Today's post reviews imagery from this entry in my dream journal Maboroshi no Yume.
The young drag queen in my second dream is a real person. He's an incredible performer. I'm just a little iffy on giving more detail, as I could see the whole "attraction" part of my dream being sort of uncomfortable and awkward.
The rich boy image comes from a few different places, I think. Probably the blonde boy that first came to my mind was Tom Felton as Draco Malfoy in the Harry Potter series.
I really don't know much about Tom Felton. But he's been busy enough in the film world since Harry Potter that the whole "where are they now" thing in my dream doesn't seem to apply to him very well.
In fact, I had no idea that Tom Felton stars with Daisy Ridley in the new film Ophelia, a retelling of the Hamlet story through the heroine's eyes, directed by Claire McCarthy.
Here's a video where McCarthy, Felton, and Naomi Watts speak about Ophelia.
It's also interesting to see George MacKay in this vid. MacKay plays Hamlet in Ophelia and starred in the 2014 film Pride, which is probably one of my top ten favorite movies of this decade. Here's the trailer for Pride.
It sounds like Ophelia is still working on getting US distribution -- that is mind-boggling to me. Even if it's a so-so movie, it has huge star power and a pretty cool sounding story. Oh well...
But I think the young blonde boy in my dream is also inspired by other boys I've seen in other images in my waking life.
One blonde boy I've seen and adored recently is Radley Wright, who plays the four-year-old version of Tommy in the Denver Center for the Performing Arts' current production of the 1992 musical The Who's Tommy.
Here's one image of Radley Wright, on the left, with the other cast members who play Tommy (counter-clockwise, from bottom): Owen Zitek, Samuel Bird, and Andy Mientus.
Does it look in this picture like Samuel Bird got to click the shutter? Hilarious and cute.
Anyway, the DCPA's production of The Who's Tommy is really great. It runs through May 27th, 2018. If you're in the Denver area during that time, I highly recommend checking it out. Here's a trailer that really captures the magic of the show.
Another blonde boy who inspired the rich blonde boy in my dreams is Hunter Carson, who is probably one of the most beautiful human beings I've ever seen in my life in his role as Hunter Henderson in the film Paris, Texas.
The scene in Paris, Texas where Hunter reunites with his mother Jane, played by Nastassja Kinski, is also one of my favorite scenes in movie history.
Here is the trailer for Paris, Texas. I definitely recommend checking the film out.
So I do feel like there's a lot of stuff related to all these images that filters its way into my dream.
I think the real determinant, however, of the image of the blonde boy came from Nastassja Kinski as opposed to Hunter Carson.
I had seen the movie Carmen Jones on Sunday, after having gone to see a new production of Carmen by Cleo Parker Robinson Dance here in Denver.
I was so intrigued by the story changes made to Carmen by Cleo Parker Robinson that I wanted to see a more traditional version of it again so I could refresh my memory of the story. So I watched the Otto Preminger version of Oscar Hammerstein's Carmen Jones, which is incredible. Here's the trailer.
Carmen Jones must be one of my favorite musicals. And yesterday, while I was thinking about the film again, I described it to myself as an old standard American musical redone with the film style of Werner Herzog. I was trying to think what the best Herzog film would be to compare it to. I settled on Aguirre: The Wrath of God, even though I think I really meant Woyzeck.
Here's the trailer for Herzog's Woyzeck.
Anyway, after watching Carmen Jones, I had been thinking about the style of drama that the Carmen story has. The drama is driven by character choice, which I always love. But it's also driven by the pitting against each other of two characters' ideals, choices, and desires. I felt like this type of drama was heavily inspired by Shakespeare, though it is a bit more academic and neoclassical, if you will (which probably smart people will not).
As I considered this, my mind went immediately to Georg Büchner's play of Woyzeck. Woyzeck was written in 1913, about forty years after Carmen. The two plays are very different in some ways. Some might argue that Woyzeck previsioned World War I in an already war-scarred Europe. The drama of Woyzeck may actually be seen as a midway point between dramas like Carmen and expressionist films like Murnau's Sunrise and Lang's Metropolis.
However, some of the key elements of the drama of Woyzeck are very much in common with those of Carmen and Carmen Jones -- such as, most easily recognized, the way in both dramas the heroine's new lover defeats her old lover and makes the old lover feel incompetent and inferior, and the way the old lover's inferiority complex leads him to murder the heroine.
What's odd to me is that -- I was thinking of all of this on Sunday. But on Monday, as I rethought Carmen Jones, Herzog's Woyzeck simply would not pop into my mind! Weird...
Anyway, all of these films by Herzog star Klaus Kinski, who is Nastassja Kinski's father. Nastassja Kinski would relate to Paris, Texas, in which Kinski co-stars with Hunter Carson, the beautiful blonde boy who made me think of the other beautiful blonde boys who inspired my dream.
Carmen Jones inspired another image in my dreams -- the fence in my first dream. The fence appears in a kind of weird place -- inside a gigantic room that is part library and part political floor, and maybe part church sanctuary, but is also divided up into rooms in some way I probably never figured out in my dream. But the fence definitely comes from the fence which is so dramatically powerful in the first scene of Carmen Jones.
The drama in my first dream is actually related to my trying to decide whether to have a girl on my team (probably some kind of athletic team) who is a star basically because she's so vocal and convinces everybody she's a good player, or to have a girl who is actually a good player but who nobody ever pays attention to.
This dream drama is a sort of echo of the dramatic conflict between Carmen and Cindy Lou in the film Carmen Jones.
But I think my dream has a different angle to that drama. I see myself sort of as Harry Belafonte's character Joe in Carmen Jones. But I have a different role from Joe that's related to my own life. I am set up in a managerial position, having to make a hiring decision. I go with the person I think will be the better performer. But the decision makes the people around me not like me. I have to justify myself. But I basically end up being even more disliked. The dream ends with me either kneeling and pleading or else crawling and groveling to the folks who are essentially the employees for whom I'm managing this project.
However, I honestly also think I see myself in the first dream as the Cindy Lou "good athlete" character in contest against the boisterous Carmen character. I have always wanted to offer the companies I've worked for top-level performance and haven't really wanted to be the flashy person who gets all the attention. But I've always ended up in a situation where, the better I perform, the more my coworkers hate me. And usually that hatred is driven by the loudmouthed people who don't perform well and want me out of the picture. But... with a couple exceptions... those loudmouthed people are usually men.
Really, I think these patterns in my professional life are based on my early life. I dealt with a lot of sibling rivalry as a kid. And I don't think I need to get into that very much right now. But I think unconsciously I kind of always put myself into professional situations where I'm facing the same kind of rivalry I faced with my siblings as a child. These rivalry situations are real situations. But in some ways I always manage to ignore the warning signs of these situations -- almost like I want to put myself into the situations.
I've also -- even though I dealt with years and years of appearance issues -- been called a pretty boy all my life. There are years -- decades -- of my life where I know I was not a pretty boy. But I was still called a pretty boy. In my professional life I've also constantly been called a golden boy and a boy wonder -- usually derisively, out of jealousy.
So I think a lot of this "golden boy" imagery in my dreams comes from this sense of myself. I project this sense of myself onto these actual golden children (blonde boys) from imagery in my waking life. And I set up a rivalry among golden children in both of my dreams. This professional rivalry of golden children in my dreams is based on the patterns of sibling rivalry in my early life.
And, I guess, as you can see, this dream continues to explore a lot of the conflicts that have been explored in many of my recent dreams. It really is a psychological problem that has been very strong over the past two months of my life. And I'm pretty sure I'll be morally paralyzed until I can find a provisional solution to this psychic conflict.
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