This post reviews images from this entry in my dream journal maboroshi no yume.
In my dream there's a seventeen-year-old girl who has been severely injured by Lyme disease.
I think the girl's age was inspired by two thing. I watched the movie Weird Science on Friday night. And in that movie, one of the boys is fifteen years old, and the other is sixteen.
Here's the trailer for Weird Science.
But I've also recently read Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. And, of course, in that play much is made of the fact that Juliet is thirteen years old.
But I also think that there's a lot of stuff around anxiety about aging in Romeo and Juliet. The Nurse barely has any teeth in her head. Capulet's wife makes fun of him and says he should carry a crutch instead of a sword. And I think a lot of Capulet's story arc is based around his own reflection, as he perhaps reaches his sixties?, that maybe his wife would have led a happier life if he hadn't married her so soon.
So in Romeo and Juliet there's definitely some drama around being young and thinking about growing old, as well as growing old and reflecting on one's youth. I'm at an age where I'm reflecting on my own youth. So it would make sense that these elements in Shakespeare's drama would inspire my dream.
But in Weird Science there's also an element of youth reflecting on old age. In particular, Wyatt's grandparents visit to check in while Wyatt's parents are away. And they find Wyatt throwing a huge party. Lisa, the computer-generated dream girl who can make anything happen, stops the grandparents from freaking out -- by freezing them and putting them in the kitchen pantry.
But strangely, the person this seventeen-year-old girl in my dream reminds me more of the character of Tonya Harding's mom as played by Allison Janney in the film I, Tonya.
Here's the trailer for I, Tonya.
I, Tonya is another film about youth versus age. And like Romeo and Juliet, it's a film about what adults expect of young people, what young people think adults expect of them, and what young people expect of themselves.
But I think, in terms of my own life, as I reflect, I feel like -- I can feel all the years of my adult life. Like... I know and feel the passage of time, in its fullness, so to speak. But I also feel like everything has passed in the blink of an eye.
And I'm at an age now where in that next blink of an eye, provided I even survive that long, I'll be very close, say, to the age my grandparents were when they died. It's strange to feel like I have such a close connection, even still, somehow, to my high school self, while I feel so close to that self I can't even imagine yet -- the one that's closer to my grandparents. I really think my mind is working hard to come to terms with that.
In my dream, the girl has Lyme disease. The disease has claimed her hands, and maybe also her forearms. These images both come from stuff I scrolled past on Twitter, and maybe also on YouTube, yesterday. I didn't look at either item.
But I think there was a news article mentioned on Twitter where a (seventeen-year-old?) girl made some kind of cure for complications for Lyme disease while waiting on a cure from the doctors. And I think I saw a YouTube video on my suggestions where a boy with no hands can play the piano really well. So even though I didn't read the article or watch the video, it's easy to see how those images influenced my dream.
The three beds in my immediate field of view in the bedroom the hotel woman assigns to me are most definitely related to myself, my brother, and my sister. So basically I've come back to my youth, when my sister, my brother, and I all lived in the same house. The three beds probably comes from the fact that in Weird Science Wyatt, for some odd reason, has two beds in his bedroom.
I felt like Wyatt's two beds basically meant that at some point Wyatt and his big brother had to share a bedroom, and that Wyatt has really never been able to free the space of his bedroom emotionally from his brother's presence. Plus, it makes it convenient to have a second bed when Gary (an emotionally preferable version of Wyatt's brother) spends the night.
So in my dream, I see that the bedroom of my youth still has all three beds in it -- mine, my sister's, and my brothers. So I probably still haven't gotten over a lot of stuff from my youth.
At the same time, this room probably has a lot more beds in it. And I think that has something to do with... well... a lot of things. Nowadays there are a lot of kids in my family. It always turns out that there are a lot of adults, too -- adults who just suddenly become part of the family. So all the houses in my family feel full. Except mine.
But the room is also a girl-themed bedroom. There's probably even a huge dollhouse somewhere. By the way, this dollhouse probably came from my walk yesterday. I walked past a house and saw a huge dollhouse on the porch. For some reason I found that image so charming.
However, dollhouses mean a lot to me, emotionally and sexually. The first time I ever masturbated, when I was eleven, it was after fantasizing that I could become a Barbie doll and live in my sister's Barbie doll house. I basically imagined myself as this bisexual Barbie who had sex with both Ken and some other Barbie.
The emotional power of this image was probably stirred up by Weird Science, as well, when you consider that Lisa was originally a Barbie doll, probably belonging to Wyatt's sister Chloe.
I also wonder whether the bed assignment in the dream isn't meant to stand for the time I spent in Covenant House, a sort of youth shelter in midtown Manhattan, in 1998.
In my dream, of course, I start out at a Hampton Inn. I'm pretty sure it was a Hampton Inn because of the way the cursive sign looked -- with the white background and blue cursive.
But as I try to get signed into this hotel, the woman concierge decides to send me all the way out to the outskirts of town, and put me into some trailer home that's as filled with beds as I felt the Covenant House was when I stayed there.
There's a lot going on here. But in short, I think I've been reflecting a lot on my career lately. It seems like, especially starting in November or December of 2009, once the financial crisis had moved into aftermath phase, I have just not been wanted in the professional world at all and that I've had to fight for any shred of existence there.
But that definitely got worse in 2012, once I came back home to Colorado. Right now, and, really, since 2012, Denver has been a place of incredible financial abundance. But you wouldn't know it by the way people have continually tried to shut me out of the business world, political world, art world, etc. When people don't want you around, they will just try their very hardest to make you feel like the real issue is that they can't afford you -- even if you only cost half of what they're paying for everybody else.
So that all translates into my dream as... I'm already late for the convention (i.e. I was already late in starting my professional life). I just want to get checked into a hotel (i.e. I just want a steady job to get me through the rest of my professional life). I find a cheap hotel and remember that that was good enough in the past (i.e. I put myself up for sale for work at half-price). The concierge really doesn't want to check me in at all, but she eventually has to, and she shoves me out on the outskirts of town (i.e., I am probably given even more of a runaround).
So I'm out on the outskirts of life. And I know that where this woman has put me, I'll spend a long time walking back to where I need to be. But I'm confronted with a bedroom full of beds, but with the three main beds being mine and my siblings.
From this room I walk into a room with three hospital beds -- i.e. three deathbeds -- the beds for me, my brother, and my sister. So, as I mentioned before, I feel like I'm in a kind of midlife crisis. And the dream puts it pretty bluntly. I walk from my and my siblings' childhood bedroom into a room with our deathbeds.
Of course, I'm greeted by this person who's supposed to be a seventeen-year-old survivor of Lyme disease who made her own cure, combined with a young boy who became a piano virtuoso with no hands. In other words, the hotel woman immediately takes me to see a young person who did incredible stuff in spite of insurmountable odds to prove, as she's desired to prove all along, that I'm just too lazy to do anything good.
But when I look at this seventeen-year-old girl, she's actually a mom -- Tonya Harding's mom in I, Tonya. So she's really not a seventeen-year-old girl at all. She's my mom, trying to pretend she's a seventeen-year-old girl.
I look away from this mother trying to pretend she's a daughter. First of all -- this hotel woman who hates me is trying to use this person as proof of my incompetence. (Plenty of white women and men try every single day to prove I'm incompetent, mainly because, since I'm half-Mexican and half-Irish, they see me as a Mexican and think I'm incompetent -- or a crook -- anyway.) But the girl the hotel woman is putting before me is actually my mom. And that kind of disgusts and pisses me off.
So I look away and see a kitchen full of family members. There's a family crisis. And suddenly I wonder how I could have been so selfish as to have looked away from my mom. So I look back to my mom. I go ahead and play along with her, pretending that she's seventeen years old. I even decide that I'll go ahead and flirt with her, so she, so my mom, feels like I want to be with her, until she goes to have her surgery.
Since I feel like what all of this is saying, I'll leave this all right here.
Some things I will say, however are... I'm not sure why Houston was the city in my dream. I also don't know why my brain couldn't figure out at the beginning whether I was in Denver on the way to Houston, in between Denver and Houston, or already in Houston.
Another thing I found fun and interesting and charming in the dream was that blue Vespa that just magically appeared for a bit. So I wanted to put a picture of a blue Vespa in this entry.
Interestingly enough, the Vespa was inpsired by yesterday's walk, too. As I reached a part of my walk with some new high-end apartments, after I'd walked through a part of town where a lot of people were walking in the opposite direction from me, heading to the Colorado Rockies game, this kind of stupid guy drove his motorcycle up onto the sidewalk and basically right into my path of walking. I got out of the guy's way.
But it was just weird -- to have this guy -- he'd done a U-turn, too. So that was weird. He'd been on the street, did a U-turn, drove up onto the sidewalk, and then drove into my path of walking, so I'd have to get out of his way. Just a strange, strange situation.
So... somehow, because of that situation, I imagined myself on the sidewalk, but riding a baby blue Vespa! Okay...
Also, just thinking of it... the whole walking from childhood beds to deathbeds kind of reminds me of that Stone Temple Pilots song "Dead and Bloated."
No comments:
Post a Comment