surrender at a deadly moment

Good morning, everybody.

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

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.

lifestyles of the rich and imprisoned

Good morning, everybody.

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

Also, I added a drawing to this entry in my dream journal.

The most striking image in the dream for me was the image of the Vesuvius castle. I think this image largely comes from my reading Little Dorrit, by Charles Dickens. A good amount of the second half of the novel has taken place in Venice.


Little Dorrit's family has been found to be the heirs to a great fortune. They are released from the Marshalsea debtor's prison. Immediately, after settling accounts with some people, and seeing to the well-being of some other people, the family goes out on a series of travels. While out on their travels, the family meets up with some other people from London. The groups of people all end up in Venice, where, apparently, they decide to spend a large portion of their time.


Of course, Venice is a city of canals, and, as Dickens describes it, is kind of like a labyrinth of canals. Now in my dream, the canals are dry, so they look like aqueducts. In my experience, aqueducts are used as channels to divert storm waters flowing down from watersheds, in order to prevent flooding. So most of the time, aqueducts are dry. But I'm not sure if the network of concrete is really supposed to be aqueducts or canals, or if it's supposed to be something altogether different.

Again, why should I substitute "Vesuvius" for "Venice?" Vesuvius is a Volcano, and Venice is a town. My dream begins with the launching of a space rocket. So maybe my dream took the name Vesuvius for the estate to combine the town of Venice with the explosive action of the launching of the space rocket. I'm not sure.

The Vesuvius of my dreams is famous because of something to do with wine. Wine also plays a big role in passages of Little Dorrit, in a number of different ways. One of the characters, I can't remember who right now, made a good deal of money off a vineyard. All throughout the story, wine is shown as an illustration of the comforts that certain establishments can provide people. And even the way people drink wine (or, in one occasion, wipe it off their mustache) can indicate what kind of a person one is.

The "gated" community feel of the Vesuvius of my dreams also relates to a passage where Little Dorrit reflects on the similarities of the lives of the extremely wealthy with the lives of the poor in the Marshalsea debtor's prison.

In fact, I'd like to share the passage with you where Little Dorrit reflects on the similarities. The passage is from the rights-free Project Gutenberg version of the book, the link to which is above.

"It appeared on the whole, to Little Dorrit herself, that this same society in which they lived, greatly resembled a superior sort of Marshalsea. Numbers of people seemed to come abroad, pretty much as people had come to the prison; through debt, through idleness, relationship, curiosity, and general unfitness for getting on at home. They were brought into these foreign towns in the custody of couriers and local followers, just as the debtors had been brought into the prison. They prowled about the churches and the picture-galleries, much in the old, dreary, prison-yard manner. They were usually going away again tomorrow or next week, and rarely knew their own minds, and seldom did what they said they would do, or went where they said they would go: in all this again, very like the prison debtors. They paid high for poor accommodation, and disparaged a place while they pretended to like it: which was exactly the Marshalsea custom. They were envied when they went away by people left behind, feigning not to want to go: and this again was the Marshalsea habit invariably. A certain set of words and phrases, as much belonging to tourists as the College and the Snuggery belonged to the jail, was always in their mouths. They had precisely the same incapacity for settling down to anything, as the prisoners used to have; they rather deteriorated one another, as the prisoners used to do; and they wore untidy dresses, and fell into a slouching way of life: still, always like the people in the Marshalsea."

Before reading Little Dorrit last night, I looked through the Connoisseur booklet of luxury homes put out by Sotheby's Denver in June. The Connoisseur comes with my copy of the Denver Business Journal. Of course, I don't have the money to buy one of those multi-million dollar homes. But I love to look through the pictures and imagine what it would be like to live in one of those places. I'm not alone in that, I'm sure.

So I think my dream combined my fantasy of living in one of those luxury houses with Little Dorrit's reflections on the idle lives of the wealthy in Venice, to make a Vesuvius castle as a part of some gated community.

The interesting thing is that the "Himalayan Museum" is located down in the bowels of this concrete network before the Vesuvius castle. Of course, the "Himalayan Museum" is the Ruben Museum of Himalayan Art, distorted into some kind of basement convention center, for some reason.

But what also strikes me as odd about that is that the Himalayas are well known for being very high mountains. But here we have a Himalayan Museum, a museum for the cultures of the high mountains, being entrenched before a castle named after a volcano, or a mountain. So the mountains are trenches before a mountain. I'm not sure why that is, either.

Of course, Vesuvius had an entire culture at its base -- Pompey -- which was destroyed by the volcano. So that could be a part of it. Maybe my dream is somehow comparing Himalayan culture with Pompeyan culture. I don't know.

Another thing I'd quickly like to mention is the connection of my first dream with a movie I watched last night, "Billie." The movie stars Patty Duke and was made in 1965. The movie is about a girl who uses the rock and roll rhythms inside her head to pace herself for running. By using these rhythms, she can actually make herself run so fast that she can beat all of the boys on the track team. There's actually no girls' track team at this school -- because in 1965, this film says, sports were thought of as something girls didn't do.

The film is actually pretty cool. Patty Duke is awesome. And there are a couple of other pretty intriguing plot lines in the film, besides the track star plot. But one of the main things that people talk about throughout the film is equality between men and women. One of my favorite ideas, stated by Billie's father, is that Billie has invented a third sex, in addition to men and women: the sex of "equals."

Of course, even before this film, people were speaking of "third genders." I think Havelock Ellis may even have mentioned homosexuals as being a "third gender." And transgendered people were, and still are, sometimes, thought of as a third gender. But I don't think I've ever heard the third gender referred to as "equals." It sounded too awesome -- like something you might hear in a science fiction novel. Anyway, that's at least part of the reason I had that dream about equality.


But an image in my fourth dream also comes from the movie. Since there are no sports for girls in "Billie," there's apparently also no girls' locker room. So the boys make a locker room especially for Billie. The locker room is, unfortunately, the storage room/boiler room, apparently. But the boys do it up nicely, so that Billie feels welcome.


I took the idea of a storage room and made it into my house, and then into my grandma's house (or vice versa -- I'm not sure). My grandma's house is kind of like storage. She has a lot of stuff. It fills up her whole house.


And my apartment -- well, I barely have anything. Seriously. Outside of my books and notebooks, I barely have anything. But I think I think of my apartment -- of my whole entire life -- as storage. Because I have, for instance, a whole bunch of accumulated knowledge, and I'm just not putting it to any sort of good use.


I keep on trying and trying to think why this is. Why am I so unactive? How could I have spent -- for goodness sake -- close to seventeen years by now, if you include my three years of college, studying and studying and writing and writing, and not doing anything -- or, really, only doing a very negligible amount -- with all this stuff? I just store it up. Store, store, store.


It does make me think of another passage of Little Dorrit, which I'll end this entry by sharing with you:


"Fanny has adapted herself to our new fortunes with wonderful ease...


"This reminds me that I have not been able to do so, and that I sometimes despair of ever being able to do so. I find that I cannot learn. ... I am so slow that I scarcely get on at all. As soon as I begin to plan, and think, and try, all my planning, thinking, and trying go in old directions, and then I remember with a start that there are no such cares left, and that in itself is so new and improbable that it sets me wandering again...


"It is the same with all these new countries and wonderful sights. They are very beautiful, and they astonish me, but I am not collected enough -- not familiar enough with myself, if you can quite understand what I mean -- to have all the pleasure in them that I might have. What I knew before them, blends with them, too, so curiously. For instance, when we were among the mountains, I often felt... as if the Marshalsea must be behind that great rock; or as if Mrs. Clennam's room where I have worked so many days, and where I first saw you [Arthur Clennam], must be just beyond that snow. Do you remember one night when I came with Maggy to your lodging in Covent Garden? That room I have often and often fancied I have seen before me, travelling along for miles by the side of our carriage, when I have looked out of the carriage-window after dark. We were shut out that night, and sat at the iron gate, and walked about till morning. I often look up at the stars, even from the balcony of this room, and believe that I am in the street again, shut out with Maggy."

nel mezzo del cammin -- crisis!

Good morning, everybody.

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

However, I'd also like to note that I'm going to start putting drawings in my dream journal. I put my first drawing in this dream journal entry.

I would really love to make one drawing per dream journal entry. If I can do it, I will. If not, I'll do as many as I can. But I'll at least hold myself to no less than two drawings a week. I'm also going to try and go back to some of my more popular posts and put drawings into those posts.


The two images from last night's dreams that really stand out for me are the image of the soldier and the image of the table of contents. I think they both come from Little Dorrit, by Charles Dickens.


Little Dorrit is divided into two sections: one called "Poverty," and the other called "Riches." I'm just getting toward the end of the "Poverty" section now. Little Dorrit is probably most famous for its depiction of the Circumlocution Office, which sets out to find what needs to be done in England, and then sets up schemes for "How Not To Do It."


I think these two ideas blended together in my dream to create a table of contents in two halves, one half of which seems to be constantly repeating itself and getting nowhere, and the other half of which may be more exciting.


But I think this relates pretty well to my life. I'm getting toward the end of the first half of my life (if I'm lucky enough to live another day, week, month, year, etc.). And, looking back on the first half of my life, I see the same old weaknesses and lazinesses repeated, over and over.


Could the second half of my life be more interesting than I'd made the first half? Well... I judge the "creator" of this book (who could actually be myself) as being too stupid for me to want to care about. So I shut the book and turn my head away from it. That's a little bleak. And a little frightening. It makes me look like I'm shutting the book of my own life!


Although I do have to say that I do have a different orientation toward the "creator" or "creators" of this book. I do look at them as being other people. This may mean that I need guidance from other people in my life.


But in the past I've always looked at myself (in my more arrogant moments, which are, like, all the time) as being smarter than everybody else. If I were actually to take advice from the people around me, listen to what people tell me, and apply what people tell me to the things I do in life, would I have a lot more interesting and effective life?


Maybe the first half of my life has repeated and repeated and wallowed around in these same old problems specifically because I've been too hard-headed to listen to the people around me. And maybe if I just listen to the people around me -- and, more importantly, do what they tell me to do -- I can live a more interesting life.


But -- the dream still ends on a bleak note, even considering things that way. Because I'm still too hard-headed to listen to anybody. I'd rather just slam the book shut on the second half of my life and turn my head away, rather than admit that other people in this world could actually know better than I do!


Wow -- I can't believe I am so arrogant!


The soldier reminds me of a character in Little Dorrit named Mr. Meagles. One of the basic plot ideas of Little Dorrit is that there are all these characters who had been quarantined while travelling through Marseilles. But then they're let go, and they all go their separate ways -- though it appears that all their separate ways are "to London." Anyway, they eventually all meet up, and their lives intertwine in interesting ways.


The main character is a man named Arthur Clennam. Clennam is walking down the street one day when he re-encounters Mr. Meagles, who had been quarantined with him in Marseilles. Meagles has with him an engineer-inventor named Danny Doyce. Doyce has just been wrung through the Circumlocution Office while trying to get a patent on a new invention of his. He can't make money on the product (I guess) without the patent. But the Circumlocution Office is, it seems, concerned only with how not to get Doyce his patent.


Meagles, who is a bit bureaucratic himself, has taken Doyce under his wing. And it appears that Clennam later on gets involved in taking more care of the business aspect of Doyce's pursuits. But when Clennam first meets with Meagles again, Meagles is in such consternation over the runaround Doyce has gotten from the Circumlocution Office that he keeps on taking off his hat and rubbing his head in a frenzy, complaining about how terribly hot it is.


Danny Doyce is a bit of a parallel to Little Dorrit (or Amy Dorrit, as she's properly called). Both are very eager, diligent workers. Both have a spark of genius about them. Doyce's genius seems to be his ability to invent. Little Dorrit's genius seems to be her persistent care and kindness (19th century attitudes towards women much?). And Clennam seems to be the catalyst for both of them, the person who is looking to serve their administrative, practical, business needs in order to get them set on the right path in life.


Arthur Clennam is, I should say, probably my favorite male character in any Dickens novel I've read . I mean -- he is so far. I'm not through with the novel yet.

I'd like to identify myself with Arthur Clennam, just because he seems to be so caring, and so interested in getting things done, and so interested in serving people. But I think I identify more with the weaknesses in Little Dorrit and Danny Doyce, while also aspiring to their flashes of genius.

The soldier in my dream is obviously taking his actions from Mr. Meagles. Standing in front of Meagles, who is complaining about the demands of the business woman (who could be my dream version of the Circumlocution Office), I could be Doyce, or I could be Clennam. I don't know who I am. Or Meagles could be one aspect of myself, embodied in the soldier, and I, seeing through "my eyes," could be another aspect of myself, as either Doyce or Clennam. But I don't know which.

It's pretty funny. I never end with a very clear picture of what my dreams are trying to say.

irresponsibly overly responsible

Good morning, everybody.

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

The ideas both of travelling and of the North of Italy are about the only dream images that stand out for me very easily. I believe I took the ideas from the Charles Dickens novel Little Dorrit, which I'm currently reading. The book begins with a group of travelers who are in quarantine in Marseilles. They get out of quarantine, head back to England, and go their separate ways. But through the course of the book, they all seem to weave their ways back into each others' lives.


One of the characters is John Baptist Cavalletto, a man from Italy. So I obviously took Italy to be "North of Italy" in my dream. I'm not sure why. And I probably distorted "Cavalletto" into "Svetlana," though, again, I don't know why.


I think the idea of travelling struck me because I think a lot about travelling. I also never took much time to travel during my life. I basically left college when I was twenty, moved to New York City, spent a few years there, then moved around a little bit, but not much, in the United States, doing nature work. After that I moved back to New York and continued doing nature work. But I ended up getting involved in an office job and stagnating in New York from about 2006 through 2011.


But the way I speak about travelling in the dream seems to me to signify my own personal travelling, my own personal search for some place or situation that will accept me. I don't feel accepted right now. Part of that may be my own problem. Maybe I don't accept my situations well enough for them to accept me. Or maybe I don't accept myself well enough for myself to be accepted in my life situations. But there's also a possibility that I am still looking for a situation in life that's right for me. And I think this is what travelling means in my dream.

Of course, I'm not really travelling, I'm only talking about it! And either my talk is so boring that the person I'm talking to goes into the bathroom to avoid my talking, or else my attitude is so inconsiderate that I talk a person all the way into the bathroom without even noticing that the person is trying, in spite of my talking, to take care of something else. Interesting how I want to be accepted, but how I'm so tactless that I'll talk someone all the way into the bathroom. What?

The person sitting outside the bathroom is the Isabella Rossellini character from the film Blue Velvet. In Blue Velvet, the character is named Dorothy Vallens. I think part of the reason the Dorothy Vallens character appeared in my dream is because I was listening to a little bit of Ritchie Valens over the past couple days, including the song "Donna." It may have occurred to me at some point that if Ritchie Valens had married the Donna of the song, her name would have been Donna Valens, very close to the Dorothy Vallens of Blue Velvet.

But the Rossellini character's name is Svetlana in my dream. I'm really not sure what that means. But Svetlana keeps the same kind of panicked character that Dorothy Vallens has in Blue Velvet. Obviously, that kind of panicked attitude is what I was looking to express, as well.

I think that I am supposed to identify with Svetlana in the dream. I come to dinner with a woman. Svetlana is also at dinner with a woman. Neither the woman I'm with nor the woman Svetlana is with make themselves very visible. And the things that I say personally, even though I'm not directing them at all to Svetlana, can get Svetlana in trouble. All of this points to the idea that I'm identified with Svetlana, or that she's some other part of my personality.

I'm apparently talking about travel as an opportunity to search out places that will accept me for who I am. But when I talk about travel, this other aspect of myself warns me off from talking about it, because it will apparently stop me from performing my job as well as I could.

This is the part of me, then, that kind of drives me to keep my head down all the time, keep myself working all the time, until I'm so overworked that I'm a nervous wreck and that I do things like explode on the job and walk out of perfectly decent situations. It has to do with an emotional imbalance, I know. I can't balance working life with an emotional life outside of work. I tend to bring all my emotions into all my spheres of life. I can't separate anything. That in itself can be exhausting.

But I do this because I don't know any other way to act. And I guess the goal of my life -- right now -- is to find the way to balance those different aspects of my life. I really don't even know how to start. I really don't even know if I have a clear idea about things.

I think that's part of the reason a story like Little Dorrit touches me so much. Little Dorrit is a twenty-two-year-old woman who still looks like a little child. She works like crazy to provide for her father, who is stuck in debtor's prison. Little Dorrit still actually lives with her father in the debtor's prison, and only goes out during the day -- even though she can go out whenever she wants -- to perform her job.

But Little Dorrit is, or at least is seen to be, immature in other than physical ways. She doesn't seem to know how to function in the social world, how to recognize even the most basic customs of adult life. This definitely reminds me of myself.

But it also reminds me of something I spoke about in a previous post, where I mentioned a news article about a center here in Denver that helps people under the age of eighteen get over their drug addictions and start a normal life. One of the young men in that article spoke about how just being able to learn the normal aspects of the day-to-day responsibilities of an adult is hard work.

I could identify with the boy on that point. All through my life I've felt like doing just fulfilling normal adult responsibilities was something magic -- something beyond my grasp. I think it's part of the reason I overwork myself at jobs. I'm just trying to be a normal human being, and I don't know how. So I just go double-time on everything I do know how to do. And I end up driving myself into the ground.

The weird thing is, that I believe most people around me would say I'm a fairly responsible person. I'm not sure why people say that about me. I certainly don't feel like I'm very responsible at all.

The manager in my dream comes, strangely enough, from another character in Little Dorrit, a character named Maggy. Maggy is twenty-eight years old. But mentally she's a ten year old. She even insists to people that she's ten years old. She called Little Dorrit her "Little Mother." But she's much bigger and stockier than Little Dorrit -- and she's actually six years older than Little Dorrit!

Of course the Maggy character seems to me like an interesting variation on my fetish theme of the adult baby. But Maggy fits in with this theme running throughout Little Dorrit of little children caring for big babies. When Dickens mentions this, he means undersized children taking care of their younger siblings who, for some reason, are enormous for their age! It again highlights this over-responsibility of Little Dorrit, which is offset by Dorrit's own immaturity in some aspects.

But for some reason, my mental image of Maggy translated itself -- and softened itself, quite a bit! -- into the image of the manager in my dream. I'm not sure what it means. But my instinct is telling me this is the case.

I was pretty interested in the woman behind the espresso machine, as well. I'm not sure who she is or where she comes from. But I liked her. I actually liked all the women in that dream. They were all interesting.

I didn't intend to work so much on this dream.

The only other thing I wanted to mention is that I'm planning on making drawings for some of my dreams. The drawings will probably be crude, but I think I'll get better at them as I get comfortable with them. I would like to make one drawing for each dream journal entry. But I'm not sure how I'll do at that. So I'll aim for at least making two or three a week.

But I think I am going to begin, actually, by going back to some of my more visited dream journal entries, and making drawings for those dreams first. I'm not sure why I decided to do that.

Anyway, as I make drawings for dream journal entries, if the entries are from the past, I'll go ahead and put a little notice in my dreamday journal, so that anybody who wants to see the drawings can take a look at them.