This post reviews imagery from this entry in my online dream journal, maboroshi no yume.
I might have skipped today's analysis, as I am kind of pushing up against my work hours. But I needed to reflect a little on this dream.
Part of this dream relates, of course, to the #MeToo movement -- the movement where women are taking strong action against sexual harassment. And it's gotten some great results so far.
So obviously it feels weird for me to wake up from a dream where my preconscious is sort of complaining about the movement. I almost didn't want to post the dream. But that would have been a disservice to my dreaming mind.
I want to deal with the most immediate influence on the dream from my dream day. Last night I went to a political volunteer meeting in a part of Denver I used to live in. As I was waiting at an intersection, there were two bicyclists, both women. One of the women made a point to bully me in a passive aggressive way as we waited for the light and then as we crossed the street.
I was annoyed by that. But I think the sense of annoyance was compounded by my feeling that I'd been bullied out of this neighborhood altogether about a year and a half ago. So that all stayed with me and ended up in my dream.
I was also dealing with some self-image issues. My washing machine needs a pretty simple part replacement. I'm waiting for it to come. But instead of taking my clothes to the laundry, I'm just waiting for the part to arrive. So all my clothes smell. So I'm terrified of any public situations right now.
At the political event I was at, two women sat next to me. And I was so freaked out by how bad I probably smelled that I was literally almost completely turned away from the women the entire time. I just wanted to shrink to the very back of the room, where nobody would be around me. I kind of embossed those two women in my mind because they stood for how I thought everybody in the meeting must really have thought I smelled so terrible. It's hard to express the level of mental anguish I was in, as funny and pathetic as that sounds.
So obviously the bicycle women and the two women at the political meeting found their way into my dream. But this same dynamic of being bullied and then feeling isolated in a political meeting come from a prior experience.
As political season was ramping up this year, I was thinking about helping out Faith Winter, a Colorado state representative who is running for Colorado's state Senate. Faith Winter has easily been Colorado's strongest proponent in the Me Too movement as it pertains to conduct by Colorado's politicians.
The big reason I wanted to volunteer for Winter was because she's in a really important swing district in the state. One of my political mentors also told me the most important thing I could do this year would be to volunteer my time for whoever ran in that district.
I started down the road of volunteering for Winter. But at her kickoff event, two women treated me mean before I even got inside the building where Winter's office is, then continued annoying me all the way into Winter's office. One woman thought she could just bully me because I was inconsequential. The other woman just went along with it. The main bullying woman ended up being an elected official.
Some other stuff happened after that that just made me feel that Winter's race was going to be pretty high-profile. There were going to be a lot of people around her who wanted to be involved in her high-profile race. Those folks would bully "inconsequential" people like me every chance they got. So I just decided not to be a part of Winter's race.
So there's this dynamic of being bullied by two women before heading into a political meeting a couple months ago that echoed into my experience from yesterday. I think this whole mental process says a lot more about me and my own inner life than it does about the women in my waking life that influenced my preconscious imagery.
The imagery of the naked women comes from a couple things. First, I was watching a Lazy Game Reviews video on YouTube yesterday. The review was for the PC video game Spore. One of the draws of the game is that you create your own creatures. So obviously a lot of people would just make creatures that had (or were) huge phalluses, etc.
Another image that I think influenced the imagery of the naked women was this image of Alex Jones that's been passed around the internet a lot recently. The image shows the controversial celebrity topless in a before and after photo which is supposedly touting the body-shaping effects of some product. But folks on the internet have basically claimed that the only thing the imagery shows is that Jones has gotten a tan.
For some reason, these photos of Alex Jones made me think of the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver's Shadow of Men, a solo show of the work of Cleon Peterson.
So I think the two white women turning into two naked women, one of whom is white, while the other is dark brown, relates to the naked phallic creatures in Spore and the white and "brown" Alex Jones and the white and black characters in Cleon Peterson's paintings. The tapered down look of the women also comes from the weird way Jones's posture makes him look like the characters in Peterson's paintings: kind of really wide at the shoulders and tiny at the hips and bottom.
Why are these naked women based on imagery of men? I'm honestly not sure. I definitely would say at least in part it has to do with homoerotic desire. I'm turning the women into men to turn them into objects of homoerotic affection. My sexuality tends to go back and forth that way, especially in my dreams. So I could imagine that my preconscious may have been tired of looking at naked women for a bit and may just have wanted to see some naked men.
But I think the making equivalent of women's and men's bodies in my dream is also saying something about the philosophy lying behind a lot of the ways I think the Me Too movement is being exploited by people who don't care about women's rights at all and just want to make a society that's as sexually conservative and frigid as possible. Women are behind this movement as well. Women have been just as active as men in movements to desexualize society.
If there's anything that I think characterizes the charged nature of touch, it's relation to homophobia, and how a lot of the misuses of the Me Too movement are eventually related to a anti-LGBTQ agenda, it would be yet another episode that has gone around on the internet recently: Philadelphia's state representative Daryl Metcalfe basically going into a homophobic panic attack when simply touched on the arm by his colleague, Representative Matt Bradford.
So... it's hard to say what exactly my mind was getting at with this dream. Basically, I feel like there's an image of these two white women who are happy about a "no touching," maybe even a "no looking," law that was passed. They passed the law by having a black, male legislator "in their pocket." They're happy they can use the law against men. Then, holding hands and becoming naked, they take on bodies that obviously were influenced by imagery of male bodies from my waking life.
The imagery of the clean apartment complexes and row houses comes from -- basically what the neighborhood I was in yesterday has become. That neighborhood is gentrified. And it's highly Democratic and ostensibly liberal. But it's also full of white people who don't like having brown people around, as well as wealthy people who don't like having not wealthy people around. It's... the kind of liberalism that really isn't liberal. Hypocritical liberalism in a now almost completely gentrified neighborhood.
I personally feel like I was bullied out of that neighborhood and that even when I go back there, I experience "spook tactics" to keep me feeling unwelcome in the neighborhood. By liberals. And I feel like those same "spook tactics" are par for the course for white people in the arts, business, and politics in general in the Denver metro area.
The imagery of the crowded street comes from another episode of Lazy Game Reviews, a review of the PC Game Cities: Skylines. In this video, Clint talks a lot about some weak parts in the game that make traffic in the cities really bad, and how the bad traffic issues can lead to really bad effects on the rest of the game, including the destruction of buildings and the decay of entire neighborhoods.
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