everyday stars

This blog reviews images from my waking life that influence the images of my dreams.

This post reviews imagery from this entry in my dream journal maboroshi no yume.

One strong image from my dream is the song "Everyday People," by Sly and the Family Stone.

This song is probably one of my favorite songs of all time. And it brings back a lot of memories, as I used to hear it a lot, especially while working as a coffee server (not a barista) at the Oren's Daily Roast in Grand Central Station in New York City.

Here's a picture of an Oren's Daily Roast. But I'm honestly not sure which one.

I worked there in 2000, when the store was located near the Grand Central entrance on 42nd Street, between Madison and Park Avenue. From pictures of the Oren's Daily Roast in Grand Central that I see online, it looks like the store's actually moved into the Grand Central Market, which is (still?) this nifty sort of La Boqeria knock-off that basically takes up an entire concourse of the station.

So "Everyday People" connects me to Grand Central Station. This job was basically the last foodservice job I had. I'd already been doing some temp office work by this time. But in mid-2000 I learned my best friends were going to move from Colorado to New York as well. I'd thought I'd have to have a place they could stay in. So I figured I'd get a regular job and save up so I'd have a place once they arrived.

It turned out I didn't need to do that. My friends came way more prepared than I had. One of them already secured a $60K per year job. Another secured a $30K per year job. So before they'd even gotten to NYC, they had secured a combined household income of $90K per year. And their earnings only went up from there. They found an entire floor of a brownstone in Brooklyn, which they were moved into on their first day in the city. They didn't need me at all.

But their moving to NYC was what made me shift my focus away from working service jobs for low pay at odd hours of the day so I could spend the regular hours at the various branches of the New York Public Library, to working more professional jobs.

Oren's Daily Roast was one job I worked -- from 6 AM to 12 PM, Monday through Friday. I also worked at the UPS on Houston Street four hours a night -- but I can't really remember what the hours were now. 5 to 9? 6 to 10? Something. Then in between, I'd go to one of the NYPL libraries and read. I trained my mind pretty hardcore in those days. But it was also a lot of self-torture.

Of course, there's another image of Grand Central Station -- the food court-like area in the lower level. Here's one shot of the food court.

This lighting, and the sense of all floors, ceiling, walls, etc., being made of stone, match very much the feeling of my third dream.

Here's another shot of the lower-level food court area in Grand Central. Here you have a good shot of the leather chairs they have down there. These chairs appeared in my dream. And if they're still at Grand Central Station -- I have to say -- that just seems so crazy to me that those chairs are there!

Another strong image from last night was this strange library that was more like a conceptual art installation. The entire space was black. The walls were modular. And they were screens onto which imagery like television static played.

This space is definitely inspired by my experience seeing Ryoji Ikeda's The Transfinite at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City back in 2011. Here's my own video of the experience.

So... a lot of this imagery is taking me back to New York City, and probably to moments that are at or near really transitional times in my life in the city. And, again, this is probably because I'm going through so much transition in my life right now.

But... another transitional image would be this enormous office space where there's nobody around except myself and a young, blonde, female coworker. This office space reminded me a lot of the institutional trading floor Banc of America Securities had at 9 West 57th Street. I worked on the floor in 2000 and 2005. In 2005 I moved from being a temp there to a full-time employee in the research department. That was probably one of the biggest professional transitions of my life.

Here's a 2014 view of a Bank of America trading floor. It's not from 9 West 57th, though, as BofA had moved out of that space in 2008.

The image on the screen in the video library dream is kind of funny. It's supposed to be an historical image from the late 1960s. But instead it's an image of Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk. This dream image was definitely inspired by my seeing this image from the movie Avengers: Infinity War, which I only saw for a second while scrolling through Twitter yesterday.

For some reason I found this image really annoying. I can't explain what it was. I really liked Black Panther. And I've not liked most Marvel movies. To see the folks from Black Panther as part of this scene just made me feel like Black Panther was taken down a notch. I can't explain it.

But the relation of this image to historical moments was also inspired by a book I'm currently reading, The Story of America: Essays on Origins, by Jill Lepore.

In The Story of America, Jill Lepore examines how America has told its history, from the time of the Jamestown Colony through the 2008 elections. Lepore basically shows how America's perception of itself and its ideals shapes which stories it tells and how it tells those stories. This idea is illustrated by relating the lives of various people who either wrote about significant events or made specific contributions to types of documentation (dictionaries, museums, the Constitution) of American history.

Here's a video where Jill Lepore talks about The Story of America.

One of the people Lepore discusses is Thomas Paine. In one section, Lepore compares Thomas Paine to Aquaman:

"Thomas Paine is, at best, a lesser Founder. In the comic book version of history that serves as America's national heritage, where the Founding Fathers are like the Hanna-Barbera SuperFriends, Paine is Aquaman to Washington's Superman and Jefferson's Batman; we never find out how he got his super powers and he only shows up when they need someone who can swim."

It was kind of novel to experience this analogy in Lepore's book. But I think the trick got stale for me at some point in the book. And I feel there was a point, probably the essay on Poe, when the book lost a lot of interest for me. I think that sense of disappointment filtered into my dream imagery.

However, another interesting part of Lepore's Story of America is how it discusses Andrew Jackson's contribution to history, in the form of the "campaign biography." After Jackson, who won his election by appealing to the common people with his own story of growing up in a log cabin, etc., candidate after candidate had to prove, through their "campaign biography," that they were regular, tough, self-made people. In other words, they had to prove that they were "everyday people," to paraphrase Sly and the Family Stone.

So I thought a lot about that yesterday and how that rhetorical method in political campaigning has been used in some pretty strange ways recently. And so my brain naturally went to Sly and the Family Stone song.

But what I will say is, while there are many songs whose beat is difficult for me to capture without a lot of practice (especially songs in weird time, not 4/4 or 3/4 time), there is only one song I can think of where I have a hard time keeping the tune. That's the song "Angel," by Malaysian pop star Atilia.

There's one specific moment, toward the end of the song, where the key seems to change in a way that I can never, ever remember. It's so weird that I never manage to get this. But I love the song, and I love the moment in the song.

So I think there's something interesting about me trying to get the melody right for a song called "Everyday People," while really the song I always have trouble with is called "Angel." But it also reminds me that maybe I'm not getting the words right because I'm trying to remember that Sly and the Family Stone also made a song called "Everybody Is a Star."

In terms of my assumption that my mistake in singing was from not going low enough, that is definitely inspired by some low singing Kanye West does in the song "Ultralight Beam."

In terms of the strange philosopher in my dream, Georges Sumner, apparently a French philosopher, I think this might be related to the philosopher Jean Baudrillard, whom I admire.

But I think this might also have to do with my reading of The Witch's Flight, by Kara Keeling.

Keeling's book explores the cinematic representation of black women, with a bit of a focus on queer black women. It's a brilliant book, full of incredible insights. But two theorists Keeling mentions in her book are Gilles Deleuze and Frant Fanon.

Deleuze and Fanon are two writers I've wanted to read for a while. And I think the George Sumner of my dream stands for them both -- especially when you think that I received two of Sumner's books from the girl in my dream. It's like my preconscious is telling me, Go ahead and start reading these guys, silly!

flirting with my mom on my birthday deathbed

This blog reviews images from my waking life that influence the images of my dreams.

This post reviews images from this entry in my dream journal maboroshi no yume.

In my dream there's a seventeen-year-old girl who has been severely injured by Lyme disease.

I think the girl's age was inspired by two thing. I watched the movie Weird Science on Friday night. And in that movie, one of the boys is fifteen years old, and the other is sixteen.

Here's the trailer for Weird Science.

But I've also recently read Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. And, of course, in that play much is made of the fact that Juliet is thirteen years old.

But I also think that there's a lot of stuff around anxiety about aging in Romeo and Juliet. The Nurse barely has any teeth in her head. Capulet's wife makes fun of him and says he should carry a crutch instead of a sword. And I think a lot of Capulet's story arc is based around his own reflection, as he perhaps reaches his sixties?, that maybe his wife would have led a happier life if he hadn't married her so soon.

So in Romeo and Juliet there's definitely some drama around being young and thinking about growing old, as well as growing old and reflecting on one's youth. I'm at an age where I'm reflecting on my own youth. So it would make sense that these elements in Shakespeare's drama would inspire my dream.

But in Weird Science there's also an element of youth reflecting on old age. In particular, Wyatt's grandparents visit to check in while Wyatt's parents are away. And they find Wyatt throwing a huge party. Lisa, the computer-generated dream girl who can make anything happen, stops the grandparents from freaking out -- by freezing them and putting them in the kitchen pantry.

But strangely, the person this seventeen-year-old girl in my dream reminds me more of the character of Tonya Harding's mom as played by Allison Janney in the film I, Tonya.

Here's the trailer for I, Tonya.

I, Tonya is another film about youth versus age. And like Romeo and Juliet, it's a film about what adults expect of young people, what young people think adults expect of them, and what young people expect of themselves.

But I think, in terms of my own life, as I reflect, I feel like -- I can feel all the years of my adult life. Like... I know and feel the passage of time, in its fullness, so to speak. But I also feel like everything has passed in the blink of an eye.

And I'm at an age now where in that next blink of an eye, provided I even survive that long, I'll be very close, say, to the age my grandparents were when they died. It's strange to feel like I have such a close connection, even still, somehow, to my high school self, while I feel so close to that self I can't even imagine yet -- the one that's closer to my grandparents. I really think my mind is working hard to come to terms with that.

In my dream, the girl has Lyme disease. The disease has claimed her hands, and maybe also her forearms. These images both come from stuff I scrolled past on Twitter, and maybe also on YouTube, yesterday. I didn't look at either item.

But I think there was a news article mentioned on Twitter where a (seventeen-year-old?) girl made some kind of cure for complications for Lyme disease while waiting on a cure from the doctors. And I think I saw a YouTube video on my suggestions where a boy with no hands can play the piano really well. So even though I didn't read the article or watch the video, it's easy to see how those images influenced my dream.

The three beds in my immediate field of view in the bedroom the hotel woman assigns to me are most definitely related to myself, my brother, and my sister. So basically I've come back to my youth, when my sister, my brother, and I all lived in the same house. The three beds probably comes from the fact that in Weird Science Wyatt, for some odd reason, has two beds in his bedroom.

I felt like Wyatt's two beds basically meant that at some point Wyatt and his big brother had to share a bedroom, and that Wyatt has really never been able to free the space of his bedroom emotionally from his brother's presence. Plus, it makes it convenient to have a second bed when Gary (an emotionally preferable version of Wyatt's brother) spends the night.

So in my dream, I see that the bedroom of my youth still has all three beds in it -- mine, my sister's, and my brothers. So I probably still haven't gotten over a lot of stuff from my youth.

At the same time, this room probably has a lot more beds in it. And I think that has something to do with... well... a lot of things. Nowadays there are a lot of kids in my family. It always turns out that there are a lot of adults, too -- adults who just suddenly become part of the family. So all the houses in my family feel full. Except mine.

But the room is also a girl-themed bedroom. There's probably even a huge dollhouse somewhere. By the way, this dollhouse probably came from my walk yesterday. I walked past a house and saw a huge dollhouse on the porch. For some reason I found that image so charming.

However, dollhouses mean a lot to me, emotionally and sexually. The first time I ever masturbated, when I was eleven, it was after fantasizing that I could become a Barbie doll and live in my sister's Barbie doll house. I basically imagined myself as this bisexual Barbie who had sex with both Ken and some other Barbie.

The emotional power of this image was probably stirred up by Weird Science, as well, when you consider that Lisa was originally a Barbie doll, probably belonging to Wyatt's sister Chloe.

I also wonder whether the bed assignment in the dream isn't meant to stand for the time I spent in Covenant House, a sort of youth shelter in midtown Manhattan, in 1998.

In my dream, of course, I start out at a Hampton Inn. I'm pretty sure it was a Hampton Inn because of the way the cursive sign looked -- with the white background and blue cursive.

But as I try to get signed into this hotel, the woman concierge decides to send me all the way out to the outskirts of town, and put me into some trailer home that's as filled with beds as I felt the Covenant House was when I stayed there.

There's a lot going on here. But in short, I think I've been reflecting a lot on my career lately. It seems like, especially starting in November or December of 2009, once the financial crisis had moved into aftermath phase, I have just not been wanted in the professional world at all and that I've had to fight for any shred of existence there.

But that definitely got worse in 2012, once I came back home to Colorado. Right now, and, really, since 2012, Denver has been a place of incredible financial abundance. But you wouldn't know it by the way people have continually tried to shut me out of the business world, political world, art world, etc. When people don't want you around, they will just try their very hardest to make you feel like the real issue is that they can't afford you -- even if you only cost half of what they're paying for everybody else.

So that all translates into my dream as... I'm already late for the convention (i.e. I was already late in starting my professional life). I just want to get checked into a hotel (i.e. I just want a steady job to get me through the rest of my professional life). I find a cheap hotel and remember that that was good enough in the past (i.e. I put myself up for sale for work at half-price). The concierge really doesn't want to check me in at all, but she eventually has to, and she shoves me out on the outskirts of town (i.e., I am probably given even more of a runaround).

So I'm out on the outskirts of life. And I know that where this woman has put me, I'll spend a long time walking back to where I need to be. But I'm confronted with a bedroom full of beds, but with the three main beds being mine and my siblings.

From this room I walk into a room with three hospital beds -- i.e. three deathbeds -- the beds for me, my brother, and my sister. So, as I mentioned before, I feel like I'm in a kind of midlife crisis. And the dream puts it pretty bluntly. I walk from my and my siblings' childhood bedroom into a room with our deathbeds.

Of course, I'm greeted by this person who's supposed to be a seventeen-year-old survivor of Lyme disease who made her own cure, combined with a young boy who became a piano virtuoso with no hands. In other words, the hotel woman immediately takes me to see a young person who did incredible stuff in spite of insurmountable odds to prove, as she's desired to prove all along, that I'm just too lazy to do anything good.

But when I look at this seventeen-year-old girl, she's actually a mom -- Tonya Harding's mom in I, Tonya. So she's really not a seventeen-year-old girl at all. She's my mom, trying to pretend she's a seventeen-year-old girl.

I look away from this mother trying to pretend she's a daughter. First of all -- this hotel woman who hates me is trying to use this person as proof of my incompetence. (Plenty of white women and men try every single day to prove I'm incompetent, mainly because, since I'm half-Mexican and half-Irish, they see me as a Mexican and think I'm incompetent -- or a crook -- anyway.) But the girl the hotel woman is putting before me is actually my mom. And that kind of disgusts and pisses me off.

So I look away and see a kitchen full of family members. There's a family crisis. And suddenly I wonder how I could have been so selfish as to have looked away from my mom. So I look back to my mom. I go ahead and play along with her, pretending that she's seventeen years old. I even decide that I'll go ahead and flirt with her, so she, so my mom, feels like I want to be with her, until she goes to have her surgery.

Since I feel like what all of this is saying, I'll leave this all right here.

Some things I will say, however are... I'm not sure why Houston was the city in my dream. I also don't know why my brain couldn't figure out at the beginning whether I was in Denver on the way to Houston, in between Denver and Houston, or already in Houston.

Another thing I found fun and interesting and charming in the dream was that blue Vespa that just magically appeared for a bit. So I wanted to put a picture of a blue Vespa in this entry.

Interestingly enough, the Vespa was inpsired by yesterday's walk, too. As I reached a part of my walk with some new high-end apartments, after I'd walked through a part of town where a lot of people were walking in the opposite direction from me, heading to the Colorado Rockies game, this kind of stupid guy drove his motorcycle up onto the sidewalk and basically right into my path of walking. I got out of the guy's way.

But it was just weird -- to have this guy -- he'd done a U-turn, too. So that was weird. He'd been on the street, did a U-turn, drove up onto the sidewalk, and then drove into my path of walking, so I'd have to get out of his way. Just a strange, strange situation.

So... somehow, because of that situation, I imagined myself on the sidewalk, but riding a baby blue Vespa! Okay...

Also, just thinking of it... the whole walking from childhood beds to deathbeds kind of reminds me of that Stone Temple Pilots song "Dead and Bloated."

embarrassment is fine

This blog reviews images from my waking life that influence the images of my dreams.

This post reviews images from this entry in my dream journal maboroshi no yume.

Last night I watched the movie Drop Dead Fred. Here's the trailer for the film.

I remember liking Drop Dead Fred as a kid. But I didn't watch it very often, and I'm not sure why. Anyway, there are a couple images from the movie that I think influenced my dream.

In my first dream, I'm jogging up a hill, and apparently teaching people about running. But a guy pushing or carrying a baby beats me.

I think that image was inspired by this image from Drop Dead Fred where Elizabeth is out speedwalking with Janie.

This scene actually made me think of another 1980s/90s film where -- I think -- Tom Hanks is on some rooftop track, walking along as an overweight man (maybe John Candy?) is jogging. But I can't remember the film.

Anyway, yesterday, as I remembered this image, I started imagining this overweight man's inner life, for some weird reason. I imagined him having this fantasy where he eventually loses weight and beats Tom Hanks at running. But I also then imagined him feeling defeated and depressed because he also felt he'd never be able to achieve that.

This was probably a weird imagination to have. But I think it connects well with my own feelings of inferiority.

In the third dream, I'm flying through a landscape that's entirely made of human-sized "fun size" candy packages. At the top of a hill is a white doorway standing all on its own. I'm pretty sure this image comes from the part in Drop Dead Fred where Elizabeth and Fred walk through a doorway with no wall.

I also just remembered that in my second dream, I kind of make a fool of myself while teaching people (again) about making sales calls. After I make a fool of myself I start imagining something like a chakra diagram, except that the chakras are replaced by phone-related imagery.

In Drop Dead Fred, the Janie character, while being a very businesslike and practical executive, is also very New Agey. And there's a pretty hilarious scene where she embarrasses herself in front of all the other executives. I think this is what inspired the embarrassment and chakra diagram of the second dream.

My first and second dreams were very interesting because of this weird storyline, so to speak, where I was supposed to be teaching people how to do things and instead I made myself look completely incompetent at the tasks.

I think that's a pretty good statement about how I've felt in my professional and social life recently. People pay attention to things I do. But I feel like I'm doing a terrible job. I should be able to tell myself not to worry about things. I don't think anybody else is too worried. But my dreams seem to deal more with the anxiety side than the relaxation side. So there's obviously something I need to work through.

The only other imagery I can think of that inspired last night's dream is all the stuff that's been happening with the NFL recently. It sounds like the NFL decided over the past couple days to fine any football team whose players kneel during the national anthem.

This news must have resonated with me more than I thought yesterday, because I obviously imagined myself flying over this mountain landscape which I also thought of as having dimensional characteristics like those of a football stadium.

I don't know what inspired the imagery of this landscape being entirely made out of gigantic "fun size" candy packages, or how that relates to all of the NFL controversy. But I think there is a relation there.

So those are the inspirations I've seen on the imagery from last night's dreams. But I honestly can't make many analytical connections from it all this time.

the last sexual resort

This blog reviews images from my waking life that influence the images of my dreams.

This post reviews imagery from this entry in my dream journal maboroshi no yume.

The resort hotel in my first dream is probably inspired by the Terranea Resort, which is outside Los Angeles. Here's a photo of the entrance of the Terranea Resort, from TripAdvisor.

I went to Los Angeles in December of 2014. I had to go out there for one day for business. But I stayed out there for two more days for a sort of vacation. I somehow got a really good price on the Terranea Resort. The resort is a ways out from Los Angeles. The traffic was always bad. It was usually a three-hour round-trip each day. But the resort property was huge and beautiful. Here are some pictures from my trip.

I had an unbelievably good setup for the first two nights I was at the resort. I had been put in one of their "bungalows," these suites set apart from the rest of the hotel in small buildings. It was almost like having a little cabin to myself.

However, some people at the Terranea seemed to be angry at the fact that I was in this space. So they kind of made a point of doing some weird stuff. In particular, on my second night at the resort, they seriously had a party right in front of my door. They ended up leaving all these broken bottles of booze in front of my door. The liquor was all over the balcony in front of my place the next morning. And this mess led to some other issues that made it so I had to get moved from the little cabins into a room in the larger hotel building.

This -- keep in mind -- was in December of 2014. So I'm not saying it's a problem with the Terranea nowadays. But it was definitely a problem when I was there.

So the "two guys" in my dream that I fear will see me go into the resort and then make trouble for me while I'm in there are definitely the guys who skulked around at the Terranea, angry at my presence in one of the "good" cabins, who then messed up my time there and made it so I had to leave the cabin.

There are some personal reasons why this image from three and a half years ago popped up in my dream. One is that I've been kind of digging back into the past recently as I'm kind of making some changes in my professional life. So I think this experience refreshed itself in my memory. It's pretty easy for the experience to take on the power of some of my present life experiences.

But I also think this image popped up in my dream because last night while I was out at a local restaurant called Hamburger Mary's I saw the MV for "New Rules" by Dua Lipa.

Of course, this MV takes place in The Confidante resort in Miami. And I think I just translated this resort into my memory of the resort in Los Angeles. (Image from TripAdvisor.)

But the MV also reminds me a lot of a university dormitory. All of the drama in the MV feels like the drama in a college dorm. And I think my confusion over all of that is what made the space of my fourth dream so confused. Was it a children's daycare? Was it a dormitory? Was it an apartment complex? Was it an office space? Or are all of those places different by very much? My dream may seriously have been asking if there's a difference.

I've had lots of dreams in my life where I'm ascending steeply. In some dreams I'm in a space shuttle or flying up into the air or into space. But in other dreams I'm walking up a sidewalk or a mountain path that suddenly becomes incredibly steep. And occasionally I'll dream that I'm driving up a steep hill. But I don't think I've ever ascended upwards in a tunnel, like in my first dream from last night. Strange combination of ascension and a subterranean feeling.

I really can't say where the tunnel image came from. But the entrance to the tunnel definitely came from this review of the video game The Giana Sisters Christmas on Lazy Game Reviews' YouTube channel.

In The Giana Sisters Christmas each level apparently ends with something like the entrance to a cave. And this is basically what inspired the tunnel entrance image in my dream. But I'm not sure what inspired the tunnel itself.

I have been watching a lot of Lazy Game Reviews on YouTube. And I think that binge-watching has influenced a lot of my dreams.

So... the hollowed-out CPU in my second dream probably comes from LGR as well. It could come from quite a number of videos where Clint opens up a CPU. But I think it particularly comes from this LGR review of the Diamond S3 Savage4 Pro+ graphics card from the 1990s.

In this review, Clint opens up a CPU and, chuckling, sarcastically remarks on the "lovely cable management from late nineties Packard Bell."

In my dream the CPU was black and the wires were red and blue. Obviously the wires are meant to be veins and arteries in my dream.

I'm honestly still puzzled as to why the imagery of the sea anemone-like flesh appeared in my dream. (Image below from Wikipedia.)

The leg surgery imagery makes sense on a number of levels. For me personally, the leg imagery relates to some leg and hip issues I'd started having a month or so ago. For a couple different reasons, starting in October of 2017, I'd fallen into the habit of falling asleep in my lazy chair. I would then wake up and go to bed in my bed.

I think the sleeping in my lazy chair was really messing with my hips. My hips were really starting to hurt whenever I sat for too long. But as soon as I stopped the habit of sleeping in my lazy chair, my hip problems went away.

However, those hip issues made me realize that I am, in fact, getting older. I'm having problems, like hip problems, that I'd never had before in my life. Coming to terms with bodily issues like that is, I think, part of coming to terms with the fact that I am not forever for this world.

However, I think the hip issues were also related to my weight. And while I'm definitely not overweight by any means, I gained about 25 pounds in the middle of last year that I haven't been able to lose, and it seems like my body still hasn't been able to get along with that extra weight. I always feel weird issues I can only think of as "stretchy" issues related to that extra body weight.

But another thing I've dealt with over the past year is vascular issues. The vascular issues probably have to do with weight and with bad eating -- probably bad eating more than weight.

But they also have a lot to do with stress. There were some times last year where my work situation stressed me out so much that I seriously had chest pains, neck pains, etc., that felt like vascular problems.

One day in particular was so bad that -- the only way I can describe it is... for one or two days afterward, I seriously felt like the arteries around my heart had been blown up, stretched out, like when you blow up a balloon.

So I think a lot of the leg imagery relates to all of that stuff. And partly I think the sea anemone-like flesh relates to my anxiety over... whatever... something like the fatty deposits I fear exist in my body. So I'm trying to pull all that fat out of my body in the dream.

But I'm also pretty sure that image of cutting my leg open and pulling at some fleshy fringes probably relates to women masturbating. The anemone fringes may stand for labia. But I really think they stand for the clitoris.

Considering that a lot of times when I masturbate, I imagine myself as a woman, I'm probably trying in my dream to imagine myself with a clitoris. But my dream gives me a ton of clitorides.

I'm not sure... But it seems like my dream is saying something about my sexual complexes. I'm trying to... I don't know... Do the ultimate masturbation, where... let's say, I "scissor" (???) so hard that I tear out all the orgasms (clitorides) I'll ever need.

Free of all that sexual burden, I anticipate, I'll be able to move around, or operate, in the world much better. But I can only do so after I've shoved my leg into the CPU -- i.e. after I've sort of turned myself into a robot. But my identity would still be mine, since my foot comes through one of the empty disk drive holes in the CPU.

So basically there's this wish for me to operate on myself, pull out all the sexual desire I might have for the rest of my life, and make myself into some sort of machine, because I feel that will help me function better in the world.

But as soon as I perform this operation on myself, I realize that I've basically hollowed myself out. I reflect that a hollow body isn't a natural body. And I feel like I've possibly injured myself. But I also try to convince myself that it's actually natural for a body to be hollowed out, and that I didn't do a bad thing by basically tearing flesh out of myself.

I feel like there are some more levels I could discuss here. But I've probably gone on too long already. So I'll leave things here.

late to the party

This blog reviews images from my waking life that influence the images of my dreams.

This post reviews images from this entry in my dream journal maboroshi no yume.

Every once in a while, whenever I have some free time, I like to do drawings that I spend a little more time on. I draw slow. So I usually need a whole evening to draw something. Anyway, last night I made this drawing.

The drawing is of Abby Veiga and Olivia Magni dancing to the song "Together" at the Jump dance competition in Los Angeles. Here's the source image.

Here's the video I got the image from, on the Dancing with YT channel on YouTube.

This performance by Abby Veiga and Olivia Magni, choreographed by Jessica Monnig, is really incredible.

I feel like my drawing didn't do the dance, or the beautiful dancers, much justice -- mainly because I was a bit too heavy-handed with my pen.

Since I only draw occasionally, other than in my dream journals, I still have trouble putting together different parts of a drawing. So in this drawing, I feel happy with the bodies, the poses, and the proportions, as well as the gold parts of the costumes. But I'm not very happy with the faces. And I could even sense yesterday when I went wrong with them. And that stuck with me all night.

So I'm not surprised I dreamed of being in a sort of reclining position with a girl. I think I was trying to get into the moment of the dance. But I guess my preconscious took things a little bit further.

But I don't think the girl in my dreams looked like either Abby Veiga or Olivia Magni. There may have been a bit of a resemblance to other girls I have been thinking about a lot recently, though I'm not sure the girl looked like one of them, either.

One dancer I've drawn a lot is Olivia Taylor. I started paying attention to little dancers because of Maddie Ziegler in the MV for the Sia song "Chandelier." But the first little dancer besides Zielger that I paid attention to was Olivia Taylor. She's probably still my favorite young competitive dancer, though I don't feel like I see stuff of hers pop up on YouTube as often nowadays.

Taylor is an incredible dancer. But she's also incredibly beautiful. Here's a photo of her.

Another girl I've been thinking about a lot lately is Laneya Grace. One of the big reasons I think about her is because I feel like she looks a lot like Olivia Taylor. Here's a picture of Grace, which I think is by Amy Wenzel.

Anyway, I was thinking about Laneya Grace a lot because of her role as the little girl in the MV for Avicii's song "Wake Me Up."

But I think last night I thought of Olivia Taylor a lot because -- I've tried drawing her a lot and I feel like I never do her beauty any justice.

The oatmeal on the stove, by the way, came from a movie I watched recently, Nicholas Ray's film Party Girl, starring Cyd Charisse.

There's a scene right at the beginning where Charisse burns her hand on a pot of cocoa. That burn leads to a scene I was sort of shocked to find in a 1958 studio film like Party Girl. So that's why the oatmeal was burning on the stove in my dream.

There are some things, too, that relate to my family. Obviously at the end of the dream there's a relative of mine, who kind of makes the whole situation seem like a family situation -- which it very well could have been.

But I've dealt with some inner conflict over the weekend because of family stuff. And I've felt like a failure because of it. Yet, when I started drawing, I forgot all about the family stuff.

However, when I got so critical of myself for my drawing, I think that made me think about my family again. I think I felt pretty pathetic... worrying about some drawing, when I should really have been thinking about all the family stuff.

So I think the family imagery in my dreams comes from that. A lot of that conflict of wanting to resolve things with my family once and for all, so we can all just be happy together, but just messing it up all the time. And trying to find a way to make that immature amateur artist in me reconcile with my adult self so I can just finally be a good relative to my family.

But I don't think I'm totally there. Obviously, my brain didn't hit the mark with that goal. My preconscious had other problems to solve. I'm just not totally sure what those problems were.

dead mall renaissance

This blog reviews images from my waking life that influence the images of my dreams.

This post reviews images from this entry of my dream journal maboroshi no yume.

A lot of the imagery of my dreams has a distinctively late 1970s/early 1980s style, partly because, as I mentioned in a previous post, I've recently been leafing through photos in a 1983 book called Denver: America's Mile High Center of Enterprise, which I inherited from my grandparents last year after my step-grandma passed away.

But the deep blue coming through the windows in the first of my dreams from last night also, I think, comes from this dead mall video on Ace's Adventures YouTube channel. This video documents Shoppingtown Mall in Syracuse, NY.

This video is, in my opinion, one of Anthony's most elegantly filmed dead mall videos. The pacing has a Frederick Wiseman style. Throughout the video, Anthony films the skylights of the mall. In this way, we get a sense of the passage of time -- how much time Anthony spent inside the mall. At one point, there's a glimpse of some beautiful, deep blue late afternoon light. I think this is what influenced my dream so much.

My brain is pretty temperamental and lazy. So there are times when I just can't read. All I can do is look at images.

So I've been purposely feeding my brain imagery of dead malls and Renaissance Art, just to see what my unconcious and preconscious make of things. One book I've been looking through is this book from an old McGraw-Hill series on the history of art and culture.

One book I started leafing through last night was this National Geographic book, The Renaissance: Maker of Modern Man.

This is another book I inherited from my grandparents. And in the book has some elements that flowed through into my dreams. One comes from this page, which displays a beautiful lemon grove and building that belonged to Cosimo de Medici.

But the beautiful lemon grove and building did not appear in my dream, as I'd hoped they would. Instead, the story in the text influenced my dream. The story tells how Cosimo would settle down daily to read St. Gregory's Moralia, which is a 35-freakin'-volume commentary on the Book of Job. Yikes!

Here's an image from Alamy that shows an actual page from St. Gregory's Moralia.

I'm pretty sure I could imagine that kind of page without actually having seen it. And that's the kind of page that became the text in the architecture book in my third dream.

However, there was another influence from my leafing through the National Geographic's book on the Renaissance. It came from this page, which shows the Teatro Olimpico, by Andrea Palladio.

Again, this was an image I was very interested in. First of all, this fish-eye lens reminds me a lot of this image, which serves as the frontispiece, so to speak, for the Denver book I've been leafing through.

But this image was also interesting to me because the ceiling in this image is a painted sky. But when I first looked at it I thought it was a real sky.

This trompe-l'œil effect of a fake sky reminds me a lot of the mall walkways in Las Vegas -- particularly in this case of those at The Venetian. Here are some images of those walkways from when I went to Las Vegas as part of a work trip last year.

So, again, I was hoping to see some images in my dream that reminded me of the Teatro Olimpico or my walks in Las Vegas.

But instead what influenced my dream was the actual book that Andrea Palladio wrote, The Four Books of Architecture.

I don't think I'd ever known about Palladio's book on architecture. And, of course, as soon as I learned of it, I wanted to have and read it. Hence my preconscious groaning in my dream about having to lug something like that around -- physically and psychically!

Here is a cool video from The School of Life's YouTube channel, where Dr. Hannah Roxburgh, PhD, discusses the life, work, and philosophy of Palladio.

In my third dream, where this whole architecture book imagery takes place, there's a discussion between myself and a current Denver-area political candidate about whether these books are meant for me or my mom.

There are obviously, as you can assume, a lot of emotional dynamics around this discussion -- from the family perspective and from the perspective of this conversation between myself and a high-profile Denverite. And a lot of that stuff relates back to conversations between my mom, my grandpa, and myself. But I would get too tangled up in talking about that stuff. So I'll just leave it to the side.

But I think it all leads, anyhow, to a question I'm always asking myself -- which, I'm sure, we ALL ask ourselves -- which is basically, What right do I have to success in my life? What right do I have to act in the world at all?

I, like many others, am confronted every day with that question, sometimes by myself, and sometimes by others. Usually people ask the question of "Who is this guy?" to give euphemism to the fact that they don't think a person should be acting in the world. Usually they believe that the person shouldn't be allowed to act in the world because they're biased against the group of people of whom that person is a part.

It's hard to call bullshit on that mentality. And so usually the person who's the object of that statement feels a need to be better and better. It's a vicious cycle. And I've been a part of of it since at least 2004, when I really started to assert myself in the social world. But it's such a powerful force on my life, I think, because I let it be, because of a lot of my emotional complexes from my youth.

Obviously I question my life every single day. I'm getting older. And I'm confronted with the fact that I'm closer to the day of my death than I am to the day of my birth at this point. And I think that's why I imagined myself as a seventy-year-old (my grandpa died in his early seventies) in my second dream. I do get upset at myself for acting like a child when I should be acting like an adult. But I can't seem to find a social foothold that will allow me enough permission in the world to claim my right to adult action -- and adult social and material standing, by the way.

Instead, what I keep on running up against is just social group after social group that is so annoyed by the most basic fact of my existence, apparently, that they just all immediately go into kid-mode and focus on nothing but annoying the hell out of me. Again -- that's not really something unique to my experience. It's a part of the way game theory has come to rule the world, unfortunately, in my opinion.

This is why, as soon as I reflect on my age, I go into another room, where I sit down next to my brother/nephew who immediately sets to annoying my by tapping his used chopsticks (i.e. slobbery eating utensils) against my shoulder.

The imagery of the Hit Stix -- I'm not sure how that relates to things. However, I keep on meaning to make this book, Toys of the 50s, 60s, and 70s, a part of my nightly imagery while I'm waiting for my brain to feel ready to read again.

I got this book a couple years ago while at the History Colorado Center's exhibit by the same name. This exhibit has traveled to a few different museums. Here's a video about the exhibit from The Senator John Heinz History Center's YouTube channel.

My goal has been to read about some of the toys and then look up YouTube videos on them. But I haven't gotten to them yet. I also reflected last night that the toys only go through the 1970s. That would mean I'd miss out on some of the toys from my youth, i.e. the 1980s and 1990s. I didn't think of any toys in particular. But my preconscious obviously chose Hit Stix as a good example. Here's an image of HitStix from the PicClick website.

And here's an old commercial for Hit Stix.

The commercial really sucks. It tries so hard to be cool. But it misses the mark so badly. And, as I remember, Hit Stix as a toy were themselves pretty disappointing.

zombie fire

This blog reviews images from my waking life that influence the images of my dreams.

Today's post reviews images from this entry in my dream journal maboroshi no yume.

I had a lot of stuff to do today so couldn't really address my dream images in depth. That's probably better, as I think smaller entries are nicer than longer, ranting entries.

One big influence on my first dream is this YouTube review of Star Wars DroidWorks by Lazy Game Reviews.

A lot of the desert settings from this game play into my dream. The desert tunnels also probably inspire the strange, large desert buildings of my dream. Strangely, the desert buildings in my dream are supposed to be industrial outskirts of a large desert city. So they're supposed to be industrial buildings, I'm pretty sure. But they're more like ancient palaces or alien sci-fi buildings of some kind. Weird.

I feel like my view of the strange desert building from which the young girl makes her zombie announcement also comes from Raphael's painting of The Fire in the Borgo. The image below is from the Wikipedia entry on the painting.

I had been studying the painting last night. The picture on Wikipedia is better than the picture in the book that I was studying from. But even still, it's a strange painting. The fire itself is barely in the picture. And so much of the drama in the story is so spatially balanced that, for me, anyway, it's hard to feel any drama. I think all of this dramatic strangeness filtered into my first dream. But the space of Raphael's painting influence the space of the strange desert building,  as well.

The girl's announcement that she's a zombie reminds me a lot of an amateur fetish novel I wrote three years ago called Hallowgiving. In that novel, most of the characters become zombies and vampires. The zombies and vampires have a final showdown, which is filmed via drones by news stations. Here's a link to that story.

I think back to my story Hallowgiving a lot, as I feel like, in an allegorical sense, a lot of the stuff I described in that story is happening today.

Other than that, I was walking around my hometown of Denver yesterday. I walked through a kind of industrial area that is being developed more and more and is becoming a sort of fashionable neighborhood. It wasn't too long ago that the whole area felt like a desert. So I think my memory of the place came back in my dream, in a sort of strange way.

I think that the first dream also has a lot to do with the recent events in Israel and Palestine, which are extremely distressing, to say the least. I would probably imagine that the blonde girl in my dream is inspired by Ivanka Trump. Images below are from Business Insider.