This post reviews imagery from this entry in my dream journal maboroshi no yume.
In my second dream, there's a moment where I'm in a small desert town with some of my old friends. It's daytime, but everything looks really dark.
It's kind of funny, because I told myself yesterday that I was going to have a dream image like this. Yesterday I had been leafing through a 1983 book called Denver: America's Mile High Center of Enterprise.
I leafed through the book until the sun had almost completely set and there was no light in my house. Looking at some final images before getting up to turn on a light, I thought, Oh, now I'm going to imagine myself in some weirdly dark sort of area.
I also had a feeling I'd see myself in a desert. The book, written in 1983, i.e. 35 years ago as of this writing, documented a time when Denver was taking on some really interesting growth projects. But Denver was still a sort of desert town, as I think this photo, looking from Stapleton Airport toward downtown, illustrates very well.
This 1983 image struck me a lot, as it shows how downtown Denver used to be just this little up-sprouting of skyscrapers. But it also shows Stapleton airport, which no longer exists. In fact, all of the tree area in this photo would now be nothing but developed city sprawl, I'm pretty sure, if you looked at a photo today.
But I also looked at some other photos in the book, such as this image of the Johns Manville Corporation headquarters building.
As you can see, the building is surrounded by a desert mountain landscape. I honestly don't know whether the building still exists. And if it does, I wondered last night, is it still surrounded by desert? Or has the land around it been developed?
Another area the book talks about is Greenwood Village, which was just then becoming a center for Denver's tech industry. Nowadays Greenwood Village is so developed and overrun that -- I used to work there -- traffic into and out of the area is an absolute nightmare. It can take you an hour to get three exits down the highway on a bad day. But in this book, Greenwood Village was still a fresh, new, innovative, exciting, and pioneering idea.
As a side note, the little article in the image above discusses the John Madden company. When I worked in Greenwood Village in 2016, I was also involved with an art gallery in Denver. And through my interest in helping out the gallery, I reached out to the Madden Museum. In that way I ended up meeting some of the Madden family. Unfortunately I let those relationships die as my relationship with the art gallery died.
The Madden Museum, anyway, is a great museum, probably one of my favorite art spaces in the Denver metro area. Here's a link to their site. And here's an image from their website -- of this beautiful sculpture of a dancer. I love this work so much.
So this book got me thinking about desert imagery. But it also really impacted me emotionally for some family reasons.
Last year my step-grandma passed away. When she passed away I inherited about half of my grandparents' library. Over the past year I've been working my way slowly through the roughly 1,500 volumes I inherited.
As I work through the books from the 1970s and 1980s that are specifically related to Colorado history, however, I discover that my step-grandma actually had a hand in editing some of these works! This is something I did not know at all. My grandparents never discussed it, or if they did, I certainly don't remember. My mom would always mention, either bragging or as if annoyed, depending on her mood, that my step-grandma helped create a few Colorado-themed cookbooks. But she never mentioned her hand in editing some of these historical books.
And though he wasn't in the construction industry, my grandpa, through volunteer and community work, also had a hand in some construction projects in the Denver area, including Denver International Airport -- which, obviously, replaced Stapleton International Airport, the airport in the image above.
So my grandparents had a lot of connections in Denver and Colorado. But they never helped any of us grandkids out by leveraging these connections. I think that sort of stinks, honestly. But I also think it has to do with some emotional issues my grandpa had that prevented him from sort of thinking about his progeny in these terms.
Here's my thought on my grandpa and my family's emotional arc. My great grandma was a very strong woman. She grew up in the Colorado mountains in the 1910s. She survived a lot and was a brilliant person. But I think she ended up over-idealizing her husband, my great grandfather, who passed away before I was born.
I think my great grandma's over-idealization of my great grandpa led to my grandpa feeling maternally neglected, which, I think, led him to have an over-idealized conception of manliness (which he could never meet) and a sort of devalued conception of femininity.
My grandpa met my biological grandma, and, as far as I can tell, their having my mother led to my grandpa dropping out of university and marrying my grandma. My grandpa therefore -- it seems to me -- always devalued my biological grandma. But his only two children were also girls -- my mom and my aunt. And he just devalued women. So he didn't pass on any motivation for my mom and aunt -- both perfectly intelligent and capable human beings -- to make something out of their lives.
I think my mom resented this more than my aunt. And I feel like my mom has ended up having a number of anti-society complexes that are based on anti-father complexes because of all this. I think a lot of my mom's anti-society outlook has translated into my outlook. And I think that's partly why I tend to become extremely paranoid and belligerent as I detect myself finding any sort of foothold or success in the social world.
I have thought over and over this emotional dynamic over the past year as I've worked through the stuff I've inherited from my grandparents. But the emotional dynamic feels really painful when I look through the books that my step-grandma edited. I just think to myself -- couldn't my grandparents have helped me out in some way? I might never understand why they weren't able to open up this part of their life to me.
There's also a sense -- as I'm continually treated as a person who doesn't belong in Denver's business, art, and political realms -- that... I see all these connections my family has had to Denver -- ranging back decades, even before the 1970s. And I see how and where my family is connected. But I'm treated like a person who doesn't belong here. I'm treated like an upstart. But if my grandparents had put me in front of all these people they were friends with, I'd have the connections I needed. People would see me as someone who fit in. I wouldn't have the issues and problems I have today. But they didn't do that. And why? I just... don't understand...
I feel dispossessed. And I feel dispossessed... betrayed... by my own family...
So, getting back to my dream imagery, the place where this strange light occurred was a small desert town in Texas. That town is obviously Marfa, Texas, that strange town which a couple times each year serves as a gathering spot for some of the world's elite artists and celebrities. The Denver gallery owners I used to be friends with also have a gallery location in Marfa. I went to Marfa a couple times in 2016. And the place holds a lot of spiritual power for me.
Here's an image of Marfa's city limits, via Extreme Geographer.
And here's an image from an NPR article, the link is here, of the Chinati Foundation, Donald Judd's art institution that made Marfa a world-famous art locale.
The ramen place in my dream is like a typical Japanese ramen stand. But I think it actually comes from my memory of a phở shop in Marfa called Marphở. Here's an image of Marphở, from this article by the Mint Society -- though it sounds like Marphở is no longer in business.
Marphở I think connects the idea of a small desert town (what Denver honestly never was, though, among big cities, it's always been just that) with the image of Texas, but also to something else that's also resonated with me a lot over the past few days, the new MV for "Mou Setsunai to wa Iwasenai" by the J-pop group Gesu no Kiwami Otome.
In this MV, the band members play a group of four friends. It seems to me that the fourth friend, played by lead singer Enon Kawatani, has died. He was the boyfriend of the character played by drummer Hona Ikoka. The three remaining friends meet up and remember their old friend. At one point, the Hona Ikoka character, out biking like the Enon Kawatani character used to do, becomes very determined to carry out her boyfriend's beloved bike ride with a sense of happiness instead of sadness. This moment in the MV always makes me teary-eyed.
I seriously couldn't even paste the stills into this blog without becoming teary-eyed!!!
Hona Ikoka looks kind of unique in this video. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's her longer hair. But she reminds me of a girl I used to like when I lived in New Mexico. The girl liked me, too. And one night she even took me back home with her. But neither of us could get to the point she wanted to get to, which was us sleeping together. She wanted to be with me. At the party we were at, I overheard her talking with her friends about it. But when we got to her house, nothing happened. I ended up just saying goodnight and walking home.
I think the girl in my first dream relates back to my friend from New Mexico in this way. I've always personally had a really hard time initiating anything with girls -- simply because I've always had a horrible fear of doing anything to make girls feel like I think they're just sex objects. So a lot of my romantic relationships just die on the vine. And this one was no different.
But I always think... thankfully I don't think I impact anybody's life in such a strong way. But when I do, it's only in the bad ways. And I always think, what if I could just leave people with the happy moments only? And when they do things, they just think about me in a happy way? So when I see this moment in "Mou Setsunai to wa Iwasenai" I definitely wish I could only leave the people who care about me with the happy memories.
Since I first learned of Sigmund Freud, back in 1995, my life has been about trying to untangle the psychological past of my history, try and create some resolution to it, and move forward with my life in some functional way. Since about 1997, when I really started having dreams, my life has really been all about my dreams. And my dreams have related to all of this stuff -- trying to re-inherit where I've been disinherited and re-possess where I've been dispossessed -- trying to reclaim enough of my self-history as a foundation for my self-worth that I can stop self-sabotaging and stop allowing people to sabotage me; but also so I can expand and give to people, and so I can give in such a way that people want to take from me, from me fully, from me as I fully am.
But I'm not sure that will ever happen. I've recently felt like I'm pretty much washed up at this point.
Anyway, this all relates to my first two dreams. I only had a few images I wanted to discuss quickly from my third dream. I don't have any thoughts right now, honestly, about the fourth dream.
The third dream takes place in some sort of family fun center. When I was a kid, we had a place called Funplex, which was a combination of a huge arcade, a laser tag arena, a roller skating rink, a putt-putt golf course, and some other entertainment settings. I hardly ever went to this place -- maybe two times between my twelfth and eighteenth years -- because the place was so far away and so expensive. So there's always a sort of idealized feeling to the place.
Here's an image of the sign for the Funplex in Houston, Texas, via Fame City Waterworks. Even though this sign is from the Houston Funplex, it gives a good idea of the 1980s Funplex style.
I hadn't really paid attention to Funplex. But, according to this Denver Post article, the Denver Funplex went through a few name changes before finally closing down in 2015.
I think I thought of Funplex because of a couple images I saw in the Denver book I'd been reading last night. One is of Lakeside Amusement Park, the bottom photo in the image below. Unlike with Funplex, my family did go to Lakeside pretty often. We went at least once a year -- because my grandpa got free passes through his work once a year.
The other image is this image, of Aurora Mall.
I, like a lot of people nowadays, I think, look at malls with a lot of nostalgia. Malls are sort of in a transition phase right now. Many malls are dying, etc., which leads people to talk about the "dead mall" phenomena. But some malls are still successful. The Aurora Mall went through a transition in 2005, as can be seen from this photo from the website Labelscar, which looked at the dead mall phenomena before dead malls were cool.
However, the Aurora Mall became the Town Center Mall, an image of which is below. And I think it's doing pretty well.
Anyway, I'm not sure what to make of the imagery of the Aurora Mall translating into the imagery of a Funplex sort of place in my dream. I see the connection. But I'm not sure what it means.
