shadowed by projections

Good morning, everybody.

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

My first dream is another dream involving organized stalking. Organized stalking is, or was, when I was following things, one of the main ideas in current conspiracy theory. It's the idea that people organize themselves in groups in order to follow other people around, for some reason or another.

The conspiracy theory idea is that organized stalking is a method of mind control, some kind of CIA operation to see how to shape and control people's minds. A lot of conspiracy theorists say that there is some sort of ultimate CIA link to all the groups of people following other people around. The person being followed around is called a targeted individual.

Regardless of the fact that CIA mind control programs have been documented as having existed (and when Clinton was President, he apologized for mind control programs done on people in the 1960s and 1970s), I'm not sure I believe in any of the theories about organized stalking. But I think it shows up in my dreams over and over because it's a theory that meshes well with my own psychological complexes.

In fact, one of the reasons I followed conspiracy theories for a while, and occasionally still follow them, is because I find that they match with a lot of the darker aspects of our collective unconscious, in terms of really powerful authority figures, people out to get people, ultimate links to ultimate evils, and so forth. In an age where religion seems to be in its death throes, things like conspiracy theory may step in to allow the human psyche some realm in which to express archetypes and symbols and what not.

But even if there isn't some big conspiracy surrounding activities such as organized stalking, it's pretty obvious that currently people have been using technology, social media, to conduct activities that would look very much like organized stalking, such as flash mobs for robbing stores.

One phenomenon of the flash mob robberies is that they are often accompanied by group beatings. A mob might end up attacking one person in the streets or in a park while that person is alone, or while the group of people targeted is far outnumbered by the group of people in the flash mob.

This kind of hits home for me personally, even though I know for certain that what I'm about to talk about has nothing to do with organized stalking or flash mobs. Mostly it has to do with my own stupidity.

On New Year's Day, 2011, I walked through Prospect Park after having visited with a friend. It wasn't very late at night at all, but the sun was down. Still, Prospect Park had become (for better or worse) a place where people feel safer and safer to walk around or jog or bike at night. But on that night I was attacked by about ten kids. They all just grouped around me and beat the crap out of me. I'm really small and skinny. So it was pretty easy for them to do.

Like I said, it was my own stupidity for walking through the park at night. But the event allowed me at least to sympathize with some of the people who were absolutely on record as being victims in a flash mob beating.

And I think the event stuck with me even more, since I don't really like myself. I don't feel wanted in the world. I feel like nobody in the world thinks I deserve to be around. I really give myself a working-over with self-hatred just about every day of my life. I project all my self-hatred outward, so that I feel that I don't really hate myself, but that everybody else hates me. Having a group of people beat me down just confirmed it.

Actually, I do have to say that I've been in very few fights in my life. Because I'm weak. I purposely keep myself very skinny. So I just don't get into fights.

But the only fights I can think of have been where big groups have fought against me. The one I just mentioned is one. The other was in 2006 where a group of scrubby guys confronted me right in the Gramercy Park area of Manhattan. And the other was in 2003, where (this one was all my fault) a bartender, then three kids, then an entire bar full of people, got in a fight with me.

Those are, I think, the only three fights I've been in in my entire life. And they were all... not fights so much as they were me getting my ass beat down.

But I think the ideas of conspiracy theory and of organized stalking have recently been at the forefront of my mind because of two books I've just read: Condominium, by John D. MacDonald, and Murder on the Orient Express, by Agatha Christie.

In Condominium, one of the characters involves himself very deeply in conspiracy theory, to the point where his studies of conspiracy theory shut him out of the rest of life altogether. Another character in the book organizes what could basically be thought of as a vigilante militia to protect the condominium he lives in from some kids hanging around the area.

I'm hardly a kid anymore. I'm 34. But the way this character is drawn in the book, I feel like I know him in the personalities of people whom I've lived around over the course of my adult life: people in their 50s and 60s who look at everybody under the age of 40 with jealousy and suspicion -- violent, vehement suspicion. Seeing that character brought to life by MacDonald brought my own resentment of real-life versions of that character back to my mind.

In Murder on the Orient Express, of course, the murder victim actually is followed around by a large group of people. The murder victim in Orient Express really could be thought of as a targeted individual who is the object of organized stalking. Of course, he committed a crime that deserved his punishment. But it really shook me to see such a blatant presentation of organized stalking.

The theme actually reminded me a lot of the Fritz Lang film M, in which the Peter Lorre figure is first the object of organized stalking and then becomes a defendant in what basically amounts to a mob jury of vigilantes.

I think my own fears of being followed come from two things. One is the idea that there is some "inexpressible guilt" I have on my conscience that "everybody else" knows I must pay for. The other is the idea that I have some "great potential" in me that "everybody else" wants to keep down.

These two ideas, I think, compensate each other. The truth lies somewhere between, obviously. I'm a normal person with normal faults. I think if I could accept myself as a normal person, I'd probably lose a lot of the paranoid fears that inform my dreams in such a way that they involve themes of organized stalking.

But I think the idea of some "great potential" informed a lot of this dream. At the beginning of the dream, I've apparently finished one task, and now I'm waiting for word on my next task. This gives the idea of me being on some sort of assignment, of being part of a larger goal: of having, in other words, some great potential.

So, while I'm waiting, I do a strange thing. I begin to fly. I do this, though, by stepping on a stone. I then fly up through the air and around a tree's canopy.

A few nights ago, I had a dream in which I was assigned a "task" of spitting on trees. I had to spit on the root crown of the trees. I don't know what this means. But it's obvious that in that dream, my concern was with the base of the tree. In this dream the concern is with the canopy of the tree. So there is a balancing out of themes, which, according to Jung, happens a lot in dream cycles.

But what also interested me in the dream was this image of flying by stepping on a stone. I think one obvious interpretation of that image would be that I was "using stepping stones" to "rise up in the world." Unfortunately, I'm so ill-equipped for the social processes of this world that I think using just one stepping stone will allow me to fly as high as I want in the world.

But I think the image of the "stepping stone" also comes from the video below. The video shows a captive test for the new Sierra Nevada Corporation Dream Chaser space vehicle. The test was, as far as I could tell, to determine some of the aerodynamic characteristics of the Dream Chaser's structure. But you'll notice in the video how the vehicle is lifted off from and dropped back onto something that looks like a giant mattress. I think I translated this mattress into a "stepping stone" in my dream.

The views of the Dream Chaser being carried over the Jefferson County landscape (which is, incidentally, my landscape -- where I'm living right now) reminded me a lot of some of the other spaceflight-related dreams I've recently had. The fact that the Dream Chaser is basically picked up, wheeled around a bit, and then dropped back down to earth, also reminds me of the flight pattern I take around the canopy of the tree in my dream.

secret satanic submission

Good morning, everybody.

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

The easiest image for me to recognize from my dreams last night was the image of the men attacking me.

Last night I watched a Japanese pink film called Maid's Secret. The film is about two women who vie for the affections of one man. They each try to become the woman they think the man really wants. One of the woman becomes submissive, a maid working in a maid cafe in Akihabara. The other becomes dominant, working as a punishing mistress.

When it becomes apparent that the man likes the maid better than he likes the mistress, the mistress gets two of her submissive men to rape the maid. The rape scene is pretty long and drawn out and basically spoils the movie for me.

Two nights ago I watched a Japanese pink film called Rafureshia. This film is also about two women. One woman is a young woman involved with an overly protective, but incestuous, relationship with her father. The other woman is married to a completely disinterested man. The man's mother also has sexual feelings for the man.

In a scene that appears to be a suicide scene, the young woman jumps off the balcony of her father's mansion and into the sea. She ends up swimming to the shore of a town, where she meets three transient men. The transient men immediately take her to their little hovel and have sex with her.

This scene isn't much of a rape scene, since the girl, as she first meets the men, shows her sexual readiness by lifting up her skirt and showing the men her panties. She doesn't fight the men. And she actually thinks of the men as her friends. But the men come after the young woman with the same kind of intensity as the men raping the maid in Maid's Secret.

But last night I also started reading Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot mystery Murder on the Orient Express. In the book the detective Hercule Poirot is called back suddenly to London to work on finishing a case. He books an emergency ride on the first departing train. He expects the train will be empty. But he is surprised to find that the train is so full he can only get a sleeper room by sharing it with another person.

So the image from Orient Express translates itself from a train onto a bus in my dream. Instead of being a well-off detective getting onto an elegant train, however, I'm myself, getting onto a bus, and sharing the last seat with a few transient guys, whom I probably identify with more than I'd identify with Poirot.

The men end up attacking me. And I'd assume that this would mean they take away whatever innocence I'm trying to hold onto, like the maid in Maid's Secret, or they take away whatever naivete I've been sheltered by, like the young woman in Rafureshia.

But when the men somehow find out I'm on some kind of "special mission," to deliver a report, they stop attacking me. Or else they find out that they like me and they stop attacking me. I'm not sure which it is.

Reporting is a theme in all these dreams. I just finished reading the John D. MacDonald novel Condominium. The novel is all about the developers and the residents of a shoddily-constructed condominium out in the Florida keys.

The novel is overall really great, with a great cast of characters and a lot of interesting little soap-opera like dramas. The novel also concludes with a lot of very intense action. The intensity of the action is on the scale of some of the climaxes of some of Stephen King's great works.

But one of the final plot lines in the book involves a man assigned to write a report about how poorly built and hurricane-prone the condominiums are out on this particular Florida key. The report is written and distributed to everybody out on the key who will take it. Some people try to hush up the report. But it's already out there. But even though it's already out there, people still don't really pay attention to it.

This, of course, reminds me a lot of the events leading up to the financial crisis we've been through recently. The comparison is too obvious to really go in depth.

I think I, like so many other people nowadays, fantasize about being a person -- somehow -- to write some report full of foresight that can warn people off of some impending crisis. Of course, those reports were already written. The people who had foresight about our financial crisis have already been recognized as such. So it's strange that I would fantasize about being one of those people. The list is already written. I'm not on it.

But I was also surfing around on the net yesterday and picked up two reports. One was put out by the White House and was an outline for strengthening rural communities in the United States. That report was, I believe, put out within the last 48 hours.

The other report was put out by the Office of Basic Energy Sciences within the U.S. Department of Energy in March of this year. That report was basically the 2011 annual progress report for the BES.

So, after shuffling aimlessly through those reports for a few minutes, I think I had internet reports on the brain. Whenever I get internet reports on the brain, I often think of Michael Aquino, the founder of the Temple of Set.

I got to know about Michael Aquino basically through conspiracy videos on YouTube. Aquino is famous in those videos because not only was the Temple of Set formed after Aquino had been involved with the Church of Satan, but because Aquino, serving as Lieutenant Colonel in the United States Army, was also involved in psychological warfare operations.

Michael Aquino is also famous for having been a part of Geraldo Rivera's sensationalist "expose" on Satanism, which is also on YouTube.

I'm not educated enough to have an opinion one way or the other about psychological warfare.

But, with my mother having been a pagan, though not a Satanist, when I was born, I've often found it quite annoying to have people claim that someone is bad just because he has been involved with the Church of Satan.

My family became Christian when I was very young. As I've gotten older I've wondered whether a lot of my own emotional issues might not be related to the fact that I've got a whole religious aspect of myself that I've basically plowed underground -- that more pagan aspect of myself.

It's an overly cerebral approach to psychology, and too based, I think, in half-baked, layman's understanding of Jungian theory rather than real life experience. But I have wondered over the past few years if I'd have better emotional equilibrium in my life if I could just accept some of my deeper spiritual roots.

I found the Temple of Set more interesting than the Church of Satan, just -- for a very shallow reason -- because of its connection to Egyptian spirituality. I've been interested in Egyptian religion ever since I was a child. And about ten years ago I actually transcribed the entire E.A. Wallis Budge version of the Book of the Dead -- even though I managed not really to learn any Ancient Egyptian by having done so.

So Aquino becomes -- only in my mind -- a kind of figure for finding some kind of spiritual equilibrium in my life by accepting the pagan aspect of spirituality that I was born into. And I think this is accentuated by the fact that Aquino's writing is very intellectual and structured, very much based in a wide knowledge of philosophical and social theories, as well as in much deeper concepts and experiences.

Of course, the figure in my dream is a figure embodying some psychological issue of my own. But this psychological figure means something important to the continued development (?) of my psyche.

I want to believe that if I have a report in my hands (a kind of realized mental project) that has something to do with a task assigned to me by this important psychological figure (metaphorized by my understanding of Michael Aquino's public image), then I am protected by the importance of the task. Kind of a Lord of the Rings theme, I guess.

skin punk

Good morning, everybody.


This entry is supplemental to this entry in my dream journal blog.

One theme that recurs in my dreams is of organized stalking and targeted individuals. You can look up organized stalking on YouTube. There are plenty of examples of it.


I think, though, that everybody has dreams of being stalked or being targeted. It's the same with me. I think this can relate to one of two things. Either I wish that I was so special that people had to "target" to keep whatever is special about me under wraps. Or else, there is something I don't like about my own personality, my "shadow side," that I try to avoid, but that follows me everywhere.


Also, I think anybody who knows even as little as I do about conspiracy theory knows that organized stalking and targeted individuals are supposed to be part of that plan.


Well, I think the reason the themes of organized stalking were so apparent in my dream last night was because in the book I'm reading right now (even though I didn't read any of it last night), Condominium, by John D. MacDonald, there are a couple of characters intricately caught up in researching conspiracy theories. There are also a couple characters who basically form a militia to protect their condominium against young people.


Whereas a couple of nights before, I had a dream where I was being stalked by young people, in this dream I'm being stalked by one person who might be more around my age and one person who is a bit older than I. This would be a compensation -- one side of my emotions is struggling with the fact that I'm becoming older, while another side of my emotions is struggling with the fact that I still feel like people treat me like I'm young. My dreams show me one side of the argument, then another.


I know, without yet having reached it, that the climax of Condominium. So I imagined a storm brewing over a beach in my dream. I have never been to Florida. So I just imagined some random beach scene from the East Coast -- namely Far Rockaway. I'm not sure why that is. 


Yesterday I went to Downtown Denver. I walked around down there for a little while and then headed into the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art. The museum currently has an exhibition of punk photography running. The photos are by Bruce Conner. The photos basically mainly show the punk scene in San Francisco during the late 1970s. 


One of the photos shows a person looking into the Mabuhay club. At first I thought the person was a man. But the person was a woman. The woman is wearing a jacket commemorating someone's service in Vietnam.


I took the bus Downtown. The bus had to stop for a couple minutes a couple of times because there were people in wheelchairs getting onto and off the bus. Some person behind me kept complaining about the people in wheelchairs. He even called them "p---ies" for being in wheelchairs, which I thought was odd.


So I think I combined these two images into the images of the wheelchair person in my dream. 


The person in the Adidas jacket came from two places. In the morning yesterday I went out to buy a paper. A young man, kind of tall and skinny, seemed to be heading out of my apartment complex at the same time as I, and he seemed to be going in the same place. It was a little strange, and it freaked me out a little.


But, also, a couple days ago, I watched the YouTube video below. This video talks about some designers working with sporting labels to create sporty fashions in preparation for the Olympics. The video mentions that designer Stella McCartney collaborates with Adidas.

Yesterday I also watched the Pedro Almodovar film La Piel Que Habito (The Skin I Live In). The complete film is available on YouTube. But for this entry, I'm just putting a link to the trailer that is on YouTube.

I'm not sure that my first dream had anything to do with the film. But the second dream definitely did. One of the pivotal scenes of the film involves two people having sex at the base of a tree. One of the characters, who is suffering from some major psychological issues, ends up biting the other character's hand to keep him from continuing to have sex with her.


I think my brain condensed ejaculation with the biting of the hand, making ejaculation into spitting. I then took this image and went walking all around town, spitting on the base of every tree.


I think that what this probably meant is that I was walking around town, advertising my sexual availability everywhere I went. But there wasn't anybody else out on the sidewalks. I was all by myself on the sidewalks. Everybody else was in a car. Everybody could still see what I was doing -- or at least I was worried they could. But nobody was close enough for me actually to do  it with them.


My third dream, the lobotomy dream, is also, I think, a reflection to the movie. In the movie, one of the characters gets a sex-change forced upon him. Actually, I believe that La Piel Que Habito, while I'm sure it's known as an update of the classic film Eyes without a Face, is also, in my opinion, one of the best forced-feminization stories of all time.


As I went through puberty, I began to have desires to be a transvestite. At the ages of eleven and twelve I began getting and wearing women's underwear from stores. I always fantasized that I'd be magically transported into a girl's body. But I never wanted to lose my own identity, my memory of myself as who I was as a boy. I thought that if I lost my identity, I'd lose my intelligence (whatever kind of intelligence I have).


I think that that desire not to lose my intelligence was actually related to a fear of castration. Losing my penis would be equivalent with losing my intellect. I don't think that's a fact of life, you know, that penis equals intellect. But it was just a part of my fear of castration.


The woman in my dream didn't look like the re-made woman in the movie. But she stood for the  woman, I'm pretty sure. So a person asking her if she wanted a lobotomy, and her telling the person yes would be the same thing, according to that fear of castration, as agreeing to having a sex change operation.


One last thing I'd like to say about La Piel Que Habito, even though it doesn't have to do with my dreams: one scene uses the Elliott Smith song "Between the Bars" really incredibly. Of course, the version used is a cover version. But the melody is really characteristic of Smith: very melancholy and nostalgic. It creates a perfect mood for that scene, which is kind of like a goodbye-before-death scene.


Here's a fabulous YouTube video with Smith's version:

And here's the Chris Garneau cover, which is used in the Almodovar film:

So, anyway, I was so moved, both by the scene in the film and my love for Smith's song that I spent, oh, god, maybe an hour or so singing that song, over and over again.


Dear god, when I think about some of the silly things I do sometimes...

condominiums, new york city, and riley kilo

Hi Everybody!

This blog is going to be supplemental to my dream blog, "maboroshi no yume," which is at the link below.

maboroshi no yume

Both blogs are rather personal. I'd guess that the "maboroshi no yume" blog is more personal than this blog. Like I said, "maboroshi no yume" is a journal of my dreams. This blog will be like an analysis of my deams.

But I am going to try to give "my life's (a) dream" a broader scope, so that there will be more content of general interest and relevance. I find that my dreams are based on what I read in books, what I see online, what I hear in the news, and what I experience in the outside world. So I think this blog is an attempt to connect the very personal landscape of my dreams with the more conventionally social world of waking life.

But, also, a warning for anybody who is not into fetish: I am an adult baby, at least part-time. And I am interested in other fetishes, even though I may not partake in them. So there will be a lot of discussion, most likely, of sexuality, fetish, and especially of paraphilic infantilism, or of being an adult baby.

So, then...

Today's post will be supplemental to this dream journal entry.

The first impression I got from my first dream in this post was that it was partly inspired by my reading in the John D. MacDonald novel Condominium. This novel, written in 1977, is about a poorly built Condominium, the people who poorly run it, and the people who live in it and are fighting to make it a better place to live.

The novel has a lot to offer current readers, I believe: it shows the housing market on the brink of colapse, and the effects of a poorly managed housing market on regular American citizens.

Here is a link to the Amazon.com page for Condominium.

I think the plot element that stuck in my dreams is of these young people hanging around the condominium, kind of threatening the older people who live in the building.

I had another dream a few nights ago about young people hanging around on what I thought of as "Kurt Cobain's estate," a kind of huge mansion with Buddhist, and, eventually, apocalyptic Chritstian sculpture all over the place.

I'm 34 years old. And I think I'm looking back to having been a young person. I wish those days of youth could come back for me. And so I think I'm having these dreams full of young people.

The apartment complexes are very much like the tall housing projects on the East side of Manhattan. There actually is a highway overpass that runs alongside some of them, kind of shadowing the road that passes alongside the projects.

I think the reason for my having thought of these apartment complexes was that I'd watched a video on YouTube last night by an adult baby named Riley Kilo. I was surprised to hear that Riley had left New York City at about the same time as I had, in the middle of January of this year. It made me nostalgic to for New York. So I think my dream set me in New York, to make me feel like I was "back home" (even though, really, I'm back home right now).

I've recently started wearing diapers to bed as well. And I think the fact that I wear diapers to bed gave me the image of walking around town in only diapers.

Those are the main images that I think relate my dream to my waking life experiences. Have a good day, and I hope to be back here very soon for you!