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.

shadowed by projections

Good morning, everybody.

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

My first dream is another dream involving organized stalking. Organized stalking is, or was, when I was following things, one of the main ideas in current conspiracy theory. It's the idea that people organize themselves in groups in order to follow other people around, for some reason or another.

The conspiracy theory idea is that organized stalking is a method of mind control, some kind of CIA operation to see how to shape and control people's minds. A lot of conspiracy theorists say that there is some sort of ultimate CIA link to all the groups of people following other people around. The person being followed around is called a targeted individual.

Regardless of the fact that CIA mind control programs have been documented as having existed (and when Clinton was President, he apologized for mind control programs done on people in the 1960s and 1970s), I'm not sure I believe in any of the theories about organized stalking. But I think it shows up in my dreams over and over because it's a theory that meshes well with my own psychological complexes.

In fact, one of the reasons I followed conspiracy theories for a while, and occasionally still follow them, is because I find that they match with a lot of the darker aspects of our collective unconscious, in terms of really powerful authority figures, people out to get people, ultimate links to ultimate evils, and so forth. In an age where religion seems to be in its death throes, things like conspiracy theory may step in to allow the human psyche some realm in which to express archetypes and symbols and what not.

But even if there isn't some big conspiracy surrounding activities such as organized stalking, it's pretty obvious that currently people have been using technology, social media, to conduct activities that would look very much like organized stalking, such as flash mobs for robbing stores.

One phenomenon of the flash mob robberies is that they are often accompanied by group beatings. A mob might end up attacking one person in the streets or in a park while that person is alone, or while the group of people targeted is far outnumbered by the group of people in the flash mob.

This kind of hits home for me personally, even though I know for certain that what I'm about to talk about has nothing to do with organized stalking or flash mobs. Mostly it has to do with my own stupidity.

On New Year's Day, 2011, I walked through Prospect Park after having visited with a friend. It wasn't very late at night at all, but the sun was down. Still, Prospect Park had become (for better or worse) a place where people feel safer and safer to walk around or jog or bike at night. But on that night I was attacked by about ten kids. They all just grouped around me and beat the crap out of me. I'm really small and skinny. So it was pretty easy for them to do.

Like I said, it was my own stupidity for walking through the park at night. But the event allowed me at least to sympathize with some of the people who were absolutely on record as being victims in a flash mob beating.

And I think the event stuck with me even more, since I don't really like myself. I don't feel wanted in the world. I feel like nobody in the world thinks I deserve to be around. I really give myself a working-over with self-hatred just about every day of my life. I project all my self-hatred outward, so that I feel that I don't really hate myself, but that everybody else hates me. Having a group of people beat me down just confirmed it.

Actually, I do have to say that I've been in very few fights in my life. Because I'm weak. I purposely keep myself very skinny. So I just don't get into fights.

But the only fights I can think of have been where big groups have fought against me. The one I just mentioned is one. The other was in 2006 where a group of scrubby guys confronted me right in the Gramercy Park area of Manhattan. And the other was in 2003, where (this one was all my fault) a bartender, then three kids, then an entire bar full of people, got in a fight with me.

Those are, I think, the only three fights I've been in in my entire life. And they were all... not fights so much as they were me getting my ass beat down.

But I think the ideas of conspiracy theory and of organized stalking have recently been at the forefront of my mind because of two books I've just read: Condominium, by John D. MacDonald, and Murder on the Orient Express, by Agatha Christie.

In Condominium, one of the characters involves himself very deeply in conspiracy theory, to the point where his studies of conspiracy theory shut him out of the rest of life altogether. Another character in the book organizes what could basically be thought of as a vigilante militia to protect the condominium he lives in from some kids hanging around the area.

I'm hardly a kid anymore. I'm 34. But the way this character is drawn in the book, I feel like I know him in the personalities of people whom I've lived around over the course of my adult life: people in their 50s and 60s who look at everybody under the age of 40 with jealousy and suspicion -- violent, vehement suspicion. Seeing that character brought to life by MacDonald brought my own resentment of real-life versions of that character back to my mind.

In Murder on the Orient Express, of course, the murder victim actually is followed around by a large group of people. The murder victim in Orient Express really could be thought of as a targeted individual who is the object of organized stalking. Of course, he committed a crime that deserved his punishment. But it really shook me to see such a blatant presentation of organized stalking.

The theme actually reminded me a lot of the Fritz Lang film M, in which the Peter Lorre figure is first the object of organized stalking and then becomes a defendant in what basically amounts to a mob jury of vigilantes.

I think my own fears of being followed come from two things. One is the idea that there is some "inexpressible guilt" I have on my conscience that "everybody else" knows I must pay for. The other is the idea that I have some "great potential" in me that "everybody else" wants to keep down.

These two ideas, I think, compensate each other. The truth lies somewhere between, obviously. I'm a normal person with normal faults. I think if I could accept myself as a normal person, I'd probably lose a lot of the paranoid fears that inform my dreams in such a way that they involve themes of organized stalking.

But I think the idea of some "great potential" informed a lot of this dream. At the beginning of the dream, I've apparently finished one task, and now I'm waiting for word on my next task. This gives the idea of me being on some sort of assignment, of being part of a larger goal: of having, in other words, some great potential.

So, while I'm waiting, I do a strange thing. I begin to fly. I do this, though, by stepping on a stone. I then fly up through the air and around a tree's canopy.

A few nights ago, I had a dream in which I was assigned a "task" of spitting on trees. I had to spit on the root crown of the trees. I don't know what this means. But it's obvious that in that dream, my concern was with the base of the tree. In this dream the concern is with the canopy of the tree. So there is a balancing out of themes, which, according to Jung, happens a lot in dream cycles.

But what also interested me in the dream was this image of flying by stepping on a stone. I think one obvious interpretation of that image would be that I was "using stepping stones" to "rise up in the world." Unfortunately, I'm so ill-equipped for the social processes of this world that I think using just one stepping stone will allow me to fly as high as I want in the world.

But I think the image of the "stepping stone" also comes from the video below. The video shows a captive test for the new Sierra Nevada Corporation Dream Chaser space vehicle. The test was, as far as I could tell, to determine some of the aerodynamic characteristics of the Dream Chaser's structure. But you'll notice in the video how the vehicle is lifted off from and dropped back onto something that looks like a giant mattress. I think I translated this mattress into a "stepping stone" in my dream.

The views of the Dream Chaser being carried over the Jefferson County landscape (which is, incidentally, my landscape -- where I'm living right now) reminded me a lot of some of the other spaceflight-related dreams I've recently had. The fact that the Dream Chaser is basically picked up, wheeled around a bit, and then dropped back down to earth, also reminds me of the flight pattern I take around the canopy of the tree in my dream.

dressing in drag in drag

Good morning, everybody.

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

I think I'd like to start with the second dream, because it's so easy for me to see where the actual imagery came from.

Yesterday I was looking at the Dust Jacket Attic blog, which showed some really nice photos of the BCBG Max Azria Resort 2013 collection.

One of the photos the blog showed was this one:

Notice the v-shape to the top. I really liked this shape. I think my dreaming mind exaggerated it.

Also, while watching YouTube, I came across the video below, for the song called "Baby Cruising Love," by the Japanese pop group Perfume:

You can see in how in the video the girls are wearing really soft, cream-white fabrics.

Also, yesterday I watched a video on the FashionTVHot channel on YouTube showing clips from the Salon de la Lingerie in Paris. There is a girl at 1:29 in this video who looks like an adult version of the younger girl I imagined would come "sweep me off my feet" in my dream.

The clothing the young girl is wearing in the dream definitely comes from the color of this BCBG dress, also shown on Dust Jacket Attic.

But I think the "tie-dyed" pattern definitely comes from some of the patchy patterning in the lingerie in the video above.

There were some more difficult aspects about the imagery in the dream. The first was the "shoes," which were like big, satiny bows. This image, actually, comes from the movie Maid's Secret, which I watched a couple nights ago.

The "maid" in the movie is actually a cosplay maid who works in a "Maid Cafe" in Akihabara. A part of the maid costume is a big bow or ribbon, displayed on the chest. The maid's loss of, and then search for, the ribbon basically leads to a pretty awful rape scene. During the rape scene, the maid's panties get shoved down one of her legs, almost down to the maid's foot.

I think my mind took the bow, as a symbol of submissiveness, and relocated it from my chest to my feet, where the maid's panties were as she'd been raped. I'm obviously wearing a weird transvestite costume. It looks like a man's tuxedo. But my feet, my shoes, are showing the feminine/submissive side I am trying to display by being a transvestite.

Carl Jung says that shoes can be seen (not all the time, but sometimes) as a symbol for socialization. Our feet are where we connect with the world. And our shoes are like the social aspect we employ in ourselves to protect ourselves from the full forces of nature and the world. So even though my "transvestite" costume in the dream looks like a tuxedo, where I'm finally connecting with the world, I'm a submissive maid.

But why the tuxedo in the dream? Well, last night I finished reading Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express. Two plot elements (I don't think I'll spoil anything for anybody) are a red kimono and a railway conductor's outfit.

It's eventually understood that the railway conductor's outfit had probably been worn by a woman. So the woman had been dressed up as a man. She'd been a transvestite, in other words.

The kimono is an elegant piece of clothing, much like the tuxedo. So I think I condensed the image in my mind of a kimono and a railway conductor's outfit to make a tuxedo. So, when I look at myself in the mirror, I'm seeing, apparently, myself, as a woman, dressing in drag, so that I look like a man. But my feet show that I really am a woman. And, underneath my tuxedo, I'm still wearing a dress.

But I think the reason I ran with the image of the female transvestite from Orient Express is that it kind of counters the anxiety I had from watching the rape scene in Maid's Secret. I think I liked the idea in Orient Express of some woman dressing up as a man and killing a man who had caused her so much grief in the past. It seemed like the woman needed to take up some sort of masculine aspect in order to get control of the situation.

So I think I, in need of some control as well, allowed the transvestite part of myself to "dress in drag" and look like a man, so that I could get some control over a situation. But I'm not sure. That analysis seems a little shaky. I might be reading a little too much into stuff.

I don't want to get too much into my other dreams, now that I've spent so much time on this dream. For the third dream, I'd say that the "gash" the man receives also comes from Orient Express, where the man murdered has been gashed twelve times.

But the gash being on the nose makes me think of the expression "nose out of joint." That means, of course, that someone's been offended. Usually it means someone's been offended by something they probably shouldn't have been offended so easily by. The fact that the man is overworked and exhausted and then he gets his "nose out of joint" is all a statement about me personally.

For the first dream, the spaceflight dream, the only thing I'll say right now is that I had another dream, only a few nights ago, where my spaceflight had been delayed. That dream also started with me flying around in a space capsule, then landing. And in that dream I was, again, delayed by a man who was something like a supervisor to me, and who said I wasn't ready for a spaceflight yet.

I'm not sure what the meaning is to all that. But it's interesting that the themes repeated themselves so plainly.

secret satanic submission

Good morning, everybody.

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

The easiest image for me to recognize from my dreams last night was the image of the men attacking me.

Last night I watched a Japanese pink film called Maid's Secret. The film is about two women who vie for the affections of one man. They each try to become the woman they think the man really wants. One of the woman becomes submissive, a maid working in a maid cafe in Akihabara. The other becomes dominant, working as a punishing mistress.

When it becomes apparent that the man likes the maid better than he likes the mistress, the mistress gets two of her submissive men to rape the maid. The rape scene is pretty long and drawn out and basically spoils the movie for me.

Two nights ago I watched a Japanese pink film called Rafureshia. This film is also about two women. One woman is a young woman involved with an overly protective, but incestuous, relationship with her father. The other woman is married to a completely disinterested man. The man's mother also has sexual feelings for the man.

In a scene that appears to be a suicide scene, the young woman jumps off the balcony of her father's mansion and into the sea. She ends up swimming to the shore of a town, where she meets three transient men. The transient men immediately take her to their little hovel and have sex with her.

This scene isn't much of a rape scene, since the girl, as she first meets the men, shows her sexual readiness by lifting up her skirt and showing the men her panties. She doesn't fight the men. And she actually thinks of the men as her friends. But the men come after the young woman with the same kind of intensity as the men raping the maid in Maid's Secret.

But last night I also started reading Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot mystery Murder on the Orient Express. In the book the detective Hercule Poirot is called back suddenly to London to work on finishing a case. He books an emergency ride on the first departing train. He expects the train will be empty. But he is surprised to find that the train is so full he can only get a sleeper room by sharing it with another person.

So the image from Orient Express translates itself from a train onto a bus in my dream. Instead of being a well-off detective getting onto an elegant train, however, I'm myself, getting onto a bus, and sharing the last seat with a few transient guys, whom I probably identify with more than I'd identify with Poirot.

The men end up attacking me. And I'd assume that this would mean they take away whatever innocence I'm trying to hold onto, like the maid in Maid's Secret, or they take away whatever naivete I've been sheltered by, like the young woman in Rafureshia.

But when the men somehow find out I'm on some kind of "special mission," to deliver a report, they stop attacking me. Or else they find out that they like me and they stop attacking me. I'm not sure which it is.

Reporting is a theme in all these dreams. I just finished reading the John D. MacDonald novel Condominium. The novel is all about the developers and the residents of a shoddily-constructed condominium out in the Florida keys.

The novel is overall really great, with a great cast of characters and a lot of interesting little soap-opera like dramas. The novel also concludes with a lot of very intense action. The intensity of the action is on the scale of some of the climaxes of some of Stephen King's great works.

But one of the final plot lines in the book involves a man assigned to write a report about how poorly built and hurricane-prone the condominiums are out on this particular Florida key. The report is written and distributed to everybody out on the key who will take it. Some people try to hush up the report. But it's already out there. But even though it's already out there, people still don't really pay attention to it.

This, of course, reminds me a lot of the events leading up to the financial crisis we've been through recently. The comparison is too obvious to really go in depth.

I think I, like so many other people nowadays, fantasize about being a person -- somehow -- to write some report full of foresight that can warn people off of some impending crisis. Of course, those reports were already written. The people who had foresight about our financial crisis have already been recognized as such. So it's strange that I would fantasize about being one of those people. The list is already written. I'm not on it.

But I was also surfing around on the net yesterday and picked up two reports. One was put out by the White House and was an outline for strengthening rural communities in the United States. That report was, I believe, put out within the last 48 hours.

The other report was put out by the Office of Basic Energy Sciences within the U.S. Department of Energy in March of this year. That report was basically the 2011 annual progress report for the BES.

So, after shuffling aimlessly through those reports for a few minutes, I think I had internet reports on the brain. Whenever I get internet reports on the brain, I often think of Michael Aquino, the founder of the Temple of Set.

I got to know about Michael Aquino basically through conspiracy videos on YouTube. Aquino is famous in those videos because not only was the Temple of Set formed after Aquino had been involved with the Church of Satan, but because Aquino, serving as Lieutenant Colonel in the United States Army, was also involved in psychological warfare operations.

Michael Aquino is also famous for having been a part of Geraldo Rivera's sensationalist "expose" on Satanism, which is also on YouTube.

I'm not educated enough to have an opinion one way or the other about psychological warfare.

But, with my mother having been a pagan, though not a Satanist, when I was born, I've often found it quite annoying to have people claim that someone is bad just because he has been involved with the Church of Satan.

My family became Christian when I was very young. As I've gotten older I've wondered whether a lot of my own emotional issues might not be related to the fact that I've got a whole religious aspect of myself that I've basically plowed underground -- that more pagan aspect of myself.

It's an overly cerebral approach to psychology, and too based, I think, in half-baked, layman's understanding of Jungian theory rather than real life experience. But I have wondered over the past few years if I'd have better emotional equilibrium in my life if I could just accept some of my deeper spiritual roots.

I found the Temple of Set more interesting than the Church of Satan, just -- for a very shallow reason -- because of its connection to Egyptian spirituality. I've been interested in Egyptian religion ever since I was a child. And about ten years ago I actually transcribed the entire E.A. Wallis Budge version of the Book of the Dead -- even though I managed not really to learn any Ancient Egyptian by having done so.

So Aquino becomes -- only in my mind -- a kind of figure for finding some kind of spiritual equilibrium in my life by accepting the pagan aspect of spirituality that I was born into. And I think this is accentuated by the fact that Aquino's writing is very intellectual and structured, very much based in a wide knowledge of philosophical and social theories, as well as in much deeper concepts and experiences.

Of course, the figure in my dream is a figure embodying some psychological issue of my own. But this psychological figure means something important to the continued development (?) of my psyche.

I want to believe that if I have a report in my hands (a kind of realized mental project) that has something to do with a task assigned to me by this important psychological figure (metaphorized by my understanding of Michael Aquino's public image), then I am protected by the importance of the task. Kind of a Lord of the Rings theme, I guess.