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.
