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.
Monday, July 9, 2012
Sunday, July 8, 2012
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.
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.
Saturday, July 7, 2012
virtual submissive
Good morning, everybody.
This post is related to this entry in my dream journal.
The image that stuck in my head the most from the dreams was the image of me floating over the city, using some sort of video-game-like viewing device to track all the people in the cars and on the sidewalks below me.
This image, I believe, comes from the fact that on Thursday I published a story called "Job Hunter" on the self-publishing website Smashwords. The story is about two people who protect a large-scale virtual reality system that is still in the process of development. The VR system is used for work purposes: people play games to control robots, and the robots do work, such as manufacturing work.
One of the characters, Trent, uses a monitoring system at the beginning of the story to track the people coming onto the system for work. This system kind of projects images onto the parts of the landscape where people are going.
Of course, the image has its origin in a few other places. For instance, all the talk about Google's computer-screen eyeglasses is something that's always fueling my fantasies. And, of course, in the William Gibson novel Spook Country, one of the main characters, Bobby Chombo, uses a virtual reality helmet to show people various celebrity crimes that had occurred at various locations in, I believe Los Angeles.
So the image wasn't original. But it was a lot of fun to play with in my dream.
The roommate I have in my dream comes from my having watched a 1996 documentary called Fetishes three nights ago.The documentary shows the day-to-day activities in a New York City fetish parlor called Pandora's Box. The fetish parlor is run by dominant women -- mistresses -- who cater to submissive clients. The clients have all sorts of tastes, all sorts of fetishes. The only requirement is that they must want to be dominated, they must want to be submissive.
One of the characters in the film is a man just like the man in my dream. He has a "mummification" fetish, where he basically gets his body almost entirely wrapped in Saran Wrap. He seemed like a really nice guy. But I'm not really sure why, out of all the people in the movie (and I liked almost everybody in the movie), I had to identify with this guy.
Another character does, though, show up in my fourth dream. The older man in that dream turns into a younger man at one point. At this point he resembles a man, who, in Fetishes, had a wrestling fetish. But he apparently thought he was going to smart around and, instead of being submissive, actually try to hurt one of the women. The woman got the man off him. But the man stalked off angrily, because the woman wouldn't let him dominate her. But the requirement of Pandora's Box is that you must want to submit.
I think this matches a lot with the themes of my dream. The man is causing trouble in the theater. So he's being kicked out. But he wants to get violent with the proprietor, who is really a weak, old man. But I confront the man instead. At this point he becomes the wrestler from Fetishes. I'm not sure why, but he and I work something out so -- some kind of compromise -- so that he doesn't have to leave, even though he doesn't go back into the theater.
The sex scene in my first dream probably comes from a movie I watched two nights ago -- The Abnormal Female. It's basically an old porn movie from the 1960s. The premise is one of the usuals: a group of women go in to talk with a "psychiatrist" one by one, revealing their sexual escapades to him. The sexual escapades are then shown. The film is largely boring as hell. But toward the end there are some decent lesbian scenes.
In these lesbian scenes there are some close-ups of the girls' hips moving in a nice rhythm together. It's really sensual. And I think I carried that image with me, in some way, to the imagery of me in bed with H.
This post is related to this entry in my dream journal.
The image that stuck in my head the most from the dreams was the image of me floating over the city, using some sort of video-game-like viewing device to track all the people in the cars and on the sidewalks below me.
This image, I believe, comes from the fact that on Thursday I published a story called "Job Hunter" on the self-publishing website Smashwords. The story is about two people who protect a large-scale virtual reality system that is still in the process of development. The VR system is used for work purposes: people play games to control robots, and the robots do work, such as manufacturing work.
One of the characters, Trent, uses a monitoring system at the beginning of the story to track the people coming onto the system for work. This system kind of projects images onto the parts of the landscape where people are going.
Of course, the image has its origin in a few other places. For instance, all the talk about Google's computer-screen eyeglasses is something that's always fueling my fantasies. And, of course, in the William Gibson novel Spook Country, one of the main characters, Bobby Chombo, uses a virtual reality helmet to show people various celebrity crimes that had occurred at various locations in, I believe Los Angeles.
So the image wasn't original. But it was a lot of fun to play with in my dream.
The roommate I have in my dream comes from my having watched a 1996 documentary called Fetishes three nights ago.The documentary shows the day-to-day activities in a New York City fetish parlor called Pandora's Box. The fetish parlor is run by dominant women -- mistresses -- who cater to submissive clients. The clients have all sorts of tastes, all sorts of fetishes. The only requirement is that they must want to be dominated, they must want to be submissive.
One of the characters in the film is a man just like the man in my dream. He has a "mummification" fetish, where he basically gets his body almost entirely wrapped in Saran Wrap. He seemed like a really nice guy. But I'm not really sure why, out of all the people in the movie (and I liked almost everybody in the movie), I had to identify with this guy.
Another character does, though, show up in my fourth dream. The older man in that dream turns into a younger man at one point. At this point he resembles a man, who, in Fetishes, had a wrestling fetish. But he apparently thought he was going to smart around and, instead of being submissive, actually try to hurt one of the women. The woman got the man off him. But the man stalked off angrily, because the woman wouldn't let him dominate her. But the requirement of Pandora's Box is that you must want to submit.
I think this matches a lot with the themes of my dream. The man is causing trouble in the theater. So he's being kicked out. But he wants to get violent with the proprietor, who is really a weak, old man. But I confront the man instead. At this point he becomes the wrestler from Fetishes. I'm not sure why, but he and I work something out so -- some kind of compromise -- so that he doesn't have to leave, even though he doesn't go back into the theater.
The sex scene in my first dream probably comes from a movie I watched two nights ago -- The Abnormal Female. It's basically an old porn movie from the 1960s. The premise is one of the usuals: a group of women go in to talk with a "psychiatrist" one by one, revealing their sexual escapades to him. The sexual escapades are then shown. The film is largely boring as hell. But toward the end there are some decent lesbian scenes.
In these lesbian scenes there are some close-ups of the girls' hips moving in a nice rhythm together. It's really sensual. And I think I carried that image with me, in some way, to the imagery of me in bed with H.
Wednesday, July 4, 2012
wasting my breath
Good morning, everybody.
This post is related to this entry in my dream journal.
As usual, I'm kind of slow in recognizing the images from my own dreams. Yesterday, I wondered where the wood walls in my dream came from. It wasn't until later in the day that I remembered that one of my favorite blog sites, Fine Little Day, had a series of pictures of a workshop with wood walls just like the one in my dream.
I think I was looking forward to talking about that today. So last night's dream took another image of walls from a different post on Fine Little Day and put that in my dream. I think that's why I have the grainy, grey images on the walls in the second dream from last night.
When I woke up -- here's another example of my slowness -- I thought that the "standardized test" in my dream was either the ACT, SAT, or GRE. Now that I reflect on it, though, it was most likely the FINRA Series 86 test, which I had to pass in order to become a financial analyst in 2008.
I took the test in August of 2008 and failed it by two points. I retook it in September of 2008 and passed it easily. The first time I'd taken the test, I hadn't really studied for it. And, even still, I probably could have passed it. But I was just so paranoid about leaving my desk, and I really needed to go to the bathroom, that I ended the test 60 minutes early, without having double-checked my answers! So I went back in September of 2008, having studied a bit more, and having emptied my bladder completely before testing. And I did fine.
I could say -- like a lot of people thought -- that I came into that test with no financial background. But that isn't true. I had no formal education in finance. But by the time I took the test I'd been working with my company for almost three years. I'd read and studied everything I could get my hands on while I was at the company. I took company-based online tests. And I attended any sort of lecture or informational meeting the company put on. So I actually came into that test with probably about a beginner-level financial background.
Anyway, so I did fine on the test. But -- like I've said a million times before, I basically stopped working in the financial industry a little more than a year ago, in June of 2011. After leaving the position I was in at that time, I spent a lot of time in the libraries of New York City, trying to get back in touch with the studying mindset I'd left behind when I'd found myself suddenly falling into the financial industry in October of 2005.
One day, I was studying at the Science, Industry, and Business Library. Two girls were sitting across from me. They were studying for the FINRA Series 7 test, one of the tests you have to pass before you can take the Series 86.
The girls were talking about how recently FINRA had decided to make the Series 7 harder, because too many people were passing it. The idea the girls had was, I guess, that if you made the test harder, and fewer people passed it, you'd have less chance of stupid decisions causing another financial crisis.
But then one of the girls gave a "prime example" of someone for whom it was too easy to pass the test. He was a guy who'd come into a bank as a temporary administrative assistant. His goal in life had originally been to be a writer. He was made into a permanent administrative assistant. Then he wanted to be a made into an analyst. So he took all his FINRA tests and passed them -- with no financial experience!
Of course, that was my story, even though I'm sure I had it in common with other men and women. But the woman was talking about it as if it were plainly scandalous. I felt horrible. I just sat there silently listening to my story as if were a perfect example of all the low-class people Wall Street had let on board.
To be honest, I don't think FINRA was trying to make the Series 7 harder, as much as they were trying to update the Series 7 to reflect shifts in the skill and knowledge sets people felt needed to be emphasized in order to create a safer investment environment. But, still, when I heard the word "harder," I thought, Well, I'd obviously be too stupid to pass the new test, then.
I really don't think about going back into the financial industry, just mainly because I don't think there's any space for me there anymore. Besides, I'm not sure the environment is for me. If it were, I'm sure I would still be right where I was a year ago. I left of my own accord.
But I always wonder -- what would the new Series 7 test be like? Would I be able to pass it? The Series 7 test wasn't easy, but I passed it with a good comfort level. So I don't think my brain equates difficulty with the Series 7 like it does with the Series 86. So I think my dream changed the Series 7 with the Series 86 to make an atmosphere of performance anxiety.
Really, though, I wish I could stop harping on my old jobs all the time. I remind myself of the song "Better Be Quiet Now," by Elliott Smith. Except, at least he was at least singing about a love interest. I'm whining about a job. It's silly. And, even after a year, I'm still griping. It's pretty dumb.
This post is related to this entry in my dream journal.
As usual, I'm kind of slow in recognizing the images from my own dreams. Yesterday, I wondered where the wood walls in my dream came from. It wasn't until later in the day that I remembered that one of my favorite blog sites, Fine Little Day, had a series of pictures of a workshop with wood walls just like the one in my dream.
I think I was looking forward to talking about that today. So last night's dream took another image of walls from a different post on Fine Little Day and put that in my dream. I think that's why I have the grainy, grey images on the walls in the second dream from last night.
When I woke up -- here's another example of my slowness -- I thought that the "standardized test" in my dream was either the ACT, SAT, or GRE. Now that I reflect on it, though, it was most likely the FINRA Series 86 test, which I had to pass in order to become a financial analyst in 2008.
I took the test in August of 2008 and failed it by two points. I retook it in September of 2008 and passed it easily. The first time I'd taken the test, I hadn't really studied for it. And, even still, I probably could have passed it. But I was just so paranoid about leaving my desk, and I really needed to go to the bathroom, that I ended the test 60 minutes early, without having double-checked my answers! So I went back in September of 2008, having studied a bit more, and having emptied my bladder completely before testing. And I did fine.
I could say -- like a lot of people thought -- that I came into that test with no financial background. But that isn't true. I had no formal education in finance. But by the time I took the test I'd been working with my company for almost three years. I'd read and studied everything I could get my hands on while I was at the company. I took company-based online tests. And I attended any sort of lecture or informational meeting the company put on. So I actually came into that test with probably about a beginner-level financial background.
Anyway, so I did fine on the test. But -- like I've said a million times before, I basically stopped working in the financial industry a little more than a year ago, in June of 2011. After leaving the position I was in at that time, I spent a lot of time in the libraries of New York City, trying to get back in touch with the studying mindset I'd left behind when I'd found myself suddenly falling into the financial industry in October of 2005.
One day, I was studying at the Science, Industry, and Business Library. Two girls were sitting across from me. They were studying for the FINRA Series 7 test, one of the tests you have to pass before you can take the Series 86.
The girls were talking about how recently FINRA had decided to make the Series 7 harder, because too many people were passing it. The idea the girls had was, I guess, that if you made the test harder, and fewer people passed it, you'd have less chance of stupid decisions causing another financial crisis.
But then one of the girls gave a "prime example" of someone for whom it was too easy to pass the test. He was a guy who'd come into a bank as a temporary administrative assistant. His goal in life had originally been to be a writer. He was made into a permanent administrative assistant. Then he wanted to be a made into an analyst. So he took all his FINRA tests and passed them -- with no financial experience!
Of course, that was my story, even though I'm sure I had it in common with other men and women. But the woman was talking about it as if it were plainly scandalous. I felt horrible. I just sat there silently listening to my story as if were a perfect example of all the low-class people Wall Street had let on board.
To be honest, I don't think FINRA was trying to make the Series 7 harder, as much as they were trying to update the Series 7 to reflect shifts in the skill and knowledge sets people felt needed to be emphasized in order to create a safer investment environment. But, still, when I heard the word "harder," I thought, Well, I'd obviously be too stupid to pass the new test, then.
I really don't think about going back into the financial industry, just mainly because I don't think there's any space for me there anymore. Besides, I'm not sure the environment is for me. If it were, I'm sure I would still be right where I was a year ago. I left of my own accord.
But I always wonder -- what would the new Series 7 test be like? Would I be able to pass it? The Series 7 test wasn't easy, but I passed it with a good comfort level. So I don't think my brain equates difficulty with the Series 7 like it does with the Series 86. So I think my dream changed the Series 7 with the Series 86 to make an atmosphere of performance anxiety.
Really, though, I wish I could stop harping on my old jobs all the time. I remind myself of the song "Better Be Quiet Now," by Elliott Smith. Except, at least he was at least singing about a love interest. I'm whining about a job. It's silly. And, even after a year, I'm still griping. It's pretty dumb.
Tuesday, July 3, 2012
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.
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.
Friday, June 29, 2012
perverted leadership
Good morning, everybody.
This post is related to this entry in my dream journal.
In my second dream, I had a really hard time getting a strap for my backpack pulled up my right arm. The strap was too tight.
This image was directly related to an experience I had as I woke from my first dream. I had a sharp pain underneath my left shoulder blade. I wasn't sure what it was. But it hurt like crazy for about thirty seconds. Then it stopped.
This pain -- which was very much a part of my waking life, not a lingering image from a dream -- I mean, I was sitting up and rubbing my back -- is indicative of a heart attack. But I think the pain was psychosomatic rather than real.
The reason is, two nights ago, I watched the David Lynch film Blue Velvet. I also watched some bits and pieces of the film, as well as the special features documentary on the film, last night. At the beginning of the film, the main character's dad has a heart attack. He feels the pain in his neck, not in his shoulder.
It struck me as scary that he'd feel the pain in the neck. Probably because ever since, in early 2011, I got jumped by a group of kids (who did spend a lot of time punching me in the base and at the back of my head, as they were all the way around me in a circle, and just punched whatever part of me they could reach), I've felt like something bad will eventually happen to the base of my brain, and that I'll end up going insane or doing something really bad and violent because I've had my amygdala all screwed up or something.
So, for some reason, I think, just to keep myself from thinking about a heart attack being related to a pain in the neck, I removed the "heart attack pain" down from the neck to the shoulder blades, by using my own body.
Or -- maybe I had a real heart attack. I'd assume it's not unheard of for a 34-year-old to have a heart attack.
Another image from that second dream, the "sperm pipeline," comes from that first scene in Blue Velvet, too. The father is out watering his lawn when he has his heart attack. There's a kink in the hose, which, I guess, is supposed to be a metaphor for clogged arteries.
But I translated the image so that the hose becomes a pipeline -- a kinky pipeline, but with no kink in it -- and so that it carries sperm instead of blood. I'm not sure why, other than because it was a sex dream. Part of it may have to do with the fact that, when I first watched Blue Velvet, I thought that the ear Jeffrey found was a condom, like a used condom that had been left on the ground. I think the movie would basically have been the same if Jeffrey had just found a used condom instead of an ear. The movie seems to be about coming to terms with sexuality.
The other thing I think is interesting, though, about that sperm pipeline is that the two men who are having sex with each other in order to keep it running -- much just have so much sexual potency! I don't know what to say about it. Like with a lot of things in my dreams, while I'm in the dream I just seem to take things for granted. But when I woke up, I was just amazed with how much sperm those two guys were creating. Wow!
I think part of that might have to do with the fact that I was reading The Ship Who Sang, by Anne McCaffrey, last night. The Ship Who Sang is basically a series of short and long stories following the career of a woman who, born with extreme birth defects, has her body implanted into a spaceship. One of the woman's (Helva's) missions is to carry 300,000 embryos to various pioneer planets throughout the universe. That's obviously a lot of babies. So I think I translated that image into a "baby pipeline," or a "sperm pipeline."
The orgy, I think, also comes from another story in The Ship Who Sang. In this story, "Dramatic Mission," Helva is assigned to carry a group of actors to a planet that has no performance art of its own. In exchange for the humans teaching these aliens how to act (they perform Romeo and Juliet, of course), the aliens give the humans a new, secret form of energy.
But there are all kinds of scandals and intrigues on the trip over to the planet. And at the planet, the way the humans interact with the aliens is very weird, almost like a non-bodily transfer of energy -- which seems very much like an orgy in some more spiritual sense. So I think these scandals and the weird alien interactions combined and touched ground in my dream to make just a plain old orgy.
I think that the dream ends with what I at first expect to be a performance of Jesus Christ Superstar, but which ends up really being a performance of a musical for the cartoon Superbook, is due to my having read this story about the acting troupe as well.
But I'd also say that it's due to Blue Velvet. Near the beginning of the movie, a radio gives the station identification jingle, which sounds to me very much like a melody that might be heard in Jesus Christ Superstar. While I was watching the movie, I didn't quite articulate it to myself that way. But I did tell myself, That jingle really sounds like something from the late 1960s.
I actually think Jesus Christ Superstar isn't such a stretch for my imagination. The entire time I was watching Blue Velvet, I kept thinking of how much it must have been influenced by another film which used the song "Blue Velvet," Scorpio Rising, by Kenneth Anger. I'm not actually sure whether Lynch was influenced by Anger's film, to be honest with you. But the visual tastes seem to be a lot alike at times.
But what I didn't think of was that, the way Lynch plays with time periods and styles in Blue Velvet is a little bit similar to the way that Andrew Lloyd Webber plays with time periods and styles in Jesus Christ Superstar. In addition, Jesus Christ Superstar has a theme very much like that of the "Dramatic Mission" story in The Ship Who Sang: a bunch of people going out to some distant place to perform a classic story.
Here's the original opening for the Japanese version of Superbook, which is pretty hot.
And here's the opening for the American version, which is also pretty cool.
What also struck me as interesting about the dream was that the people toward the end of it recognized me somehow as their leader. But they had my intentions all mistaken. I had seen a cute girl. I didn't want her to think that I was a pervert because I was watching an orgy. So I backed up from the orgy so the cute girl would think I wasn't watching. Then everybody else watching the orgy just thought I was getting bored. So they decided to stop the orgy.
It's strange that I was in such a leadership position. But I also think I wasted my leadership in that instance.
I didn't want the girl to see me watching an orgy. And I was embarrassed because I was wearing girls' clothing. It was probably girls' clothing, too -- like for young girls, not for women, just given the pattern and the ruffles and so forth. Now, I did, apparently, want to watch the orgy. And I did want to wear the girls' clothing. But I didn't want the cute girl to see me doing all this stuff. The people I was hanging out with took this as their cue to stop it all.
But I think my problem is that, in actuality, I should want any girl I would be with to see all the perverted aspects of myself. If a girl can't deal with that stuff, then both she and I would be much happier understanding that far ahead of time. And people who look to me as a leader will, I hope, take me as being less of a sanctimonious prig if I can just accept myself for who I am and not be shy about advertising myself to the girls I like as being who I am.
Even in my dream I was, first of all, shocked that these people were looking at me as a leader and, second of all, regretful that they took my embarrassment as a sign of boredom. They seemed to carry out an action I didn't want them to carry out because they misunderstood the signals I was giving them.
I think that relates this group of people directly to the three "insubordinate identities" in my first dream. The fact that all three of these women are naked is, again, likely from Blue Velvet, from the scene where Isabella Rossellini comes walking through the lawn naked.
But the women also look a little bit robotic. I think they actually also come from an episode of the 1980s version of Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy, where Astro meets a part-robot detective named Sherlock Homespun. The detective has hair very much like the hair of the women in my dream.
Also, last Saturday, I went to the art gallery at the Arvada Center here in Colorado. The gallery is currently running an exhibition called Faces, Places, and Spaces. One of the works, by a woman named Marie Gibbons, is a series of masks, each showing a kind of mood or developmental stage of a person. The masks all seem to show the same girl going through these stages, although the girl may look vastly different based on the mood.
But one of the moods is called, I believe, "Limitation." In this mood, the girl has some kind of mechanical disk instead of an eye in her right eye socket. I think that this image -- an image of a partly robotic woman -- helped to create the image of the female identities in my first dream.
This post is related to this entry in my dream journal.
In my second dream, I had a really hard time getting a strap for my backpack pulled up my right arm. The strap was too tight.
This image was directly related to an experience I had as I woke from my first dream. I had a sharp pain underneath my left shoulder blade. I wasn't sure what it was. But it hurt like crazy for about thirty seconds. Then it stopped.
This pain -- which was very much a part of my waking life, not a lingering image from a dream -- I mean, I was sitting up and rubbing my back -- is indicative of a heart attack. But I think the pain was psychosomatic rather than real.
The reason is, two nights ago, I watched the David Lynch film Blue Velvet. I also watched some bits and pieces of the film, as well as the special features documentary on the film, last night. At the beginning of the film, the main character's dad has a heart attack. He feels the pain in his neck, not in his shoulder.
It struck me as scary that he'd feel the pain in the neck. Probably because ever since, in early 2011, I got jumped by a group of kids (who did spend a lot of time punching me in the base and at the back of my head, as they were all the way around me in a circle, and just punched whatever part of me they could reach), I've felt like something bad will eventually happen to the base of my brain, and that I'll end up going insane or doing something really bad and violent because I've had my amygdala all screwed up or something.
So, for some reason, I think, just to keep myself from thinking about a heart attack being related to a pain in the neck, I removed the "heart attack pain" down from the neck to the shoulder blades, by using my own body.
Or -- maybe I had a real heart attack. I'd assume it's not unheard of for a 34-year-old to have a heart attack.
Another image from that second dream, the "sperm pipeline," comes from that first scene in Blue Velvet, too. The father is out watering his lawn when he has his heart attack. There's a kink in the hose, which, I guess, is supposed to be a metaphor for clogged arteries.
But I translated the image so that the hose becomes a pipeline -- a kinky pipeline, but with no kink in it -- and so that it carries sperm instead of blood. I'm not sure why, other than because it was a sex dream. Part of it may have to do with the fact that, when I first watched Blue Velvet, I thought that the ear Jeffrey found was a condom, like a used condom that had been left on the ground. I think the movie would basically have been the same if Jeffrey had just found a used condom instead of an ear. The movie seems to be about coming to terms with sexuality.
The other thing I think is interesting, though, about that sperm pipeline is that the two men who are having sex with each other in order to keep it running -- much just have so much sexual potency! I don't know what to say about it. Like with a lot of things in my dreams, while I'm in the dream I just seem to take things for granted. But when I woke up, I was just amazed with how much sperm those two guys were creating. Wow!
I think part of that might have to do with the fact that I was reading The Ship Who Sang, by Anne McCaffrey, last night. The Ship Who Sang is basically a series of short and long stories following the career of a woman who, born with extreme birth defects, has her body implanted into a spaceship. One of the woman's (Helva's) missions is to carry 300,000 embryos to various pioneer planets throughout the universe. That's obviously a lot of babies. So I think I translated that image into a "baby pipeline," or a "sperm pipeline."
The orgy, I think, also comes from another story in The Ship Who Sang. In this story, "Dramatic Mission," Helva is assigned to carry a group of actors to a planet that has no performance art of its own. In exchange for the humans teaching these aliens how to act (they perform Romeo and Juliet, of course), the aliens give the humans a new, secret form of energy.
But there are all kinds of scandals and intrigues on the trip over to the planet. And at the planet, the way the humans interact with the aliens is very weird, almost like a non-bodily transfer of energy -- which seems very much like an orgy in some more spiritual sense. So I think these scandals and the weird alien interactions combined and touched ground in my dream to make just a plain old orgy.
I think that the dream ends with what I at first expect to be a performance of Jesus Christ Superstar, but which ends up really being a performance of a musical for the cartoon Superbook, is due to my having read this story about the acting troupe as well.
But I'd also say that it's due to Blue Velvet. Near the beginning of the movie, a radio gives the station identification jingle, which sounds to me very much like a melody that might be heard in Jesus Christ Superstar. While I was watching the movie, I didn't quite articulate it to myself that way. But I did tell myself, That jingle really sounds like something from the late 1960s.
I actually think Jesus Christ Superstar isn't such a stretch for my imagination. The entire time I was watching Blue Velvet, I kept thinking of how much it must have been influenced by another film which used the song "Blue Velvet," Scorpio Rising, by Kenneth Anger. I'm not actually sure whether Lynch was influenced by Anger's film, to be honest with you. But the visual tastes seem to be a lot alike at times.
But what I didn't think of was that, the way Lynch plays with time periods and styles in Blue Velvet is a little bit similar to the way that Andrew Lloyd Webber plays with time periods and styles in Jesus Christ Superstar. In addition, Jesus Christ Superstar has a theme very much like that of the "Dramatic Mission" story in The Ship Who Sang: a bunch of people going out to some distant place to perform a classic story.
Here's the original opening for the Japanese version of Superbook, which is pretty hot.
And here's the opening for the American version, which is also pretty cool.
What also struck me as interesting about the dream was that the people toward the end of it recognized me somehow as their leader. But they had my intentions all mistaken. I had seen a cute girl. I didn't want her to think that I was a pervert because I was watching an orgy. So I backed up from the orgy so the cute girl would think I wasn't watching. Then everybody else watching the orgy just thought I was getting bored. So they decided to stop the orgy.
It's strange that I was in such a leadership position. But I also think I wasted my leadership in that instance.
I didn't want the girl to see me watching an orgy. And I was embarrassed because I was wearing girls' clothing. It was probably girls' clothing, too -- like for young girls, not for women, just given the pattern and the ruffles and so forth. Now, I did, apparently, want to watch the orgy. And I did want to wear the girls' clothing. But I didn't want the cute girl to see me doing all this stuff. The people I was hanging out with took this as their cue to stop it all.
But I think my problem is that, in actuality, I should want any girl I would be with to see all the perverted aspects of myself. If a girl can't deal with that stuff, then both she and I would be much happier understanding that far ahead of time. And people who look to me as a leader will, I hope, take me as being less of a sanctimonious prig if I can just accept myself for who I am and not be shy about advertising myself to the girls I like as being who I am.
Even in my dream I was, first of all, shocked that these people were looking at me as a leader and, second of all, regretful that they took my embarrassment as a sign of boredom. They seemed to carry out an action I didn't want them to carry out because they misunderstood the signals I was giving them.
I think that relates this group of people directly to the three "insubordinate identities" in my first dream. The fact that all three of these women are naked is, again, likely from Blue Velvet, from the scene where Isabella Rossellini comes walking through the lawn naked.
But the women also look a little bit robotic. I think they actually also come from an episode of the 1980s version of Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy, where Astro meets a part-robot detective named Sherlock Homespun. The detective has hair very much like the hair of the women in my dream.
Also, last Saturday, I went to the art gallery at the Arvada Center here in Colorado. The gallery is currently running an exhibition called Faces, Places, and Spaces. One of the works, by a woman named Marie Gibbons, is a series of masks, each showing a kind of mood or developmental stage of a person. The masks all seem to show the same girl going through these stages, although the girl may look vastly different based on the mood.
But one of the moods is called, I believe, "Limitation." In this mood, the girl has some kind of mechanical disk instead of an eye in her right eye socket. I think that this image -- an image of a partly robotic woman -- helped to create the image of the female identities in my first dream.
Thursday, June 28, 2012
violent disease
Good morning, everybody.
This post is related to this entry in my dream journal.
The most obvious image for me is the image of the severed hand. This comes directly from my having watched the film Blue Velvet, by David Lynch.
The movie's plot basically begins driving forward when the main character of the film, Jeffrey, finds a severed ear in a field. Jeffrey takes puts this ear in a paper bag and takes it to the police station.
There are a number of views of the ear throughout the film. The ear looks pale and bloodless. I think that's why the hand in my dream appears, even though layers of skin keep getting peeled and peeled away, never to get down to a level of pink flesh. I'm sure that the paper bag in the film translated into the plastic bag in my dream. But I'm not sure why.
I think part of the reason the severed ear was translated into a severed hand was due to the fact that I was reading about Aimee Copeland, the woman who has been in the news recently because of her fight against a flesh-eating bacteria. Aimee Copeland lost both her hands to the illness.
In the dream, the severed hand is exhibited in connection with a disease where a person's body burns up from the inside. Actually, in the dream disease, the heart locks up -- stops functioning altogether -- and then the body burns up from the inside. I'm not sure about the heart locking up. But the burning up from the inside sounds a lot like a description people give of what happens to a person on the drug bath salts, which has made the news a lot recently.
The biggest bath salts news seems to have been a case in Miami where a man has been accused of chewing off a large portion of another man's face. The man was originally said to have been on bath salts. However, when I looked up "bath salts" in the news just now, I was surprised to find that the man accused of this crime appears to have tested negative for the bath salts drug. It appears the only drug he was found to have tested positive for is marijuana.
Whenever I read the news and I find stories about people who've just gone completely crazy and committed all kinds of weird crimes, I tend to obsess over it. I wonder if I'd be capable of doing those kinds of things.
And when I overexert myself, I get really way too touchy and irritable, to the point where I sometimes wonder if I'm going a little insane. A few of my recent dreams have dealt with the subject of overexertion and being overly irritable. I also think this trait has been at the top of my mind because the book I just finished reading, Future Shock, spends a lot of time talking about the overexertion people of the present day might feel by being in a world of accelerating technological development.
I'm pretty sure that the weird images I had, first of flying in the air but not really being in a vehicle, and then of driving through the street but not really being in a vehicle, came from my reading last night in the book The Ship Who Sang, by writer Anne McCaffrey. In this book the main character Helva is born with serious birth defects. Like the many other people born like her, Helva is put into a mechanical shell and wired up to a spaceship. Helva is, in effect, the spaceship.
I think that my dream is kind of a way of imagining the flight of a vehicle like a spaceship or a car, from the "point of view" of the vehicle, as a way of trying to understand what the character Helva may have felt like. But I'm still feeling my own body -- which is why I'm having a hard time doing things like holding on to my notebook and so forth.
What I also find interesting -- even though I have no idea where it comes from -- is the recurring image of gossip in my dreams. I'm not sure why that appeared so strongly. I don't seek out gossip in the news. But I always tend to read sensationalist news. And that's kind of the same thing as gossip. So maybe that's what it is.
This post is related to this entry in my dream journal.
The most obvious image for me is the image of the severed hand. This comes directly from my having watched the film Blue Velvet, by David Lynch.
The movie's plot basically begins driving forward when the main character of the film, Jeffrey, finds a severed ear in a field. Jeffrey takes puts this ear in a paper bag and takes it to the police station.
There are a number of views of the ear throughout the film. The ear looks pale and bloodless. I think that's why the hand in my dream appears, even though layers of skin keep getting peeled and peeled away, never to get down to a level of pink flesh. I'm sure that the paper bag in the film translated into the plastic bag in my dream. But I'm not sure why.
I think part of the reason the severed ear was translated into a severed hand was due to the fact that I was reading about Aimee Copeland, the woman who has been in the news recently because of her fight against a flesh-eating bacteria. Aimee Copeland lost both her hands to the illness.
In the dream, the severed hand is exhibited in connection with a disease where a person's body burns up from the inside. Actually, in the dream disease, the heart locks up -- stops functioning altogether -- and then the body burns up from the inside. I'm not sure about the heart locking up. But the burning up from the inside sounds a lot like a description people give of what happens to a person on the drug bath salts, which has made the news a lot recently.
The biggest bath salts news seems to have been a case in Miami where a man has been accused of chewing off a large portion of another man's face. The man was originally said to have been on bath salts. However, when I looked up "bath salts" in the news just now, I was surprised to find that the man accused of this crime appears to have tested negative for the bath salts drug. It appears the only drug he was found to have tested positive for is marijuana.
Whenever I read the news and I find stories about people who've just gone completely crazy and committed all kinds of weird crimes, I tend to obsess over it. I wonder if I'd be capable of doing those kinds of things.
And when I overexert myself, I get really way too touchy and irritable, to the point where I sometimes wonder if I'm going a little insane. A few of my recent dreams have dealt with the subject of overexertion and being overly irritable. I also think this trait has been at the top of my mind because the book I just finished reading, Future Shock, spends a lot of time talking about the overexertion people of the present day might feel by being in a world of accelerating technological development.
I'm pretty sure that the weird images I had, first of flying in the air but not really being in a vehicle, and then of driving through the street but not really being in a vehicle, came from my reading last night in the book The Ship Who Sang, by writer Anne McCaffrey. In this book the main character Helva is born with serious birth defects. Like the many other people born like her, Helva is put into a mechanical shell and wired up to a spaceship. Helva is, in effect, the spaceship.
I think that my dream is kind of a way of imagining the flight of a vehicle like a spaceship or a car, from the "point of view" of the vehicle, as a way of trying to understand what the character Helva may have felt like. But I'm still feeling my own body -- which is why I'm having a hard time doing things like holding on to my notebook and so forth.
What I also find interesting -- even though I have no idea where it comes from -- is the recurring image of gossip in my dreams. I'm not sure why that appeared so strongly. I don't seek out gossip in the news. But I always tend to read sensationalist news. And that's kind of the same thing as gossip. So maybe that's what it is.
Wednesday, June 27, 2012
failure shock
Good morning, everybody.
This post is related to this entry in my dream journal.
The image that has stuck with me most from last night's dreams was the woman in the red dress. And what really struck me about her was just the way she had that, while most of her dress was very tight and form fitting, her left shoulder had a huge puff of fabric coming off of it.
I've lately been thinking of adding drawings, either to my dream journals or to my dreamday journals. Maybe this woman would be a good place to start. So I'll think about adding her in tonight or tomorrow or something.
Anyway, I know I've seen a dress just like that somewhere recently -- possibly from a blog I frequently look at -- Dust Jacket Attic -- or one of the fashion channels I frequently watch on YouTube.
The woman obviously stands as a goal or an end point in my dream. I can see her clearly, even though she's far away. And I can see her as if with my eyes, not in my "mind's eye," or my imagination. She's a performer, and she's glamorous. So maybe she's an ideal that I'm trying to attain. I think the second dream is all about keeping a clear eye on attaining my goals.
The only thing that keeps me from thinking the woman at the end of the island is totally an ideal is that my family is down there, too, and that I am going to watch my nephews perform as well. There are a lot of people on my walk down to the end of the island that seem to want to block my path or throw me off the path. But I have to keep a focus on my goals -- which aren't unattainable ideals, but are practical, and even have something to do with my family.
I'd like to know what my goals are, first, though. I used to think I knew what my goals were. But I think I got majorly distracted from my goals over the past few years. So, maybe my nephews in my dream are really aspects of myself -- elements that are coming to life again, starting out as little children, growing up from that point -- maybe under the guidance of that ideal performing woman.
The screen of job in my first dream is also interesting to me. The fact that it's just some huge, clear screen floating in space makes me feel that that screen is actually something like lenses on my own eyes, and that I just think the lenses are a big screen floating in space. In that case, the lenses would be something like Google Shades.
I think the idea of Google Shades, which I always like to think about anyway, was also at the forefront of my mind. I submitted another short story on the Smashwords self-publishing website. This story, which I call "Blind Relationships," takes place in the present day, with a series of flashbacks going back roughly ten years. But the end of the story actually takes place ten years in the future. A woman is interviewing two other women. But she is recording the interview via a cellular device that's basically a part of her eyeglasses. The idea comes straight from the concept of Google Shades.
So I think that this image brought the idea of Google Shades back into my dream, and that I was "using" Google Shades in my dream without really knowing it.
The other image from the first dream that really interested me was the "milk bomb." At first this bomb looked like some kind of metal canister. But then it looked like a Pillsbury biscuit canister, the kind that you pop open and then just lay out the ready-made biscuits on a pan to cook.
Here's a pretty good video of a Pillsbury can popping open.
But why the heck did the bomb turn into a Pillsbury container? And why did it shoot out milk instead of biscuits? I suppose the milk coming out the Pillsbury container in my dream was probably some sort of sexual image. That seems pretty obvious. I guess the bomb was some kind of symbol of my being sexually weak or impotent -- or just powerless and pathetic in life overall.
I probably do identify with the man in the dream who threw the bomb. And I expected the bomb to be something big, something real. But it just popped open like a Pillsbury container and got milk all over the place. Gross.
It's also weird, I think, that the man who threw the bomb is dressed in scrubby clothes and seems to be a complete lunatic, even though it also appears that the man is working with the men in the business suits, and even appears to be their friend. I think they wanted to invite him to lunch, but he was too obsessed with whatever work he was doing to go with them. Then they said something that he took as an insult, so he decided to throw his powerless bomb at them.
All of that obviously has to do with me. I overwork myself. And then I get myself into an emotional frenzy where I take everything the wrong way. I alienate myself from my friends -- and co-workers! -- because I take everything they say as an insult. And even though I don't get violent, I do get overly rude and angry. But I really genuinely feel powerless, unsafe, unprotected, and completely ineffective in life.
I think that this personality trait was at the top of my mind yesterday because I was reading something similar to it in Alvin Toffler's book Future Shock last night. In Future Shock, Toffler gives a description of the mental development of someone who has been overexposed to high-information environments such as war, disaster, or foreign cultures. The progression goes from one of being irritable, to being unable to make rational decisions, to finally withdrawing from life altogether and being completely apathetic.
So, reading such a mirrored aspect of my own personality traits, I was a bit surprised. And I think I carried some sort of visual metaphor for my feelings about Toffler's statement, and how it compared to my own personality, into my dream.
I think the women in my first dream come from my reading in msnbc.com about a couple of girls in Corpus Christi, Texas, who had been shot while they were out at a park on Saturday night. One of the girls was killed. The other was in critical condition. One main focus of the article seems to be that the girls had recently come out to their friends as a lesbian couple. But there didn't seem to be any evidence that the girls were shot as part of a hate crime.
A memorial to the girl who had been killed was photographed in the msnbc article. The beach can be seen in the background. I think that's why in the dream I imagined myself on a dock over a river like the Hudson River, and why I imagined myself talking to girls and waiting for girls.
I also have a connection to Corpus Christi because, even though I live in Denver, Colorado, a lot of my work recently has had to do with people near the Corpus Christi area. So I think my thoughts about my professional life in New York connected with my recent work's influence near the Corpus Christi area. But I can't say, really, what the connection would have been beyond all that.
UPDATE -- I also just saw this article on the TechCrunch site. The photo in the article looks a lot like the image I had in my first dream of the hollow space below the skyscraper, where the crazy Pillsbury bomber was standing.
I would consider this a coincidence. I don't think it was anything I pre-cognized in my dream. If it wasn't a coincidence, there is a chance that someone in my apartment building was listening to the news really early in the morning. I probably heard the news report through the walls while I was sleeping and incorporated the thoughts into my head.
Interesting in this video, too, are the orange traffic cones and orange and white striped barrier poles, which could give you an idea of the way those objects looked in my second dream.
Also -- I would just like to say that my thoughts go out to everybody in Greece at this time. My thoughts go out to everybody all over the world. Man, the world is having a tough time right now. Everybody is. But let's all do our best to get through it.
This post is related to this entry in my dream journal.
The image that has stuck with me most from last night's dreams was the woman in the red dress. And what really struck me about her was just the way she had that, while most of her dress was very tight and form fitting, her left shoulder had a huge puff of fabric coming off of it.
I've lately been thinking of adding drawings, either to my dream journals or to my dreamday journals. Maybe this woman would be a good place to start. So I'll think about adding her in tonight or tomorrow or something.
Anyway, I know I've seen a dress just like that somewhere recently -- possibly from a blog I frequently look at -- Dust Jacket Attic -- or one of the fashion channels I frequently watch on YouTube.
The woman obviously stands as a goal or an end point in my dream. I can see her clearly, even though she's far away. And I can see her as if with my eyes, not in my "mind's eye," or my imagination. She's a performer, and she's glamorous. So maybe she's an ideal that I'm trying to attain. I think the second dream is all about keeping a clear eye on attaining my goals.
The only thing that keeps me from thinking the woman at the end of the island is totally an ideal is that my family is down there, too, and that I am going to watch my nephews perform as well. There are a lot of people on my walk down to the end of the island that seem to want to block my path or throw me off the path. But I have to keep a focus on my goals -- which aren't unattainable ideals, but are practical, and even have something to do with my family.
I'd like to know what my goals are, first, though. I used to think I knew what my goals were. But I think I got majorly distracted from my goals over the past few years. So, maybe my nephews in my dream are really aspects of myself -- elements that are coming to life again, starting out as little children, growing up from that point -- maybe under the guidance of that ideal performing woman.
The screen of job in my first dream is also interesting to me. The fact that it's just some huge, clear screen floating in space makes me feel that that screen is actually something like lenses on my own eyes, and that I just think the lenses are a big screen floating in space. In that case, the lenses would be something like Google Shades.
I think the idea of Google Shades, which I always like to think about anyway, was also at the forefront of my mind. I submitted another short story on the Smashwords self-publishing website. This story, which I call "Blind Relationships," takes place in the present day, with a series of flashbacks going back roughly ten years. But the end of the story actually takes place ten years in the future. A woman is interviewing two other women. But she is recording the interview via a cellular device that's basically a part of her eyeglasses. The idea comes straight from the concept of Google Shades.
So I think that this image brought the idea of Google Shades back into my dream, and that I was "using" Google Shades in my dream without really knowing it.
The other image from the first dream that really interested me was the "milk bomb." At first this bomb looked like some kind of metal canister. But then it looked like a Pillsbury biscuit canister, the kind that you pop open and then just lay out the ready-made biscuits on a pan to cook.
Here's a pretty good video of a Pillsbury can popping open.
But why the heck did the bomb turn into a Pillsbury container? And why did it shoot out milk instead of biscuits? I suppose the milk coming out the Pillsbury container in my dream was probably some sort of sexual image. That seems pretty obvious. I guess the bomb was some kind of symbol of my being sexually weak or impotent -- or just powerless and pathetic in life overall.
I probably do identify with the man in the dream who threw the bomb. And I expected the bomb to be something big, something real. But it just popped open like a Pillsbury container and got milk all over the place. Gross.
It's also weird, I think, that the man who threw the bomb is dressed in scrubby clothes and seems to be a complete lunatic, even though it also appears that the man is working with the men in the business suits, and even appears to be their friend. I think they wanted to invite him to lunch, but he was too obsessed with whatever work he was doing to go with them. Then they said something that he took as an insult, so he decided to throw his powerless bomb at them.
All of that obviously has to do with me. I overwork myself. And then I get myself into an emotional frenzy where I take everything the wrong way. I alienate myself from my friends -- and co-workers! -- because I take everything they say as an insult. And even though I don't get violent, I do get overly rude and angry. But I really genuinely feel powerless, unsafe, unprotected, and completely ineffective in life.
I think that this personality trait was at the top of my mind yesterday because I was reading something similar to it in Alvin Toffler's book Future Shock last night. In Future Shock, Toffler gives a description of the mental development of someone who has been overexposed to high-information environments such as war, disaster, or foreign cultures. The progression goes from one of being irritable, to being unable to make rational decisions, to finally withdrawing from life altogether and being completely apathetic.
So, reading such a mirrored aspect of my own personality traits, I was a bit surprised. And I think I carried some sort of visual metaphor for my feelings about Toffler's statement, and how it compared to my own personality, into my dream.
I think the women in my first dream come from my reading in msnbc.com about a couple of girls in Corpus Christi, Texas, who had been shot while they were out at a park on Saturday night. One of the girls was killed. The other was in critical condition. One main focus of the article seems to be that the girls had recently come out to their friends as a lesbian couple. But there didn't seem to be any evidence that the girls were shot as part of a hate crime.
A memorial to the girl who had been killed was photographed in the msnbc article. The beach can be seen in the background. I think that's why in the dream I imagined myself on a dock over a river like the Hudson River, and why I imagined myself talking to girls and waiting for girls.
I also have a connection to Corpus Christi because, even though I live in Denver, Colorado, a lot of my work recently has had to do with people near the Corpus Christi area. So I think my thoughts about my professional life in New York connected with my recent work's influence near the Corpus Christi area. But I can't say, really, what the connection would have been beyond all that.
UPDATE -- I also just saw this article on the TechCrunch site. The photo in the article looks a lot like the image I had in my first dream of the hollow space below the skyscraper, where the crazy Pillsbury bomber was standing.
I would consider this a coincidence. I don't think it was anything I pre-cognized in my dream. If it wasn't a coincidence, there is a chance that someone in my apartment building was listening to the news really early in the morning. I probably heard the news report through the walls while I was sleeping and incorporated the thoughts into my head.
Interesting in this video, too, are the orange traffic cones and orange and white striped barrier poles, which could give you an idea of the way those objects looked in my second dream.
Also -- I would just like to say that my thoughts go out to everybody in Greece at this time. My thoughts go out to everybody all over the world. Man, the world is having a tough time right now. Everybody is. But let's all do our best to get through it.
Sunday, June 24, 2012
disintegrative pressures
Good morning, everybody.
This post is related to this entry in my dream journal blog.
I think the source of imagery for the three planes crashing in my dream is the movie Assault Girls, a role-playing game-themed film by the director Mamoru Oshii.
Mamoru Oshii is probably best known for his anime film Ghost in the Shell. But he also directed another RPG-based film, called Avalon. I think Avalon is more of an adventure film with RPG themes. But I think that Assault Girls really is a film that could be thought of as its own genre -- the RPG genre.
It struck me while I was watching the film that it had the same exploitative quality of a "pink film," or a sexploitation film. I think this film has, like a pink film, formed a style based on the themes it wishes to exploit -- really, to the exclusion of any other sort of plot device that might connect it with another genre, say, with an adventure film -- more completely than any other film.
I don't think this will be remembered as the definitive RPG film. But I would say it would be the prototypical RPG film. In fact, I was thinking that this genre, the genre of the RPG exploitation film, should be called "grey film," a tongue-in-cheek reference to the "pink film," and also an homage to the character Grey in the film.
But this film is from 2009, and I'm sure that whatever terminology has sprouted up around the film has taken strong root a long time ago.
There is also a potential of nostalgia and fun in the "grey film" genre, I believe, that's exemplified in certain moments of Assault Girls. Mamoru Oshii did, after all, direct the cartoon series for Urusei Yatsura, which is, in my opinion, one of the funnest and most nostalgic cartoon series of all time.
It might not be easy for people to see how an RPG film could give people nostalgia. And I don't play RPGs myself. But watching my family members play, I see how much fun they have being part of their online groups. They do have fun in that RPG world, and they do form memories about which they very possibly could be nostalgic.
Anyway, Assault Girls is about three women and on man involved in a virtual reality role-playing game. The characters all (except for the man) have some mode of transportation. The modes of transportation all fly.
But towards the end of the movie, all three flying devices crash. The mode of transporation of one of the women is actually her own body, which transforms into the body of a giant raven. The woman who can turn into a raven is always crash landing, making huge dents with her body into the earth.
The other main aspect of these two dreams, the warning, I think comes from my having read Agatha Christie's novel N or M? This novel is set a couple years into World War II. It was actually written at the same time, in 1941. The main characters of the novel are Tommy and Tuppence Beresford. They're a married couple in their forties, and they've had an on-and-off career as spies, including during World War I. They're put back to work to unravel some sort of Nazi plot that is being developed for the attack of Britain.
Tommy and Tuppence have two children, Derek and Deborah. The two young people are off contributing to the war effort, and they have no idea that their parents are working to prevent the invasion of Britain. In fact, they think that their parents are rather doddering old folks who need to be patronized and cared for. But Deborah gets perilously close to the danger her parents are involved in at one point in the novel, and at the end of the novel, there is a rather touching scene where Tuppence prays that Derek and Deborah make it through the war without getting hurt.
So I think I took Tuppence as the older woman figure and Deborah as the younger woman figure.
I'm not sure why the aircraft had names like they did. One thing I think is that it could also be related to N or M? Agatha Christie is most known for her detectives Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple. In the Wikipedia entry on Agatha Christie, Christie basically says that she never got her two main detectives together in one story because of the way their personalities conflicted.
However, I'm sure this isn't a new idea, but it seems like maybe Tommy and Tuppence Beresford could be like a compromise combination of Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple.
Christie wrote surprisingly few books involving Tommy and Tuppence. But the books were written all throughout Christie's career. I wonder if, from a quasi-psychological standpoint, Christie didn't need both a male main character and a female main character to express whatever kind of integrative process she was going through in the creative act of writing her works. The Poirot character could be the animus figure, and the Marple character could be the anima figure.
But maybe, at certain points in Christie's creative life or real life, or both, Christie found that this integrative process had reached a phase, kind of like a completion phase, where the animus and anima could come together. For some reason or another, the animus and anima couldn't come together as Poirot and Marple. But they could come together as Tommy and Tuppence.
Somehow -- I'm not sure how -- this idea may possibly relate to the strange way in which the aircraft are named in my dreams.
The aircraft in my dreams are like X-15 rocket planes, planes which actually rocketed up into the lower levels of outer space. I think the X-15 has always been my favorite aircraft, just because of its rocket propulsion, its high speeds, and the way it just went high up into the air and came speeding back down. It all seems scary as hell to me, and I couldn't imagine being an X-15 pilot. But I like the X-15 a lot.
In 2008 I actually read the Periscope Film edition of the X-15 flight manual -- mainly for psychological reasons, oddly enough. I had been reading a lot of Bruno Bettelheim's work at the time. In The Empty Fortress, Bettelheim mentions how some of his autistic patients identified themselves with fantasy cars, and even made detailed descriptions of these fantasy cars.
It seemed to me that in the working of mechanisms, like cars, there is always some sort of active equilibrium that needs to be maintained. I wondered -- I'm not sure why -- if I could try to look at the functioning of some of the most high-tech mechanisms I could think of -- fighter jets and so forth -- and see if I couldn't determine some sort of system balance that would equate to a psychological system balance.
So I read the Periscope Film editions of the X-15 flight manual and the SR-71 flight manual. I'm not sure what I retained out of either of those manuals, other than a very basic idea that everything seems aimed at a balance of pressures and distribution of fluids and gases, as well as a maintenance of electrical integrity, throughout the entire systems of the planes.
But whatever I've managed to retain from my studies of those planes, I suppose that, because of my studies, both the X-15 and SR-71 have stuck with me as psychological symbols ever since.
The thing is, though, that the three planes in my dream have pipes sticking up and out of them. This would mean, as far as I can tell, that the very complex system of distribution of pressures, which should all be inside the plane, has busted and worked its way outside the plane. Of course, that's no good. And that could be a symbol for my own life -- a kind of warning I'm trying to give myself.
Interestingly, though, I think those pipes also have to do with the Alan Turing doodle that Google was running for a couple days. I didn't actually play the doodle until yesterday morning. And then I only played it once. By the time I got through the game, I understood what I was supposed to do. I was going to play again. But I had a few other things to do. So I was going to come back to the doodle. But then I shut my computer off and went and took care of the things I wanted to do outside for the day.
When I got home in the afternoon, I didn't want to turn my Internet on. I figured the Turing doodle would still be on Google this morning. So, anticipating being able to play the game, I think I dreamt about the pipe-like connections between the circles that make up the points of action for the game. Of course, the Turing doodle was gone this morning -- ugh! Oh, well.
This post is related to this entry in my dream journal blog.
I think the source of imagery for the three planes crashing in my dream is the movie Assault Girls, a role-playing game-themed film by the director Mamoru Oshii.
Mamoru Oshii is probably best known for his anime film Ghost in the Shell. But he also directed another RPG-based film, called Avalon. I think Avalon is more of an adventure film with RPG themes. But I think that Assault Girls really is a film that could be thought of as its own genre -- the RPG genre.
It struck me while I was watching the film that it had the same exploitative quality of a "pink film," or a sexploitation film. I think this film has, like a pink film, formed a style based on the themes it wishes to exploit -- really, to the exclusion of any other sort of plot device that might connect it with another genre, say, with an adventure film -- more completely than any other film.
I don't think this will be remembered as the definitive RPG film. But I would say it would be the prototypical RPG film. In fact, I was thinking that this genre, the genre of the RPG exploitation film, should be called "grey film," a tongue-in-cheek reference to the "pink film," and also an homage to the character Grey in the film.
But this film is from 2009, and I'm sure that whatever terminology has sprouted up around the film has taken strong root a long time ago.
There is also a potential of nostalgia and fun in the "grey film" genre, I believe, that's exemplified in certain moments of Assault Girls. Mamoru Oshii did, after all, direct the cartoon series for Urusei Yatsura, which is, in my opinion, one of the funnest and most nostalgic cartoon series of all time.
It might not be easy for people to see how an RPG film could give people nostalgia. And I don't play RPGs myself. But watching my family members play, I see how much fun they have being part of their online groups. They do have fun in that RPG world, and they do form memories about which they very possibly could be nostalgic.
Anyway, Assault Girls is about three women and on man involved in a virtual reality role-playing game. The characters all (except for the man) have some mode of transportation. The modes of transportation all fly.
But towards the end of the movie, all three flying devices crash. The mode of transporation of one of the women is actually her own body, which transforms into the body of a giant raven. The woman who can turn into a raven is always crash landing, making huge dents with her body into the earth.
The other main aspect of these two dreams, the warning, I think comes from my having read Agatha Christie's novel N or M? This novel is set a couple years into World War II. It was actually written at the same time, in 1941. The main characters of the novel are Tommy and Tuppence Beresford. They're a married couple in their forties, and they've had an on-and-off career as spies, including during World War I. They're put back to work to unravel some sort of Nazi plot that is being developed for the attack of Britain.
Tommy and Tuppence have two children, Derek and Deborah. The two young people are off contributing to the war effort, and they have no idea that their parents are working to prevent the invasion of Britain. In fact, they think that their parents are rather doddering old folks who need to be patronized and cared for. But Deborah gets perilously close to the danger her parents are involved in at one point in the novel, and at the end of the novel, there is a rather touching scene where Tuppence prays that Derek and Deborah make it through the war without getting hurt.
So I think I took Tuppence as the older woman figure and Deborah as the younger woman figure.
I'm not sure why the aircraft had names like they did. One thing I think is that it could also be related to N or M? Agatha Christie is most known for her detectives Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple. In the Wikipedia entry on Agatha Christie, Christie basically says that she never got her two main detectives together in one story because of the way their personalities conflicted.
However, I'm sure this isn't a new idea, but it seems like maybe Tommy and Tuppence Beresford could be like a compromise combination of Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple.
Christie wrote surprisingly few books involving Tommy and Tuppence. But the books were written all throughout Christie's career. I wonder if, from a quasi-psychological standpoint, Christie didn't need both a male main character and a female main character to express whatever kind of integrative process she was going through in the creative act of writing her works. The Poirot character could be the animus figure, and the Marple character could be the anima figure.
But maybe, at certain points in Christie's creative life or real life, or both, Christie found that this integrative process had reached a phase, kind of like a completion phase, where the animus and anima could come together. For some reason or another, the animus and anima couldn't come together as Poirot and Marple. But they could come together as Tommy and Tuppence.
Somehow -- I'm not sure how -- this idea may possibly relate to the strange way in which the aircraft are named in my dreams.
The aircraft in my dreams are like X-15 rocket planes, planes which actually rocketed up into the lower levels of outer space. I think the X-15 has always been my favorite aircraft, just because of its rocket propulsion, its high speeds, and the way it just went high up into the air and came speeding back down. It all seems scary as hell to me, and I couldn't imagine being an X-15 pilot. But I like the X-15 a lot.
In 2008 I actually read the Periscope Film edition of the X-15 flight manual -- mainly for psychological reasons, oddly enough. I had been reading a lot of Bruno Bettelheim's work at the time. In The Empty Fortress, Bettelheim mentions how some of his autistic patients identified themselves with fantasy cars, and even made detailed descriptions of these fantasy cars.
It seemed to me that in the working of mechanisms, like cars, there is always some sort of active equilibrium that needs to be maintained. I wondered -- I'm not sure why -- if I could try to look at the functioning of some of the most high-tech mechanisms I could think of -- fighter jets and so forth -- and see if I couldn't determine some sort of system balance that would equate to a psychological system balance.
So I read the Periscope Film editions of the X-15 flight manual and the SR-71 flight manual. I'm not sure what I retained out of either of those manuals, other than a very basic idea that everything seems aimed at a balance of pressures and distribution of fluids and gases, as well as a maintenance of electrical integrity, throughout the entire systems of the planes.
But whatever I've managed to retain from my studies of those planes, I suppose that, because of my studies, both the X-15 and SR-71 have stuck with me as psychological symbols ever since.
The thing is, though, that the three planes in my dream have pipes sticking up and out of them. This would mean, as far as I can tell, that the very complex system of distribution of pressures, which should all be inside the plane, has busted and worked its way outside the plane. Of course, that's no good. And that could be a symbol for my own life -- a kind of warning I'm trying to give myself.
Interestingly, though, I think those pipes also have to do with the Alan Turing doodle that Google was running for a couple days. I didn't actually play the doodle until yesterday morning. And then I only played it once. By the time I got through the game, I understood what I was supposed to do. I was going to play again. But I had a few other things to do. So I was going to come back to the doodle. But then I shut my computer off and went and took care of the things I wanted to do outside for the day.
When I got home in the afternoon, I didn't want to turn my Internet on. I figured the Turing doodle would still be on Google this morning. So, anticipating being able to play the game, I think I dreamt about the pipe-like connections between the circles that make up the points of action for the game. Of course, the Turing doodle was gone this morning -- ugh! Oh, well.
Saturday, June 23, 2012
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.
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.
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