This blog reviews images from my waking life that influence the images of my dreams.
Today's post reviews this entry from my dream journal blog, Maboroshi no Yume.
In last night's dream, the only image I could really place was the image of the strange bike. This bike definitely comes from the recently posted video by Kelsey Lewin on the Super Nintendo LifeCycle Exertainment Bike. Here's the video.
Of course, the "handlebars" for the bike in my dream were like a wheel that you would see on an old Sit 'n Spin toy.
Image from Buzz Feed Partner on Pinterest
Given that the bike had no wheels, was stuck on a pole, had a Sit 'n Spin wheel, and never got used throughout my entire dream (!!!), I would obviously say that this image has a lot to do with feeling like I'm going nowhere in my life.
I'm really not sure what else the imagery is related to.
In 2001 and 2002 I lived as a Volunteer-in-Parks in Wupatki National Monument, near Flagstaff, Arizona. Ever since that time, the desert has been a huge part of my dreams.
I live back in my hometown of Denver, Colorado, right now. I walk a lot of places to get around town. I've walked as much as possible all my life. I like walking. But I feel like it slows down my life a lot. I also have a lot of scary moments out walking when big trucks pass by me on thin sidewalks or shoulders of the road.
My relationship with my sister is shaky at best. And there are a lot of times that is really distressing to me. I want to be around my sister more. And I want to help my sister more. But I never seem to be able to connect with her.
This blog reviews images from my waking life that influence the images of my dreams.
Today's post relates to this entry in my dream journal maboroshi no yume.
I'm honestly not sure of where the actual imagery in the dreams comes from. However, a lot of the occurrences in the dreams remind me a lot of my daily life.
In the first dream I'm acting as a critic of a space. I actually play this role a lot in my waking life -- giving people my opinion about things. It's not usually a space, architecture, etc. It's usually more like art, business strategy, politics, etc.
In the second dream I meet up with one of my friends, an art dealer with whom I haven't spoken in about a year.
When I first met my art dealer friend, back in 2015, she had just started up her gallery after the previous owner passed away. The space the gallery in was small, kind of rundown. The front area lacked heating and air conditioning. And the storage area for the art was a mess.
I helped my friend create a business plan for her gallery. My friend and her team got really serious and in a pretty short time did a lot of incredible stuff to make their gallery successful. They moved to a much nicer space.
The strange "grocery store" in my first dream is probably the first location of that art gallery. The "groceries" are obviously works of art -- not in a bad way. Products are products sometimes. That's all that means.
I stopped talking with my gallerist friend because she treated me in a pretty shady and shaky way after I'd done a lot and devoted a lot of my time and effort toward helping her gallery. But I don't really want to talk about that.
Anyway -- this is kind of the story of my social life. Even in the business world, I've helped a lot of people build their careers, turn around their businesses, build the sales side of their business almost from scratch, and get their businesses sold. But it always seems like people find the most underhanded and passive-aggressive ways to kick me out the door once they've gotten what they want from me. I have a lot of things in life I can feel proud of. But a lot of people other than I have the money to show for it.
Nowadays I'm getting more and more involved in helping people in other social pursuits. And I think some specific things that have happened over the past couple days have seriously gotten me thinking about how involved I want to get in these things. I don't want to walk myself back down the path of helping people out and then getting screwed over in underhanded and passive-aggressive ways.
In the second dream, my gallerist friend carried me for a while over the field we were trying to cross quickly. Then my gallerist friend got tired, and I carried her the rest of the way. I feel like the wish-fulfillment component of my dream was sort of making my relationship with my gallerist friend into more of a give-and-take.
The patience and empathy component at the end of my dream is also something where I realize... a lot of people in the art world, even people who have a lot of fame, don't make a lot of money. And so, while they put on this act of being intelligent, smug, sophisticated -- whatever they think the situation calls for -- it's usually just an act, and there's a lot of struggle underneath it.
Sometimes it is good just to play along with people's acts. Play their game. Not because it helps you at all. But, first of all, because it just lifts them up and gives them hope. If you play their game, it makes them feel like other people will play their game -- i.e. that all of this struggle will end in success. But, second, you might not realize it, but they are probably already playing your game, too. They're buying into whatever your fantasies are. So you should reciprocate and buy into whatever their fantasies are.
Anyway -- these are all ideas I've been struggling with in my waking life. So it's no surprise that I see them pop up in my dreams, too.
The lifting each other up part of the dream definitely reminds me of the old Christian story of "Footprints in the Sand," which I think is ubiquitous nowadays.
Image from The Gospel Coalition
And while that's always been a key story for my psychic life, I think I've come to understand that it's more practical for me to think about how human relationships would work in this case. And I don't think it would be that one person would always carry one other person whenever that person has troubles. Instead, the two people have to work at carrying each other. If people don't give back to you, and you're doing all the heavy lifting, you're probably in a shitty relationship.
This blog reviews images from my waking life that influenced the imagery of my dreams.
Today's post relates to images in this entry of my dream journal, Maboroshi no Yume.
The image of the hospital gown was probably the most striking image for me.
The fact that I was undoing the gown to reveal more of the girl's body probably relates to this image from the music video for the song "I Feel You," by K-pop group Wonder Girls. At this moment, Wonder Girls member Sunmi undoes her jean shorts to reveal another scene where all the girls in the band are playing their instruments.
Here's the whole MV for "I Feel You," so you can see how things happen.
I personally never liked the song "I Feel You," so I never paid much attention to the video. But I ended up watching it again last night and thinking it was really sexy, even though I'm still not crazy about the song.
I watched the music video after having watched this video from the ReacttotheK YouTube channel, where university students majoring in classical music react to K-pop videos. In this video, they react to the Wonder Girls songs "I Feel You" and "Why So Lonely" (which is one of my favorite K-pop songs ever).
The ReacttotheK YouTube channel is pretty cool. The videos are a little too long. And it feels like sometimes the enthusiasm for the songs is a bit forced. But it's cool to hear a fresh perspective on the songs and to hear how classical musicians pull apart the inner workings of the songs.
Personally, I'd prefer to see fewer people reacting, shorter, more encapsulated react times, and then maybe a bit of a "challenge time" where the musicians try to reproduce some of the music they heard.
Anyway, I think the image of the color-changing floor in the restaurant in my third dream also comes from the Wonder Girls "I Feel You" MV. But I think it also comes from the music video for Michael Jackson's Billie Jean.
I do think my unconscious linked the ReacttotheK video and the "I Feel You" MV to "Billie Jean." I've been thinking about K-pop and J-pop a lot, especially about how each form grounds itself in the history of pop music. I wrote a Twitter thread about it here.
One thing I didn't mention in my Twitter thread -- and I might add this note -- is that K-pop really showed its devotion to the history of pop music recently when SMTOWN held a 30th anniversary celebration of the song -- one song! -- "Man in the Mirror" by Michael Jackson. There are, of course, nowadays, so many reasons for us to remember that song. But it's incredible that SMTOWN honored Michael Jackson, "Man in the Mirror" co-writer Siedah Garrett, and the history of pop music by celebrating the anniversary of one song.
So it was really cool to hear the ReacttotheK kids talking about K-pop songs from a classical music perspective. But it just reminded me that K-pop itself is always closely studying the history of pop music and working to fit itself into that history.
It's also definitely worth checking out this video from SMTOWN, where "Man in the Mirror" co-writer Siedah Garrett and K-pop singer BoA perform the song.
This blog post is related to the imagery in my dream journal entry from this morning, which can be found here.
A lot of the imagery and atmosphere from last night's dreams still comes, I feel, from the Fred Astaire & Cyd Charisse movie The Band Wagon, which I watched a couple days ago.
The busy diner scene and the talk of the movie business in the third dream definitely come from The Band Wagon, as do the marble staircase and probably even the jewelry commercial (where the woman wears a red dress) in the dead mall in the first dream.
But probably the weird scene in the lounge room in the third dream, where there's a fight scene put on and then repeated for the benefit of rich people, is also related to The Band Wagon, namely the part where Cordova is pitching the new play to the rich backers.
Image screen grab from YouTube, via Warner Bros.
But I also believe that the imagery of the jewelry commercial in my dead mall dream was likely related to my recent superficial study of 1990s adult entertainment star Alexis Christian. Adult entertainment from the 1990s that carries the glam of the 1990s, and maybe the 1980s, too.
Image from Listal
Obviously, dead malls are always on my mind, as they are, I'm sure, for a lot of YouTube junkies like me. The Dead Mall Series by Dan Bell is definitely worth checking out.
I feel like the imagery of the dead mall in my dream was also related to Grand Central Station, which likely would loop back to The Band Wagon.
The strange deed in my dream likely comes from my recent reading of the 12th volume of the Nancy Drew mystery The Message in the Hollow Oak.
In that story, which I'm still reading, Nancy wins a radio contest and gets the deed to some land in Canada as a prize. The deed very quickly becomes a strong, yet really strangely played, element of suspense. So the strangeness of Nancy Drew's land title echoed into my dream.
The imagery of the rich woman in a flapper outfit in the third dream reminds me of The Band Wagon again. But the glasses the rich woman wears reminds me of a Rifftrax short released last night, riffing an educational film for young kids getting eyeglasses for the first time.
The strange martial arts performance relates to a video I saw last night on YouTube where San Francisco-based dance company ODC/Dance performed for San Francisco's city council at a pre-council ceremony honoring ODC's ruby anniversary.
And while the marble and stone surrounding in all three of my dreams relate partly to The Band Wagon, they also relate to my personal life. A lot of my "social life" is based on attending political events in Colorado as a spectator. I obviously see a lot of polished stone in government buildings, including Colorado's Capitol.
However, I've felt myself transitioning away from having any sort of personal goals as it relates to political life in Colorado. I think my fourth dream from two nights ago shows that. And a lot of the personal conflicts in last night's dreams, especially the second dream, show why I feel myself transitioning away from thinking about how I involve myself in Colorado's political life.
The discussion of Ron Paul, or The Ron Paul Show, in the second dream probably relates more to Bernie Sanders than to Ron Paul, as some of my favorite local political candidates in this year's election have been big supporters of Bernie Sanders and have as a consequence of that been shunned by Colorado's Democratic Party.
The big book I read in my second dream is also sort of related to my personal social life. The book is by Winston Churchill. But it's a huge book. I have a lot of books by Winston Churchill in my library. I inherited them from my grandparents after my grandmother passed away. And I'm aiming to read them soon. But the big book is definitely a reference to the Marquis de Sade's Juliette, which is enormous.
Winston Churchill gives some pretty important warnings against letting Nazism rise again, I believe. And we should probably pay attention to those warnings. But when brown people like me start talking about those warnings, even on a local level, we're thought of as speaking out of place or out of turn. We're looked at, in my opinion, as being as scandalous as the Marquis de Sade -- who, in my opinion, wasn't punished because of the sexuality of his writings, but because of their politics.
I've taken about a five-year hiatus from this blog. Wow.
This blog was originally set up to serve as a dream analysis blog, a companion to my Maboroshi no Yume blog.
My aim is to get things started back up. I'm going to try and keep the analysis low-key. The main goal will be to provide folks with elements from my dream-day that I feel influenced my dreams, as well as provide some light analysis.
I spent years and years of my life -- from 1995 to 2013 -- writing pages and pages of analysis on my dreams. There were times when writing and analyzing my dreams was my whole life. I'm past that sort of in-depth analysis. I don't think my nerves could handle it anymore.
At the same time, I'd like to give insight into how my dream-day affects my dreams, as well as give some analysis of my dreams.
I think I will eventually revive my other blog, Premature Theory, which is more of a cultural critique and analysis blog. So this blog can stay focused on dream-day elements.
There are a lot of references in this dream to broken fluid vessels. I'm pretty sure that this relates to my mother, who is having some bad trouble with her arteries. The part in my dream where I imagine the red hose hanging from the roof of the building is obviously very indicative of an artery.
Just as a quick aside -- I find it odd that I "imagine" so much in my dreams. I'm always seeing things "in my mind's eye." I mean, I daydream all the time in waking life. So I suppose it's natural that I daydream in dreaming life as well. But it still strikes me as funny.
So, on the one hand, it seems like the broken vessels stand for my worries that my mom's blood vessels are going to burst. It's a scary thought, and one I hope is far from actuality.
To reinforce this idea -- I just remembered the fragments of another dream I had last night, where someone was putting plastic blood vessels in my body. But we had to go to a blood vessel store to get all the vessels we needed. The vessels all hung on display racks on the walls.
The vessels got smaller and smaller, down to capillary size. Each vessel size had a different product name. Some of the smallest vessels would be extremely tricky to put in, and putting them in the wrong way could cause me a great deal of pain or even death. I woke up considering this death.
So I can see from that dream that I was thinking of blood vessels all night long. But the strange thing about the vessels in the "black hair" dream is that they all seemed to leak gunk -- muddy gunk or maybe even fecal gunk. I think this has to do with my bad eating habits lately. I've eaten basically the same meal day after day for days now. I'm not sure why. It's pretty disgusting, though. And I'm sure my stomach hates me for it. So I think my own plumbing, so to speak, is coming back to haunt me in my dreams.
But I also think the image of the cabin, the fainting man and woman, and the congealing of the mess into the humanoid and then into a man has something to do with the Hantavirus.
I'm sure everybody has heard about the Hantavirus issues at Yosemite Park by now. Over the summer, a few different campgrounds, including some high-end campgrounds with cabin-like tents, were infested by mice carrying the Hantavirus. One of the main effects of the Hantavirus is that is causes severe congestion of the lungs, which leads to severe pain, constrained breathing, and even death. News reports have said that about one-third of all people who contract Hantavirus die, and that there is no known cure for Hantavirus.
Hantavirus can be passed from mice to people, news reports say. Contraction of the virus usually occurs through contact with the urine or feces of an animal carrying the virus. But in dry places like Yosemite Park, where soil is as dry and potentially airborne as dust, when an animal urinates in the soil and that urine dries, the virus itself stays in the soil and is just as potentially airborne. In enclosed spaces, chances of breathing and contracting this airborne virus are even greater.
So Yosemite, to be on the safe side, has assumed that everybody who has stayed at the campgrounds infested by the infected mice is at risk of having contracted Hantavirus. The good thing about being on the safe side is that, even though there's no known cure for Hantavirus, being able to start therapy processes at the initial stages of contraction gives people a much greater chance of surviving through the illness.
So Yosemite has issued warnings to anybody who stayed in the infected areas. The unfortunate thing is, there were about 10,000 to 20,000 (based on some reports I've read) people who had been in the infected areas.
Hantavirus, odd as it may seem, has a connection with my life. About ten years ago, I worked in a National Park in the Southwestern United States. Hantavirus was a pretty normal thing around there. People didn't catch it because they were careful. It was pretty much assumed that all mice had Hantavirus. But it wasn't a huge worry.
But Hantavirus was big news in the region when I first arrived. A few people in the region, but not in the park I'd worked at, had caught the virus. Some died. Some lived to tell the stories of their agony. But after a month or so, the incidences and news flurry seemed to vanish.
The thing is, it's pretty easy to avoid getting Hantavirus. You keep your space clean and dust-free. To remove dust from a space, you wet it down, maybe even with a cleaning solution, and wipe it away. Most of the stuff people do in everyday housecleaning is enough to keep the virus at bay. And you stay away from abandoned houses and places where you see a lot of evidence of mouse activity.
But, of course, my mind ran a couple of doom scenarios. The first was that humans, acting as carriers of the virus, would pass the virus all over the world through their own urine and feces. This is kind of silly, I'd think. In most cases in the United States, human urine and feces goes through a treatment process that would kill the Hantavirus pretty easily. The virus is pretty nasty when it gets into a body. But it's pretty weak outside the body.
The second doom scenario my mind played out was that mice would travel home with people, hitching a ride in luggage, on cars, and so forth, and spread Hantavirus to other mice in other locales, thus spreading the disease beyond those initial sites. But, again, there have been Hantavirus outbreaks in the past. And the mice could just as easily have caught rides to other places in the past. They didn't. And the outbreaks have passed away. Just like this one will.
The doom scenarios, however, were in my dream a factor, I believe, in creating the Swamp Thing figure, who then became the annoying man. The Swamp Thing would in one sense be the embodiment of a pestilence.
I believe that in medieval times the Plague was often embodied as a figure. And I might have taken my understanding of that idea as inspiration for the Swamp Thing character in my dream as well. The fact that this body is walking among a huge crowd only underscores the idea of this Swamp Thing character being the embodiment of a pestilence of large-scale effect.
But I'm not sure why the dream is connecting a Plague of Hantavirus -- which obviously will not occur in waking life -- with my mom's artery problems. Both things have a risk of death associated with them. And so maybe I'm trying to keep the Plague of Death, in the figure of the annoying man, away from my mom, who doesn't look at all like the leader woman of my dream but could be related to her anyway, by telling the annoying man that the leader woman doesn't exist.
Again, I seem to end by not knowing how to make any connections. All I ever seem to come up with are starting points.
This post is going to be related to a number of dream journal entries.
Regarding today's dream journal entry, in the last dream a little girl (who is also a young woman) mentions a movie entitled Les Galans. I wasn't even sure, upon waking, whether there was a French word "galans." I looked it up quickly, of course, after having written my dream journal entry. I didn't find a film called Les Galans, but I did find a couple interesting things.
"Les galans" means "the gallants" in English. There is a play by Jean Chevalier entitled Les Galans Ridicule. Doing a quick scan, I didn't find out anything about the play. It seems to have been written before the year 1800, and to be rather obscure. I couldn't find out anything about the Jean Chevalier who'd written the play, either. There's a modern Jean Chevalier, who passed away in 1993, and who wrote works of philosophy. But I'm not sure about this 18th century Jean Chevalier.
Anyhow, the foreign language word struck me because only the night before I had a dream where I'd heard the foreign name "Nemirovna." I looked this name up and found that it was not a widely used name. In fact, the only place where I'd found the name used was in a book by the French author Corinne Vallienne, entitled Le Dernier Voyage de Lena Nemirovna.
The author of this book seems pretty interesting. She's a French instructor, actually, at the University of Tokyo. Le Dernier Voyage seems to be about an old man who lives in St. Petersburg and looks back on his life in Russia. The book, from what I've read of it, mixes memory and fantasy in a kind of magical way. It sounds like a good book. But I've never heard of it before.
What I also found interesting was that in Slovenian, the word "nemirov" means "unrest." So I found a few news articles which mentions "nemirov na" or "unrest in" certain areas. This was intriguing to me. But I'm still not certain what the whole thing means.
However, the other thing that was interesting to me about Le Dernier Voyage was that it connected the word "Nemirovna" with another phrase that I'd had in a dream from the previous night. In this dream I went to a movie theater, but I didn't know what I was going to watch. I ended up going into a theater playing a move called La Derniere 3.
It's an interesting coincidence, that one night I dream of La Derniere, and the next night I dream of "Nemirovna," and then it connects for me in La Dernier Voyage de Lena Nemirovna. But I really don't know why it happened that way.
I personally think that La Derniere 3 is a distortion of the title of the Francois Truffaut film Le Dernier Metro, a movie which has been consistently at the back of my mind lately.
One would simply take out the "me" from the "metro" and change the "o" sound to a "ois" sound to get "Le Dernier Trois." I'm not sure why the gender change was made in the title or why the "metro" would change to a "three." But I think that at least the mechanics of the distortion seem pretty obvious.
One reason the "metro" might be changed to "trois" is that "trois" sounds a little like "voyage." But I think that's stretching things a whole lot.
One thing that I'd like to mention right away is that the beautiful sky imagery in the second part of the third dream comes almost from a NASA video I saw on YouTube. About once a week, NASA puts out a "Science Cast," which gives a little glimpse of some of the science NASA works on. This could be anything from astronomy to satellite technology to atmospheric phenomena. The Science Cast I watched last night was all about how the electromagnetic storms this July caused aurora borealis-like effects to spread all over the world.
I think this video heightened a lot of the mystic feeling of my dreams.
What I'd mainly like to think about, though, for this post, is the interaction I had with my great grandmother and my grandfather. Against all rationality, whenever I have dreams involving my great grandmother and my grandfather, I always think that they're actual interactions with them. My great grandma died three years ago, and my grandpa died four years ago.
In fact -- I've always kind of hated to admit this to anybody -- but one of the reasons I feel my life has taken the path it's taken lately is because of a dream I had with my great grandma in it. This dream occurred just a little over a year after my grandma had died. It seemed to precipitate me ejecting myself from my job and putting myself into a position where I had to come back home.
My thought -- well... let's say... I'm pretty agnostic in general. I think, depending on what mood I'm in, you could assume that my beliefs are mostly based on a physical world and nothing more. Don't ask me why.
I obsess over religion sometimes. I love the old Theosophy of Charles Leadbeater and Annie Besant. I also obsess over not-quite-spiritual writers like Charles Fort. And I think of Carlos Castaneda as real philosophy. (Geez, that's a lot of Charleses, ain't it?) But I still have difficulty, almost all the time, believing that there's anything beyond existence other than the physical. That said, I still let mystical fancies play in my head almost nonstop.
"WTF?" you may be asking. Trust me, I ask the same thing. I WTF myself about once an hour.
One of my mystical fancies is that when my grandma died, she went straight to whatever the next plane of existence is. She didn't look back. She wanted to go. She was ready to go. She had people in the other world that she wanted to be with. And she didn't want to have to worry about this world anymore. So when she left, she left. That was my idea. And it was probably wrong.
So when my grandma died, I wasn't so surprised that I never saw her. Over the few months after my grandpa died, however, I had a couple of dreams about him. (Keep in mind my grandpa died a year before his mother, my great grandmother, died.)
It seems like he started out in those dreams with a very low level of intellect, like his spirit was really impaired by whatever the death process had been for him. But he was still trying to make contact from those worlds. Later on, I fantasize, he had much better ability to make contact. But he was still unable to keep himself mentally or "physically" (in terms of appearance) stable -- at least in the realm where he could interact with me. Once he got behind some wall, an invisible wall, which I saw as being the boundary of the other world, he was himself again, mentally and physically. But I personally could barely hear him!
Like I said before, I didn't have any dreams about my great grandmother. And I just figured that was because she'd headed out of this world and didn't look back. In spite of how much she loved all of her family in the living world, I think she was tired, and that she really wanted to be re-united with the people who had left her behind.
But one night I had a dream where I was at my great grandmother's house with my mom and my sister. My great grandmother rose up out of the floor and started yelling and screaming at me. I can't remember now what she wanted. But the feeling I got upon waking was that I needed to come back to my hometown.
At that point in time the dream did nothing for me other than fill me with a gnawing anxiety. I couldn't come back home. I was working a good job, a steady job, and I had a career that had a future. I felt terrible, of course, for not being able to be back home with my family, for not being able to see, for instance, my nephews grow up and go through all the important events of their lives. But I felt like I was fulfilling my own life's goals, and not just that my family understood this, but that they were proud of me for it.
Nevertheless, I've had this tendency all through my life, when I get the instinct that I need to make a change in my life, not necessarily to control the change, but to let my current life situation decay to the point where I need to make a change. There have been exceptions to the rule. But, to a large degree, I seem to let myself decay into change lazily, instead of taking an active role in the transitions in my life.
So I ended up quitting my job and losing all my money, etc., etc., until I was basically forced to come back home. I've harped on this one single event in my life enough throughout these posts. But one basic thought at the back of my mind all this time was that, if I did get back home, that I'd have some direction, some kind of answer, from my great grandma, on why she wanted me back home, what I was supposed to do.
As it turns out, I'm out here, I'm back home, and I feel even more lost, more confused, more afraid, more paranoid, than I did even while I was in New York! I miss New York terribly -- even though I hate the place -- and I want to be back there so bad. But I'm stuck here now. I'm not just stuck here. I'm stuck here in a situation where I'm not even sure, from month to month, if I'm going to be able to keep up my level of living. Okay. Enough of that.
So last night I got a surprise visit, not just from my great grandma, but from my grandpa. I'm not sure what the dynamic of things is -- why I helped my grandma around the house, and we had an interesting conversation, while my grandpa directly gave me information regarding the afterlife.
But my grandpa seemed, for the most part, normal, while he spoke with me. This might be the first time I've seen him in one of these "speaking with the dead" type of dreams where he's seemed normal. I should say that, from the time I saw my great grandma in a "speaking with the dead" dream, she seemed normal.
The information my grandpa passes me is that he woke into an afterlife, and some details on that afterlife. I take that information to help me not be afraid of death. I think about passing along this information. But I don't want my information to conflict with, or distort, other people's experiences, if they've had experiences like I've had, where they've interacted with my grandpa or great grandma after they've departed.
But at the same time -- especially with the earlier dreams I've had -- I've felt like I really should talk to people about the dreams I've had, like I should tell my mom, or my step grandmother, my grandpa's wife. I've gotten to a point, on a couple of occasions, where I was about to tell my mom. But it's really hard. I just -- I'm afraid. I don't know why.
Partly, I'm conflicted. Any psychologist will tell you that you probably aren't speaking to the dead. And I believe that. The world is what it is, physically. And I could -- well, for instance, I dreamt of Mr. Rogers one night and Michael Jackson another night. Do I think I really saw them? Of course not! So why do I think I saw my great grandma and my grandpa? Because I miss them. That's all. I didn't really speak with the dead.
So why would I tell my mom, who I know believes in all this stuff, that I spoke with my great grandma or my grandpa? Why would I upset her by telling her something I know to be an impossibility? It just seems cruel and absurd.
Now, obviously, crossing over the bridge in the second part of my grandma and grandpa dream is obviously a kind of analogy for my own passing into the afterlife. Which is kind of scary, especially with that freaky dog that unleashes Fortean torrents of rain upon me.
But the third dream also involves my death. So that's kind of scary, too. I'm walking toward some place out in the plains, apparently to get rid of teddy bears, which I associate in my mind with ancient Greek maidens sacrificing their dolls to Artemis as the maidens reach puberty.
But I'm turned around by a wise woman who holds five knives in her hand. I feel like the five knives almost certainly stand for the five of swords in Tarot. But I'm not sure what the five of swords would mean in Tarot, or what it would mean for a woman to be holding those swords -- or what it would mean for a woman holding the five of swords to be followed by near total darkness and death.
I should say that I'm not certain I die in that dream, or even that I'm injured. But I'm in the middle of a very narrow road. I've turned around from the task of sacrificing my dolls to Artemis. I see the light of my city in the distance. But it's not light enough to guide my way. I'm trying to find a bridge so I can cross a river I can't cross by wading. And, while searching -- by feeling -- in the dark for that bridge, a truck either nearly hits me (as I seem to sense it in the dream) or actually hits me (which I may have been too shocked actually to feel).
I'm lying on the ground, under a wheel, in what appear to be death linens. And I hear a woman screaming. So I obviously assume that I'm dead -- that I've been hit by the truck and killed. So that's a bit distressing. But I've had death dreams all my life, and I'm still alive. I don't think I'm going to die. I think that most of the time death dreams symbolize a transition.
What I'd guess is that, at the crossing of the bridge, I'm at the end of the road. I'm making a transition in life. But I'm completely in the dark. I have no idea where I'm going. I don't know if I'll make it across. But then -- bam! -- the transition hits me! Regardless of what I want, regardless of what I can do, my life makes a change.
That would be wish fulfillment, more than anything else -- just because I want so badly to have some sort of direction just take over my life. I really -- what I really want more than anything else, is not to have made the mistakes I've made in my life. I think that's why I keep turning back, turning back, in all my dreams. Maybe what this dream is saying is, "Quit turning back. All your mistakes have already been made. If you keep trying to turn back and undo your mistakes, you're going to find yourself in a great deal of pain."
I have a feeling that a lot of my dream imagery comes from having watched the films Village of the Damned and Children of the Damned over the past couple of nights. This would, I think, especially have influenced the imagery of the second dream.
The main image influenced by the films would be the image of the woman crashing and flying off of her bike. In the dream, I assumed the woman has died, even though it's not totally certain that the woman has died. In fact, the woman even says, through the "narration" she's constantly giving me in the dream, that she didn't even get hurt that much. But she doesn't get up.
Village of the Damned is, of course, a classic science fiction movie. It was made in 1960, and is based on John Wyndham's novel The Midwich Cuckoos. The basic idea of the movie is that a town in England, Midwich, is hit with some kind of cosmic beam. The cosmic beam impregnates every woman in the town capable (by 1960 standards) of having a child.
The children who are born as a result of this impregnation are possibly not human, or are possibly super-human. The children are super-intelligent and can use telepathy to force people to do things. But the children are void of emotion, and they seem to have only a primitive concept of humanity and justice. As a result, they seem to be selfish and ruthless. If they are hurt, they generally retaliate by making the person who'd hurt them, even if they'd hurt them unintentionally, in a similar way.
So in Village of the Damned a person driving a car down the road almost hits one of the children who, in a moment of carelessness, rushed into the street from a blind corner. The man stops in time only to bump up against the child and give her a good scare. But all the children retaliate against the man by forcing him to get into his car and drive into a brick wall.
Actually, in another scene, right at the beginning of the film, a police officer who is riding his bicycle into Midwich is stunned by the same cosmic ray that has put everybody in the town to sleep. The police officer faints and falls off his bike. So... that's a pretty dead giveaway to the image in my dream.
Children of the Damned is the 1963 follow-up to the Village of the Damned. In this semi-sequel, individual children in different places throughout the world have been conceived by means, possibly, of a cosmic ray -- or simply by means of an extremely improbable (so the geneticist of the film says) evolutionary sport. The children are all discovered by a UN-funded IQ test.
The children are all brought to London, where the heads of the countries the children live in decide that the children will either be used as top-secret weapon makers for their own individual countries, or else that the children will be destroyed as dangers to humanity.
But the children, learning of these plans, get together and hide in an abandoned church. They defend themselves against the adults who try to use them for destructive purposes. But, in defending themselves, they often have to kill the adults. One of the few adults who actually cares about the children pleads with the children to stop killing.
The children apparently have an uncanny ability to regenerate themselves. So they make it appear that they have reflected upon the man's plea. They put themselves at the mercy of the UN, assuming that the UN will destroy them in some way. I assume the children feel that if they can be "killed," be assumed dead, then come back to life, and go into hiding, that nobody will bother them.
The military powers have worked themselves into such a frenzy over the perceived threat of the children, that they have set up a tremendous destructive force against the children. But when the children surrender, the UN leaders sympathize with the children. Even the military powers decide to put their force in abeyance. But an accident causes the military to attack anyway. The UN leaders and the children are all killed.
In one scene of the movie, the child from England is being escorted to a place where he will be held until the military can figure out what to do with him. To escape, the child creates a distraction by having one of his escorts drive his car into the back of another car. While all the adults are distracted, the child runs away.
So I think both of those car crash scenes influence the scene in the dream where the woman crashed her bicycle off the road.
The modular house comes, I believe, from both of the films as well. In Village of the Damned, the children are all made to live together in the schoolhouse, where an eminent doctor has taken on the responsibility of teaching the children. Of course -- what I love is that he only teaches the children stuff like nuclear physics, and he only asks them questions like whether they think they come from another planet, or how psychic they are. He doesn't try to improve their moral sensibility at all!
In Children of the Damned, the children all escape of their own accord into the abandoned church. Like the children in Village, the children in Children sleep on makeshift beds and basically fend for themselves. And, in both movies, the children's final dwelling place is blown up. The movies both end, however, with a sense that the children's lives aren't finished. In Village, the final view is of the eyes floating out of the flaming wreckage of the building. And in Children, there is an implication that the children may die, but that they will regenerate themselves.
I think that the motif of the destruction of the final dwelling place as, perhaps, a metaphor for the destruction of the body, combined with a sense of the indestructibility of the soul, combined to make the image in my mind of a modular house, a house that could be picked up or dropped off any time. People live wherever, go wherever. People are permanent. But the housing is transient -- transient but stable.
It must have been hard for me to reconcile this in my mind, though. So I had to leave the woman along the side of the road, either dead or alive, I'm not sure. What's weird is that the woman either lives or doesn't live. But what remains permanent, in my dream, is the modular house. When the woman crashes off the side of the road, she stays there. The modular house, however, reappears at the top of the hill. And now, instead of hearing the woman, I hear the man, the husband, who may also be me myself, speaking. Strange.
I would say, however, that the idea of the modular house doesn't just come from Village of the Damned and Children of the Damned, but that it also comes from the Alvin Toffler book Future Shock, which I read a few weeks back and which seems to promote a vision of the future where objects will become more and more modular.
As I understand him, Toffler argues that buildings and homes will be modular. The world will trend away from "permanent" buildings and toward "modular" buildings. But the trend will also be toward an overall sustainability. Buildings and homes will be more modular, but by being more modular, they will be more flexible. This flexibility will be more sustainable, in the long run, than the environment of "permanent" buildings that just loom large and then rot away.
The one last point I'd like to bring up regarding Village of the Damned is something that I don't know anybody has spoken about before. But it seems pretty obvious to me that the title Village of the Damned, obviously a change from the title of the novel on which the movie was based, is a nod to the work of paranormal investigator Charles Fort's book Book of the Damned. The "Village of the Damned" would be, in a sense, the village in which take place phenomena that Charles Fort would call "damned," or not accepted by the canon of science.
In this sense, I think it's worth mentioning that the prototype of the children of Village of the Damned and Children of the Damned can be found, not in Charles Fort's Book of the Damned, but in his book Wild Talents. This book, like all of Fort's books, is well worth reading.
Of course, any literature or art that has as its subject super-gifted children always reminds me of the David Bowie song "Oh You Pretty Things."
The final thing I'd like to mention about this dream is the fact that Laurel Nakadate is in it. Nakadate is one of my favorite contemporary video artists. She has a great movie called The Wolf Knife, which I'd suggest you see if there's any chance that you can see it. But her whole body of work is really incredible. I had the opportunity, while I lived in New York, to see Nakadate on a couple of occasions. I liked her a lot. We're just about the same age -- she's a bit over a year older than I. And she's really cool.
When I've had the opportunity to see artists, I've always tried to make a point of asking them questions. And my asking them questions is stored in my head as a kind of interaction with the artists. I don't necessarily interact with people at all, in general. So, as far as my life goes, these are pretty valid interactions.
Anyway, it seems like whenever I review my "interactions" with Nakadate, I'm always struck by how stupid I was around her. One instance was where I mistook certain sounds in her film The Wolf Knife for being one thing, when they obviously were something else -- I think even after Nakadate had expressly explained what those sounds were.
The other was where Nakadate asked the audience to ask her a question, but a question in only one word. Someone asked a one-word question that I can't even remember. But Nakadate didn't think it was a good enough question to end on. So Nakadate asked the audience for a question again. I couldn't think of a one-word question right then. And Nakadate said (to the audience, but I felt like it was to me directly), "Come on? Are you really going to let that question be the one? Are you really going to let that happen?"
Of course, I knew almost immediately afterward what my question would have been. I've known and, for some stupid reason, agonized over it ever since. "Clementine."
But for some reason my brain -- didn't freeze up -- it "fatted over." It just gelled and glopped. I didn't feel nervous or scared or shy when Nakadate demanded a one-word question. I just felt lazy and distracted and sullen. I can't even tell you why.
There's also a scene in the film The Wolf Knife where a girl is disappointed in an old man she likes because the man had decided to stop teaching and spend his days smoking pot. It seems like the girl doesn't mind whether the man is old or young, or attractive or unattractive. What really matters to her is whether the man has his life together, whether he can take care of himself -- and, maybe, her. But the man obviously can't, and this is a disappointment to the girl.
I think Nakadate is an occasional character in my dreams because she stands for somebody looking in on the disappointing aspects of myself, like the girl was disappointed with the man. Since I obviously personally made a fool of myself in front of Nakadate on a number of occasions (though one can obviously assume that I personally didn't even register in her perception one way or the other), it's an easy move for my mind to transition that girl's disappointment onto Nakadate.
The disappointment I feel in these situations is generally the disappointment I've spoken a lot about in other posts, so I won't speak too much about it here. It's basically the fact that, over the past year, I've managed to kick myself down the stairs professionally, again and again. Nobody has done it to me. I've done it to myself. I'm not sure what the hell the issue is. But I've done it. When I reflect on that, I often feel like that old man in The Wolf Knife, just kind of pathetic.
There were two main images that struck me in last night's dream: the grey aspect of the young man, and the weird "lingerie" attached to the cowgirl boots.
The cowgirl boots are white leather. The strap attached to them is a crepe-like lingerie material that is pink at the edges and white toward the center. That color style is common, I think, to lingerie and, I believe, to women's clothes in general. Then, in the center of that strap, is a flower.
I can see a lot of influences from my waking life on the lingerie itself. The lingerie somehow reminded me, as I woke up, of an image in the Pedro Almodovar film Que He Hecho Yo Para Merecer Esto?, which I watched a few nights ago. The film is about a working-class family in Spain. The father is a taxi driver, and the mother does all kinds of cleaning jobs.
There are a couple of children in the family, both boys. The younger boy is only about eleven or twelve years old, but he apparently carries on all kinds of homosexual relationships. A woman living across the hallway from the family works as a prostitute and is one of the wife's best friends.
One night, the older brother says he'll give the neighbor 10 pesetas (?) worth of heroin if she'll try to attract his brother. So the neighbor takes the younger brother home after he has come home too late (from a romantic adventure) to have dinner with his own family.
The neighbor makes dinner for the younger brother. The neighbor also gets dressed up "special" for dinner -- wearing an item of lingerie that's supposed to make her look like a bride. But it's mostly a white teddy with pink fringes and a veil over the crown of the head. This white and pink piece of lingerie influenced the image of the weird lingerie in my dream.
The flower itself I think comes from the cover for the soundtrack for the movie Magnolia. Of course, the main image on that cover is a big magnolia flower. Yesterday I spent a little time singing some songs. One of the songs I sang was Aimee Mann's "Save Me," which is one of the main songs in that soundtrack.
Speaking of flowers, I would like to say that the image of the fading from pink at the edges to white at the center isn't just an image from clothing or familiar to clothing. One flower I love, the dogwood flower, has, for some species, a fading of pink at the edges to white at the center.
But this year -- I'm not sure why it was this year -- I've noticed a lot of varieties of roses out there with a pattern of fading from a darker color at the edges to a lighter color at the center. Many fade from pink to white. But there are some that fade from red to yellow or even orange to yellow. I'm sure that's a usual pattern with certain rose varieties every year. But for some reason it didn't really strike me as being a pervasive thing until this year.
I'm not sure why I had cowgirl boots as an image of my dream. But I would say that, for all the Jung I've read, one of the very few things I always have in my mind is the idea Jung had that footwear in dreams is often an image relating to a person's ability to adapt socially to the world around him.
My overall goal for the dream was to find women's clothing. The boots are really nice. And if footwear is thought of as a person's basic contact with the world, the place where our feet hit the ground, then maybe what the dream is saying is that my worry could be less about finding lingerie and more about finding a way to identify socially in the world around me. I'm really not sure.
What's interesting though about the boots being connected by the strap, which is supposed to be lingerie somehow, is that the strap is centered with a flower. If the flower is a symbol for a vagina, and the vagina is right in the center of this strap, and the strap is, like I said in my entry, about a meter long (maybe it was longer than that), then it's possible that either side of the strap would go along my inner legs and that the flower would become my vagina.
In other words, I think this weird piece of lingerie, rather than being a piece of lingerie, is some kind of sex-change device (I mean, not really, but metaphorically). But what's strange about it is that the most concrete things about it are the boots. But does that mean that the social adaptation makes the sexual identification, or that the sexual identification makes the social adaptation?
I could easily see the two sides of the strap as something like the aorta (?) arteries, the big arteries that flow down the center of our legs. These arteries are essential to life, or at least essential to the legs, I'd guess. Anyway, if a big artery like that is blocked, or if it stops functioning, a person can die. That's pretty obvious.
So, in this dream, if the flower is at the center of these straps, and the straps flow down to the boots, does the "blood" from this center, this "vagina," create the social identity? Or, because the cowgirl boots, the most concrete, most identifiable part of this outfit, are so "real," do they stabilize, and thus stand as responsible for or the creators of, the feminine arteries that lead up to this "vagina?" I really don't know.
The other aspect of the dream which is interesting is the grey man. The grey man seems like he's either insane or on drugs. He has that quality in common with two other characters from my recent dreams. One is an old man in the fifth dream of this dream journal entry. The other is Mr. Rogers himself, from the second dream of this dream journal entry.
I think that in both of those dreams I was pretty at a far distance from the man. In this dream I start out at a distance from the man. I try to avoid him. But he eventually overtakes me, grabs me, and tries to have sex with me.
Why is the man grey? I think this is partly in reaction to my own reflections on some of my other dreams. In one of the dreams, I'm a woman. I'm in a room where no lights are on. The only light comes from the moon. It makes everything, including myself, look blue. In another dream, I've met Michael Jackson in a basement storage or janitorial area. The fluorescent light is so dim down in that room that everything, including Michael Jackson, looks green. In this dream, a lot of the environment is grey. So I think I made the man grey, to match my thoughts about the other dreams.
But the fact that the man is grey reminds me also of the concept of the "classic grey" alien, probably the most popular face for the modern conception of what an extraterrestrial being would look like. In that case, the attempted rape scene in my dream would be something like an attempted alien abduction.
But I don't think the scene is anything like a reenactment of an actual abduction. Rather, what I think is that the alien in my dream stands for an alien sexual urge. This "alien," or unconscious, instinct, which is really just a part of myself, grabs a hold of me and tries to get me to have sex, or unite with it. I break free of the instinct and basically tell it, "No means no!"
What's interesting, too, is that the alien doesn't, for instance, pull down my pants. Instead, he lifts up my shirt and strokes my stomach and chest. He's pressing himself against my back, and probably against my bottom, too. But he doesn't necessarily seem too worried about having sex with me right away. He seems more interested in seducing me. And he seems to want to do so by stroking my stomach and chest. This doesn't mean, of course, that if I'd been motionless, or too weak to push away, that he wouldn't have eventually pulled down my pants and screwed me...
But after I tell the alien I'm not interested, he follows me, yelling after me the whole time. I think part of the reason for this is that the alien instinct is probably my shadow instinct. That's another one of the few Jungian concepts my feeble mind has been able to carry along with it through the years. The shadow is the part of ourselves that we don't acknowledge, because it is the stuff about ourselves we would feel ashamed to acknowledge. The grey of the alien in my dream may come from his character as the shadow.
So the shadow was trying to integrate with my conscious. That's actually a good thing, a healthy thing, when the shadow and conscious ego integrate. But when I don't allow the shadow to integrate, he follows me, like a rude guy on the street, following a girl who spurned him, calling her a whore, and so forth. Of course, he's not calling the girl a whore so much as trying to pull her down from what he sees as her pedestal, so she won't think she's "too good" to have sex with him.
That's a pretty silly tactic men use. But the alien, as my shadow, proceeds to use it with me. He's trying to pull me down from my pedestal, or break me out of my shell, so that I won't try to integrate with whatever is embodied in my fetishism, and I will try to integrate with him.
But for some reason, the alien has been trying to get me to integrate with him by stroking my stomach and chest -- in other words, my upper body. He follows me to the place where all the women's clothes are. And when I finally pull up the weird lingerie, which I think is an article of clothing that is finally good enough for me, it's completely related to my lower body. The most concrete thing about it is the footwear. The rest of it is a system that basically connects the crotch to the footwear by a lingerie equivalent of arteries.
So I break away from the alien after he tries to seduce my upper body, and I go to a place where I find a new lower body. That all seems like a pretty easy dynamic. But I guess there are still parts -- as always with my dreams -- that I don't understand.
The idea in my first dream of the father choosing between two men to decide who will marry his daughter comes a lot from this music video for "Milik Siapakah Gadis Ini," which is by the Malaysian pop artists Jinbara and Fiq. The video shows two blindfolded guys in love with the same girl. At the end of the video, the guys take off their blindfolds and see the girl standing before them.
It's pretty easy to see how the squares come from the images of film in this video.
But I think that a lot of the images from this dream, as well as images from other dreams come from my reading in Brian Greene's book on Superstring Theory, The Elegant Universe. The theme of The Elegant Universe, as I understand it so far, is that the concepts of relativity physics and the concepts of quantum physics don't reconcile with one another. So a search has been going on in the history of physics to reconcile these two theories. There's also a documentary of The Elegant Universe, which is pretty entertaining, and is on YouTube.
Greene begins his book with a short discussion of what we know about the various particles of the universe so far. He then moves into a discussion of relativity physics, giving a whole lot of really interesting discussions to illustrate the ideas of relativity. After this, Greene moves through a discussion of Newtonian physics, to help us understand the ideas of gravity. Greene then explains gravity in terms of relativity -- again, giving a lot of really helpful visual examples. Greene then moves on (and this is where I finished my reading yesterday) to various concepts of quantum physics.
One image from the book that struck me was the idea of the photon clock, which Greene represents as two mirrors set parallel to one another. A single photon will bounce from mirror to mirror, and, since the speed of light is constant, time can be measured by the bounces of the photon from mirror to mirror. Greene then uses this photon clock idea to illustrate that time will appear to be the same for two photon clocks, one at a fixed standpoint and one moving at a constant velocity.
This is a really weird image to fix into a dream about two laundromat owners vying for a woman's hand in marriage. And I'm not sure how the heck it fits in. But it definitely fits in.
An image from the second dream that comes from The Elegant Universe is the "second ending" of my dream, where I imagine myself passing out of the building altogether and ending up in the next place I'm supposed to be immediately.
This comes from Greene's funny situation of the H-Bar, an allegorical bar which illustrates some of the various aspects of quantum physics. In Greene's H-Bar, ice cubes pass through glasses and people can walk through walls. Obviously, that led me to the "second ending" of my dream, where I pass through walls myself.
The final image I can see obviously coming from The Elegant Universe is just the simple word "quantum," which led me to think of the television show Quantum Leap. I'm not sure why I thought of Marilyn Monroe or the Marilyn Monroe episode of Quantum Leap. But I did.
One last image I'd like to discuss from my dream. Last night, before going to bed, I read the first 40 pages of The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert Heinlein. The book takes place on the moon in the year 2075. The main character, Manuel Garcia O'Kelly, is a computer technician sent to the moon to deal with a computer who is a bit of a practical joker. Once up on the moon, Manuel forms a friendship with the computer, who he comes to believe is alive. But Manuel also gets caught up in a Socialist-type revolution taking place among the 3 million or so colonists of the moon.
In one scene of the book, a miner talks about how much harder it is getting for miners to locate ice under the surface of the moon. (Apparently there's ice under the surface of the moon.) But the miners are still getting paid the same for the ice they bring up. In other words, their profits are all going away.
I think this passage from the book influenced the image of the "water table" in my third dream from last night. I can't say why it's in there. And the image in my dream is definitely not about ice. It's about water. The water could potentially flood the building. The room itself reminds me, now that I think of it, as a strange distortion of an Ancient Egyptian tomb. When I think of Egypt, I think of the Nile. Again, I think of flooding and heat, not of ice. But the "water table," or level of water, reminds me of the ice level idea in the book.
A lot of the images in all the dreams from last night come from my having watched the Wong Kar Wai film Fallen Angels last night.
The dream image I feel is most influenced by Fallen Angels is the image where the woman is laying on the bed and wants the man laying on the bed with her to rub her vagina. One of the two interweaving stories of Fallen Angels involves a young, attractive hit man who is given his orders by a young, attractive woman. The woman falls in love with the man. But the woman and the man never have any contact with each other, other than, I believe, through instructions given over the fax.
So the woman carries on a fantasy relationship with the man. She goes out to bars and imagines him with her. Then she comes home and masturbates while imagining being with the man. The film shows a few scenes of the woman masturbating. The scenes are extremely sexy. The woman is very attractive, and she really seems to be enjoying herself in her fantasy.
So obviously I'd have a dream related to that scene. I've watched Fallen Angels a few times over the past few years. And the masturbation scenes have always been among my favorite movie sex scenes ever. Obviously I'd want to recreate something like that in my own dreams. I'm not sure why the idea of abortion or miscarriage comes into play in my dream, though.
The idea of jumping into a river, then being sucked along by a huge ship, comes from my reading of Neal Stephenson's novel The Diamond Age. The story takes place in a futuristic world where nanotechnology enables people basically to construct whatever they want. The basic plot is that a ludicrously wealth man, Equity Lord Finkle-McGraw, wants to give his granddaughter a present that will help break her out of the conventional mores that her father and mother are bringing her up with.
So Finkle-McGraw has a top-notch engineer named Hackworth create a high-tech book that employs living actors (communicating with the book remotely) and pseudo-intelligence. The book adapts itself to the reader's (always a little girl, according to the programming of the book) situation and teaches the girl how she can best prepare herself for real life. It's basically a primer for life.
But Hackworth decides to make an illegal copy for his daughter. He makes the copy, but he then gets mugged. One of the muggers takes the book and gives it to his little sister, Nell. Hackworth is punished for having betrayed Finkle-McGraw. He is sentenced to ten years' labor. His sentence gets him involved in some sex-ritual colony that liberates Hackworth's unconscious so that he can create these high-tech books on a much broader scale.
But before Hackworth goes off to serve his time, he makes another, different primer for his daughter. Now Finkle-McGraw's granddaugher, Hackworth's daughter, and Nell all have a primer. The three girls end up going to some special school together and becoming friends. The book kind of explores their lives as a result of their own personal circumstances and how they've learned from their primers.
When Hackworth gets out of prison, his daughter, Fiona, joins him on his search for a character who apparently wants to destroy the nanotechnology system that everybody lives on. His name is the Alchemist. One of the places Hackworth goes is a ship that also serves as a kind of virtual reality theatre. Just before the beginning of the show, somebody is thrown off the ship. Fiona jumps into the water and saves the man. Hackworth is stunned by his daughter's bravery.
Ugh... I guess that's kind of the longest-winded way ever of saying that my image of jumping into the water and then being dragged by the current of the ship comes from the image in The Diamond Age of Fiona jumping into the water and saving the man from drowning.
What interested me about the dream is that I was pretty certain that I was going to die. But what I ended up doing was kicking off of the ship. I didn't escape the drag of the ship. Instead I just kept myself from being sucked under the ship. I was in the ship's tow all the way until the boat stopped. Even when the ship stopped, I was afraid that I would be sucked under and chopped up in its propeller blades.
I would say that in general, from day to day, I wonder how the heck I'm going to get through life. I do feel like I'm getting sucked under the water. And I don't know how I'm going to make it. Financially and emotionally I feel this way.
I look back on at least the past year of my life and wonder how I could have been so feeble-minded as to have gotten myself into this position. And it really is all my fault, all my doing. I know I would have been fine if I would have just kept going along the same way with my life. So why didn't I keep going along that way? Why did I make the decision I made -- which was really tantamount to jumping out of a boat and throwing myself under a ship?
The dream seems to tell me that I'll survive, that even though I feel perilously close to being sucked under the ship and killed, that I'll actually find a way to kick off of the ship and "go with the flow" until the ride's over. But, in some ways, I feel like this is more wish fulfillment than anything else. Because nothing in my actual life seems to indicate that that's even remotely possible.
But everybody in the world feels this way nowadays. It's just the way things are. And I'd rather not dwell on it. The fact is that riding in the drag of the boat was a pretty cool experience! It was actually a lot of fun.
Another image from that dream that I think about is the image of walking out of the ride with the big crowd of people. In this case I'm walking with the crowd, not against it. There are a few people who walk against me. And there is one guy who isn't even walking in my direction until he figures he can trip me up by doing so. But in general I'm walking with the crowd.
This is an interesting compensation for my other dreams, where I'm either being paralyzed by a crowd or moving against a crowd. In yesterday's dream journal entry, for instance, one of my dreams involves needing to fly over a crowd so I can move quickly in the opposite direction; and another dream involves a group of kids needing to get on stage but being hindered by construction workers moving at right angles to the kids.
One thing I need to think about is this dynamic in my dreams. Not that it's the biggest deal in the world, but it's a little strange. Why do I, or the main characters of my dreams, often have their paths interrupted, not by people moving in the opposite direction, but by people coming from something like a perpendicular angle?
And why is there such an emphasis overall, with these "opposite direction" dreams, of huge crowds? The crowd in my "museum stalker" dream from yesterday really made me wonder this. Because the crowd was just so unbelievably large. A lot of people, obviously, come to a museum to see a really good exhibit. But this crowd of people was enormous! And everybody was here to listen to the tour guide. But so many of them were so far away from the tour guide. How could they even have heard him? It's just really weird.
But it's interesting that in the ship dream from last night, I went with the pull of the boat, first of all, and then I went with the crowd. What's also interesting about that is that the woman in the water with me tells me that if you go too deep into the water, you can't swim against the current. It's not until the woman tells me that that I see the big ship and then get sucked up into the current of the big ship.
I'm not sure. I guess what's being said is that if you get involved with big things, you kind of have to go with the flow with those things. You can't swim against it all. So if you don't want to go with the flow, you better not get involved in the first place.
In the "biking in India" dream I had a few days ago, I made a choice to go my own way. When I did, I was no longer able to get back on the path -- a path I clearly saw -- with my friend. I had a choice of basically standing completely still, or else turning with the people in my path and taking part in the ritual of the river.
It's an interesting idea, I think. It does say basically the same thing as the ship dream. If I'm going to get myself involved in something else, then I have to just go with the flow of whatever's happening. I can't pull myself back to where I was. I just have to go with the flow of whatever new choice I've made.
This, I think, relates as well to my reading of Charles Dickens' novel Little Dorrit, which I finished up last week. One of the characters, named Pancks, is a kind of assistant for a wealthy man named Casby. But Pancks basically does everything for Casby. Dickens compares Pancks to a little tugboat towing a great ship through the Thames -- and then goes on, through the rest of the novel, to metaphorize Pancks into a tugboat. So the fact that the ship is towing me along so effectively is probably due to Dickens' metaphors on Pancks.
Again, the idea is that I've set myself up, with some choice, to be towed along, or at least required to go with the flow of this choice. Well, I know my choice pretty well. All I have to do now is determine what flow I'm in, so I can go with it, I guess. Right now I don't feel like I'm in a flow at all. I feel like I'm sinking in quicksand.
