red dresses, dead malls, and local politics

This blog post is related to the imagery in my dream journal entry from this morning, which can be found here.

A lot of the imagery and atmosphere from last night's dreams still comes, I feel, from the Fred Astaire & Cyd Charisse movie The Band Wagon, which I watched a couple days ago.

The busy diner scene and the talk of the movie business in the third dream definitely come from The Band Wagon, as do the marble staircase and probably even the jewelry commercial (where the woman wears a red dress) in the dead mall in the first dream.

Image from Video City website.

But probably the weird scene in the lounge room in the third dream, where there's a fight scene put on and then repeated for the benefit of rich people, is also related to The Band Wagon, namely the part where Cordova is pitching the new play to the rich backers.

Image screen grab from YouTube, via Warner Bros.

But I also believe that the imagery of the jewelry commercial in my dead mall dream was likely related to my recent superficial study of 1990s adult entertainment star Alexis Christian. Adult entertainment from the 1990s that carries the glam of the 1990s, and maybe the 1980s, too.

Image from Listal

Obviously, dead malls are always on my mind, as they are, I'm sure, for a lot of YouTube junkies like me. The Dead Mall Series by Dan Bell is definitely worth checking out.

I feel like the imagery of the dead mall in my dream was also related to Grand Central Station, which likely would loop back to The Band Wagon.

Image from Wired New York

The strange deed in my dream likely comes from my recent reading of the 12th volume of the Nancy Drew mystery The Message in the Hollow Oak.

In that story, which I'm still reading, Nancy wins a radio contest and gets the deed to some land in Canada as a prize. The deed very quickly becomes a strong, yet really strangely played, element of suspense. So the strangeness of Nancy Drew's land title echoed into my dream.

The imagery of the rich woman in a flapper outfit in the third dream reminds me of The Band Wagon again. But the glasses the rich woman wears reminds me of a Rifftrax short released last night, riffing an educational film for young kids getting eyeglasses for the first time.

The strange martial arts performance relates to a video I saw last night on YouTube where San Francisco-based dance company ODC/Dance performed for San Francisco's city council at a pre-council ceremony honoring ODC's ruby anniversary.

And while the marble and stone surrounding in all three of my dreams relate partly to The Band Wagon, they also relate to my personal life. A lot of my "social life" is based on attending political events in Colorado as a spectator. I obviously see a lot of polished stone in government buildings, including Colorado's Capitol.

However, I've felt myself transitioning away from having any sort of personal goals as it relates to political life in Colorado. I think my fourth dream from two nights ago shows that. And a lot of the personal conflicts in last night's dreams, especially the second dream, show why I feel myself transitioning away from thinking about how I involve myself in Colorado's political life.

The discussion of Ron Paul, or The Ron Paul Show, in the second dream probably relates more to Bernie Sanders than to Ron Paul, as some of my favorite local political candidates in this year's election have been big supporters of Bernie Sanders and have as a consequence of that been shunned by Colorado's Democratic Party.

The big book I read in my second dream is also sort of related to my personal social life. The book is by Winston Churchill. But it's a huge book. I have a lot of books by Winston Churchill in my library. I inherited them from my grandparents after my grandmother passed away. And I'm aiming to read them soon. But the big book is definitely a reference to the Marquis de Sade's Juliette, which is enormous.

Winston Churchill gives some pretty important warnings against letting Nazism rise again, I believe. And we should probably pay attention to those warnings. But when brown people like me start talking about those warnings, even on a local level, we're thought of as speaking out of place or out of turn. We're looked at, in my opinion, as being as scandalous as the Marquis de Sade -- who, in my opinion, wasn't punished because of the sexuality of his writings, but because of their politics.

rejection and transition

This blog entry is about waking life imagery related to this dream entry in my dream blog Maboroshi no Yume.

I had four dreams last night. In the third dream, I began by moving from a backstage area in a theater, through a kind of sanctuary in a church that was also a restaurant, and finally into an elevator lobby in something like a hotel.

This imagery definitely comes from my experiences over the weekend. Over the weekend I attended two dance performances -- the ODC/Dance performance of The Velveteen Rabbit and the Ballet Ariel performance of Appalachian Spring and Ballerinas by Degas.

Here's a video about ODC/Dance's The Velveteen Rabbit, to give you an idea of the show.

I also wrote a Twitter thread about The Velveteen Rabbit, which is here.

But I think the Ballet Ariel performance of Appalachian Spring and Ballerinas by Degas gave a lot more inspiration to the imagery.

Here's a link to my Twitter thread about the Ballet Ariel performance.

Ballet Ariel's Ballerinas by Degas is an original dance, choreographed by Ilena Norton, and based on Degas' paintings of ballerinas. It is largely based in the ballet studio, though there are some moments showing the ballerinas on stage, performing. A couple key moments depict these performances from a backstage point of view. That imagery was really unique and powerful. I think that's why I found myself backstage in my dream.

Yesterday I also watched the great Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse musical The Band Wagon.

In The Band Wagon, Fred Astaire plays a down-on-his-luck actor whose career is revived by a musical written by his two best friends, but produced by an eccentric classical actor/producer and co-starring a prima ballerina. There are a lot of backstage scenes in The Band Wagon, too. But those scenes are grand -- and usually grand disasters! So I think a lot of the imagery of strange wiring in my dreams comes from these backstage scenes in The Band Wagon.

The body switching idea in my first dream may also have come from The Band Wagon, as there's a musical number in the musical where the Cyd Charisse character plays a blonde woman and a brunette. The Fred Astaire character plays a detective hunting for a criminal. He thinks the criminal is a man. But it ends up being the blonde woman dressed as a man. This is partly where I think the body switching idea and the gender switching idea comes from.

The idea of the body I've switched into being "rejected" (like a rejected transplant) comes partly from an article I recently read about a man receiving his second face transplant, after his first face was rejected.

The body I've switched into, as well as my old body, oddly enough, are a lot like a mix between three images, I feel: Robocop (the face), the Svedka girl, and the armored suits the Black Panther heroes wear.

I'm not really sure what this means. I was supposed to become a woman. And the woman I was supposed to switch bodies with was supposed to become a man. But we both became robots. And our (robot) bodies were possibly being rejected -- by our bodies. So our whole bodies were somehow being rejected by our whole bodies. Weird.

This idea of an entire body rejecting itself is probably based, though, in my sense of not being in very good health at all. Over the past three years I've been in some very stressful situations. But 2017 was so bad, especially in terms of work, that I seriously feel at one point that I may have done some major damage to my arteries. Since mid-2017, I've sort of felt like the condition of my vascular system has been getting worse and worse. So I'm not surprised to have a dream where my body is rejecting my body.

In my first and third dream I am faced with going up a dark tower -- a stairway in the first dream and an elevator bank in the third. That image, traveling upward in a dark tower, may also be related to death.

But this imagery may also be related to transition. In my fourth dream, I am basically traveling from one city center to another -- maybe from one city center to a city center in another country/continent! The fact that the buildings I am traveling to and from are Capitol buildings leads me to believe, given elements of my waking life, that I am, at least unconsciously, working out a new (probably a final) professional trajectory for my life.

I also deal with some issues of being attracted to, as well as socially awkward or nervous around, children. This is definitely related to senses I had of social anxiety around kids and adults while I was at the performances this weekend. I am trying to be less closed in when I'm in social settings like the theater, because I think it makes the people around me feel more at ease. I feel like my dreams were trying to work that out.

In terms of the adult baby diaper dream -- I think people may know that I have that fetish -- an adult baby fetish. When I was younger I could fit into baby diapers. Over the past two or three years I've gained so much weight that I can't. So I can only fit into adult baby diapers, which I basically hate. So in the dream, I dreamed that I had my younger, fitter body back -- and that adult baby diapers actually looked cute on me.