the secret of my flower

Good morning, everybody.

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

There were two main images that struck me in last night's dream: the grey aspect of the young man, and the weird "lingerie" attached to the cowgirl boots.

The cowgirl boots are white leather. The strap attached to them is a crepe-like lingerie material that is pink at the edges and white toward the center. That color style is common, I think, to lingerie and, I believe, to women's clothes in general. Then, in the center of that strap, is a flower.

I can see a lot of influences from my waking life on the lingerie itself. The lingerie somehow reminded me, as I woke up, of an image in the Pedro Almodovar film Que He Hecho Yo Para Merecer Esto?, which I watched a few nights ago. The film is about a working-class family in Spain. The father is a taxi driver, and the mother does all kinds of cleaning jobs.

There are a couple of children in the family, both boys. The younger boy is only about eleven or twelve years old, but he apparently carries on all kinds of homosexual relationships. A woman living across the hallway from the family works as a prostitute and is one of the wife's best friends.

One night, the older brother says he'll give the neighbor 10 pesetas (?) worth of heroin if she'll try to attract his brother. So the neighbor takes the younger brother home after he has come home too late (from a romantic adventure) to have dinner with his own family.


The neighbor makes dinner for the younger brother. The neighbor also gets dressed up "special" for dinner -- wearing an item of lingerie that's supposed to make her look like a bride. But it's mostly a white teddy with pink fringes and a veil over the crown of the head. This white and pink piece of lingerie influenced the image of the weird lingerie in my dream.


The flower itself I think comes from the cover for the soundtrack for the movie Magnolia. Of course, the main image on that cover is a big magnolia flower. Yesterday I spent a little time singing some songs. One of the songs I sang was Aimee Mann's "Save Me," which is one of the main songs in that soundtrack.

Speaking of flowers, I would like to say that the image of the fading from pink at the edges to white at the center isn't just an image from clothing or familiar to clothing. One flower I love, the dogwood flower, has, for some species, a fading of pink at the edges to white at the center.


But this year -- I'm not sure why it was this year -- I've noticed a lot of varieties of roses out there with a pattern of fading from a darker color at the edges to a lighter color at the center. Many fade from pink to white. But there are some that fade from red to yellow or even orange to yellow. I'm sure that's a usual pattern with certain rose varieties every year. But for some reason it didn't really strike me as being a pervasive thing until this year.


I'm not sure why I had cowgirl boots as an image of my dream. But I would say that, for all the Jung I've read, one of the very few things I always have in my mind is the idea Jung had that footwear in dreams is often an image relating to a person's ability to adapt socially to the world around him.


My overall goal for the dream was to find women's clothing. The boots are really nice. And if footwear is thought of as a person's basic contact with the world, the place where our feet hit the ground, then maybe what the dream is saying is that my worry could be less about finding lingerie and more about finding a way to identify socially in the world around me. I'm really not sure.


What's interesting though about the boots being connected by the strap, which is supposed to be lingerie somehow, is that the strap is centered with a flower. If the flower is a symbol for a vagina, and the vagina is right in the center of this strap, and the strap is, like I said in my entry, about a meter long (maybe it was longer than that), then it's possible that either side of the strap would go along my inner legs and that the flower would become my vagina.


In other words, I think this weird piece of lingerie, rather than being a piece of lingerie, is some kind of sex-change device (I mean, not really, but metaphorically). But what's strange about it is that the most concrete things about it are the boots. But does that mean that the social adaptation makes the sexual identification, or that the sexual identification makes the social adaptation?

I could easily see the two sides of the strap as something like the aorta (?) arteries, the big arteries that flow down the center of our legs. These arteries are essential to life, or at least essential to the legs, I'd guess. Anyway, if a big artery like that is blocked, or if it stops functioning, a person can die. That's pretty obvious.


So, in this dream, if the flower is at the center of these straps, and the straps flow down to the boots, does the "blood" from this center, this "vagina," create the social identity? Or, because the cowgirl boots, the most concrete, most identifiable part of this outfit, are so "real," do they stabilize, and thus stand as responsible for or the creators of, the feminine arteries that lead up to this "vagina?" I really don't know.


The other aspect of the dream which is interesting is the grey man. The grey man seems like he's either insane or on drugs. He has that quality in common with two other characters from my recent dreams. One is an old man in the fifth dream of this dream journal entry. The other is Mr. Rogers himself, from the second dream of this dream journal entry.


I think that in both of those dreams I was pretty at a far distance from the man. In this dream I start out at a distance from the man. I try to avoid him. But he eventually overtakes me, grabs me, and tries to have sex with me.


Why is the man grey? I think this is partly in reaction to my own reflections on some of my other dreams. In one of the dreams, I'm a woman. I'm in a room where no lights are on. The only light comes from the moon. It makes everything, including myself, look blue. In another dream, I've met Michael Jackson in a basement storage or janitorial area. The fluorescent light is so dim down in that room that everything, including Michael Jackson, looks green. In this dream, a lot of the environment is grey. So I think I made the man grey, to match my thoughts about the other dreams.


But the fact that the man is grey reminds me also of the concept of the "classic grey" alien, probably the most popular face for the modern conception of what an extraterrestrial being would look like. In that case, the attempted rape scene in my dream would be something like an attempted alien abduction.


But I don't think the scene is anything like a reenactment of an actual abduction. Rather, what I think is that the alien in my dream stands for an alien sexual urge. This "alien," or unconscious, instinct, which is really just a part of myself, grabs a hold of me and tries to get me to have sex, or unite with it. I break free of the instinct and basically tell it, "No means no!"


What's interesting, too, is that the alien doesn't, for instance, pull down my pants. Instead, he lifts up my shirt and strokes my stomach and chest. He's pressing himself against my back, and probably against my bottom, too. But he doesn't necessarily seem too worried about having sex with me right away. He seems more interested in seducing me. And he seems to want to do so by stroking my stomach and chest. This doesn't mean, of course, that if I'd been motionless, or too weak to push away, that he wouldn't have eventually pulled down my pants and screwed me...


But after I tell the alien I'm not interested, he follows me, yelling after me the whole time. I think part of the reason for this is that the alien instinct is probably my shadow instinct. That's another one of the few Jungian concepts my feeble mind has been able to carry along with it through the years. The shadow is the part of ourselves that we don't acknowledge, because it is the stuff about ourselves we would feel ashamed to acknowledge. The grey of the alien in my dream may come from his character as the shadow.


So the shadow was trying to integrate with my conscious. That's actually a good thing, a healthy thing, when the shadow and conscious ego integrate. But when I don't allow the shadow to integrate, he follows me, like a rude guy on the street, following a girl who spurned him, calling her a whore, and so forth. Of course, he's not calling the girl a whore so much as trying to pull her down from what he sees as her pedestal, so she won't think she's "too good" to have sex with him.


That's a pretty silly tactic men use. But the alien, as my shadow, proceeds to use it with me. He's trying to pull me down from my pedestal, or break me out of my shell, so that I won't try to integrate with whatever is embodied in my fetishism, and I will try to integrate with him.


But for some reason, the alien has been trying to get me to integrate with him by stroking my stomach and chest -- in other words, my upper body. He follows me to the place where all the women's clothes are. And when I finally pull up the weird lingerie, which I think is an article of clothing that is finally good enough for me, it's completely related to my lower body. The most concrete thing about it is the footwear. The rest of it is a system that basically connects the crotch to the footwear by a lingerie equivalent of arteries.


So I break away from the alien after he tries to seduce my upper body, and I go to a place where I find a new lower body. That all seems like a pretty easy dynamic. But I guess there are still parts -- as always with my dreams -- that I don't understand.

underhanded guide of souls

Good morning, everybody.

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

But it's also related to a few of my other posts, as I have not made entries for them. This was mainly because image parallels just haven't popped to mind for me for a lot of these dreams. When they do, they seem so obvious. I feel kind of silly.

I think, for instance, that my previous dream entry is influenced very much by the video for "If the Canary Stops Singing," by the Heart-Sick Groans. Especially the image in the video where the canary escapes from the cage in the mine.

I actually put this video into a playlist I made on YouTube on Sunday. The playlist is built around the song "Adia," by Sarah McLachlan.

I got the urge to listen to that song after deciding to name a character in a story I wrote for Smashwords Avia Sokratis. The name Avia Sokratis is actually based on the concept of the Shavio-Socratic dialogue, which was the name that George Bernard Shaw gave to a lot of the heady dialogue portions of his plays.

The Story I wrote, which is called "Slumber Party International," was based on recent news surrounding the announcement that CERN is planning to give on July 4th regarding the potential discovery of the controversial Higgs boson. In all the newspaper articles surrounding this announcment, there is constant mention of a pajama party being held by Columbia University in anticipation of the announcement.

This slumber party reminded me of the Harry Potter and Twilight parties. I kind of got excited imagining a "what if" scenario, where all the Harry Potter and Twilight parties were brought together, via the internet, to make a kind of global slumber party in anticipation of the potential Higgs boson announcement. What if people could be that excited about a scientific announcement?

Anyway, the story I had in my head was going to be this huge kind of pop culture melange, and there were going to be a bunch of heady discussions, which were largely going to be moderated by the girl who was kind of acting as the hub for all these internet interactions. So the name I gave her was based on the Shavio-Socratic dialogue: Avia Sokratis.

I gave Avia a love interest, and decided to give her a bit of a broken heart, too. So when I did that, I decided that "Adia" would be Avia's song. Unfortunately -- as soon as I did that, I went to YouTube and listened to "Adia." I was so struck by the song, all over again, that I decided to build a playlist around it.

The playlist became centered around freedom and birds -- kind of a death fantasy, I think, especially if you think of the "Free as a Bird" song, by the Beatles. I think the bright light in the light fixture is supposed to be my soul. The heavy black chain and the black iron edges to the light fixture are all symbols of a soul's prison. There is a desire for the birdlike soul of light to be free of the cage and heavy chains.

And my dream journal entry from two days ago comes largely from the books I'd been reading, The Ship Who Sang, by Anne McCaffrey. The book is basically six stories about a woman who, at a very young age, had her brain transferred into the control system of a spaceship.

In the last story, the woman/spaceship, Helva, is convinced to go on one final mission for the government. McCaffrey basically presents Helva as being manipulated into the mission. In return for completing the mission -- or, rather, as an antecedent to her going on the mission -- Helva is given a propulsion system based on cutting edge technology. It will basically allow her to travel at unheard of speeds.

The technology Helva receives is a kind of bargaining chip. But the person bargaining with Helva is supposed to a be a kind of underhanded, but genuinely good-hearted person -- with whom Helva is in love. So the manipulation is supposed to be a kind of example of the dirty mind games people play on each other, sometimes, during the ritual of seduction.

But I was struck by how this bargaining chip seemed like too good a product to be used as an example of the man's underhandedness. Instead, the whole scene reminded me of a statement in Marshall McLuhan's book Understanding Media, where McLuhan talks about the travelling salesman's simple faith in his products.

Of course, the travelling salesman, in McLuhan's mind, is a thing of the past. Because nowadays what's being sold isn't necessarily the product, but the experience surrounding the product. The advertising promotes a process rather than a product. And I think that Alvin Toffler would probably say, slightly differing from McLuhan, that the advertising promotes a lifestyle rather than a product.

Anyway, I've lately been debating back and forth with myself regarding the true nature of salesmanship. So I've been tossing around those little bits and pieces of McLuhan and Toffler that actually stuck in my head. And then to see the aspect of salesmanship brought up, in a sense, in McCaffrey's story, brought all that stuff back to the forefront of my mind.

In the dream I take the tack of the salesman with the simple belief in his product. The older man is, I believe, supposed to be a bit more like the underhanded salesman. My old friend KU appears in the dream, I believe, because she has always stood for me as the kind of person who could see through and despise any kind of dishonesty or underhandedness that I person would throw her way. So if I could be honest with KU and convince her of the goodness of some project, then it probably really would be good.

Also, I always had a crush on KU. So my ability to convince her would probably have a love aspect or a seduction aspect to it as well.

The theme of spying plays into my dream from last night. I think that's because I'm currently reading The Death of Sleep, by Anne McCaffrey and Jody Lynn Nye. The book is basically the story of a woman named Lunzie Mespil. Lunzie works in outer space as a Doctor. She makes travels to the far reaches of space.

But, in the course of two of her travels, Lunzie's ships are destroyed. In both instances, Lunzie is put into cryogenic sleep -- suspended animation -- until she can be rescued. In the first instance, Lunzie is asleep for 62 years. In the next, she's asleep for 10 years. In between her periods of sleep, Lunzie lives in and becomes acclimated to her new worlds -- she's like a tourist of multiple futures. She meets new people, finds new loves, and, eventually, learns how the family she's left behind has developed.

Lunzie also gets involved with efforts to stop a group of pirates that are menacing the galaxy. Last night I got up to a point in the novel where Lunzie works with someone else to obtain information from a spy. Lunzie herself is then sent out on a mission where she acts as something like a spy.

The spy aspect combines here with some of the movies I've recently watched, such as eXistenZ, by David Cronenberg, and Blue Velvet, by David Lynch, where the main characters are spying on people. In particular, I believe that the wood walls in my dream come directly from the "Trout Farm" segment of Existence.

But I think the fact that the spy is an Hispanic man comes from the Pedro Almodovar films I've recently watched, especially La Piel Que Habito. I'm not sure why this is. But I'm pretty sure that's the case.

Probably the most interesting aspect of the dream is the point where the man is drugged into a dream, and where, at that point, I either become the man or take the man's place. I really have no idea what that could be all about. The man is a spy. He gets caught as a spy. He gets drugged, then he wakes into a dream. At which point, I become him or take his place.

I would say that the spying would be looking into my unconscious. While I'm looking into my unconscious, my anima confronts me. When she confronts me, I deny who I am. But my anima drugs me so that I can't deny who I am. When she does that, she causes the "observing" side of my identity to join with the "acting" or "caught" side of my identity. Now the anima has me in one body. She decides to run tests on me.

I wonder -- you know, in Jungian psychology, there's the idea of a psychopomp, a guide of souls through the underworld. When you make an effort to understand yourself, your journey through your unconscious is sometimes typified as a journey guided by this psychopomp. In Jungian psychology, the psychopomp is often thought of as Hermes, Mercury, a male character. But in the case of this dream, could my anima actually be the psychopomp?

I'm not sure that she would be a psychopomp, a guide, still, since all she is really doing is running tests on me and drugging me. But it could still be a possibility.

a homeless house arrest fairy tale

Good morning, everybody.

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

Both these dreams have a theme which I think is common to literature. But I'm not sure what the common parallel is for this theme in America.

The theme is, of course, of taking the King's daughter for a bride. In this case, however, I'm taking the King's daughter for a girlfriend in both cases. And instead of it being a King's daughter, it's a President's daughter.

I would suppose that in America, as well as all over the modern world, the parallel to this theme would usually be taking the daughter of some extremely wealthy person, like the head of a global corporation, as a bride. But I'm pretty sure that the father in both dreams is supposed to be the President. In both dreams the father arrives with a whole squad of vehicles -- which I would think of as a motorcade. And in the first dream, the father even walks up the steps of the mansion with what appear to be a retinue of bodyguards.


I'd like to mention that the theme of bodyguards must also come from this video, by the megagroup Girls' Generation. I mentioned this video in my last post, as well. But at the beginning of the video, you'll see the girls surrounded by bodyguards.

Now, I kept thinking about making the joke in the comments section for this video, "Where's the part where they follow me until they love me?" But I figured either that that joke had been said a million times before, or else that the joke would lead to a whole bunch of useless anti/pro-Lady Gaga arguments which tend to sprout up on the comments section of just about any music video you can imagine on YouTube. So I kept the joke to myself.


The joke was a little more than a joke, since I'd be perfectly happy having Girls' Generation or Lady Gaga following me until I loved them. It wouldn't take very long in either case.

The whole video of Lady Gaga's Paparazzi does take place in a big mansion, too, which I think is interesting. The mansion also looks kind of like the White House at the beginning of the video, in my opinion. That might heighten the idea of the President theme in my dream.

Also, when I was at Pride Fest in Denver this week, one of the performances I loved was called Pride Idol, which was a karaoke contest for kids eleven years old and younger. It was a lot of fun.

But one of my favorite performances was by this boy who had his hair dyed blue, wore huge, blue, star-shaped shade-glasses (where, instead of there being lenses, there are strips of plastic like half-closed Venetian blinds), and tons of necklaces of metallic blue beads. This boy sang Lady Gaga's "Paparazzi," and he kept the lyrics that said, "I won't stop until that boy is mine." I thought that was great!

But I don't think the mansion in my dream really was based on the White House. I think it was based on the front of the Schwarzman branch of the New York Public Library, the big one with the lions in front of it.

The mansion in the dream was also related to the convent in the Almodovar film Entre Tinieblas (Dark Habits), especially at the end of the movie, where the view is from the outside at night, into the best preserved and decorated room in the convent. I watched this movie last night, so the images from this movie were obviously at the top of my mind.

Now in the dream, I was sleeping in front of the NYPL with a pile of blankets. In other words, I was sleeping like a homeless person on the streets. Now I'm pretty sure that the NYPL is careful about not letting  people sleep in front of the Schwarzman building. But other buildings, especially churches, are more permissive.

The side room in the dream, though, I think, is reminiscent of the New York Palace, one of my favorite buildings in New York. The left (north) wing of the New York Palace contains a little museum. The only time I went there was when they had a Jane Jacobs exhibit. I admired Jane Jacobs a lot at the time. But the exhibit wasn't so great.

But in the dream I am made to go into that side room and act like some kind of tour guide. I'm supposed to give some kind of talk -- I'm not even sure what -- about some place I know nothing about.

The first thing I think of again is the Schwarzman building. In 2008, I helped organize a presentation given by a global corporation. That evening, the corporation was also putting on a little party inside the Schwarzman building. I think that, in my role of organizer, I had to act like I knew what I was doing. I'm not sure if I knew what I was doing. But I suppose I did a good job. But I suppose that was also one of the times in my life where I felt like I could handle a lot more responsibility than I'd previously thought I could.

The Schwarzman is a kind of big symbol in my dreams, even though I seldom dream directly about the building. I first moved to New York in 1998. I spent a whole lot of my time inside the Schwarzman, studying mainly Sigmund Freud, George Bernard Shaw, Karl Marx, and William James. As time wore on, I ended up needing to study at other places, such as the Bobst Library of New York University.

But, especially once the economy started to tank, and I found myself with a lot of downtime, I went back to the Schwarzman building. And the place again became a center for a lot of my most important studies. But even though I was studying some of the most important literary figures of recent history, and even though I was in one of the most famous buildings in the world, I still felt like a little, poor, anonymous speck in life.

But -- even though my perception was false -- on the night I was at the Schwarzman, attending the big corporation's party, I felt like something had come around for me. I was in a building that (sorry, Mr. Schwarzman) I considered to be mine, and I was with a lot of wealthy people, enjoying a party for a big corporation. In some ways it was against a lot of the things I thought I believed in. But in some ways it was like a first step toward something I thought would be an attainable goal in my life.

I don't really feel anymore like that goal is attainable. And I think that's part of the reason I'm a homeless person, sleeping on the steps of the Schwarzman.

Now, the dream has a whole dynamic of the rich father coming up to me and telling me that I need to go lead a tour group  , and my actually going and trying to do it by throwing out questions which I hope will lead people into telling me enough that I can get an idea of how to improvise a speech that will make me look like I know what I'm talking about.

At first, when I woke up from this dream, I thought that I had been pretty original and clever in the dream. Unfortunately, though, I will say that most of the dynamic of this dream comes from the David Cronenberg film eXistenZ, which I watched a few nights ago and mentioned in a previous post.

Almost every film can, and probably has been, compared to a dream. So I made a pretty common judgment when thinking of eXistenZ as a dream. The two main characters in the film, a man and a woman, show two different ways of getting through dreams. One way is the kind of naive way, which I think I mostly take, where you just see and react to everything that happens. A lot of people -- a lot more than I ever would have guessed! -- actually seem to be able to reflect on their dreams and make creative and critical choices within their dreams. In eXistenZ, the man is the naive character and the woman is the thoughtful character.

I think in my dream I, admiring the woman character, wanted to try to be like her. So I tried to use a somewhat thoughtful, critical approach to my unknown situation.

But I think my approach to this situation also comes from waking life. In both of the positions I held in Equity Research, I was required to do a lot of research by phone -- calling up industry or government representatives all over the world and trying to get an idea of market trends from them -- sometimes about things that I knew little or nothing about.

My approach would often be to talk to these people, listen to the terminology they were using, and take any sort of reading material suggestions they would give me. I'd go through the terminology, go through the reading material, and brush up my own talking points with this material so that, the next time I got on the phone with somebody, I sounded a lot more like I knew what I was talking about -- even though I probably didn't. I never thought of myself as having learned more. Rather, I thought of myself during this process as honing more and more finely the presentation I was giving of myself to the people with whom I was conversing.

But I think this approach to things actually comes from one of the films I watched all throughout my childhood, Fletch, starring Chevy Chase.

In one of the scenes in this movie, Fletch walks into a dinner ceremony where he suddenly has to act as the Master of Ceremonies. He doesn't really have any idea what he's doing. And, of course, we as the audience can see he's doing a hilariously terrible job. But he somehow seems to fool the audience in the movie. I think I subconsciously took that aspect of Fletch as a strategy for my own personal life, from childhood all the way to the present.

I think there's one last image in the first dream that I'd like to discuss. The father figure in the dream is a "President image," I really believe. I believe that a King image must be taken up, in some, but not all instances, at least for Americans, by a President image. But I think the father figure in the dream is also a head of a corporation. I think he comes from the film The Man Who Fell to Earth, by Nicholas Roeg.

In this movie, David Bowie is an alien trying to get back to his home planet. He needs to get enough money to build a spaceship to take him home. So he uses a bunch of alien inventions to make money on earth. But the person who helps him run his company does a pretty bad job, and the company ends up getting taken over by another person, who looks very much like the father figure in my dram.

The David Bowie character, considered kind of a risk to the person who takes over the company, ends up being imprisoned in a series of rooms in a mansion for a number of years. He can have whatever he wants in the rooms. But he can't leave them.

Of course, as a paraphilic infantilist, an adult baby, I have a fantasy of being trapped in rooms, never allowed to leave them, but being given anything my babyish desires might imagine.

But I also have a weird fantasy, which I call the "hedgie fantasy." In this fantasy, I'm supposed to be some kind of genius hedge fund manager. But I have to hide my identity from everybody on the street. But my genius shines through, and everybody hates me, just because they can tell what I'm capable of. Eventually I have to hide myself from the world, isolate myself in a series of rooms. I'm incredibly rich, incredibly talented, maybe even incredibly powerful -- but I can't go anywhere, because in the outside world everybody hates me for my talent. This fantasy is very similar to The Man Who Fell to Earth.

I think that one of the reasons Aung San Suu Kyi is such a powerful figure in my mind is because she underwent house arrest for such a long time. The idea of a gifted figure like Suu Kyi being put under house arrest falls very much in line with my "hedgie fantasy."

So, all of those images combine in my dream. I'm not sure how to untangle all of it, though.

There's only one other image I'd like to discuss today. It comes from a commerial on YouTube. The commercial is for the Superfly album Mind Travel. The lead singer for Superfly, Shiho Ochi, is standing before a projection of an image of a desert road. Images of Superfly music videos are being projected onto Shiho Ochi's clothes.

The idea of "mind travel" reminds me of astral projection or remote viewing. So I think I imagined myself projecting out onto the desert road on the cover of/in the commercial for Mind Travel. But, again, I'm not sure how this pieces together with the "President's daughter" fantasy that makes up the "plot" of this dream.

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...