This post reviews images from this entry of my dream journal maboroshi no yume.
A lot of the imagery of my dreams has a distinctively late 1970s/early 1980s style, partly because, as I mentioned in a previous post, I've recently been leafing through photos in a 1983 book called Denver: America's Mile High Center of Enterprise, which I inherited from my grandparents last year after my step-grandma passed away.
But the deep blue coming through the windows in the first of my dreams from last night also, I think, comes from this dead mall video on Ace's Adventures YouTube channel. This video documents Shoppingtown Mall in Syracuse, NY.
This video is, in my opinion, one of Anthony's most elegantly filmed dead mall videos. The pacing has a Frederick Wiseman style. Throughout the video, Anthony films the skylights of the mall. In this way, we get a sense of the passage of time -- how much time Anthony spent inside the mall. At one point, there's a glimpse of some beautiful, deep blue late afternoon light. I think this is what influenced my dream so much.
My brain is pretty temperamental and lazy. So there are times when I just can't read. All I can do is look at images.
So I've been purposely feeding my brain imagery of dead malls and Renaissance Art, just to see what my unconcious and preconscious make of things. One book I've been looking through is this book from an old McGraw-Hill series on the history of art and culture.
One book I started leafing through last night was this National Geographic book, The Renaissance: Maker of Modern Man.
This is another book I inherited from my grandparents. And in the book has some elements that flowed through into my dreams. One comes from this page, which displays a beautiful lemon grove and building that belonged to Cosimo de Medici.
But the beautiful lemon grove and building did not appear in my dream, as I'd hoped they would. Instead, the story in the text influenced my dream. The story tells how Cosimo would settle down daily to read St. Gregory's Moralia, which is a 35-freakin'-volume commentary on the Book of Job. Yikes!
Here's an image from Alamy that shows an actual page from St. Gregory's Moralia.
I'm pretty sure I could imagine that kind of page without actually having seen it. And that's the kind of page that became the text in the architecture book in my third dream.
However, there was another influence from my leafing through the National Geographic's book on the Renaissance. It came from this page, which shows the Teatro Olimpico, by Andrea Palladio.
Again, this was an image I was very interested in. First of all, this fish-eye lens reminds me a lot of this image, which serves as the frontispiece, so to speak, for the Denver book I've been leafing through.
But this image was also interesting to me because the ceiling in this image is a painted sky. But when I first looked at it I thought it was a real sky.
This trompe-l'œil effect of a fake sky reminds me a lot of the mall walkways in Las Vegas -- particularly in this case of those at The Venetian. Here are some images of those walkways from when I went to Las Vegas as part of a work trip last year.
So, again, I was hoping to see some images in my dream that reminded me of the Teatro Olimpico or my walks in Las Vegas.
But instead what influenced my dream was the actual book that Andrea Palladio wrote, The Four Books of Architecture.
I don't think I'd ever known about Palladio's book on architecture. And, of course, as soon as I learned of it, I wanted to have and read it. Hence my preconscious groaning in my dream about having to lug something like that around -- physically and psychically!
Here is a cool video from The School of Life's YouTube channel, where Dr. Hannah Roxburgh, PhD, discusses the life, work, and philosophy of Palladio.
In my third dream, where this whole architecture book imagery takes place, there's a discussion between myself and a current Denver-area political candidate about whether these books are meant for me or my mom.
There are obviously, as you can assume, a lot of emotional dynamics around this discussion -- from the family perspective and from the perspective of this conversation between myself and a high-profile Denverite. And a lot of that stuff relates back to conversations between my mom, my grandpa, and myself. But I would get too tangled up in talking about that stuff. So I'll just leave it to the side.
But I think it all leads, anyhow, to a question I'm always asking myself -- which, I'm sure, we ALL ask ourselves -- which is basically, What right do I have to success in my life? What right do I have to act in the world at all?
I, like many others, am confronted every day with that question, sometimes by myself, and sometimes by others. Usually people ask the question of "Who is this guy?" to give euphemism to the fact that they don't think a person should be acting in the world. Usually they believe that the person shouldn't be allowed to act in the world because they're biased against the group of people of whom that person is a part.
It's hard to call bullshit on that mentality. And so usually the person who's the object of that statement feels a need to be better and better. It's a vicious cycle. And I've been a part of of it since at least 2004, when I really started to assert myself in the social world. But it's such a powerful force on my life, I think, because I let it be, because of a lot of my emotional complexes from my youth.
Obviously I question my life every single day. I'm getting older. And I'm confronted with the fact that I'm closer to the day of my death than I am to the day of my birth at this point. And I think that's why I imagined myself as a seventy-year-old (my grandpa died in his early seventies) in my second dream. I do get upset at myself for acting like a child when I should be acting like an adult. But I can't seem to find a social foothold that will allow me enough permission in the world to claim my right to adult action -- and adult social and material standing, by the way.
Instead, what I keep on running up against is just social group after social group that is so annoyed by the most basic fact of my existence, apparently, that they just all immediately go into kid-mode and focus on nothing but annoying the hell out of me. Again -- that's not really something unique to my experience. It's a part of the way game theory has come to rule the world, unfortunately, in my opinion.
This is why, as soon as I reflect on my age, I go into another room, where I sit down next to my brother/nephew who immediately sets to annoying my by tapping his used chopsticks (i.e. slobbery eating utensils) against my shoulder.
The imagery of the Hit Stix -- I'm not sure how that relates to things. However, I keep on meaning to make this book, Toys of the 50s, 60s, and 70s, a part of my nightly imagery while I'm waiting for my brain to feel ready to read again.
I got this book a couple years ago while at the History Colorado Center's exhibit by the same name. This exhibit has traveled to a few different museums. Here's a video about the exhibit from The Senator John Heinz History Center's YouTube channel.
My goal has been to read about some of the toys and then look up YouTube videos on them. But I haven't gotten to them yet. I also reflected last night that the toys only go through the 1970s. That would mean I'd miss out on some of the toys from my youth, i.e. the 1980s and 1990s. I didn't think of any toys in particular. But my preconscious obviously chose Hit Stix as a good example. Here's an image of HitStix from the PicClick website.
And here's an old commercial for Hit Stix.
The commercial really sucks. It tries so hard to be cool. But it misses the mark so badly. And, as I remember, Hit Stix as a toy were themselves pretty disappointing.
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