oh you pretty failure

Good morning, everybody.

This post is related to this entry in my dream journal.

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.

violent disease

Good morning, everybody.

This post is related to this entry in my dream journal.

The most obvious image for me is the image of the severed hand. This comes directly from my having watched the film Blue Velvet, by David Lynch.

The movie's plot basically begins driving forward when the main character of the film, Jeffrey, finds a severed ear in a field. Jeffrey takes puts this ear in a paper bag and takes it to the police station.

There are a number of views of the ear throughout the film. The ear looks pale and bloodless. I think that's why the hand in my dream appears, even though layers of skin keep getting peeled and peeled away, never to get down to a level of pink flesh. I'm sure that the paper bag in the film translated into the plastic bag in my dream. But I'm not sure why.

I think part of the reason the severed ear was translated into a severed hand was due to the fact that I was reading about Aimee Copeland, the woman who has been in the news recently because of her fight against a flesh-eating bacteria. Aimee Copeland lost both her hands to the illness.

In the dream, the severed hand is exhibited in connection with a disease where a person's body burns up from the inside. Actually, in the dream disease, the heart locks up -- stops functioning altogether -- and then the body burns up from the inside. I'm not sure about the heart locking up. But the burning up from the inside sounds a lot like a description people give of what happens to a person on the drug bath salts, which has made the news a lot recently.

The biggest bath salts news seems to have been a case in Miami where a man has been accused of chewing off a large portion of another man's face. The man was originally said to have been on bath salts. However, when I looked up "bath salts" in the news just now, I was surprised to find that the man accused of this crime appears to have tested negative for the bath salts drug. It appears the only drug he was found to have tested positive for is marijuana.

Whenever I read the news and I find stories about people who've just gone completely crazy and committed all kinds of weird crimes, I tend to obsess over it. I wonder if I'd be capable of doing those kinds of things.

And when I overexert myself, I get really way too touchy and irritable, to the point where I sometimes wonder if I'm going a little insane. A few of my recent dreams have dealt with the subject of overexertion and being overly irritable. I also think this trait has been at the top of my mind because the book I just finished reading, Future Shock, spends a lot of time talking about the overexertion people of the present day might feel by being in a world of accelerating technological development.

I'm pretty sure that the weird images I had, first of flying in the air but not really being in a vehicle, and then of driving through the street but not really being in a vehicle, came from my reading last night in the book The Ship Who Sang, by writer Anne McCaffrey. In this book the main character Helva is born with serious birth defects. Like the many other people born like her, Helva is put into a mechanical shell and wired up to a spaceship. Helva is, in effect, the spaceship.


I think that my dream is kind of a way of imagining the flight of a vehicle like a spaceship or a car, from the "point of view" of the vehicle, as a way of trying to understand what the character Helva may have felt like. But I'm still feeling my own body -- which is why I'm having a hard time doing things like holding on to my notebook and so forth.


What I also find interesting -- even though I have no idea where it comes from -- is the recurring image of gossip in my dreams. I'm not sure why that appeared so strongly. I don't seek out gossip in the news. But I always tend to read sensationalist news. And that's kind of the same thing as gossip. So maybe that's what it is.

failure shock

Good morning, everybody.

This post is related to this entry in my dream journal.

The image that has stuck with me most from last night's dreams was the woman in the red dress. And what really struck me about her was just the way she had that, while most of her dress was very tight and form fitting, her left shoulder had a huge puff of fabric coming off of it.

I've lately been thinking of adding drawings, either to my dream journals or to my dreamday journals. Maybe this woman would be a good place to start. So I'll think about adding her in tonight or tomorrow or something.

Anyway, I know I've seen a dress just like that somewhere recently -- possibly from a blog I frequently look at --  Dust Jacket Attic -- or one of the fashion channels I frequently watch on YouTube.

The woman obviously stands as a goal or an end point in my dream. I can see her clearly, even though she's far away. And I can see her as if with my eyes, not in my "mind's eye," or my imagination. She's a performer, and she's glamorous. So maybe she's an ideal that I'm trying to attain. I think the second dream is all about keeping a clear eye on attaining my goals.


The only thing that keeps me from thinking the woman at the end of the island is totally an ideal is that my family is down there, too, and that I am going to watch my nephews perform as well. There are a lot of people on my walk down to the end of the island that seem to want to block my path or throw me off the path. But I have to keep a focus on my goals -- which aren't unattainable ideals, but are practical, and even have something to do with my family.


I'd like to know what my goals are, first, though. I used to think I knew what my goals were. But I think I got majorly distracted from my goals over the past few years. So, maybe my nephews in my dream are really aspects of myself -- elements that are coming to life again, starting out as little children, growing up from that point -- maybe under the guidance of that ideal performing woman.

The screen of job in my first dream is also interesting to me. The fact that it's just some huge, clear screen floating in space makes me feel that that screen is actually something like lenses on my own eyes, and that I just think the lenses are a big screen floating in space. In that case, the lenses would be something like Google Shades.

I think the idea of Google Shades, which I always like to think about anyway, was also at the forefront of my mind. I submitted another short story on the Smashwords self-publishing website. This story, which I call "Blind Relationships," takes place in the present day, with a series of flashbacks going back roughly ten years. But the end of the story actually takes place ten years in the future. A woman is interviewing two other women. But she is recording the interview via a cellular device that's basically a part of her eyeglasses. The idea comes straight from the concept of Google Shades.

So I think that this image brought the idea of Google Shades back into my dream, and that I was "using" Google Shades in my dream without really knowing it.

The other image from the first dream that really interested me was the "milk bomb." At first this bomb looked like some kind of metal canister. But then it looked like a Pillsbury biscuit canister, the kind that you pop open and then just lay out the ready-made biscuits on a pan to cook.

Here's a pretty good video of a Pillsbury can popping open.

But why the heck did the bomb turn into a Pillsbury container? And why did it shoot out milk instead of biscuits? I suppose the milk coming out the Pillsbury container in my dream was probably some sort of sexual image. That seems pretty obvious. I guess the bomb was some kind of symbol of my being sexually weak or impotent -- or just powerless and pathetic in life overall.

I probably do identify with the man in the dream who threw the bomb. And I expected the bomb to be something big, something real. But it just popped open like a Pillsbury container and got milk all over the place. Gross.

It's also weird, I think, that the man who threw the bomb is dressed in scrubby clothes and seems to be a complete lunatic, even though it also appears that the man is working with the men in the business suits, and even appears to be their friend. I think they wanted to invite him to lunch, but he was too obsessed with whatever work he was doing to go with them. Then they said something that he took as an insult, so he decided to throw his powerless bomb at them.

All of that obviously has to do with me. I overwork myself. And then I get myself into an emotional frenzy where I take everything the wrong way. I alienate myself from my friends -- and co-workers! -- because I take everything they say as an insult. And even though I don't get violent, I do get overly rude and angry. But I really genuinely feel powerless, unsafe, unprotected, and completely ineffective in life.

I think that this personality trait was at the top of my mind yesterday because I was reading something similar to it in Alvin Toffler's book Future Shock last night. In Future Shock, Toffler gives a description of the mental development of someone who has been overexposed to high-information environments such as war, disaster, or foreign cultures. The progression goes from one of being irritable, to being unable to make rational decisions, to finally withdrawing from life altogether and being completely apathetic.

So, reading such a mirrored aspect of my own personality traits, I was a bit surprised. And I think I carried some sort of visual metaphor for my feelings about Toffler's statement, and how it compared to my own personality, into my dream.

I think the women in my first dream come from my reading in msnbc.com about a couple of girls in Corpus Christi, Texas, who had been shot while they were out at a park on Saturday night. One of the girls was killed. The other was in critical condition. One main focus of the article seems to be that the girls had recently come out to their friends as a lesbian couple. But there didn't seem to be any evidence that the girls were shot as part of a hate crime.

A memorial to the girl who had been killed was photographed in the msnbc article. The beach can be seen in the background. I think that's why in the dream I imagined myself on a dock over a river like the Hudson River, and why I imagined myself talking to girls and waiting for girls.

I also have a connection to Corpus Christi because, even though I live in Denver, Colorado, a lot of my work recently has had to do with people near the Corpus Christi area. So I think my thoughts about my professional life in New York connected with my recent work's influence near the Corpus Christi area. But I can't say, really, what the connection would have been beyond all that.

UPDATE -- I also just saw this article on the TechCrunch site. The photo in the article looks a lot like the image I had in my first dream of the hollow space below the skyscraper, where the crazy Pillsbury bomber was standing.

I would consider this a coincidence. I don't think it was anything I pre-cognized in my dream. If it wasn't a coincidence, there is a chance that someone in my apartment building was listening to the news really early in the morning. I probably heard the news report through the walls while I was sleeping and incorporated the thoughts into my head.


Interesting in this video, too, are the orange traffic cones and orange and white striped barrier poles, which could give you an idea of the way those objects looked in my second dream.


Also -- I would just like to say that my thoughts go out to everybody in Greece at this time. My thoughts go out to everybody all over the world. Man, the world is having a tough time right now. Everybody is. But let's all do our best to get through it.

orange and purple leadership

Good morning, everybody.

This post is related to this entry in my dream journal.

I also have some updates to some dreams I've had over the past few nights. I'm a slow thinker. So it usually takes a while for some image associations to my dreams to occur to me.

But -- actually, one of the main images of my dream connects to one of the images I wanted to mention in my updates. In the fifth and seventh dreams of today's dream journal entry, there was a tall, beautiful, black man. In the fifth dream, the man helped me find my way. In the seventh dream, he kept feeding me all kinds of sweet food.

I think this man is associated with the man who acted as MC at the Center Stage at this weekend's PrideFest in Denver. I can't find the guy's name right now. Anyway, he was really good, really smart and funny, and he seemed really kind. He's one of those MCs that really make you feel like he's guiding you through the show.

I liked him a lot. But -- he wore a lot of purple. He first wore a purple, sleeveless t-shirt and blue jeans. Then he wore an outfit with purple pants and a shirt like a tuxedo vest with long, purple tails -- so, like the vest of a tuxedo and the tails of a tuxedo's jacket all in one. It was pretty hot.

During the kid's karaoke show, the MC had a young boy up on stage with him. The boy went back stage one time and came out wearing a purple gown, like a graduation gown. The MC had a little exchange with the boy, something along the lines of, "Are you getting into my clothes again?"

And -- even more to my taste -- one of the little girls doing karaoke came up on stage wearing a pink tutu and a pink leotard. After the girl's performance, the MC said, "I need an outfit just like that!"

Of course, I agreed -- except that I would have liked to be wearing a diaper under that outfit as well.

Anyway, after all this purple, it's not surprising that I had the purple diaper and t-shirt dream in this dream entry.

But in this group of dreams, the man acts as something of a leader to me. In one dream, when I myself am trying to be a leader, and I've lost my way, I'm guided without anybody knowing. I think my admiration of the man's crowd-leadership skills (and sense of humor) made me see the man as a leader teaching me to be a leader.

I think the reason that the man appeared as the guy who was going to feed me cupcakes "or else" was probably because I saw him as a man who was so unabashedly himself, while I was still stuck in my shell. I think that eating the sweet food just means allowing myself to be a part of the sweet things in life -- like love. If I didn't open up and accept the sweet food, the man was going to spread my secret, which, obviously, was that I liked the sweet food.

Although, one thing I'll say about the image of the sweet food, is that this definitely comes from this entry in the blog Dust Jacket Attic, showing photographs of sticky date pudding. The sticky date pudding looks pretty much like the little cakes in my dream.

Another thing about being over-fed sweet food is that it is probably a compensation, or a balancing out of the theme of not eating at all in this dream journal entry.

Usually, Jung says, when you have one theme pronouncing itself really powerfully in a dream, you often get the opposed theme pronouncing itself really powerfully in a following dream. That's not always the case. Nothing is "always the case" in dreams or in waking life. But I've noticed that sometimes Jung is right about the idea of compensation.

Of course, another dream I had involved cooking way too much food. The food was fish. And I think that part of this might be my body's reaction that I've been (bachelor, terrible, terrible) eating way too much canned tuna fish lately.

But I think it might also come from this news article, which one of my friends sent me, which describes how a woman in Korea, eating a parboiled squid, had some of the squid's spermatophores shot into her mouth and embedded in her gums. The woman ended up being okay, of course. But it was kind of a gross story.

But this connects the food to sexuality, I think. I think that, if I were equate the food in my dream to my sexuality, I'd say that I probably am "a closed down shop" that "isn't expecting much business," but when I get excited about new business, I prepare too much food. Then I don't really do anything with myself, and all the food I made just sits there and rots. It's a waste of my energy -- physical and emotional. But it's all my fault. Because I don't open up my closed down shop.

I think the hitchhiker in my sixth dream is an interesting image. But I don't know what he means. Last night I browsed around through Alvin Toffler's futurist/sociological work Future Shock. There are a lot of really great things about the book. But I think the hitchhiker image came from a section in the book where Toffler mentions how many young girls in the 1960s hit the road and traveled by hitchhiking.

I personally equated this idea with an idea of Friedrich Nietzsche (I can't remember from which book -- maybe Ecce Homo?) that wanderlust is equivalent to sexual potency. People who have a great desire to travel are often very bold and powerful sexually. Of course, this was an argument made to prove that Kant, whose travels never strayed beyond his afternoon walks around Gothenburg (?), was a prude. And that argument, of course, was made to prove that Kant's philosophy was no good.


But I think that the sexually bold woman (in Nietzsche's scheme of things) in Toffler's book became the hitchhiking boy in my dream. Also sexually bold, the boy just latches on to any old car that passes, assuming it will "give him a ride," which can be taken sexually. Although, I do have to say that that image reminds me of one of my favorite movie scenes, from Back to the Future, where Marty McFly, on his skateboard, latches on to the back of a pick-up truck for a ride.


I'm not sure why we end up killing the boy. But there's obviously a development from the boy being killed to the girl stopping the yellow taxi cab and getting in. I'd say that the boy stands for one aspect of my sexuality and the girl stands for another. I probably need to let the one aspect of my sexuality go and take on the other aspect. 


But the girl seems very much like she's in a horror movie. And I get involved in that "horror movie" atmosphere with her. I'm not sure what that means. Well, I think I have some idea, though. In another passage of Future Shock, Toffler mentions a survey which showed that the one of the top criteria by which girls judge prospective boyfriends is whether they own a car.


So the boy is a hitchhiker. Like me, he hitches rides -- except that I "hitch rides" on public transportation: the bus. The boy is thrown off the bus and killed. Then I find myself in a car. But it's still not a car of my own. It's a car I pay to use by the mile. It's a taxi cab. And it's driven by my mother. But for some reason, this is good enough for the girl to get into.


But the girl "feels sorry" for me and my mom. Why? Probably because I have to get rid of the taxi cab as well. If a car can be seen as standing for my own identity, then I'm in an identity which is *not* my own. I need to get rid of this paid-for identity, which my mom is driving, i.e. in control of, and I need to get an identity of my own. But this would likely be a painful experience for both myself and my mom. Hence the reason for the girl "feeling sorry" for us both.


The final image I'd like to discuss from these dreams is the image of the bottles. A few days ago on this blog I mentioned a "fight" (wasn't much of a fight, on my side) that I got into in 2006. A group of kids gathered around me, right in the very nice Manhattan neighborhood of Gramercy Park, and took turns taunting and hitting me. 


One of the kids actually hit me over the head with a wine bottle. He must not have hit me hard because, even though it really hurt, it didn't stun me or knock me out, and it didn't break the bottle. Anyway, I think the image of hitting my boss over the head with bottles came from this image, which remained at the top of my mind since I'd mentioned it on this blog.


But the bottles I want to smash by dream-boss' skull in with are PET bottles -- plastic bottles. The worst a plastic bottle would do is annoy the heck out of somebody. It would be ineffective as far as knocking somebody out, not to mention killing them, would go. 


But I think these bottles also stand for space station modules. I think I, like a lot of other people, have been interested in China's Liu Yang, the first Chinese woman to go into space. Yesterday I watched the docking of the Shenzhen space capsule with the Tiangong 1 space station on YouTube.

This event, as well as the mention in Future Shock of modularity -- building things like homes and offices and what not, in a modular, changeable way, made me think of one of my favorite space companies, Bigelow Aerospace. They manufacture what used to be called inflatable space stations but are now referred to as expandable space stations.


These space stations are modular. The modules can interconnect with each other, thus building, I believe larger and larger space stations. I think the concept of the Bigelow space station modules is pretty well explained in this YouTube video.

I'm not sure why the space station modules changed themselves into PET bottles that would be completely ineffective at injuring my dream-boss. But I'm pretty sure they did.

Now -- I'd like to discuss a couple final images from some previous dreams. In the second dream of this dream journal entry I was being interviewed to work for a company called Orange. Upon waking, I couldn't think of why I'd dream of a company called Orange.

Well, yesterday, while reading through Reuters, I found this article on piezoelectric power generation. Piezoelectricity is basically a characteristic in certain materials that causes them, when compressed or vibrated, to give off an electric charge. This charge can be stored in batteries or used to charge small electronic devices.

I remembered reading about novel electricity generation concepts, including piezoelectricity, about two years ago. In my trekking through some of these ideas, I happened upon the company Orange, which was working with the company Gotwind to make an electricity-generating boot called Power Wellies. The boot doesn't use piezoelectrics, but a kind of electricity generation attained through temperature differentials -- i.e. the difference of the temperatures inside and outside the boot.

I had totally forgotten about the little excursion I'd done into research on these Power Wellies. And I can't honestly say, even now, why I dreamed I was working for the company Orange. But this is, I'm sure, the company I was dreaming about.

One more update on the color purple from my purple diaper dream from a couple days ago. This is, I think, just a coincidence. But it's interesting to note that Aung San Suu Kyi, a person I admire immensely as a leader, is wearing purple during her Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

And one last update. A few nights ago, I had a dream where I was standing out on a runway, watching an SR-71 landing. Again, I think this image is just coincidental. But the heat-view images in this video, of an Air Force "space plane" landing, have very much the same color scheme as that of my dream of the SR-71 landing.