stuffed animal body snatchers

Today I went downtown to the Denver Art Museum's Material World exhibit. The exhibit is part of a whole series called Spun, which uses both pieces from the museum's permanent collection as well as loaned works.

The series, from what I understand from a recent New York Times article I read about the whole thing, is an attempt to get people more interested in the museum's permanent collection, not just the special exhibits. The theme of all the Spun exhibits is the use of textiles.

But the exhibits of Material World don't seem, to me, to be completely focused textiles. For instance, one of the pieces is just an arrangement of colorful erasers, while another is an arrangement of things like colorful rolls of tape and cans and balls, all arranged on a small pedestal to look like a city. And one very large work, which seems to be a gigantic tree trunk, with roots, chopped into pieces to look like some three-dimensional, comic-book-like version of a big city, all splayed out atop scattered papers, which also have fixed to them squares and slots of wood that look like miniature versions of big cities.

Nevertheless, the theme of weaving and textiles resonates throughout the exhibit. The most interesting use of textile work is in two knit works by an artist named Oliver Herring. These works use mylar ribbons, knitted together in some kind of double pattern or crossed-over pattern.

One of the works, made out of transparent mylar, is a thick rectangle with a hole in the center, inside of which is a replica of a coat, also made out of transparent mylar. The other work, which I liked a lot, is knitted out of silver mylar. It shows a double image of a man getting out of a rocking chair. The man is double, and the rocking chair is double, to illustrate, I guess, the duplicity of motion in a frozen moment.

Another work which made interesting use of string is called "Initiator," by an artist named Lin Tianmiao. This work has a female mannequin, the white paint covering her grey body chipping away, facing a knee-high frog. The frog is pulling the woman's hair -- made out of strands of white silk and as long as a bridal train -- into his mouth. This all takes place before a curved, pink wall.

I think this piece is a very interesting combination of fairy tales: the story of the frog prince and, of course, Rapunzel. But the white hair also reminds me of the white-haired demons and witches in Asian legends -- or, at least, I should say, in Japanese anime and Chinese and Japanese horror movies. But it's a strange spin on it all. After all, the frog is pulling the woman's hair out. As he does, the woman's body is chipping away, the white paint revealing the grey material underneath. The transformation about to occur doesn't seem like a happy ending.

Another collection of works I liked in the exhibit was by an artist named Lucas Samaras. One of the works is very textile-based: it's kind of a crazy-quilt, with bars of different colored textiles spanning across the work to create a star pattern or fragmented mandala.

Another work by Samaras is some sort of small chest, painted black with white spots, and then encrusted on the inside with small colorful beads and on the outside with pebble-sized, colorful, plastic "jewels." On the top half of the interior are three heads, which I suppose are portraits of Samaras. The bottom half of the interior is lined with pencils, which have a kind of psychedelic pattern printed on them. Before that is a miniature stage, heaped up with a hefty, scattered pile of pins, atop which stands a lacquered praying mantis, being ridden by a miniature Greek bust of a woman.

Also by Samaras is a standing work that looks like a mobile, or maybe even a mobile within a mobile. The framing of the mobile is mostly made out of metal netting and -- I think! -- twisted clothes hangers. But there are also some copper wires and painted-over, metallic kitchen tools. A couple of the legs of the figure are, I think, made out of a knife and a fork. And hanging through the figure are broken pieces of colorful wine glasses. A mannequin's face is masked by some of the metal mesh on one side of the figure.

Near the work by Samaras is an interesting work by Agustina Woodgate. This work is a large quilt, of sorts, made out of the "hides" of stuffed animals. The works is very colorful and bright. But there is a strange sense of morbidity about it, seeing that it is made out of the hides of toys that, one would assume, children have once loved. The name of this work is, appropriately enough, "No Rain, No Rainbow."

Another set of works I liked was by Annette Messager. Three of her works were along one wall. Two works were clusters of small, framed pieces hung from the wall by long strings of twine fixed to ragged nails. One of the works was something like a globe made out of small, black and white photos framed in thin, black frames. The photos were all of segments of male and female bodies, mostly mouths, nipples, arms, legs, and vaginas. I'm pretty sure I didn't see any penises.

The other strung work was a tiered series of small pieces: the top row having one work, the second row having two works, the third and fourth, three, and the bottom, four. Each work was a small drawing, hung in a black frame, before a framed page of diary-style writing, in colored pencil, of one word, repeated over and over.

The drawings were lovely, like children's drawings. The top object was a set of headphones. In the second row were a drawing of an empty bed (I think); and a drawing of two scantily clad girls bumping their bottoms together while another, naked, girl looks on.

In the third row were a strange animal that looked like a rabbit, except that its ears were like a jester's hat; a little girl nursing a doll that looked like a clown or jester; and a bird flying into the sky, except that its back looked like a naked woman's body.

In the fourth row were something like a group of men floating through the sea in a giant saucepan; a group of acrobats standing atop each other; and a witch's face. And in the bottom row were a naked, demon-winged woman; a stopwatch; a folded-paper boat; and a stone being flung at a stack of cans.

The other work by Messager was also interesting: a charred-black-looking span of paper (?) in the shape of a cobra, with colorful imagery illuminating the hood and chest of the "cobra" like stained glass. The colorful imagery was, in fact, two mouths with tongues sticking out, and a nose.

I wandered around in a couple more floors of the museum, but I won't go into detail on the stuff I saw. Two interesting works by David Schnell, and "Fox Games," which, I think, is a pretty legendary work, at least in Denver.

Also, the special exhibit "Chamber," by Charles Sandison: a huge, empty room with colored words and thin lines projected onto the slanted walls. Words exploding out of invisible sources, spreading and growing like germs or DNA or star systems, and always changing color. Very lovely and quiet.

I then came home and watched the film El Amor Brujo, a Spanish film based on a Flamenco ballet, about an arranged marriage that seems to end in murder, until the ghost of the murdered husband shows up every night to dance with the widowed wife. The widow has a paramour who'd loved her since childhood. The paramour and the widow work together to get the husband's ghost to stop following the widow.

It's all very romantic and sad and very, very colorful. The people all have a garish, 1980s style. But the dancing is superb. I also like a pop song called "Azucar Moreno," which takes place near the beginning of the film.

Last night I also watched the Japanese film Goke, the Body Snatcher from Hell. That was also a wonderful movie. It's about a plane that crashes in a desert portion of island. The survivors end up being attacked by a blob-like alien that lands in a fire-glowing flying saucer. The blob-like alien cracks open people's heads and then glops up into their bodies through their foreheads. The host body then acts as a vampire, sucking people's blood. The plot is pretty straightforward. But the action is fun, and the bleak atmosphere of everything is pretty powerful.

spaceships and hot air balloons

Hello, everybody.

Yesterday I took the day off work. I was depressed for a number of reasons. Things with my family have been kind of sad lately. My boss could tell last week that I was feeling down. He wanted me to take some time off last week. But I didn't want to. Then I found out that the Colorado Aerospace Day was taking place yesterday. So I asked my boss at the end of last week if I could take yesterday off, though I didn't tell him why. My boss said that was fine.

So yesterday I attended the Colorado Aerospace Day at the State Capitol in Denver. The day was put on by the Colorado Space Business Roundtable, which is kind of a networking organization for members of the space industry in Colorado.

Colorado is actually the second biggest space-industry state in the United States, as measured, I believe, by the number of people employed. I think this is largely because of two really big space companies operating out of Colorado: Ball Aerospace and Lockheed Martin's United Launch Alliance.

But there are also a number of other really interesting companies operating out of Colorado, such as DigitalGlobe and Sierra Nevada Corp, which manufactures the Dream Chaser manned space vehicle.

There are actually a lot of other satellite, component, engineering, and software companies in Colorado dedicated to space. Colorado is also the world headquarters of the Space Foundation.

I only attended the event in the morning. After the morning session there was a lunch and then an afternoon networking session. The morning networking session was set up in the two central rooms of the Capitol. About twenty different organizations had booths up. I spoke with a few different organizations.

I spoke with the Denver Office of Economic Development, a Commission within Denver that supports business growth by bringing new companies into Denver, by supporting companies that already operate in Denver, and by encouraging startup businesses within Denver. This doesn't just include space businesses. But since space is such a big industry in Denver, space is one of the Commission's focuses.

I didn't ever actually see a live person at the Ball Aerospace booth, although there were some interesting mockups of satellites, as well as some literature on some of Ball's new satellite programs.

But I did manage to speak with a representative from the United Launch Alliance for a little while. I think one thing I've been trying and trying to figure out about the space industry is, what really would be the reality of commercializing space? What are the real commercial applications of space? And in what way would people be able to demonstrate the potential of return on any commercial investments in space?

I asked this question to the ULA rep. It seems to me that a lot of ULA's money is coming from NASA right now, and I wanted to see what strategies ULA might have for making money outside of NASA. But the answer I basically got was that a lot of the work ULA currently does with NASA could be seen as commercial.

The ULA person and I spoke a little bit more about the commercial applications of space. But it didn't sound like there were any out there. The goals of NASA seem to be focused on research and exploration, knowledge for the sake of science, so to speak, without any other aims. The ULA person said that, even with the commercial space programs that are going on right now, namely SpaceX and Virgin Galactic, those aren't really commercial programs as much as they are the dreamchildren of two very imaginative entrepreneurs.

I spoke with the people from the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and the Space Foundation as well, trying to get an idea of whether and how space is really put forward, in any spheres outside of the space industry itself, as a commercial opportunity.

The person from the AIAA made a good point that space has always provided good commercial opportunities in terms of technology transfer -- the use of technologies that have been developed for space for more mundane purposes. One of the main examples of this has always been, I think, Corning Ware.

But I think the main fact really remains that there is a whole field, wide open, for the commercialization of space. I don't feel like I'm alone in having thought that there must have been a whole bunch of people out there, working on ways to create commercial applications for space travel and habitation. But there really don't seem to be. It's kind of exciting. There really is a whole field, wide open.

After that I wandered around Downtown for a little while. I went to the Tattered Cover bookstore for about an hour. Then I went to the library. I finished reading The Age of Wonder, by Richard Holmes. The book is basically about the Romantic Age of British Science.

The Age of Wonder starts with the story of Joseph Banks, a scientist who traveled with an astronomy mission to Tahiti to observe the transit of Venus, I believe, across the sun. Joe Banks eventually formed a strong relationship with the Tahitians and began to observe them closely and in a scientific way, establishing, in a sense, the science of Anthropology. Joe Banks later became the head of the Royal Society in England.

Joe Banks remains an influential figure throughout the rest of the book. The book moves on to tell the story of William Herschel, a man of German origin, I believe, who started his career as a musician, but moved more and more into the observation of the heavens with telescopes. Herschel became obsessed with creating  his own telescopes, creating better and better telescopes, and minutely observing the heavens, eventually discovering a new planet -- Uranus.

Herschel's story is also the story of his sister, Caroline Herschel, who helped Herschel with basically all of his astronomical observations. Caroline also made discoveries of her own, mainly of new comets. These discoveries came as the result of observations Caroline made on her own, while she was conducting what she called "sweeps" of the sky.

There is a kind of break in the story which I, honestly, didn't quite get -- even though I enjoyed it -- which narrates a sort of "arms race" between Britain and France. The object of contention: hot air and hydrogen balloons. The story of the invention of hot air and hydrogen balloons, the first flights, and the flights between Britain and France are told in all their glorious eccentricity.

The story also includes a section on Mungo Park, who kind of served as Joe Banks' protege in travel. Mungo Park made two journeys deep into Africa. On his first journey he nearly died -- was, in fact, left for dead on more than one occasion. And on his second journey he actually was killed.

The most interesting part of the story, in my opinion, however, concerns the great chemist Humphry Davy. Davy's story is most interesting to me because it includes the circle of Romantic poets -- Coleridge, Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Mary Shelley are the ones most mentioned, I believe, with Coleridge actually befriending Davy, attending Davy's lectures, and even contributing to some of the Royal Society's scientific lectures, if I understand Richard Rhodes' narration correctly.

Erasmus Darwin plays a poetic role in some of the passages relating to William Herschel. But his works, though, I believe, influenced by Herschel's work, seem more to back up what Herschel is saying. The works of Coleridge, Byron, and the Shelley siblings, however, seem intimately linked with Davy's science and philosophy.

Davy himself is also somewhat of a poet. And I think one very good point Rhodes raises in his book is that some of the scientific documents left behind by people like Humphry Davy are, in themselves, good examples of Romantic literature.

What's also interesting about Davy is that he is seen as a scientist and an engineer. One of the pivotal moments in Davy's story is his creation of a safety lamp, a lamp which prevented flames from igniting the methane gases down in mine shafts. Before Davy's invention, scores of people at a time would die horrendous deaths due to the ignition of methane gases by lamp flames. But Davy, through careful observations and labors, used his understanding of chemistry to create a lamp that would not explode the methane gases.

shepherds of the modern empire

After spending a few months in a kind of emotional limbo, and not doing anything with this blog, I joined Twitter. On my Twitter account I made mini-essays that kind of substituted for this blog. But after a few months worth of writing mini-essays about stuff I read or art I saw on Twitter, I decided I'd better at least try to get this blog started back up.

One limiting factor, at least, to this blog has been that I kind of restricted myself to explaining whatever my dreams were in the directly previous night with whatever experiences I'd been having through the course of the recent days or months. I think I'd like to break free of that restriction a bit. If I feel like I have the ability to analyze my dreams within the context of this blog, I will, and I'll make sure I provide links to the dreams, like I have in the past.

But I think that what this blog will mainly become is something of a dreamer's journal. I'm not really an artist. And even as far as dreamers go, I'm rather pedestrian. But I seem to have the ability to keep track of my dreams -- I've done so somewhat well since 2004. And I might as well keep notes of my creative (rather than personal, insofar as I can avoid it) experiences, so that the few people who are interested in my dreams can also see what some might think of as the raw material of my art, the art of dreaming.

And one thing I keep trying to force myself to remember is that a blog is basically like a journal, except that, instead of gathering dust in a drawer or closet or who knows where, until I need to recall it for the sake of research or emotional support, it will be in a rather open space -- however open the internet is. Sometimes it feels like the internet is even more isolated than a drawer or a closet. But I think I've always had a few eyes on my blog posts, here and there. And so that's much better than never having any eyes on my ideas.

Today I went to the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, one of my favorite haunts. I recently became a member there, so I'm pretty sure I'm going to haunt the place a lot more frequently. The MCAD is one of the many, many sites taking part in Denver's Month of Photography, which takes place through March and even through a little bit of April.

The Month of Photography exhibit MCAD has going on right now is by an artist named Lucas Foglia. Foglia's exhibit is called "A Natural Order." It is curated by Mark Sink, the person who founded Denver's Month of Photography. If I'm not mistaken, Mark Sink also curated the Month of Photography exhibit going on at the RedLine Gallery.

Foglia's exhibit shows photographs taken between 2006 and 2010, of people living off the grid and, in a lot of ways, close to nature, in the southeastern United States. A lot of these people, apparently, live in communities. Some of them dress in an old-fashioned style. Others dress in more of a hippie-style. Others dress in a militia style. Others, apparently, don't dress at all.

There are some really interesting photos. There's a nice one of a little baby dancing on its mother's (?) shoulders as the mother plays a banjo. The little baby and mother are blonde and tan. The mother has her hair done in dreads. She has a bracelet-like tattoo on her right wrist, showing the phases of the moon. On her left forearm is a tattoo of some kind of creeping plant, maybe a morning glory. Another parent and child (?) photo I like is of a man floating on his back in a river while a baby stand-crawls on his chest.

There's another photo of a little girl that I like. The girl is lying on her back on a colorful blanket. The girl is dressed in a green fairy-costume with a vine decoration running up the front of the blouse. She has a daydreamy look on her face, and she appears to be holding the bone of some just-eaten animal in her left hand.

Another interesting photo shows a girl in her early teens, or maybe younger, being taught how to shoot a rifle by an older woman. The girl is wearing a prim, blue dress, and the older woman is wearing a prim, pink dress. Something about the posing of this photo, while rather violent in a lot of ways, also has a feeling one might get from a Jock Sturges photograph.

This feeling is accentuated in another photo, showing the back view of a fat man in swimming trunks on a dock, I believe, wrestling with a naked child, who is skinny and has long hair, but whose gender I, personally, couldn't discern.

But the violence of the photo carries over into a couple other photos. It's hard to tell if shooting a gun should be equated with violence. Obviously these people aren't learning to shoot a gun to hurt people. They're learning to shoot because they need to know how to shoot in order to hunt for their food. But in one photo, the rifle on a young man's headboard compliments his militia-style outfit and skull-and-crossbones/Confederate flag to make one feel that he has learned to use his gun to do more than hunt for food.

Another photo shows a little girl in a prim, pink dress scrawling away on a chalkboard. From a distance, one might simply assume that the little girl is writing math or spelling formulas. But a closer glance at the chalkboard reveals that the little girl is writing out conspiracy theories, modern "who controls the oil" theories and older George Orwell theories.

Some other photos show a frightful state of nature in decay. One photo is of a bear that had been killed by poison. I think it's implied, by the title of the photo, that the bear had been poisoned by a neighbor of the off-the-grid community. But I'm not sure. What's frightening about the photo, though, is how, where the bear's fur has fallen off its body, the bear kind of resembles a fat human being. In fact, at first seeing the bear at a distance, I thought I was looking at a human being playing some kind of weird game.

Another unsettling photo is of a patch of watermelons -- all decayed. I'm not sure how an entire patch of watermelons could have undergone decay like that. Some of the watermelons even appeared to be split right in half, as if they'd purposely been split open, so that they would decay. The field of watermelon vines also seems to be in a state of decay: half the vines have rotted into a rusty color against the brown soil.

One photo that I, in my insulated, little, suburban world, would think of also as a photo of decay, is of a man in something he called a wigwam (not sure how like a genuine wigwam it was). The structure doesn't seem much bigger than a sleeping bag, and it's mostly shadow. At the front of this structure are all kinds of dirt, ash, jars, and so forth. The man in the wigwam appears to be sleeping. But he doesn't seem restful. He seems miserable. Again, I may be investing something of my own feelings into my perception of the man.

One photo that I liked was of a writing desk in some kind of wood cabin. At the writing desk are a non-electric typewriter, an ash tray, and, I think, two hunks of stone. The writing desk seems to have been made out of an old door, or an old piece of wall. On the walls behind and beside the writing desk are a painting of two cheetahs in the darkness and a framed (!!!) deer's head.

After looking at the Lucas Foglia exhibit, I went to the William Lamson exhibit, which was a room with a video. The video showed a man in a wide river balancing himself on some sort of do-it-yourself, motorized flotation device. The device didn't -- I think -- move forward. I think it just kept the man floating. It was basically a circle, maybe a meter in diameter, with a mesh-metal platform on top of it. Whatever the motorized piece was was below the circle, under the water.

Whenever the river waves got too rough, or, perhaps, whenever the motor clunked out, the man was thrown off the device. He'd have to fix the motor and re-balance himself on the platform. He was wearing rubber boots. And each time he'd re-balance himself on the platform, he'd use a strange device made out of an old bike tire pump to suction the water out of his boots.

I then went upstairs, to the Karen Kilimnik exhibit, which I'd gone to before. But the first time I'd gone, I'd spent so much time in the first half that I didn't have any time to spend looking at the second half. The second half has some interesting paintings of scenery from ballets and ballet and opera halls.

It also has a little installation of a ballerina's tutu and dance shoes, sprinkled over with blue glitter and lying atop a fake cinder block, over which are crawling little mice. The installation draws attention to the fact that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, ballerinas were thought of as rats. Ballerinas were thought of as generally having had low origins, maybe of having grown up on the streets or in very poor neighborhoods. It's not too different from the way people thought of actors and playwrights in the same time period.

But what's interesting is that another of Kilimnik's drawings shows the opera house Marie Antoinette built for her Villa Trianon. The description of the drawing mentions that Marie Antoinette, while at the Villa Trianon, used to dress very simply, in a white, muslin gown, and go out into the fields, playing at being a shepherdess.

There's a strange juxtaposition here: on one side, there are the ballerinas, stigmatized as having low origins, but acting as some of the most sublime personages in the universe of human archetypes; and on the other side, there are Queens of Empires, dressing and acting as shepherdesses.

I can't help but feel that, in some way, this kind of strange juxtaposition also fits in with the photos of Lucas Foglia. The United States grew, the old Europeans might have said, out of low origins. But it soared upward to become the greatest power in the world. But now, as the greatest power in the world, we, maybe not as a whole, but in part, choose to dress simply and go back to the fields.

One last interesting thing from Kilimnik's exhibit is a little, white structure, kind of like a child's playhouse. Inside the structure are curtains with floral designs on them. And on the back wall is a screen playing some kind of fairy's ballet.

The video shows a pretend forest -- really, an artificial forest landscape inside a studio or some other small room. As the camera moves through the lush canopy of this artifical forest, it pauses, to allow superimposed images of little ballerinas to dance on the limbs and leafs of the trees and other vegetation. The whole thing is very charming.

plague vessels

Good morning, everybody.

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

There are a lot of references in this dream to broken fluid vessels. I'm pretty sure that this relates to my mother, who is having some bad trouble with her arteries. The part in my dream where I imagine the red hose hanging from the roof of the building is obviously very indicative of an artery.

Just as a quick aside -- I find it odd that I "imagine" so much in my dreams. I'm always seeing things "in my mind's eye." I mean, I daydream all the time in waking life. So I suppose it's natural that I daydream in dreaming life as well. But it still strikes me as funny.

So, on the one hand, it seems like the broken vessels stand for my worries that my mom's blood vessels are going to burst. It's a scary thought, and one I hope is far from actuality.

To reinforce this idea -- I just remembered the fragments of another dream I had last night, where someone was putting plastic blood vessels in my body. But we had to go to a blood vessel store to get all the vessels we needed. The vessels all hung on display racks on the walls.

The vessels got smaller and smaller, down to capillary size. Each vessel size had a different product name. Some of the smallest vessels would be extremely tricky to put in, and putting them in the wrong way could cause me a great deal of pain or even death. I woke up considering this death.

So I can see from that dream that I was thinking of blood vessels all night long. But the strange thing about the vessels in the "black hair" dream is that they all seemed to leak gunk -- muddy gunk or maybe even fecal gunk. I think this has to do with my bad eating habits lately. I've eaten basically the same meal day after day for days now. I'm not sure why. It's pretty disgusting, though. And I'm sure my stomach hates me for it. So I think my own plumbing, so to speak, is coming back to haunt me in my dreams.

But I also think the image of the cabin, the fainting man and woman, and the congealing of the mess into the humanoid and then into a man has something to do with the Hantavirus.

I'm sure everybody has heard about the Hantavirus issues at Yosemite Park by now. Over the summer, a few different campgrounds, including some high-end campgrounds with cabin-like tents, were infested by mice carrying the Hantavirus. One of the main effects of the Hantavirus is that is causes severe congestion of the lungs, which leads to severe pain, constrained breathing, and even death. News reports have said that about one-third of all people who contract Hantavirus die, and that there is no known cure for Hantavirus.

Hantavirus can be passed from mice to people, news reports say. Contraction of the virus usually occurs through contact with the urine or feces of an animal carrying the virus. But in dry places like Yosemite Park, where soil is as dry and potentially airborne as dust, when an animal urinates in the soil and that urine dries, the virus itself stays in the soil and is just as potentially airborne. In enclosed spaces, chances of breathing and contracting this airborne virus are even greater.

So Yosemite, to be on the safe side, has assumed that everybody who has stayed at the campgrounds infested by the infected mice is at risk of having contracted Hantavirus. The good thing about being on the safe side is that, even though there's no known cure for Hantavirus, being able to start therapy processes at the initial stages of contraction gives people a much greater chance of surviving through the illness.

So Yosemite has issued warnings to anybody who stayed in the infected areas. The unfortunate thing is, there were about 10,000 to 20,000 (based on some reports I've read) people who had been in the infected areas.

Hantavirus, odd as it may seem, has a connection with my life. About ten years ago, I worked in a National Park in the Southwestern United States. Hantavirus was a pretty normal thing around there. People didn't catch it because they were careful. It was pretty much assumed that all mice had Hantavirus. But it wasn't a huge worry.

But Hantavirus was big news in the region when I first arrived. A few people in the region, but not in the park I'd worked at, had caught the virus. Some died. Some lived to tell the stories of their agony. But after a month or so, the incidences and news flurry seemed to vanish.

The thing is, it's pretty easy to avoid getting Hantavirus. You keep your space clean and dust-free. To remove dust from a space, you wet it down, maybe even with a cleaning solution, and wipe it away. Most of the stuff people do in everyday housecleaning is enough to keep the virus at bay. And you stay away from abandoned houses and places where you see a lot of evidence of mouse activity.

But, of course, my mind ran a couple of doom scenarios. The first was that humans, acting as carriers of the virus, would pass the virus all over the world through their own urine and feces. This is kind of silly, I'd think. In most cases in the United States, human urine and feces goes through a treatment process that would kill the Hantavirus pretty easily. The virus is pretty nasty when it gets into a body. But it's pretty weak outside the body.

The second doom scenario my mind played out was that mice would travel home with people, hitching a ride in luggage, on cars, and so forth, and spread Hantavirus to other mice in other locales, thus spreading the disease beyond those initial sites. But, again, there have been Hantavirus outbreaks in the past. And the mice could just as easily have caught rides to other places in the past. They didn't. And the outbreaks have passed away. Just like this one will.

The doom scenarios, however, were in my dream a factor, I believe, in creating the Swamp Thing figure, who then became the annoying man. The Swamp Thing would in one sense be the embodiment of a pestilence.

I believe that in medieval times the Plague was often embodied as a figure. And I might have taken my understanding of that idea as inspiration for the Swamp Thing character in my dream as well. The fact that this body is walking among a huge crowd only underscores the idea of this Swamp Thing character being the embodiment of a pestilence of large-scale effect.

But I'm not sure why the dream is connecting a Plague of Hantavirus -- which obviously will not occur in waking life -- with my mom's artery problems. Both things have a risk of death associated with them. And so maybe I'm trying to keep the Plague of Death, in the figure of the annoying man, away from my mom, who doesn't look at all like the leader woman of my dream but could be related to her anyway, by telling the annoying man that the leader woman doesn't exist.

Again, I seem to end by not knowing how to make any connections. All I ever seem to come up with are starting points.

les derniers galans

Good morning, everybody.

This post is going to be related to a number of dream journal entries.

Regarding today's dream journal entry, in the last dream a little girl (who is also a young woman) mentions a movie entitled Les Galans. I wasn't even sure, upon waking, whether there was a French word "galans." I looked it up quickly, of course, after having written my dream journal entry. I didn't find a film called Les Galans, but I did find a couple interesting things.

First of all, there is a set of ice falls in the French Alps that's called Les Galans. It is, I believe, along a specific series of ice fall climbs known as La Grave, which is near the Haute-Alps commune of the same name. This photo is from the Camp to Camp page for the La Grave climb.

"Les galans" means "the gallants" in English. There is a play by Jean Chevalier entitled Les Galans Ridicule. Doing a quick scan, I didn't find out anything about the play. It seems to have been written before the year 1800, and to be rather obscure. I couldn't find out anything about the Jean Chevalier who'd written the play, either. There's a modern Jean Chevalier, who passed away in 1993, and who wrote works of philosophy. But I'm not sure about this 18th century Jean Chevalier.

Anyhow, the foreign language word struck me because only the night before I had a dream where I'd heard the foreign name "Nemirovna." I looked this name up and found that it was not a widely used name. In fact, the only place where I'd found the name used was in a book by the French author Corinne Vallienne, entitled Le Dernier Voyage de Lena Nemirovna.

The author of this book seems pretty interesting. She's a French instructor, actually, at the University of Tokyo. Le Dernier Voyage seems to be about an old man who lives in St. Petersburg and looks back on his life in Russia. The book, from what I've read of it, mixes memory and fantasy in a kind of magical way. It sounds like a good book. But I've never heard of it before.

What I also found interesting was that in Slovenian, the word "nemirov" means "unrest." So I found a few news articles which mentions "nemirov na" or "unrest in" certain areas. This was intriguing to me. But I'm still not certain what the whole thing means.

However, the other thing that was interesting to me about Le Dernier Voyage was that it connected the word "Nemirovna" with another phrase that I'd had in a dream from the previous night. In this dream I went to a movie theater, but I didn't know what I was going to watch. I ended up going into a theater playing a move called La Derniere 3.

It's an interesting coincidence, that one night I dream of La Derniere, and the next night I dream of "Nemirovna," and then it connects for me in La Dernier Voyage de Lena Nemirovna. But I really don't know why it happened that way.

I personally think that La Derniere 3 is a distortion of the title of the Francois Truffaut film Le Dernier Metro, a movie which has been consistently at the back of my mind lately.

One would simply take out the "me" from the "metro" and change the "o" sound to a "ois" sound to get "Le Dernier Trois." I'm not sure why the gender change was made in the title or why the "metro" would change to a "three." But I think that at least the mechanics of the distortion seem pretty obvious.

One reason the "metro" might be changed to "trois" is that "trois" sounds a little like "voyage." But I think that's stretching things a whole lot.

in the middle of the end of the road

Good morning, everybody.

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

One thing that I'd like to mention right away is that the beautiful sky imagery in the second part of the third dream comes almost from a NASA video I saw on YouTube. About once a week, NASA puts out a "Science Cast," which gives a little glimpse of some of the science NASA works on. This could be anything from astronomy to satellite technology to atmospheric phenomena. The Science Cast I watched last night was all about how the electromagnetic storms this July caused aurora borealis-like effects to spread all over the world.

I think this video heightened a lot of the mystic feeling of my dreams.

What I'd mainly like to think about, though, for this post, is the interaction I had with my great grandmother and my grandfather. Against all rationality, whenever I have dreams involving my great grandmother and my grandfather, I always think that they're actual interactions with them. My great grandma died three years ago, and my grandpa died four years ago.

In fact -- I've always kind of hated to admit this to anybody -- but one of the reasons I feel my life has taken the path it's taken lately is because of a dream I had with my great grandma in it. This dream occurred just a little over a year after my grandma had died. It seemed to precipitate me ejecting myself from my job and putting myself into a position where I had to come back home.

My thought -- well... let's say... I'm pretty agnostic in general. I think, depending on what mood I'm in, you could assume that my beliefs are mostly based on a physical world and nothing more. Don't ask me why.

I obsess over religion sometimes. I love the old Theosophy of Charles Leadbeater and Annie Besant. I also obsess over not-quite-spiritual writers like Charles Fort. And I think of Carlos Castaneda as real philosophy. (Geez, that's a lot of Charleses, ain't it?) But I still have difficulty, almost all the time, believing that there's anything beyond existence other than the physical. That said, I still let mystical fancies play in my head almost nonstop.


"WTF?" you may be asking. Trust me, I ask the same thing. I WTF myself about once an hour.

One of my mystical fancies is that when my grandma died, she went straight to whatever the next plane of existence is. She didn't look back. She wanted to go. She was ready to go. She had people in the other world that she wanted to be with. And she didn't want to have to worry about this world anymore. So when she left, she left. That was my idea. And it was probably wrong.

So when my grandma died, I wasn't so surprised that I never saw her. Over the few months after my grandpa died, however, I had a couple of dreams about him. (Keep in mind my grandpa died a year before his mother, my great grandmother, died.)

It seems like he started out in those dreams with a very low level of intellect, like his spirit was really impaired by whatever the death process had been for him. But he was still trying to make contact from those worlds. Later on, I fantasize, he had much better ability to make contact. But he was still unable to keep himself mentally or "physically" (in terms of appearance) stable -- at least in the realm where he could interact with me. Once he got behind some wall, an invisible wall, which I saw as being the boundary of the other world, he was himself again, mentally and physically. But I personally could barely hear him!

Like I said before, I didn't have any dreams about my great grandmother. And I just figured that was because she'd headed out of this world and didn't look back. In spite of how much she loved all of her family in the living world, I think she was tired, and that she really wanted to be re-united with the people who had left her behind.

But one night I had a dream where I was at my great grandmother's house with my mom and my sister. My great grandmother rose up out of the floor and started yelling and screaming at me. I can't remember now what she wanted. But the feeling I got upon waking was that I needed to come back to my hometown.

At that point in time the dream did nothing for me other than fill me with a gnawing anxiety. I couldn't come back home. I was working a good job, a steady job, and I had a career that had a future. I felt terrible, of course, for not being able to be back home with my family, for not being able to see, for instance, my nephews grow up and go through all the important events of their lives. But I felt like I was fulfilling my own life's goals, and not just that my family understood this, but that they were proud of me for it.

Nevertheless, I've had this tendency all through my life, when I get the instinct that I need to make a change in my life, not necessarily to control the change, but to let my current life situation decay to the point where I need to make a change. There have been exceptions to the rule. But, to a large degree, I seem to let myself decay into change lazily, instead of taking an active role in the transitions in my life.

So I ended up quitting my job and losing all my money, etc., etc., until I was basically forced to come back home. I've harped on this one single event in my life enough throughout these posts. But one basic thought at the back of my mind all this time was that, if I did get back home, that I'd have some direction, some kind of answer, from my great grandma, on why she wanted me back home, what I was supposed to do.

As it turns out, I'm out here, I'm back home, and I feel even more lost, more confused, more afraid, more paranoid, than I did even while I was in New York! I miss New York terribly -- even though I hate the place -- and I want to be back there so bad. But I'm stuck here now. I'm not just stuck here. I'm stuck here in a situation where I'm not even sure, from month to month, if I'm going to be able to keep up my level of living. Okay. Enough of that.

So last night I got a surprise visit, not just from my great grandma, but from my grandpa. I'm not sure what the dynamic of things is -- why I helped my grandma around the house, and we had an interesting conversation, while my grandpa directly gave me information regarding the afterlife.

But my grandpa seemed, for the most part, normal, while he spoke with me. This might be the first time I've seen him in one of these "speaking with the dead" type of dreams where he's seemed normal. I should say that, from the time I saw my great grandma in a "speaking with the dead" dream, she seemed normal.

The information my grandpa passes me is that he woke into an afterlife, and some details on that afterlife. I take that information to help me not be afraid of death. I think about passing along this information. But I don't want my information to conflict with, or distort, other people's experiences, if they've had experiences like I've had, where they've interacted with my grandpa or great grandma after they've departed.

But at the same time -- especially with the earlier dreams I've had -- I've felt like I really should talk to people about the dreams I've had, like I should tell my mom, or my step grandmother, my grandpa's wife. I've gotten to a point, on a couple of occasions, where I was about to tell my mom. But it's really hard. I just -- I'm afraid. I don't know why.

Partly, I'm conflicted. Any psychologist will tell you that you probably aren't speaking to the dead. And I believe that. The world is what it is, physically. And I could -- well, for instance, I dreamt of Mr. Rogers one night and Michael Jackson another night. Do I think I really saw them? Of course not! So why do I think I saw my great grandma and my grandpa? Because I miss them. That's all. I didn't really speak with the dead.

So why would I tell my mom, who I know believes in all this stuff, that I spoke with my great grandma or my grandpa? Why would I upset her by telling her something I know to be an impossibility? It just seems cruel and absurd.

Now, obviously, crossing over the bridge in the second part of my grandma and grandpa dream is obviously a kind of analogy for my own passing into the afterlife. Which is kind of scary, especially with that freaky dog that unleashes Fortean torrents of rain upon me.

But the third dream also involves my death. So that's kind of scary, too. I'm walking toward some place out in the plains, apparently to get rid of teddy bears, which I associate in my mind with ancient Greek maidens sacrificing their dolls to Artemis as the maidens reach puberty.

But I'm turned around by a wise woman who holds five knives in her hand. I feel like the five knives almost certainly stand for the five of swords in Tarot. But I'm not sure what the five of swords would mean in Tarot, or what it would mean for a woman to be holding those swords -- or what it would mean for a woman holding the five of swords to be followed by near total darkness and death.

I should say that I'm not certain I die in that dream, or even that I'm injured. But I'm in the middle of a very narrow road. I've turned around from the task of sacrificing my dolls to Artemis. I see the light of my city in the distance. But it's not light enough to guide my way. I'm trying to find a bridge so I can cross a river I can't cross by wading. And, while searching -- by feeling -- in the dark for that bridge, a truck either nearly hits me (as I seem to sense it in the dream) or actually hits me (which I may have been too shocked actually to feel).

I'm lying on the ground, under a wheel, in what appear to be death linens. And I hear a woman screaming. So I obviously assume that I'm dead -- that I've been hit by the truck and killed. So that's a bit distressing. But I've had death dreams all my life, and I'm still alive. I don't think I'm going to die. I think that most of the time death dreams symbolize a transition.

What I'd guess is that, at the crossing of the bridge, I'm at the end of the road. I'm making a transition in life. But I'm completely in the dark. I have no idea where I'm going. I don't know if I'll make it across. But then -- bam! -- the transition hits me! Regardless of what I want, regardless of what I can do, my life makes a change.

That would be wish fulfillment, more than anything else -- just because I want so badly to have some sort of direction just take over my life. I really -- what I really want more than anything else, is not to have made the mistakes I've made in my life. I think that's why I keep turning back, turning back, in all my dreams. Maybe what this dream is saying is, "Quit turning back. All your mistakes have already been made. If you keep trying to turn back and undo your mistakes, you're going to find yourself in a great deal of pain."

oh you pretty failure

Good morning, everybody.

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

I have a feeling that a lot of my dream imagery comes from having watched the films Village of the Damned and Children of the Damned over the past couple of nights. This would, I think, especially have influenced the imagery of the second dream.

The main image influenced by the films would be the image of the woman crashing and flying off of her bike. In the dream, I assumed the woman has died, even though it's not totally certain that the woman has died. In fact, the woman even says, through the "narration" she's constantly giving me in the dream, that she didn't even get hurt that much. But she doesn't get up.

Village of the Damned is, of course, a classic science fiction movie. It was made in 1960, and is based on John Wyndham's novel The Midwich Cuckoos. The basic idea of the movie is that a town in England, Midwich, is hit with some kind of cosmic beam. The cosmic beam impregnates every woman in the town capable (by 1960 standards) of having a child.

The children who are born as a result of this impregnation are possibly not human, or are possibly super-human. The children are super-intelligent and can use telepathy to force people to do things. But the children are void of emotion, and they seem to have only a primitive concept of humanity and justice. As a result, they seem to be selfish and ruthless. If they are hurt, they generally retaliate by making the person who'd hurt them, even if they'd hurt them unintentionally, in a similar way.

So in Village of the Damned a person driving a car down the road almost hits one of the children who, in a moment of carelessness, rushed into the street from a blind corner. The man stops in time only to bump up against the child and give her a good scare. But all the children retaliate against the man by forcing him to get into his car and drive into a brick wall.

Actually, in another scene, right at the beginning of the film, a police officer who is riding his bicycle into Midwich is stunned by the same cosmic ray that has put everybody in the town to sleep. The police officer faints and falls off his bike. So... that's a pretty dead giveaway to the image in my dream.

Children of the Damned is the 1963 follow-up to the Village of the Damned. In this semi-sequel, individual children in different places throughout the world have been conceived by means, possibly, of a cosmic ray -- or simply by means of an extremely improbable (so the geneticist of the film says) evolutionary sport. The children are all discovered by a UN-funded IQ test.

The children are all brought to London, where the heads of the countries the children live in decide that the children will either be used as top-secret weapon makers for their own individual countries, or else that the children will be destroyed as dangers to humanity.

But the children, learning of these plans, get together and hide in an abandoned church. They defend themselves against the adults who try to use them for destructive purposes. But, in defending themselves, they often have to kill the adults. One of the few adults who actually cares about the children pleads with the children to stop killing.

The children apparently have an uncanny ability to regenerate themselves. So they make it appear that they have reflected upon the man's plea. They put themselves at the mercy of the UN, assuming that the UN will destroy them in some way. I assume the children feel that if they can be "killed," be assumed dead, then come back to life, and go into hiding, that nobody will bother them.

The military powers have worked themselves into such a frenzy over the perceived threat of the children, that they have set up a tremendous destructive force against the children. But when the children surrender, the UN leaders sympathize with the children. Even the military powers decide to put their force in abeyance. But an accident causes the military to attack anyway. The UN leaders and the children are all killed.

In one scene of the movie, the child from England is being escorted to a place where he will be held until the military can figure out what to do with him. To escape, the child creates a distraction by having one of his escorts drive his car into the back of another car. While all the adults are distracted, the child runs away.

So I think both of those car crash scenes influence the scene in the dream where the woman crashed her bicycle off the road.

The modular house comes, I believe, from both of the films as well. In Village of the Damned, the children are all made to live together in the schoolhouse, where an eminent doctor has taken on the responsibility of teaching the children. Of course -- what I love is that he only teaches the children stuff like nuclear physics, and he only asks them questions like whether they think they come from another planet, or how psychic they are. He doesn't try to improve their moral sensibility at all!

In Children of the Damned, the children all escape of their own accord into the abandoned church. Like the children in Village, the children in Children sleep on makeshift beds and basically fend for themselves. And, in both movies, the children's final dwelling place is blown up. The movies both end, however, with a sense that the children's lives aren't finished. In Village, the final view is of the eyes floating out of the flaming wreckage of the building. And in Children, there is an implication that the children may die, but that they will regenerate themselves.

I think that the motif of the destruction of the final dwelling place as, perhaps, a metaphor for the destruction of the body, combined with a sense of the indestructibility of the soul, combined to make the image in my mind of a modular house, a house that could be picked up or dropped off any time. People live wherever, go wherever. People are permanent. But the housing is transient -- transient but stable.

It must have been hard for me to reconcile this in my mind, though. So I had to leave the woman along the side of the road, either dead or alive, I'm not sure. What's weird is that the woman either lives or doesn't live. But what remains permanent, in my dream, is the modular house. When the woman crashes off the side of the road, she stays there. The modular house, however, reappears at the top of the hill. And now, instead of hearing the woman, I hear the man, the husband, who may also be me myself, speaking. Strange.

I would say, however, that the idea of the modular house doesn't just come from Village of the Damned and Children of the Damned, but that it also comes from the Alvin Toffler book Future Shock, which I read a few weeks back and which seems to promote a vision of the future where objects will become more and more modular.

As I understand him, Toffler argues that buildings and homes will be modular. The world will trend away from "permanent" buildings and toward "modular" buildings. But the trend will also be toward an overall sustainability. Buildings and homes will be more modular, but by being more modular, they will be more flexible. This flexibility will be more sustainable, in the long run, than the environment of "permanent" buildings that just loom large and then rot away.

The one last point I'd like to bring up regarding Village of the Damned is something that I don't know anybody has spoken about before. But it seems pretty obvious to me that the title Village of the Damned, obviously a change from the title of the novel on which the movie was based, is a nod to the work of paranormal investigator Charles Fort's book Book of the Damned. The "Village of the Damned" would be, in a sense, the village in which take place phenomena that Charles Fort would call "damned," or not accepted by the canon of science.

In this sense, I think it's worth mentioning that the prototype of the children of Village of the Damned and Children of the Damned can be found, not in Charles Fort's Book of the Damned, but in his book Wild Talents. This book, like all of Fort's books, is well worth reading.

Of course, any literature or art that has as its subject super-gifted children always reminds me of the David Bowie song "Oh You Pretty Things."

The final thing I'd like to mention about this dream is the fact that Laurel Nakadate is in it. Nakadate is one of my favorite contemporary video artists. She has a great movie called The Wolf Knife, which I'd suggest you see if there's any chance that you can see it. But her whole body of work is really incredible. I had the opportunity, while I lived in New York, to see Nakadate on a couple of occasions. I liked her a lot. We're just about the same age -- she's a  bit over a year older than I. And she's really cool.


When I've had the opportunity to see artists, I've always tried to make a point of asking them questions. And my asking them questions is stored in my head as a kind of interaction with the artists. I don't necessarily interact with people at all, in general. So, as far as my life goes, these are pretty valid interactions.


Anyway, it seems like whenever I review my "interactions" with Nakadate, I'm always struck by how stupid I was around her. One instance was where I mistook certain sounds in her film The Wolf Knife for being one thing, when they obviously were something else -- I think even after Nakadate had expressly explained what those sounds were.


The other was where Nakadate asked the audience to ask her a question, but a question in only one word. Someone asked a one-word question that I can't even remember. But Nakadate didn't think it was a good enough question to end on. So Nakadate asked the audience for a question again. I couldn't think of a one-word question right then. And Nakadate said (to the audience, but I felt like it was to me directly), "Come on? Are you really going to let that question be the one? Are you really going to let that happen?"


Of course, I knew almost immediately afterward what my question would have been. I've known and, for some stupid reason, agonized over it ever since. "Clementine."


But for some reason my brain -- didn't freeze up -- it "fatted over." It just gelled and glopped. I didn't feel nervous or scared or shy when Nakadate demanded a one-word question. I just felt lazy and distracted and sullen. I can't even tell you why.


There's also a scene in the film The Wolf Knife where a girl is disappointed in an old man she likes because the man had decided to stop teaching and spend his days smoking pot. It seems like the girl doesn't mind whether the man is old or young, or attractive or unattractive. What really matters to her is whether the man has his life together, whether he can take care of himself -- and, maybe, her. But the man obviously can't, and this is a disappointment to the girl.


I think Nakadate is an occasional character in my dreams because she stands for somebody looking in on the disappointing aspects of myself, like the girl was disappointed with the man. Since I obviously personally made a fool of myself in front of Nakadate on a number of occasions (though one can obviously assume that I personally didn't even register in her perception one way or the other), it's an easy move for my mind to transition that girl's disappointment onto Nakadate.


The disappointment I feel in these situations is generally the disappointment I've spoken a lot about in other posts, so I won't speak too much about it here. It's basically the fact that, over the past year, I've managed to kick myself down the stairs professionally, again and again. Nobody has done it to me. I've done it to myself. I'm not sure what the hell the issue is. But I've done it. When I reflect on that, I often feel like that old man in The Wolf Knife, just kind of pathetic.

the secret of my flower

Good morning, everybody.

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

There were two main images that struck me in last night's dream: the grey aspect of the young man, and the weird "lingerie" attached to the cowgirl boots.

The cowgirl boots are white leather. The strap attached to them is a crepe-like lingerie material that is pink at the edges and white toward the center. That color style is common, I think, to lingerie and, I believe, to women's clothes in general. Then, in the center of that strap, is a flower.

I can see a lot of influences from my waking life on the lingerie itself. The lingerie somehow reminded me, as I woke up, of an image in the Pedro Almodovar film Que He Hecho Yo Para Merecer Esto?, which I watched a few nights ago. The film is about a working-class family in Spain. The father is a taxi driver, and the mother does all kinds of cleaning jobs.

There are a couple of children in the family, both boys. The younger boy is only about eleven or twelve years old, but he apparently carries on all kinds of homosexual relationships. A woman living across the hallway from the family works as a prostitute and is one of the wife's best friends.

One night, the older brother says he'll give the neighbor 10 pesetas (?) worth of heroin if she'll try to attract his brother. So the neighbor takes the younger brother home after he has come home too late (from a romantic adventure) to have dinner with his own family.


The neighbor makes dinner for the younger brother. The neighbor also gets dressed up "special" for dinner -- wearing an item of lingerie that's supposed to make her look like a bride. But it's mostly a white teddy with pink fringes and a veil over the crown of the head. This white and pink piece of lingerie influenced the image of the weird lingerie in my dream.


The flower itself I think comes from the cover for the soundtrack for the movie Magnolia. Of course, the main image on that cover is a big magnolia flower. Yesterday I spent a little time singing some songs. One of the songs I sang was Aimee Mann's "Save Me," which is one of the main songs in that soundtrack.

Speaking of flowers, I would like to say that the image of the fading from pink at the edges to white at the center isn't just an image from clothing or familiar to clothing. One flower I love, the dogwood flower, has, for some species, a fading of pink at the edges to white at the center.


But this year -- I'm not sure why it was this year -- I've noticed a lot of varieties of roses out there with a pattern of fading from a darker color at the edges to a lighter color at the center. Many fade from pink to white. But there are some that fade from red to yellow or even orange to yellow. I'm sure that's a usual pattern with certain rose varieties every year. But for some reason it didn't really strike me as being a pervasive thing until this year.


I'm not sure why I had cowgirl boots as an image of my dream. But I would say that, for all the Jung I've read, one of the very few things I always have in my mind is the idea Jung had that footwear in dreams is often an image relating to a person's ability to adapt socially to the world around him.


My overall goal for the dream was to find women's clothing. The boots are really nice. And if footwear is thought of as a person's basic contact with the world, the place where our feet hit the ground, then maybe what the dream is saying is that my worry could be less about finding lingerie and more about finding a way to identify socially in the world around me. I'm really not sure.


What's interesting though about the boots being connected by the strap, which is supposed to be lingerie somehow, is that the strap is centered with a flower. If the flower is a symbol for a vagina, and the vagina is right in the center of this strap, and the strap is, like I said in my entry, about a meter long (maybe it was longer than that), then it's possible that either side of the strap would go along my inner legs and that the flower would become my vagina.


In other words, I think this weird piece of lingerie, rather than being a piece of lingerie, is some kind of sex-change device (I mean, not really, but metaphorically). But what's strange about it is that the most concrete things about it are the boots. But does that mean that the social adaptation makes the sexual identification, or that the sexual identification makes the social adaptation?

I could easily see the two sides of the strap as something like the aorta (?) arteries, the big arteries that flow down the center of our legs. These arteries are essential to life, or at least essential to the legs, I'd guess. Anyway, if a big artery like that is blocked, or if it stops functioning, a person can die. That's pretty obvious.


So, in this dream, if the flower is at the center of these straps, and the straps flow down to the boots, does the "blood" from this center, this "vagina," create the social identity? Or, because the cowgirl boots, the most concrete, most identifiable part of this outfit, are so "real," do they stabilize, and thus stand as responsible for or the creators of, the feminine arteries that lead up to this "vagina?" I really don't know.


The other aspect of the dream which is interesting is the grey man. The grey man seems like he's either insane or on drugs. He has that quality in common with two other characters from my recent dreams. One is an old man in the fifth dream of this dream journal entry. The other is Mr. Rogers himself, from the second dream of this dream journal entry.


I think that in both of those dreams I was pretty at a far distance from the man. In this dream I start out at a distance from the man. I try to avoid him. But he eventually overtakes me, grabs me, and tries to have sex with me.


Why is the man grey? I think this is partly in reaction to my own reflections on some of my other dreams. In one of the dreams, I'm a woman. I'm in a room where no lights are on. The only light comes from the moon. It makes everything, including myself, look blue. In another dream, I've met Michael Jackson in a basement storage or janitorial area. The fluorescent light is so dim down in that room that everything, including Michael Jackson, looks green. In this dream, a lot of the environment is grey. So I think I made the man grey, to match my thoughts about the other dreams.


But the fact that the man is grey reminds me also of the concept of the "classic grey" alien, probably the most popular face for the modern conception of what an extraterrestrial being would look like. In that case, the attempted rape scene in my dream would be something like an attempted alien abduction.


But I don't think the scene is anything like a reenactment of an actual abduction. Rather, what I think is that the alien in my dream stands for an alien sexual urge. This "alien," or unconscious, instinct, which is really just a part of myself, grabs a hold of me and tries to get me to have sex, or unite with it. I break free of the instinct and basically tell it, "No means no!"


What's interesting, too, is that the alien doesn't, for instance, pull down my pants. Instead, he lifts up my shirt and strokes my stomach and chest. He's pressing himself against my back, and probably against my bottom, too. But he doesn't necessarily seem too worried about having sex with me right away. He seems more interested in seducing me. And he seems to want to do so by stroking my stomach and chest. This doesn't mean, of course, that if I'd been motionless, or too weak to push away, that he wouldn't have eventually pulled down my pants and screwed me...


But after I tell the alien I'm not interested, he follows me, yelling after me the whole time. I think part of the reason for this is that the alien instinct is probably my shadow instinct. That's another one of the few Jungian concepts my feeble mind has been able to carry along with it through the years. The shadow is the part of ourselves that we don't acknowledge, because it is the stuff about ourselves we would feel ashamed to acknowledge. The grey of the alien in my dream may come from his character as the shadow.


So the shadow was trying to integrate with my conscious. That's actually a good thing, a healthy thing, when the shadow and conscious ego integrate. But when I don't allow the shadow to integrate, he follows me, like a rude guy on the street, following a girl who spurned him, calling her a whore, and so forth. Of course, he's not calling the girl a whore so much as trying to pull her down from what he sees as her pedestal, so she won't think she's "too good" to have sex with him.


That's a pretty silly tactic men use. But the alien, as my shadow, proceeds to use it with me. He's trying to pull me down from my pedestal, or break me out of my shell, so that I won't try to integrate with whatever is embodied in my fetishism, and I will try to integrate with him.


But for some reason, the alien has been trying to get me to integrate with him by stroking my stomach and chest -- in other words, my upper body. He follows me to the place where all the women's clothes are. And when I finally pull up the weird lingerie, which I think is an article of clothing that is finally good enough for me, it's completely related to my lower body. The most concrete thing about it is the footwear. The rest of it is a system that basically connects the crotch to the footwear by a lingerie equivalent of arteries.


So I break away from the alien after he tries to seduce my upper body, and I go to a place where I find a new lower body. That all seems like a pretty easy dynamic. But I guess there are still parts -- as always with my dreams -- that I don't understand.

quantum marriage

Good morning everybody.

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

The idea in my first dream of the father choosing between two men to decide who will marry his daughter comes a lot from this music video for "Milik Siapakah Gadis Ini," which is by the Malaysian pop artists Jinbara and Fiq. The video shows two blindfolded guys in love with the same girl. At the end of the video, the guys take off their blindfolds and see the girl standing before them.

It's pretty easy to see how the squares come from the images of film in this video.

But I think that a lot of the images from this dream, as well as images from other dreams come from my reading in Brian Greene's book on Superstring Theory, The Elegant Universe. The theme of The Elegant Universe, as I understand it so far, is that the concepts of relativity physics and the concepts of quantum physics don't reconcile with one another. So a search has been going on in the history of physics to reconcile these two theories. There's also a documentary of The Elegant Universe, which is pretty entertaining, and is on YouTube.

Greene begins his book with a short discussion of what we know about the various particles of the universe so far. He then moves into a discussion of relativity physics, giving a whole lot of really interesting discussions to illustrate the ideas of relativity. After this, Greene moves through a discussion of Newtonian physics, to help us understand the ideas of gravity. Greene then explains gravity in terms of relativity -- again, giving a lot of really helpful visual examples. Greene then moves on (and this is where I finished my reading yesterday) to various concepts of quantum physics.

One image from the book that struck me was the idea of the photon clock, which Greene represents as two mirrors set parallel to one another. A single photon will bounce from mirror to mirror, and, since the speed of light is constant, time can be measured by the bounces of the photon from mirror to mirror. Greene then uses this photon clock idea to illustrate that time will appear to be the same for two photon clocks, one at a fixed standpoint and one moving at a constant velocity.

This is a really weird image to fix into a dream about two laundromat owners vying for a woman's hand in marriage. And I'm not sure how the heck it fits in. But it definitely fits in.

An image from the second dream that comes from The Elegant Universe is the "second ending" of my dream, where I imagine myself passing out of the building altogether and ending up in the next place I'm supposed to be immediately.

This comes from Greene's funny situation of the H-Bar, an allegorical bar which illustrates some of the various aspects of quantum physics. In Greene's H-Bar, ice cubes pass through glasses and people can walk through walls. Obviously, that led me to the "second ending" of my dream, where I pass through walls myself.

The final image I can see obviously coming from The Elegant Universe is just the simple word "quantum," which led me to think of the television show Quantum Leap. I'm not sure why I thought of Marilyn Monroe or the Marilyn Monroe episode of Quantum Leap. But I did.

One last image I'd like to discuss from my dream. Last night, before going to bed, I read the first 40 pages of The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert Heinlein. The book takes place on the moon in the year 2075. The main character, Manuel Garcia O'Kelly, is a computer technician sent to the moon to deal with a computer who is a bit of a practical joker. Once up on the moon, Manuel forms a friendship with the computer, who he comes to believe is alive. But Manuel also gets caught up in a Socialist-type revolution taking place among the 3 million or so colonists of the moon.

In one scene of the book, a miner talks about how much harder it is getting for miners to locate ice under the surface of the moon. (Apparently there's ice under the surface of the moon.) But the miners are still getting paid the same for the ice they bring up. In other words, their profits are all going away.

I think this passage from the book influenced the image of the "water table" in my third dream from last night. I can't say why it's in there. And the image in my dream is definitely not about ice. It's about water. The water could potentially flood the building. The room itself reminds me, now that I think of it, as a strange distortion of an Ancient Egyptian tomb. When I think of Egypt, I think of the Nile. Again, I think of flooding and heat, not of ice. But the "water table," or level of water, reminds me of the ice level idea in the book.

surrender at a deadly moment

Good morning, everybody.

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

A lot of the images in all the dreams from last night come from my having watched the Wong Kar Wai film Fallen Angels last night.

The dream image I feel is most influenced by Fallen Angels is the image where the woman is laying on the bed and wants the man laying on the bed with her to rub her vagina. One of the two interweaving stories of Fallen Angels involves a young, attractive hit man who is given his orders by a young, attractive woman. The woman falls in love with the man. But the woman and the man never have any contact with each other, other than, I believe, through instructions given over the fax.


So the woman carries on a fantasy relationship with the man. She goes out to bars and imagines him with her. Then she comes home and masturbates while imagining being with the man. The film shows a few scenes of the woman masturbating. The scenes are extremely sexy. The woman is very attractive, and she really seems to be enjoying herself in her fantasy.


So obviously I'd have a dream related to that scene. I've watched Fallen Angels a few times over the past few years. And the masturbation scenes have always been among my favorite movie sex scenes ever. Obviously I'd want to recreate something like that in my own dreams. I'm not sure why the idea of abortion or miscarriage comes into play in my dream, though.


The idea of jumping into a river, then being sucked along by a huge ship, comes from my reading of Neal Stephenson's novel The Diamond Age. The story takes place in a futuristic world where nanotechnology enables people basically to construct whatever they want. The basic plot is that a ludicrously wealth man, Equity Lord Finkle-McGraw, wants to give his granddaughter a present that will help break her out of the conventional mores that her father and mother are bringing her up with.


So Finkle-McGraw has a top-notch engineer named Hackworth create a high-tech book that employs living actors (communicating with the book remotely) and pseudo-intelligence. The book adapts itself to the reader's (always a little girl, according to the programming of the book) situation and teaches the girl how she can best prepare herself for real life. It's basically a primer for life.


But Hackworth decides to make an illegal copy for his daughter. He makes the copy, but he then gets mugged. One of the muggers takes the book and gives it to his little sister, Nell. Hackworth is punished for having betrayed Finkle-McGraw. He is sentenced to ten years' labor. His sentence gets him involved in some sex-ritual colony that liberates Hackworth's unconscious so that he can create these high-tech books on a much broader scale.


But before Hackworth goes off to serve his time, he makes another, different primer for his daughter. Now Finkle-McGraw's granddaugher, Hackworth's daughter, and Nell all have a primer. The three girls end up going to some special school together and becoming friends. The book kind of explores their lives as a result of their own personal circumstances and how they've learned from their primers.


When Hackworth gets out of prison, his daughter, Fiona, joins him on his search for a character who apparently wants to destroy the nanotechnology system that everybody lives on. His name is the Alchemist. One of the places Hackworth goes is a ship that also serves as a kind of virtual reality theatre. Just before the beginning of the show, somebody is thrown off the ship. Fiona jumps into the water and saves the man. Hackworth is stunned by his daughter's bravery.

Ugh... I guess that's kind of the longest-winded way ever of saying that my image of jumping into the water and then being dragged by the current of the ship comes from the image in The Diamond Age of Fiona jumping into the water and saving the man from drowning.

What interested me about the dream is that I was pretty certain that I was going to die. But what I ended up doing was kicking off of the ship. I didn't escape the drag of the ship. Instead I just kept myself from being sucked under the ship. I was in the ship's tow all the way until the boat stopped. Even when the ship stopped, I was afraid that I would be sucked under and chopped up in its propeller blades.

I would say that in general, from day to day, I wonder how the heck I'm going to get through life. I do feel like I'm getting sucked under the water. And I don't know how I'm going to make it. Financially and emotionally I feel this way.

I look back on at least the past year of my life and wonder how I could have been so feeble-minded as to have gotten myself into this position. And it really is all my fault, all my doing. I know I would have been fine if I would have just kept going along the same way with my life. So why didn't I keep going along that way? Why did I make the decision I made -- which was really tantamount to jumping out of a boat and throwing myself under a ship?

The dream seems to tell me that I'll survive, that even though I feel perilously close to being sucked under the ship and killed, that I'll actually find a way to kick off of the ship and "go with the flow" until the ride's over. But, in some ways, I feel like this is more wish fulfillment than anything else. Because nothing in my actual life seems to indicate that that's even remotely possible.

But everybody in the world feels this way nowadays. It's just the way things are. And I'd rather not dwell on it. The fact is that riding in the drag of the boat was a pretty cool experience! It was actually a lot of fun.

Another image from that dream that I think about is the image of walking out of the ride with the big crowd of people. In this case I'm walking with the crowd, not against it. There are a few people who walk against me. And there is one guy who isn't even walking in my direction until he figures he can trip me up by doing so. But in general I'm walking with the crowd.

This is an interesting compensation for my other dreams, where I'm either being paralyzed by a crowd or moving against a crowd. In yesterday's dream journal entry, for instance, one of my dreams involves needing to fly over a crowd so I can move quickly in the opposite direction; and another dream involves a group of kids needing to get on stage but being hindered by construction workers moving at right angles to the kids.

One thing I need to think about is this dynamic in my dreams. Not that it's the biggest deal in the world, but it's a little strange. Why do I, or the main characters of my dreams, often have their paths interrupted, not by people moving in the opposite direction, but by people coming from something like a perpendicular angle?

And why is there such an emphasis overall, with these "opposite direction" dreams, of huge crowds? The crowd in my "museum stalker" dream from yesterday really made me wonder this. Because the crowd was just so unbelievably large. A lot of people, obviously, come to a museum to see a really good exhibit. But this crowd of people was enormous! And everybody was here to listen to the tour guide. But so many of them were so far away from the tour guide. How could they even have heard him? It's just really weird.

But it's interesting that in the ship dream from last night, I went with the pull of the boat, first of all, and then I went with the crowd. What's also interesting about that is that the woman in the water with me tells me that if you go too deep into the water, you can't swim against the current. It's not until the woman tells me that that I  see the big ship and then get sucked up into the current of the big ship.

I'm not sure. I guess what's being said is that if you get involved with big things, you kind of have to go with the flow with those things. You can't swim against it all. So if you don't want to go with the flow, you better not get involved in the first place.

In the "biking in India" dream I had a few days ago, I made a choice to go my own way. When I did, I was no longer able to get back on the path -- a path I clearly saw -- with my friend. I had a choice of basically standing completely still, or else turning with the people in my path and taking part in the ritual of the river.

It's an interesting idea, I think. It does say basically the same thing as the ship dream. If I'm going to get myself involved in something else, then I have to just go with the flow of whatever's happening. I can't pull myself back to where I was. I just have to go with the flow of whatever new choice I've made.

This, I think, relates as well to my reading of Charles Dickens' novel Little Dorrit, which I finished up last week. One of the characters, named Pancks, is a kind of assistant for a wealthy man named Casby. But Pancks basically does everything for Casby. Dickens compares Pancks to a little tugboat towing a great ship through the Thames -- and then goes on, through the rest of the novel, to metaphorize Pancks into a tugboat. So the fact that the ship is towing me along so effectively is probably due to Dickens' metaphors on Pancks.

Again, the idea is that I've set myself up, with some choice, to be towed along, or at least required to go with the flow of this choice. Well, I know my choice pretty well. All I have to do now is determine what flow I'm in, so I can go with it, I guess. Right now I don't feel like I'm in a flow at all. I feel like I'm sinking in quicksand.