This post reviews imagery from this entry in my dream journal maboroshi no yume.
One strong image from my dream is the song "Everyday People," by Sly and the Family Stone.
This song is probably one of my favorite songs of all time. And it brings back a lot of memories, as I used to hear it a lot, especially while working as a coffee server (not a barista) at the Oren's Daily Roast in Grand Central Station in New York City.
Here's a picture of an Oren's Daily Roast. But I'm honestly not sure which one.
I worked there in 2000, when the store was located near the Grand Central entrance on 42nd Street, between Madison and Park Avenue. From pictures of the Oren's Daily Roast in Grand Central that I see online, it looks like the store's actually moved into the Grand Central Market, which is (still?) this nifty sort of La Boqeria knock-off that basically takes up an entire concourse of the station.
So "Everyday People" connects me to Grand Central Station. This job was basically the last foodservice job I had. I'd already been doing some temp office work by this time. But in mid-2000 I learned my best friends were going to move from Colorado to New York as well. I'd thought I'd have to have a place they could stay in. So I figured I'd get a regular job and save up so I'd have a place once they arrived.
It turned out I didn't need to do that. My friends came way more prepared than I had. One of them already secured a $60K per year job. Another secured a $30K per year job. So before they'd even gotten to NYC, they had secured a combined household income of $90K per year. And their earnings only went up from there. They found an entire floor of a brownstone in Brooklyn, which they were moved into on their first day in the city. They didn't need me at all.
But their moving to NYC was what made me shift my focus away from working service jobs for low pay at odd hours of the day so I could spend the regular hours at the various branches of the New York Public Library, to working more professional jobs.
Oren's Daily Roast was one job I worked -- from 6 AM to 12 PM, Monday through Friday. I also worked at the UPS on Houston Street four hours a night -- but I can't really remember what the hours were now. 5 to 9? 6 to 10? Something. Then in between, I'd go to one of the NYPL libraries and read. I trained my mind pretty hardcore in those days. But it was also a lot of self-torture.
Of course, there's another image of Grand Central Station -- the food court-like area in the lower level. Here's one shot of the food court.
This lighting, and the sense of all floors, ceiling, walls, etc., being made of stone, match very much the feeling of my third dream.
Here's another shot of the lower-level food court area in Grand Central. Here you have a good shot of the leather chairs they have down there. These chairs appeared in my dream. And if they're still at Grand Central Station -- I have to say -- that just seems so crazy to me that those chairs are there!
Another strong image from last night was this strange library that was more like a conceptual art installation. The entire space was black. The walls were modular. And they were screens onto which imagery like television static played.
This space is definitely inspired by my experience seeing Ryoji Ikeda's The Transfinite at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City back in 2011. Here's my own video of the experience.
So... a lot of this imagery is taking me back to New York City, and probably to moments that are at or near really transitional times in my life in the city. And, again, this is probably because I'm going through so much transition in my life right now.
But... another transitional image would be this enormous office space where there's nobody around except myself and a young, blonde, female coworker. This office space reminded me a lot of the institutional trading floor Banc of America Securities had at 9 West 57th Street. I worked on the floor in 2000 and 2005. In 2005 I moved from being a temp there to a full-time employee in the research department. That was probably one of the biggest professional transitions of my life.
Here's a 2014 view of a Bank of America trading floor. It's not from 9 West 57th, though, as BofA had moved out of that space in 2008.
The image on the screen in the video library dream is kind of funny. It's supposed to be an historical image from the late 1960s. But instead it's an image of Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk. This dream image was definitely inspired by my seeing this image from the movie Avengers: Infinity War, which I only saw for a second while scrolling through Twitter yesterday.
For some reason I found this image really annoying. I can't explain what it was. I really liked Black Panther. And I've not liked most Marvel movies. To see the folks from Black Panther as part of this scene just made me feel like Black Panther was taken down a notch. I can't explain it.
But the relation of this image to historical moments was also inspired by a book I'm currently reading, The Story of America: Essays on Origins, by Jill Lepore.
In The Story of America, Jill Lepore examines how America has told its history, from the time of the Jamestown Colony through the 2008 elections. Lepore basically shows how America's perception of itself and its ideals shapes which stories it tells and how it tells those stories. This idea is illustrated by relating the lives of various people who either wrote about significant events or made specific contributions to types of documentation (dictionaries, museums, the Constitution) of American history.
Here's a video where Jill Lepore talks about The Story of America.
One of the people Lepore discusses is Thomas Paine. In one section, Lepore compares Thomas Paine to Aquaman:
"Thomas Paine is, at best, a lesser Founder. In the comic book version of history that serves as America's national heritage, where the Founding Fathers are like the Hanna-Barbera SuperFriends, Paine is Aquaman to Washington's Superman and Jefferson's Batman; we never find out how he got his super powers and he only shows up when they need someone who can swim."
It was kind of novel to experience this analogy in Lepore's book. But I think the trick got stale for me at some point in the book. And I feel there was a point, probably the essay on Poe, when the book lost a lot of interest for me. I think that sense of disappointment filtered into my dream imagery.
However, another interesting part of Lepore's Story of America is how it discusses Andrew Jackson's contribution to history, in the form of the "campaign biography." After Jackson, who won his election by appealing to the common people with his own story of growing up in a log cabin, etc., candidate after candidate had to prove, through their "campaign biography," that they were regular, tough, self-made people. In other words, they had to prove that they were "everyday people," to paraphrase Sly and the Family Stone.
So I thought a lot about that yesterday and how that rhetorical method in political campaigning has been used in some pretty strange ways recently. And so my brain naturally went to Sly and the Family Stone song.
But what I will say is, while there are many songs whose beat is difficult for me to capture without a lot of practice (especially songs in weird time, not 4/4 or 3/4 time), there is only one song I can think of where I have a hard time keeping the tune. That's the song "Angel," by Malaysian pop star Atilia.
There's one specific moment, toward the end of the song, where the key seems to change in a way that I can never, ever remember. It's so weird that I never manage to get this. But I love the song, and I love the moment in the song.
So I think there's something interesting about me trying to get the melody right for a song called "Everyday People," while really the song I always have trouble with is called "Angel." But it also reminds me that maybe I'm not getting the words right because I'm trying to remember that Sly and the Family Stone also made a song called "Everybody Is a Star."
In terms of my assumption that my mistake in singing was from not going low enough, that is definitely inspired by some low singing Kanye West does in the song "Ultralight Beam."
In terms of the strange philosopher in my dream, Georges Sumner, apparently a French philosopher, I think this might be related to the philosopher Jean Baudrillard, whom I admire.
But I think this might also have to do with my reading of The Witch's Flight, by Kara Keeling.
Keeling's book explores the cinematic representation of black women, with a bit of a focus on queer black women. It's a brilliant book, full of incredible insights. But two theorists Keeling mentions in her book are Gilles Deleuze and Frant Fanon.
Deleuze and Fanon are two writers I've wanted to read for a while. And I think the George Sumner of my dream stands for them both -- especially when you think that I received two of Sumner's books from the girl in my dream. It's like my preconscious is telling me, Go ahead and start reading these guys, silly!
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