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.

twisted fantasies with missing friends

Good morning, everybody.

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

Um... first of all, Billy Corgan is not dead. Thank God!

I checked the news just now. I guess the news that's out there on Billy Corgan is that he and the rest of Smashing Pumpkins are releasing a new album called Oceania on June 19th.

I would say that Billy Corgan was on my mind, first of all because of the comment I made in the dream -- which I'd noticed with some sort of devilish glee in waking life -- that Elena Anaya looks like Billy Corgan on the poster for the Almodovar forced-fem film La Piel Que Habito.

But I have also thought about Corgan a lot, as I've been listening to the song "Stand Inside Your Love" from the Smashing Pumpkins album Machina: The Machines of God quite a bit.

I think part of the idea of the killer comes from my reading in the news yesterday about the trauma surgeon from Buffalo, New York, who is being sought -- country-wide! -- as a person of interest in the shooting death of his ex-girlfriend.

And I guess -- there's a story about Jello Biafra, I believe, how when he and the Dead Kennedys got really famous, that Biafra got jumped and beat up by a whole bunch of his "fans" outside a club one night. The "fans" beat up Biafra as a punishment for, in their minds, selling out.

Yesterday afternoon I was looking through the Taschen book of photos by Pierre et Gilles. One of the photos shows a beautiful, wealthy-looking couple in front of a sunset in the 1970s. The photo is highly stylized. But the background looks like the interior of the Mabuhay club, where Bruce Conner photographed a lot of punk shows.

In fact, the hairstyles of the guys in the punk photos weren't too far different from the hairstyle of the guy in the Pierre et Gilles photo. I got the feeling, looking at the Conner punk photos, that the people going to these punk shows were people who'd sooner or later have job-jobs in offices, and be sell-outs, just like they'd accused Biafra of being a sell-out. Looking at the Pierre et Gilles photo just cemented that idea in my mind.

I can't really say, though, why all of that transferred itself onto Billy Corgan.

The dream that struck me the most, however, was the "Orange" dream. I found it interesting that the company I was going to work for was called "Orange." I could make a few assumptions about that offhand.

First of all -- the Google Blogger format involves a lot of orange.

Second -- there are two music videos I've been watching on YouTube lately that involve the color orange. One is the video "Colors," by the artist Utada Hikaru.

There is a line in the song that goes "orenji iro no yuuhi wo tonari de miteru dake de," which, in my limited understanding of Japanese, means something like "do you remember seeing the orange sunset?" Or "sunrise." I'm not sure.

I love this song quite a bit. But, for some reason, the use of the word "orange" in it bugs me. I really have no idea why.

There's another j-pop song which uses the color orange. It's a song called "Milk Chapon," by the artist Yuu Takahashi.

But even with these songs, I really have no idea why "orange" entered my dream in such a forceful way.

A little history on myself relating to this dream -- I think it comes out pretty clear in the dream -- is that I worked in the Equity Research industry for a few years. I worked first at a large bank, where I met the friend in my dream.

I'd actually worked my way up from being a temporary employee to being a permanent Administrative Assistant, to being a first-level Financial Analyst. When the financial crisis first hit, I got laid off from that bank.

I was unemployed for a while, then moved to a smaller firm. I was actually promoted to a higher position, that of Associate, while I was at that firm. But, for some reason I got pretty close to having a nervous breakdown, and I left the firm.

I was unemployed for a good number of months. I had decided (for personal reasons) not to go on unemployment. I spent all the money I had in my bank account. Penniless, I came back home.  I got a job unrelated to Equity Research in my hometown of Denver, Colorado. But I miss New York, and I miss the work I was doing out there.

Yesterday, there was a conference in Denver related to the industry I was doing research on at the smaller firm. I contacted my old boss, to see if he was in Denver. But he hadn't come to the conference.

I then thought of my old friend ES. I thought I might see if there were any Denver conferences related to the industry she's now covering in the near future. I thought if there were, I'd try to see if I could see her for a few minutes while she was out here. I would really love to see my old friend.

So, to counteract the sadness I had when I thought of my old friend, I obviously had a dream with my friend in it. It was a fantasy dream, in a sense, because it had me working for her, which would be kind of like heaven for me, even though I don't think it would ever happen. The reasons for it not happening in the dream, though, are far from the reasons for it not happening in reality. The reasons in my dream are, obviously, part of my own personal insecurities.

I think one reason this dream came on so strong, as well, was that I watched the David Cronenberg film Spider last night. In the first scene of the film there are a bunch of people getting off a train. One of the women looks a lot like my friend. And when Spider (played by Ralph Fiennes) gets off the train, I feel a lot like him. I feel crazy, isolated, completely out of the stream of the rest of society.

I think the vision of my friend's crotch in the dream come from my reading in the news about a Representative in the state of Michigan who was barred from speaking in the Michigan state House of Representatives because, during her remarks on an abortion rule, she mentioned her vagina.

This seems obviously stupid to me. How could somebody not be allowed to discuss vaginas during a debate on abortion? Anybody who can't think about a vagina cannot by any means say that they are making an educated, informed decision about abortion laws. It's stupid. And it is one of those things that, while appearing to promote an image of increased professionalism, serves really to bar women from a certain level of professionalism by labeling a certain part of their body itself as being unprofessional.

I don't know why that image had to connect to my old friend in this dream. She's a woman, and she's extremely professional, and nobody has of yet done anything to keep her from achieving basically everything she's wanted to achieve. I admire my friend a lot.

The dream ends with a fantasy of me being an adult baby for my friend. I think that would really make my friend sick if she ever heard about it.

Another old friend that I miss in New York then showed up in my last dream of the night. She tended bar at a karaoke bar I would always go to. I love to sing karaoke, and I actually do a lot of Japanese karaoke, even though I don't really know how to speak Japanese (imagine the agony for listeners to that!). I had a huge crush on my friend -- of course I'd never tell her something like that. I wouldn't want to bug her with that. But now that I can't see her, I miss her a lot.

And, of course, I miss my ex-girlfriend H, even though we still talk from time to time.

The only other image I wanted to talk about was the goslings. In my walks through my neighborhood, I actually pass two geese who are raising their little goslings. The goslings, actually, aren't so little anymore. They're about three-quarters the size of their parents. But they still have their immature feathers: kind of pea-yellow and black feathers, all scruffy looking.

I just think the goslings I walk past in waking life are so cute! I'm not sure why they end up so distorted in my dream. Or -- why they end up talking. Weird.