twisted fantasies with missing friends

Good morning, everybody.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

skin punk

Good morning, everybody.


This entry is supplemental to this entry in my dream journal blog.

One theme that recurs in my dreams is of organized stalking and targeted individuals. You can look up organized stalking on YouTube. There are plenty of examples of it.


I think, though, that everybody has dreams of being stalked or being targeted. It's the same with me. I think this can relate to one of two things. Either I wish that I was so special that people had to "target" to keep whatever is special about me under wraps. Or else, there is something I don't like about my own personality, my "shadow side," that I try to avoid, but that follows me everywhere.


Also, I think anybody who knows even as little as I do about conspiracy theory knows that organized stalking and targeted individuals are supposed to be part of that plan.


Well, I think the reason the themes of organized stalking were so apparent in my dream last night was because in the book I'm reading right now (even though I didn't read any of it last night), Condominium, by John D. MacDonald, there are a couple of characters intricately caught up in researching conspiracy theories. There are also a couple characters who basically form a militia to protect their condominium against young people.


Whereas a couple of nights before, I had a dream where I was being stalked by young people, in this dream I'm being stalked by one person who might be more around my age and one person who is a bit older than I. This would be a compensation -- one side of my emotions is struggling with the fact that I'm becoming older, while another side of my emotions is struggling with the fact that I still feel like people treat me like I'm young. My dreams show me one side of the argument, then another.


I know, without yet having reached it, that the climax of Condominium. So I imagined a storm brewing over a beach in my dream. I have never been to Florida. So I just imagined some random beach scene from the East Coast -- namely Far Rockaway. I'm not sure why that is. 


Yesterday I went to Downtown Denver. I walked around down there for a little while and then headed into the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art. The museum currently has an exhibition of punk photography running. The photos are by Bruce Conner. The photos basically mainly show the punk scene in San Francisco during the late 1970s. 


One of the photos shows a person looking into the Mabuhay club. At first I thought the person was a man. But the person was a woman. The woman is wearing a jacket commemorating someone's service in Vietnam.


I took the bus Downtown. The bus had to stop for a couple minutes a couple of times because there were people in wheelchairs getting onto and off the bus. Some person behind me kept complaining about the people in wheelchairs. He even called them "p---ies" for being in wheelchairs, which I thought was odd.


So I think I combined these two images into the images of the wheelchair person in my dream. 


The person in the Adidas jacket came from two places. In the morning yesterday I went out to buy a paper. A young man, kind of tall and skinny, seemed to be heading out of my apartment complex at the same time as I, and he seemed to be going in the same place. It was a little strange, and it freaked me out a little.


But, also, a couple days ago, I watched the YouTube video below. This video talks about some designers working with sporting labels to create sporty fashions in preparation for the Olympics. The video mentions that designer Stella McCartney collaborates with Adidas.

Yesterday I also watched the Pedro Almodovar film La Piel Que Habito (The Skin I Live In). The complete film is available on YouTube. But for this entry, I'm just putting a link to the trailer that is on YouTube.

I'm not sure that my first dream had anything to do with the film. But the second dream definitely did. One of the pivotal scenes of the film involves two people having sex at the base of a tree. One of the characters, who is suffering from some major psychological issues, ends up biting the other character's hand to keep him from continuing to have sex with her.


I think my brain condensed ejaculation with the biting of the hand, making ejaculation into spitting. I then took this image and went walking all around town, spitting on the base of every tree.


I think that what this probably meant is that I was walking around town, advertising my sexual availability everywhere I went. But there wasn't anybody else out on the sidewalks. I was all by myself on the sidewalks. Everybody else was in a car. Everybody could still see what I was doing -- or at least I was worried they could. But nobody was close enough for me actually to do  it with them.


My third dream, the lobotomy dream, is also, I think, a reflection to the movie. In the movie, one of the characters gets a sex-change forced upon him. Actually, I believe that La Piel Que Habito, while I'm sure it's known as an update of the classic film Eyes without a Face, is also, in my opinion, one of the best forced-feminization stories of all time.


As I went through puberty, I began to have desires to be a transvestite. At the ages of eleven and twelve I began getting and wearing women's underwear from stores. I always fantasized that I'd be magically transported into a girl's body. But I never wanted to lose my own identity, my memory of myself as who I was as a boy. I thought that if I lost my identity, I'd lose my intelligence (whatever kind of intelligence I have).


I think that that desire not to lose my intelligence was actually related to a fear of castration. Losing my penis would be equivalent with losing my intellect. I don't think that's a fact of life, you know, that penis equals intellect. But it was just a part of my fear of castration.


The woman in my dream didn't look like the re-made woman in the movie. But she stood for the  woman, I'm pretty sure. So a person asking her if she wanted a lobotomy, and her telling the person yes would be the same thing, according to that fear of castration, as agreeing to having a sex change operation.


One last thing I'd like to say about La Piel Que Habito, even though it doesn't have to do with my dreams: one scene uses the Elliott Smith song "Between the Bars" really incredibly. Of course, the version used is a cover version. But the melody is really characteristic of Smith: very melancholy and nostalgic. It creates a perfect mood for that scene, which is kind of like a goodbye-before-death scene.


Here's a fabulous YouTube video with Smith's version:

And here's the Chris Garneau cover, which is used in the Almodovar film:

So, anyway, I was so moved, both by the scene in the film and my love for Smith's song that I spent, oh, god, maybe an hour or so singing that song, over and over again.


Dear god, when I think about some of the silly things I do sometimes...