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.