is saying -- can you teach these girls? And then putting them in situations with the girls. And it turns out that all these intellectual, malleable guys are interested in is sex, just like all the other guys. That's just an idea. I don't know if it's true at all.


Anyway, I think the tough guys found their way into my dream as a reaction to the kind of guys who were in Chytilova's film. But I do find it interesting that I may have dreamt that I myself was the brunette girl, serving, basically, these tough guys who I found to be missing from Sedmikrasky. But I probably do feel more of an identity with the girls. Or, I should say, I'd rather be like one of the girls.


The guys in my dream don't seem to be mean, either. I don't know. Maybe in other situations they would be mean. But at least in my dream they aren't mean. They're just tough. I don't know what makes me think they're tough. They're wearing black leather jackets. Apparently that makes a person tough. I don't know.

lifestyles of the rich and imprisoned

Good morning, everybody.

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

Also, I added a drawing to this entry in my dream journal.

The most striking image in the dream for me was the image of the Vesuvius castle. I think this image largely comes from my reading Little Dorrit, by Charles Dickens. A good amount of the second half of the novel has taken place in Venice.


Little Dorrit's family has been found to be the heirs to a great fortune. They are released from the Marshalsea debtor's prison. Immediately, after settling accounts with some people, and seeing to the well-being of some other people, the family goes out on a series of travels. While out on their travels, the family meets up with some other people from London. The groups of people all end up in Venice, where, apparently, they decide to spend a large portion of their time.


Of course, Venice is a city of canals, and, as Dickens describes it, is kind of like a labyrinth of canals. Now in my dream, the canals are dry, so they look like aqueducts. In my experience, aqueducts are used as channels to divert storm waters flowing down from watersheds, in order to prevent flooding. So most of the time, aqueducts are dry. But I'm not sure if the network of concrete is really supposed to be aqueducts or canals, or if it's supposed to be something altogether different.

Again, why should I substitute "Vesuvius" for "Venice?" Vesuvius is a Volcano, and Venice is a town. My dream begins with the launching of a space rocket. So maybe my dream took the name Vesuvius for the estate to combine the town of Venice with the explosive action of the launching of the space rocket. I'm not sure.

The Vesuvius of my dreams is famous because of something to do with wine. Wine also plays a big role in passages of Little Dorrit, in a number of different ways. One of the characters, I can't remember who right now, made a good deal of money off a vineyard. All throughout the story, wine is shown as an illustration of the comforts that certain establishments can provide people. And even the way people drink wine (or, in one occasion, wipe it off their mustache) can indicate what kind of a person one is.

The "gated" community feel of the Vesuvius of my dreams also relates to a passage where Little Dorrit reflects on the similarities of the lives of the extremely wealthy with the lives of the poor in the Marshalsea debtor's prison.

In fact, I'd like to share the passage with you where Little Dorrit reflects on the similarities. The passage is from the rights-free Project Gutenberg version of the book, the link to which is above.

"It appeared on the whole, to Little Dorrit herself, that this same society in which they lived, greatly resembled a superior sort of Marshalsea. Numbers of people seemed to come abroad, pretty much as people had come to the prison; through debt, through idleness, relationship, curiosity, and general unfitness for getting on at home. They were brought into these foreign towns in the custody of couriers and local followers, just as the debtors had been brought into the prison. They prowled about the churches and the picture-galleries, much in the old, dreary, prison-yard manner. They were usually going away again tomorrow or next week, and rarely knew their own minds, and seldom did what they said they would do, or went where they said they would go: in all this again, very like the prison debtors. They paid high for poor accommodation, and disparaged a place while they pretended to like it: which was exactly the Marshalsea custom. They were envied when they went away by people left behind, feigning not to want to go: and this again was the Marshalsea habit invariably. A certain set of words and phrases, as much belonging to tourists as the College and the Snuggery belonged to the jail, was always in their mouths. They had precisely the same incapacity for settling down to anything, as the prisoners used to have; they rather deteriorated one another, as the prisoners used to do; and they wore untidy dresses, and fell into a slouching way of life: still, always like the people in the Marshalsea."

Before reading Little Dorrit last night, I looked through the Connoisseur booklet of luxury homes put out by Sotheby's Denver in June. The Connoisseur comes with my copy of the Denver Business Journal. Of course, I don't have the money to buy one of those multi-million dollar homes. But I love to look through the pictures and imagine what it would be like to live in one of those places. I'm not alone in that, I'm sure.

So I think my dream combined my fantasy of living in one of those luxury houses with Little Dorrit's reflections on the idle lives of the wealthy in Venice, to make a Vesuvius castle as a part of some gated community.

The interesting thing is that the "Himalayan Museum" is located down in the bowels of this concrete network before the Vesuvius castle. Of course, the "Himalayan Museum" is the Ruben Museum of Himalayan Art, distorted into some kind of basement convention center, for some reason.

But what also strikes me as odd about that is that the Himalayas are well known for being very high mountains. But here we have a Himalayan Museum, a museum for the cultures of the high mountains, being entrenched before a castle named after a volcano, or a mountain. So the mountains are trenches before a mountain. I'm not sure why that is, either.

Of course, Vesuvius had an entire culture at its base -- Pompey -- which was destroyed by the volcano. So that could be a part of it. Maybe my dream is somehow comparing Himalayan culture with Pompeyan culture. I don't know.

Another thing I'd quickly like to mention is the connection of my first dream with a movie I watched last night, "Billie." The movie stars Patty Duke and was made in 1965. The movie is about a girl who uses the rock and roll rhythms inside her head to pace herself for running. By using these rhythms, she can actually make herself run so fast that she can beat all of the boys on the track team. There's actually no girls' track team at this school -- because in 1965, this film says, sports were thought of as something girls didn't do.

The film is actually pretty cool. Patty Duke is awesome. And there are a couple of other pretty intriguing plot lines in the film, besides the track star plot. But one of the main things that people talk about throughout the film is equality between men and women. One of my favorite ideas, stated by Billie's father, is that Billie has invented a third sex, in addition to men and women: the sex of "equals."

Of course, even before this film, people were speaking of "third genders." I think Havelock Ellis may even have mentioned homosexuals as being a "third gender." And transgendered people were, and still are, sometimes, thought of as a third gender. But I don't think I've ever heard the third gender referred to as "equals." It sounded too awesome -- like something you might hear in a science fiction novel. Anyway, that's at least part of the reason I had that dream about equality.


But an image in my fourth dream also comes from the movie. Since there are no sports for girls in "Billie," there's apparently also no girls' locker room. So the boys make a locker room especially for Billie. The locker room is, unfortunately, the storage room/boiler room, apparently. But the boys do it up nicely, so that Billie feels welcome.


I took the idea of a storage room and made it into my house, and then into my grandma's house (or vice versa -- I'm not sure). My grandma's house is kind of like storage. She has a lot of stuff. It fills up her whole house.


And my apartment -- well, I barely have anything. Seriously. Outside of my books and notebooks, I barely have anything. But I think I think of my apartment -- of my whole entire life -- as storage. Because I have, for instance, a whole bunch of accumulated knowledge, and I'm just not putting it to any sort of good use.


I keep on trying and trying to think why this is. Why am I so unactive? How could I have spent -- for goodness sake -- close to seventeen years by now, if you include my three years of college, studying and studying and writing and writing, and not doing anything -- or, really, only doing a very negligible amount -- with all this stuff? I just store it up. Store, store, store.


It does make me think of another passage of Little Dorrit, which I'll end this entry by sharing with you:


"Fanny has adapted herself to our new fortunes with wonderful ease...


"This reminds me that I have not been able to do so, and that I sometimes despair of ever being able to do so. I find that I cannot learn. ... I am so slow that I scarcely get on at all. As soon as I begin to plan, and think, and try, all my planning, thinking, and trying go in old directions, and then I remember with a start that there are no such cares left, and that in itself is so new and improbable that it sets me wandering again...


"It is the same with all these new countries and wonderful sights. They are very beautiful, and they astonish me, but I am not collected enough -- not familiar enough with myself, if you can quite understand what I mean -- to have all the pleasure in them that I might have. What I knew before them, blends with them, too, so curiously. For instance, when we were among the mountains, I often felt... as if the Marshalsea must be behind that great rock; or as if Mrs. Clennam's room where I have worked so many days, and where I first saw you [Arthur Clennam], must be just beyond that snow. Do you remember one night when I came with Maggy to your lodging in Covent Garden? That room I have often and often fancied I have seen before me, travelling along for miles by the side of our carriage, when I have looked out of the carriage-window after dark. We were shut out that night, and sat at the iron gate, and walked about till morning. I often look up at the stars, even from the balcony of this room, and believe that I am in the street again, shut out with Maggy."

nel mezzo del cammin -- crisis!

Good morning, everybody.

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

However, I'd also like to note that I'm going to start putting drawings in my dream journal. I put my first drawing in this dream journal entry.

I would really love to make one drawing per dream journal entry. If I can do it, I will. If not, I'll do as many as I can. But I'll at least hold myself to no less than two drawings a week. I'm also going to try and go back to some of my more popular posts and put drawings into those posts.


The two images from last night's dreams that really stand out for me are the image of the soldier and the image of the table of contents. I think they both come from Little Dorrit, by Charles Dickens.


Little Dorrit is divided into two sections: one called "Poverty," and the other called "Riches." I'm just getting toward the end of the "Poverty" section now. Little Dorrit is probably most famous for its depiction of the Circumlocution Office, which sets out to find what needs to be done in England, and then sets up schemes for "How Not To Do It."


I think these two ideas blended together in my dream to create a table of contents in two halves, one half of which seems to be constantly repeating itself and getting nowhere, and the other half of which may be more exciting.


But I think this relates pretty well to my life. I'm getting toward the end of the first half of my life (if I'm lucky enough to live another day, week, month, year, etc.). And, looking back on the first half of my life, I see the same old weaknesses and lazinesses repeated, over and over.


Could the second half of my life be more interesting than I'd made the first half? Well... I judge the "creator" of this book (who could actually be myself) as being too stupid for me to want to care about. So I shut the book and turn my head away from it. That's a little bleak. And a little frightening. It makes me look like I'm shutting the book of my own life!


Although I do have to say that I do have a different orientation toward the "creator" or "creators" of this book. I do look at them as being other people. This may mean that I need guidance from other people in my life.


But in the past I've always looked at myself (in my more arrogant moments, which are, like, all the time) as being smarter than everybody else. If I were actually to take advice from the people around me, listen to what people tell me, and apply what people tell me to the things I do in life, would I have a lot more interesting and effective life?


Maybe the first half of my life has repeated and repeated and wallowed around in these same old problems specifically because I've been too hard-headed to listen to the people around me. And maybe if I just listen to the people around me -- and, more importantly, do what they tell me to do -- I can live a more interesting life.


But -- the dream still ends on a bleak note, even considering things that way. Because I'm still too hard-headed to listen to anybody. I'd rather just slam the book shut on the second half of my life and turn my head away, rather than admit that other people in this world could actually know better than I do!


Wow -- I can't believe I am so arrogant!


The soldier reminds me of a character in Little Dorrit named Mr. Meagles. One of the basic plot ideas of Little Dorrit is that there are all these characters who had been quarantined while travelling through Marseilles. But then they're let go, and they all go their separate ways -- though it appears that all their separate ways are "to London." Anyway, they eventually all meet up, and their lives intertwine in interesting ways.


The main character is a man named Arthur Clennam. Clennam is walking down the street one day when he re-encounters Mr. Meagles, who had been quarantined with him in Marseilles. Meagles has with him an engineer-inventor named Danny Doyce. Doyce has just been wrung through the Circumlocution Office while trying to get a patent on a new invention of his. He can't make money on the product (I guess) without the patent. But the Circumlocution Office is, it seems, concerned only with how not to get Doyce his patent.


Meagles, who is a bit bureaucratic himself, has taken Doyce under his wing. And it appears that Clennam later on gets involved in taking more care of the business aspect of Doyce's pursuits. But when Clennam first meets with Meagles again, Meagles is in such consternation over the runaround Doyce has gotten from the Circumlocution Office that he keeps on taking off his hat and rubbing his head in a frenzy, complaining about how terribly hot it is.


Danny Doyce is a bit of a parallel to Little Dorrit (or Amy Dorrit, as she's properly called). Both are very eager, diligent workers. Both have a spark of genius about them. Doyce's genius seems to be his ability to invent. Little Dorrit's genius seems to be her persistent care and kindness (19th century attitudes towards women much?). And Clennam seems to be the catalyst for both of them, the person who is looking to serve their administrative, practical, business needs in order to get them set on the right path in life.


Arthur Clennam is, I should say, probably my favorite male character in any Dickens novel I've read . I mean -- he is so far. I'm not through with the novel yet.

I'd like to identify myself with Arthur Clennam, just because he seems to be so caring, and so interested in getting things done, and so interested in serving people. But I think I identify more with the weaknesses in Little Dorrit and Danny Doyce, while also aspiring to their flashes of genius.

The soldier in my dream is obviously taking his actions from Mr. Meagles. Standing in front of Meagles, who is complaining about the demands of the business woman (who could be my dream version of the Circumlocution Office), I could be Doyce, or I could be Clennam. I don't know who I am. Or Meagles could be one aspect of myself, embodied in the soldier, and I, seeing through "my eyes," could be another aspect of myself, as either Doyce or Clennam. But I don't know which.

It's pretty funny. I never end with a very clear picture of what my dreams are trying to say.