Self-Portrait Day: Dreams for Bernard, Part 2 *

* The names of the dreamers have been posted in invisotext. If you select the white space just above each dream, the dreamers' secret identities will be revealed.

Want to play a little game? I know this is a lot of dreams — believe me, I know — but select a few that especially intrigue or puzzle you, and think them over for a while before you look at my comments.

If you follow the pattern of most of my dream groups—and my previous attempts to read the dreams of strangers — you’ll come up with totally different stuff from me — things I couldn’t fit in, or just missed, or that your own psyches make you sensitive to. It shows what extremely complex and dense constructs dreams can be. So do it, and maybe give the dreamer some of your own comments.
----This has been a very interesting experience for me because, aside from investigating my own dreams, I’ve never had an opportunity to do such an extended “cold reading” of strangers’ dreams, and I generally hold back a lot in responding to dreams in groups. It’s incredibly good practice for me.

Sorry if I used the wrong pronoun in referring to you—especially if you think I should know whether you’re an X or a Y already. Like Stephen Colbert, I don’t see gender.

Except in Misanthrope. Hard to miss there.

Other dream news:

-The “I Dream of Hillary/Barack/McCain” website is still going strong; send them a dream if you have one. My dream colleagues are doing new comments soon. By the way, the big dream conference is coming up in Montreal in July—details at www.asdreams.org; if you’re there, come by and see me. (There’ll be something about Leiris, for the first time that I can recall.)

-This morning I had my first arguably precognitive dream in years. I was in Princeton, where I had bought a bike (a black three-speed bike, which a friend of mine found hilarious) and rented an apartment from an old lady, intending somehow to give it up after a couple of nights, or pass it on to someone else. After I park the bike in front of a college building, I go into a bike store to buy a lock and the guys in the store get all into examining my bike and suggesting all kinds of modifications.

Then I wake up and when I look at the Washington Post, there’s a story on biking in Princeton (which is even weirder than my dream), with a picture of all these bikes parked in a row in front of a college building, very like my dream.

Of course, I was watching House, which is set in Princeton, the night before.

-Synchronicity is some weird shit. This weekend I was visiting relatives and on top of the refrigerator was a ceramic sculpture of a one-eyed orange octopus that my niece made. (See Dream #14 from last week.) -- Bernard Welt

22.

Mike

here is a dream i had on may 19th of 2007:

"crazy crazy crazy fucking post-apocalyptic wasteland decorated with modernist, sparse architecture in the middle of fields and highways. some crazy monkey that was very ill and permanently in christ mode (in terms of how he would rest in my apartment), crazy weird breakdancing groups ("we rest in the restrooms so we can stay together!"), renting a movie from a video store and ending up with a betamax tape instead of a vhs tape (friend says, "Keep it! Betamax tapes are so rare they're worth millions now!") down the street to use the restroom and some kid I hadn't seen since HS ends up telling me last time I partied at his house it was my fault his mother had to clean up the bathroom ("I mean, I know it wasn't really your fault, but you opened the floodgates") someone who was tall with a build a la jim carey in that hipster movie about memory trying to type out on a typewriter that he wants to blow me but my roommate--being a 45 year old business women--was home but at least i got spooned and a few shakes before she came in. then came business time and me and a friend who had shown up in the same room decided to not stay where we were supposed to ("fuck this, I'm going out") and ending up wandering fields and almost dying on the highway but then mark (rl friend) shows up and tells me about how now the dude who wanted to blow me has decided he is into my friend and dude is friends with mark and aparently they have some sort of rating scale that all the friends have to vote on before anything happens and i'm all like "OKAY WHATEVER" and we go to this tent that's a makeshift art gallery and most of the art is shitty but one corner is alright but that belongs to my depressed friend and then mat donovan (rl friend) is there and tells me he didn't get into art school because the "principal person" asked him "is your work bringing anything new to the art world?" and then sitting on a couch by a bunch of random girls who apparently have found out that i'm going to be traveling far away ("how are you going to get there?" / "oh, i'm not leaving america, I'll be walking or hitching I guess") and then watching things from a distance, tired ("can we go grab a soda and light up?" i say as I hold a cigarette in the air, right hand) outside almost fuck up a display of soda, someone yells at someone else and the blame gets slid onto me but i shrug and walk over a poster advertising a show that my band is playing at and this poster is gigantic and tons of people have scribbled things about how awesome we are and under the main text of the poster "AFTER PARTY AT MIKEY'S" ("i guess we are having an afterparty andy" / "well that's okay i guess") and then *******"

Comments:

When you actually discuss dreams with the dreamer, you usually spend some time trying to get an account of the predominating emotions in the dream, and get a sense of the relation of dream imagery to these fluctuating emotions. And maybe here is where I should say a word about my sense of what dreams “are”: In my view, they represent the subjective experience of a variety of different kinds of mental states, which run from the hypnagogic hallucinations of sleep onset—the images that (usually) briefly flash before you as you’re falling asleep—to the elaborate narratives of REM-sleep, which seem the most profoundly “psychological”—that is, most inclined prominently to display a lot of intriguing mental associations, whatever the actual physiological stimuli that might give rise to the basic dream imagery.

So that’s just to say that in some dream accounts, you might be most struck by the way that the imagery reflects the somatic stimuli (like a sore throat, the need to urinate, indigestion) or extrasomatic stimuli (your alarm clock, getting tangled in the sheets, someone blowing you as you sleep — I’m just trying to give interesting examples here), and sometimes you might find most interesting the revelation of the dreamer’s characteristic patterns of association of ideas—as Jung called them, “complexes.” (This, by the way, is already admitting much greater variety to dream life than Freud allowed.)

So: One way of looking at dreams (associated with the very interesting and very nice dream psychologist Ernest Hartmann) is that in elaborate dream narratives, the dreamer is having predominating emotional states (presumably in response to the day’s events), which of course fluctuate as feelings will do, which are reflected in the metaphorical construction of imagery characteristic of the dream state (as well as daytime reverie). So it is interesting to see how the imagery pictures these shifting emotional states—but even more interesting to consider that the dreaming mind is testing the boundaries of these metaphors as indicators of how we process our experiences emotionally and respond to them in waking life with behavior strategies.
----Hence the very interesting idea that, essentially, in dreams we are watching our minds fall back upon their most habitual ways of thinking but under conditions that allow us to loosen up associations of ideas so we can explore strategies we would not have thought of in the waking state. Obviously, this is very similar to the function that art (as opposed to rational thought, politics, and, at least until recently, theory in the sciences and humanities) can perform for a culture.
----(And now I will digress to say that one of the first papers I gave on dreaming was a talk on G. W. Pabst’s Secrets of the Soul [1926], which was made to explain Freud’s theories to the masses. My perspective was that an analysis of the dream analysis within the film easily showed that it didn’t follow Freud’s principles at all and was constructed as propaganda for the psychoanalytic movement rather than illustration of Freudian method.

So as I’m about to start, I look out in the audience and see Ernest Hartmann, who, I happen to know, was dandled on Freud’s knee when he was two, as his parents were in Freud’s circle. And I freak; I think I actually trembled. I got through my talk and Hartmann sat with me at lunch and said I’d done pretty good, which was nice but still weird. And I kept feeling that it’s just not possible that I’m one degree of separation from Freud; it seemed unreal. I grew up seeing him as such a mythic figure.)
----Well, I figured I’d say that sometime, so I said it now, in response to a complicated dream, in order to say that I’m not only trying to see the imagery of the dream in my mind’s eye but also feel what feelings it reflects (a process that has always reminded me of imitating someone else’s facial expression to see what it makes you feel).

So this dreamer is thinking about how he feels about the possibilities of standing out from the crowd, achieving the success in self-expression (and this just means actualization of one’s own distinctive way of being in the world, not necessarily success in some mode or genre of actual art-making) that’s signified either by recognition or by a feeling of satisfaction, of understanding and being understood.

In this dream, the shared world of society has been destroyed and the dreamer is wandering in the conceptually streamlined world of the unconscious. The images are of exemplary suffering and vigorous energy, and these are contrasted with the “restrooms” (which is typical of dreams’ capacity to foreground the subtext implicit in terms we use in daytime speech). The dreamer stands out by acquiring a valuable object, that is, achieving wealth (and the betamax tape is a brilliant condensation of the idea of the crowd failing to recognize true value); and explores sexual fulfillment (my guess is that the dreamer associates Jim Carey to some particular “hipster” role, very possibly Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind because it’s so congruent with the approach of this dream).

As the dream progresses, the consequences and emotional shadings of achieving self-expression—the negative ones, such as messing up a bathroom, as well as positive—appear as mini-scenarios, culminating in the awareness of two challenges: first, the very serious question about authenticity posed by “the principal person” (and obviously I only get to these readings by erasing the differences between the dreamer and his various characters/personae because, after all, I see this as a matter of himself asking questions of himself); and second, the consequences of fame, which is to say, self-exposure, signified by the fan girls, the poster, and the party he doesn’t know is happening at his place but accepts. By the end of the dream, the dreamer accepts that others will occupy his dream. Which is, you know, a very nice place to be.

23.

JW Veldhoen

have had one dream as a constant. I cannot say that it was the first dream, but it takes precedence over other dreams by virtue of constancy. That is, if constancy is a virtue. It is a bad dream, or a nightmare. Dreams either are good or bad, neutral, or unremembered, but you cannot always know what type of dream it is that you are dreaming in the midst of dreaming. They say that the symptoms of a dream come from the future, and not from out of the past. That is why this one dream terrifies me so much. The dream begins differently each time. The details seem real at first, the prosaic order of the day, and then some slip, as I eat dinner at the breakfast table and pour milk on a salad, or a disembodied voice announces it is time for a spinal tap while I brush my teeth, a meow from a guppy. The intrusion of absurdity, of dream, looms, as a darkness, at the periphery of the dream, and then all of the images die away, and I am left in the dark, or rather, the dark encircles, and becomes animate, it replaces the image, to become only itself, a total replacement, and an entity. In the dream, before it closes down, I have some intuition of this presence, that it is there, and this knowledge by itself causes the dream to collapse. What happens next is paralysis. I know I am in a dream, or have entered into the dark half of dream, but I can’t awaken. I struggle to consciousness but to no avail, and panic. I try to vocalize and get someone outside of the dream to wake me, and to save me. I think it is the doubt that they will not save me that causes it to collapse. I have opened my eyes in this part of dreaming before, but have remained asleep, many times, and this is all the worse because my waking vision works, yet I am still unable to move, the nerves will not fire, and I am motionless, silent, and trapped inside myself. Finally, I fight through, and start screaming until someone wakes me.

To D + B (One Hundred Dreams) (scroll down to the April 25 entry)

Comments:

Well, what’s described here is the “pure” nightmare experience, that is, the state that medievals called “nightmare” and attributed sometimes to possession by an incubus or succubus—and about which Freud’s disciple Ernest Jones wrote, connecting it interestingly to the vampire and the werewolf as an eruption of the repressed irrational that the subject experiences as annihilating the ego. It is much rarer than what most of us think of a nightmare—a vivid dream accompanied by intense anxiety—but still not very unusual. (A cool way of thinking of the distinction for anyone really into movies, is the difference between the standard Universal horror movies like Dracula that grew into most of the horror genre, and the Val Lewton/Jacques Tourneur pictures like I Walked with a Zombie, which have much more the atmosphere of classic nightmare.) One feature is the endurance of the world of the nightmare into the waking state, which these days would be described as an interruption of the function of the arousal mechanism, just as in the night terrors of children. (This happens to be the topic I discussed with Alex Trebek for about 45 seconds during my JEOPARDY! half-time interview, a hilarious and utterly humiliating experience I’d love to tell you about sometime if I hadn’t completely blocked the horrifying memory.)

The imagery is not vivid, and even kind of abstract, typical of the non-REM dream state. You can see that, unlike the REM-state anxiety dream, it’s not using visual symbolism but simply expressing the wakening conscious state’s terror at trying to process the decidedly unreal—just as we might respond with terror on suddenly encountering a ghost, or an obvious breach of a physical law, in the normal waking state. This is also evidenced by the fact that most of the dream account is given to thinking and wondering rather than describing. So here the conscious state sees the dreamworld as infecting it, as it were, rather than, as in the typical anxiety dream, accepting the dreamworld on its own terms. It’s not surprising to see this kind of protest against the irrational.

By the way, there are psychological profiles more disposed to this kind of nightmare than others (nothing pathological, I hasten to add, but a common profile among artists) and they’re also typical of stress, including lack of sleep and withdrawal, especially from nicotine addiction.

24.

Commonpeople

The way teachers dealt with conflicts in our school was by putting students to fight each other in front of everyone. There were rules to the fights, and extreme violence wasn't allowed, but it nevertheless seemed like an unfair system to me. That's because I had a bully. He was tall and beautiful, with stylish black hair and a rich family. He was a strong fighter, originally from Italy; he was popular with everyone except me.

The reason why she and I became friends was because she had a bully too; he was the Italian's best friend, his henchman. He tormented her, but she tried to laugh it off by saying that it was his poor way of showing love. She watched from the sides the day I fought in the playground, pushed against the wall by my italian tormentor, the kids' cheers ringing in my ears.

One of the rules for starting an officially sanctioned fight was to hit your adversary's face with a glove. She thought it would be a laugh if she challenged her own bully to a fight; she thought it would put a stop to his torments if he was pressured into fighting her in public. We went to his house and knocked on the door. A young maid dressed in white opened the door and I introduced myself. He came to the door, not realizing she was hiding behind me, ready to strike his cheek with a glove. He was shocked; she laughed.
----Walking home, a desert storm fell upon me. All the beasts ran across the dunes seeking shelter. I saw a rare giant spider, lightly-pink and confused, try to get away. I found her mother heading home, her head covered with a scarf that barely protected her against the whipping sand. We walked together for a while when we suddenly saw a figure ahead of us, stumbling, holding on to a wall. It was my friend. She was crying and covered in bruises and blood.

Comments:

The dreamer and his friend represent two styles of dealing with conflict—and I would guess that the emphasis on the official sanction for the fights indicates the kind of actual life conflict the dreamer has in mind. The dreamer experiences a scene that is unpleasant—being victimized—but when it comes to the strategy of standing up to the bully on the approved way, he cannot see the scene; it is elided — what some of you theoryheads would call a lacuna. It is instead envisioned as catastrophe — the desert scene — with the dreamer’s state of mind seen as animals fleeing, and a final image of the brave friend defeated.

This reminds me of dreams that essentially weigh the possible consequences of imagined courses of action, based on scenarios from the dreamer’s past — or maybe imagination.


25.

Douglas A. Martin

I’m trying to figure out if I dream, tend to, or if this one was, in a narrative sequence or not — or if that’s something my waking brain imposes? As I was trying to think if I remember my dreams or not, I was remembering writing of dreams, where I knew I was taking this idea to some end: like letting language manipulate? Anyway, last night (4/22), and it was one that woke me up so I couldn’t sleep anymore: I am more hovering in it, over a wooded landscape, but the trees are low lying, or a canopy, so most movement is like bent over movement (figure for writing? though I just see this in reading back over), though at moments too it seems to clear, so big movements can be made up to the sky. There is a scarecrow-type figure, and I guess I kind of mean the Scarecrow from Batman, but also the illustration of Struwwelpeter (one of my student’s just loaned this to me, because of something in class I was talking about trying to write, or write from, and I read/looked at it yesterday — but also this scarecrow I recognize as a kind of default dream figure, for me, a “Jason” kind of guy (now Friday the 13th I do definitely mean) — lots of dreams I have to wake up from involve some figuring of him. This

“assignment” — for the portrait day — Math told me about it — reminded me of something Brian Pera once asked for Lowblueflame, which I think is gone now, but which I loved, loved participating in, and my dream recording there too I think somehow interacted with Jason…jesus. OK: so there’s a frame, like this space in the woods, but also I’m watching as a kind of white car, rounded lines, rather square, is being backed up or I’m just now making it move in remembering. It’s there in the woods. The leaves are definitely brown. I’m trying to get away even though I’m not seeing myself so much as an actual body in the dream. At some point a body is slammed to the ground, but by no hands on it, just someone (the Scarecrow I guess I fill in) standing more towards the periphery watching. And I know this has something to do with Maggie N., she is there too, either being killed or making me see how someone is being and I have to watch/help, or I’m helping in the killing: that seems to be something I know for sure in the dream. But I know too if I don’t see the figure for not me, then I will be killed. Does this need to be interpreted, even? I wait to see. I wish I remembered more of it than just this central piece or motifs.

Comments:

The dream and comments are so blended together in this account that I’m not able to tell what the dream account is, exactly, and it seems to me the dreamer is acknowledging that by asking if it even needs to be interpreted. The dreamer’s uncertainty about what happened in the dream and what is imposed on it by the waking mind may be a philosophical problem, or it may be, as psychoanalytic views would have it, a way of describing the very typical dream feature of things that both are and are not—though this is a bit sketchier than most dream accounts—which comes from negation, denial. The first is really no different from the problem of uncertainty regarding any kind of memory if one overthinks it, and suggests that the only approach that will resolve the problem is to relax and proceed with what you think it is; the second attributes the uncertainty to the dream experience itself. Obviously only the dreamer can resolve this.
----I wrote about Jason Voorhees in an essay Dennis reprinted here last Halloween because I’m interested in the power of this hooded figure (also like John Merrick, the Elephant Man, in David Lynch’s version), a kind of personification of uncontrollable phallic power—I love the way Jason keeps popping up like an unwelcome teenage boner—that reminds us of the unconscious linkage of virility and death (or loss of identity, annihilation of ego). The association of Struwwelpeter—imagined as castrating in even the most naïve accounts—reminds one of the fear of the father’s superior phallus as the agent of castration in a very orthodox Freudian view. And it’s not improbable that the emotional intensity of this complex is the source of the feeling of uncertainty (of failure to acknowledge the fantasy) in telling the dream, as a Freudian would have it: the “I think it is, but this cannot be so.”

26.

Akechikogorou

I am on a road in a flat out-of-town area of pale ocher and brown colors.

I am standing in front of a teenage boy. He’s beautiful with a dark skin and dark, curly hair, like an Arab. He’s close. He looks at me and I can feel the warmth of his body.
He’s naked to the waist and I’m taking him slowly into my arms, feeling his soft skin pressing gently against me.

His back feels weird. My fingertips slide down the line where his spine should be across a very rough, uneven surface. It’s irritating.

I somehow get to see his back (maybe I’m looking over his shoulder while continuing to hug him, but I’m not sure about my body’s position). What I see strikes me with terror:
Instead of skin, his shoulders and back are covered with a crust like a wholegrain bread that is thickly covered with pumpkin seeds. My fingers have already dug into this crust, scratching loose some of the pumpkin seeds. They break off easily and ripple down. But underneath them there are more of these large, oval, kind of sharp-edged olive-brown seeds—more and more...and though it is most disgusting and makes me feel like vomiting I cannot stop, I have to dig my fingers deeper and deeper into that loose mass and the boy just lets me do it without reaction...

I woke up with a start at this point, my body all covered with goose-flesh and my stomach about to revolt. The feeling of terror was extremely physical, and it lasted throughout the next day and returns, only slightly toned down, every time I think of the dream.

Comments:

Well, I have a strong feeling about this dream, so I will just go ahead and say it, but really, really emphasizing that my experience may have nothing whatever to do with this dreamer’s actual dream. Really, really, seriously; I mean this is why I feel so weird about even offering my associations is, the assertion that I know nothing about any other dreamer’s dream is not just a pose or a ritual formula, OK?

In my experience, male dreamers are very disposed to picture their relation to their genitals (and their sexual impulses) as a relation to a baby, a boy, or a man (sometimes a woman), and to express different ideas according to the state of that dream character. But generally, with a baby or child, the dreamer is holding him and experiences some surprising sudden action—for example, the baby cries uncontrollably or spits up milk as the dreamer is stroking or shaking it in his lap; I think of an instance where the man is a body-builder who “blows his top” and suddenly deflates like a balloon. (You can see why these instances seem so convincing of the general thesis of sexual symbolism, which not everyone accepts.) And I am equally convinced that many males, especially boys and young men, hetero and homo and whatever, unconsciously figure their relations to other males in their waking lives, as relations to their genitals—for example, developing a relation to another male that both protects and tends to provoke.
----Therefore this dreams evokes two issues for me: The first is, as Freud (again, sorry) says, that erection is an endlessly fascinating phenomenon for males (and, he says, for females, though of this I am not so convinced, because I am never sure that women are ever as impressed by hard-ons as men are)—and that it is endlessly impossible for the male to rationalize — that is, we continue to be slaves not only to our hard-ons, but to our inability to comprehend the category-defying, wonderful mystery they represent. (For example, Freud returns more than once to the idea that, to the unconscious mind, they “defy gravity”—though you might think that even the unconscious mind is perhaps not quite that dumb.) It would be very typical of the dream process, then, to exaggerate both the softness and the hardness of the penis.

The second is that the relation of sexual arousal and the sexual apparatus to reproduction is the subject of much repression in modern culture — some represented by Freud’s own successful effort to transform the associations of the term “sexual”—so that part of the unconscious’ business is to construct representations not only of desire but of reproductive power — and these representations, I personally believe, lie behind horror images just as much as the more classically “Freudian” images of desire do. (I may exaggerate or just mistake the divergence from classical Freudianism here, and for those of you who are really into this, yes, I know that the use of the term “desire” here is controversial, and that this involves the relation of “drive” and “instinct” in various revisions of Freud.) I feel I’ve seen many of these images. So a simple way to characterize this is:

At some point in childhood, the dreamer forms a picture (or many) of what it means that he carries “seeds” inside him — in fact, incalculably many seeds — and indeed grew from seed himself. This is seen as something alien and incomprehensible in himself. (To be fair to Freud, this is a significant part of what he meant by “infantile erotic fantasy,” but many Freudians have failed to understand that.) In his adult dream, this image blends with the personification of the phallus (that is, an image that represents an externalization of “his” relation to “his” body part, object of desire, and reproductive power); and further, with a representation of the mysterious phenomenon of the erection.

And it is not irrelevant to remind the reader that healthy males are experiencing erection for at least much of their REM sleep, when the most vivid and bizarre dreaming occurs. This erection, and even emission in sleep, is not necessarily linked to overt sexual content in dreams, by the way. The only instance I’ve ever encountered of nocturnal emission in a sleep lab—presumably because the lab conditions inhibit it — is often cited as proof of the reality of sexual symbolism: when the dreamer was awakened after emission, he reported that he was dreaming only that a faucet was stuck and after he strained to turn it, a flow of water gushed out.
----Naturally I wouldn’t pursue these associations to a dream in class but I hope and expect that this dreamer will not feel it intrusive if I . . . well, I swear I was going to say “if I dwell at some length on his sexual organ.” Ooops. Goddamn that Freud dude.


27.

Slatted Light

Bernard,

This is a dream I had a while ago. I feel a little odd about posting it in public in a way because of its gratuitous violence, I guess. It seems very postal spree in its quality or something and therefore kind of reductive. But this fascinates me mainly because it seems so unlike me. I don’t think I’ve ever had any dream like it before or since and so I'm intrigued to hear your reading.

***

I live in a house across from a bar that looks like a blend between a general store and a hotel. The place is two stories high at least and has elaborate balconies surrounding it that seem overly complex and baroque. The house I’m living in looks new and uninhabited by comparison as if it had only just now been erected. I live there with what feels like my family but isn’t because not a single one of the people who live there with me look at all like my relatives. In the dream, I know this. It doesn’t cause me any stress. The narrative begins with me walking from my door across the street to the bar. I step inside to find the place packed with people drinking beer and seeming to celebrate something. There’s a kind of counter you’d expect to see in the kind of bar you’d expect to see in films about the Wild West and the whole room has that feel to it, though the customers don’t. Shelves full of produce strangely line the room and the tables people drink at are placed around them as if there wasn’t quite enough room in this place to designate separate space for its different functions. I’ve come to purchase something from the shop part but I decide I need to use the bathroom first. I make my way through the crowd of revellers to the back of the bar and find a bathroom with two stalls that’s incredibly cramped and tiny. One is a stall for able-bodied customers, the other one is for the disabled. I squeeze in and go about my business when I hear sound from beside me and turn and see a crack in the wall, a quite long but narrow fissure through which an eye is looking in at me. The person on the other side is in the disabled stall, in a wheelchair, watching me and making strange whistling sounds as they breathe. This person asks me to kill them. They say it through the slot which the lips are not pressed against. I’m horrified in an irresolvable way. I say, no, I’d never do that, and have this really strong sense of conviction. Then I flush and leave. Even in the dream, the absurdity of that is not lost on me.

I go back out and there’s some interference in the dream I can’t quite remember but the next thing I know I’ve come back to the counter and I’m speaking to a woman in a leather slaughterhouse apron behind it, asking her if she has something in stock that I can’t recall either. I’m not even certain I knew what I was asking for at the time. The place is full of noise and it’s hard for the woman to hear. I move toward the end of the bar to come around and talk to her when I bump against somebody really large and threatening. This guy wants to start a fight with me. He tries to grab at me or something and suddenly, I move to the end of the bar and around it, almost as if I know what I have to do in advance, and I grab up a shotgun from behind there. I work the pump and fire. The chest of the guy who tried to fight with me explodes and he goes down. Everyone else falls silent. Internally, I’m almost immediately completely resigned or adapted to this new situation. I understand that I’m a murderer. So I think, Fuck i’ and I call out, Where’s that cripple? as crudely as that. The guy in the wheelchair rolls forward and I tell him if he wants, I’ll kill him now. But he turns around and snarls at me furiously that he wanted someone who would actually care to kill him. I was like, Have it your way. Fine.

It seems I’m holding all the people in their hostage when the door opens and in comes a woman with a bunch of schoolkids. She immediately sees the situation and shouts and tries to run out. I guess I figure I’m in this too deeply now to stop and I shoot her as she’s headed down the steps. Back inside, the kids are running everywhere and people start to panic and in the chaos, someone tries to wrestle the gun from me. I managed to either kill this person or get them away from me when I realise a fire has started. The panic increases. I struggle toward the door which is surrounded by terrified people but is itself strangely unblocked and I go out and slam the door and secure it with a wooden crossbar that falls across the centre and absolutely prevents anyone else from getting out. Then I walk down into the street and stand on my own while I watch the place burn up.

It seems by this time I’m running on some logic I don’t really understand except it feels inevitable and fully developed. I walk back across the street to my house and I go inside and shoot every member of my not-family in there. Then I come back out again to watch the fire. At this point, the otherwise fluid progression of the dream alters. It flashes to an image of a school of sharks in what appears to be a channel of rapid water becoming tangled up in electrical power lines that lift them out of the water and into the air, cutting deep into their sides and killing them. Then I see a bear in the same water with what looks to be the tyre of a car skewered through its back somehow, howling and roaring, as the water washes it away. The dream comes back to me then as if it had been continuing itself while I was gone. I’ve lifted the shotgun to my chin and I’m grasping the trigger. I wake up at the moment I die.

Comments:

It’s probably no big surprise that I think of this as a good, even auspicious dream, the kind associated with making meaning of one’s life, or getting one’s bearings. The feelings the dreamer has about it basically come down to our responses to the dual (or more) function of dream images—one the one hand, they are all, including the human characters, symbols, metaphors; on the other, as the dream-self interacts with them, we are also testing out our behavioral strategies, and specifically those which guard the integrity of the ego—actual physical survival but also the coherence of identity. (I know shockingly little about the dreams of transgendered people, but you can see why they’d be so important in understanding this function of dreaming, and I hope to get to remedying my deplorable ignorance in this area soon.)

So it is quite possible that we, let’s say, construct a fantasy of annihilating some personification of a problem, or a feared aspect of the self, and then, within the dream, also react as if the action were not symbolic at all. The easiest aspect of this dream comes when the dreamer encounters the figure in the wheelchair in the bathroom. The symbolism of a dream image often comes clearer when we just ask ourselves, “What is this?” (a different tactic than Freud’s free association, which also works very well). “What is a bathroom?” Let’s say that it’s a very private place we go to in order to eliminate that within us which we do not need, which we find dispensable. “Why is it private?” Maybe we start to think about how what we do in the bathroom undermines the image we wish to project of ourselves; or recognize that we don’t want to be exposed to others eliminating their waste any more than we want them observing us. By the same token we might ask what a general store and a hotel are, and for me it’s fairly easy to make this into the unconscious mind, where our various aspects of character come and go, and where there is a storehouse of goods we can make use of. It’s interesting that the crisis of this dream comes when the dreamer cannot make his needs understood by the shopkeeper.

By a chain of such thoughts we might arrive at an idea that the disabled figure (as Freud would say) “overdetermines” the basic idea behind the bathroom—the segregation and elimination of the weaker part of ourselves. This shifts us from Freud to Jung, since the wheelchair guy is a Shadow figure—the “inferior” part of ourselves, by which Jung means the characteristics that are alive within us but which we refuse to acknowledge. Contemporary psychologists would call these “ego-dystonic” characteristics, those which don’t fit in with our concept of ourselves.

So this dreamer is behaving like many others in killing the weak, even if it comes after a struggle in which he protests that he can’t. It’s not surprising if a convention of the western — the barroom where the showdown takes place — enters into the dream; the western is predicated on the satisfaction we take in seeing the superior force eliminate the inferior through definitive violence.

The person who has this dream is proposing two things to himself: You don’t want to be the one who does the killing, but the weaker side of yourself, the stuff about you that pisses you off, has to be eliminated, and you’re the only one who can do it. But at the same time the dream says: Stand up to that antagonistic side of yourself and who knows where the violence will end?


28.

Maximum Etc.

Bernard,

I haven't had this dream in a long time, probably since my first year of college at the very latest (which was in 2000) but during adolescence and especially my first couple years of high school I used to have it all the time -- not regularly, exactly, but often enough that all this time later it still sticks out in my mind. Basically, the dream was a view of a landscape that was constantly shifting. I'm not sure that "I" existed as a character in the dream, but what my mind saw was a sort of panorama of open land. No signs of civilization or human, animal or vegetable life; it was all mountains and open plains. It was different every time, first because "I" was floating above it and moving forward through it, but also because as I said earlier the landscape itself was constantly in flux--not volatile like eruptions or landslides, more like morphing and shape-shifting, terraforming in real time (well, real dream time, but still). That said, there was a certain consistency to the scene that allowed me to understand "I" was back in the same place every time. The motif was pretty other-planety, I always thought of it as somewhat Martian, but the color scheme was deeper and more brooding- lots of heavy blues and purples, or sometimes green-greys. Never more than one or two colors on any given night, or consistency in the variation between colors on different nights. Looking forward to getting your take on this, and thanks.


Comments:

This is really pretty abstract, and it would be very interesting to know what emotions accompanied the dream, and if they varied a lot. But since it sounds like you are dreaming of a setting without the action of the movie; and since the essential element is the relation of you, the dream-ego, to the landscape, and that it is constantly changing; and since that landscape feels alien; and since it’s a dream from adolescence — I’d see it as a basic mode that developed in your dream life for expressing your sense of your relation to your body. I hear about dreams in which dominating emotional state is expressed through color, but I don’t know a lot about that issue.


29.

Paul Curran

I remember mostly fragments of past dreams and was trying to come up with something more solid but nothing much appeared. I got a massive cold last week but I'm much better now. Anyway, the dream below is one I've had on and off for years. It's probably a bit obvious and easy to analyse but I thought better to join in than not. It's okay if my name's on it.

***

The most vivid dream I remember is a recurring one of stabbing someone. I lash out from some vague frustration and then pull back. He looks sad and disappointed to have witnessed this ugliness. He has done nothing to deserve it. I am shocked and embarrassed to have exposed it. I stab him viciously to cover up the initial wound. I want to wipe out his recognition and the thought of him telling others. How can we go back from here? My wrist jars as the knife chips bone. Once it was my dad, who died after a botched half-attempt at euthanasia, but it is usually a stranger. Sometimes it is near water. Sometimes he comes back and I have to hide out in the rooftop of a suburban house until he dies. Sometimes I only dream the aftermath but know it is the same killing from the same dream. I had this dream before but this time it is real and although no one has found out I have to live with knowing someone might one day. I always wake up several times within the dream thinking my life is now fucked.

Comments:

Most people have dreams in which they attack someone—sometimes the focus seems to be on the manner of the attack (such as stabbing, shooting, punching), sometimes on the circumstances (such as what provokes it). Here the outstanding feature is the strange idea of covering up the first stab with another. It is a great image of the common tactic in life of doing further damage in a futile attempt cover up damage already done. I have no doubt that this dream proceeds from thoughts the dreamer has about some situation in his life—which will probably occur to him if he just asks himself in a relaxed mood, “So what does this remind me of?”—and that this accounts for the reminders that this is real and that it affects his life. This is an uncomfortable dream, but a very good dream because it offers a way to insight. (I love it because it’s a great illustration of what dreams can do; I’m undoubtedly going to be thinking about it more.)


30.

Tosh

I had the strangest dream last night that I was with my Uncle and we were on a bus. We were going to a shopping centrer, when all of sudden he got off the bus in front of the center and started folding the bus so he can carry it into the mall. It was light weight, but still very long. So he would bump the bus into people as they were walking around us. But he folded the bus like paper or a piece of plastic.

Comments:

So here’s what we do in my dream groups (most of the time): We offer to the dreamer our associations (rather than analyses) on the principle, “If this were my dream . . .” which is to say, we acknowledge that the associations are our own, not the dreamer’s. So if the responses resonate for the dreamer, it’s because they approach universal themes, or because the dreamer and the responder have something in common.

In this case, the focus of the dream is the conversion of the bus, which transports people, into something that can be transported — which makes it a very nice image for a number of things, including the imagination itself. So the detail that matters, beyond that, is the bumping into people.

But if this were my dream, the first association I would have is to Jacques Tati — it’s the conjunction of “my uncle” with the simplified Playtime-style cityscape of bus and shopping center, along with the famous moment when the bus reflects the two-dimensional world of the film. In any of my regular dream groups, this association would be a stretch, but the chances are that this dreamer is familiar with Tati, so it would be interesting to see if this association offers him anything.

31.

SYpHA_69

Date of dream: 4/23/2008
This is the ending section of a very long sequence of dreams I had last night. It appears to be a sequel to the Miami Vice movie. I see Colin Farrell once again playing the part of Sonny Crockett, and looking as he did in the first Miami Vice film. He’s driving in a car, in a city I presume to be Miami. A woman is with him. He notices in his rearview mirror that he’s being followed. He tries to lose the guy following him but no dice. So he pulls over to the side of the road. The other driver does the same thing. Colin then reaches into the back seat of his car and pulls out a large seat cushion of sorts. He tilts it in front of his rearview mirror. For some reason, the seat cushion acts almost like a mirror, in that it deflects sunlight off the rearview mirror and at the car behind him. Colin looks into his rearview mirror, sees that the driver who has been following him is doing the exact same thing with his seat cushion. Colin realizes that it’s Jamie Foxx, who is playing the part of Ricardo Tubbs once again. Relieved, Colin returns his gun to his glove compartment (how the gun magically appeared in his hand, I have no idea). The two men get out of their cars, greet each other, hug. Foxx asks Colin what’s up and Colin mentions how he’s on a new case now, something involving an illegal arms dealer (whose name I can’t remember).
----Now it’s a courtroom scene. There’s a man at a table, some kind of stool pigeon, or maybe an undercover cop. He’s wearing a nice suit, has short hair, looks slightly unshaven. Colin, also in a suit, is pacing around the courtroom, holding a small tape recorder. He’s playing a tape for the audience to listen to. The tape is a monologue of sorts, and the voice belongs to that of the man in the suit who is seated at the table. He’s talking, on the tape, about how a gun company called Wrentz Security every now and then secretly delivers guns to the arms dealer mentioned in the dream’s previous scene. As the tape comes to an end, the man at the table mouths the closing words, as he knows them by heart. Then he smiles. Colin, satisfied, turns the tape off. Everyone in the courtroom claps and cheers. Later, an old man walks up to Colin and tells him that the tape recorder he was using was obviously phony.

Cut to some sort of giant hockey rink. The place is packed. In the center of the rink is a big brown bear standing on his hind legs. The bear is wearing hockey skates and is also somehow holding a hockey stick. It’s a very comical image. Before the bear is a puck. Jaunty organ music plays (da da da DA DA DA… CHARGE!) The bear begins hitting the puck in a clumsy, awkward manner as he heads for the goal, which is being defended by a human hockey player. The bear arrives at the goal, but doesn’t hit the puck into it. Instead he barrels right into the human player and begins to eat him in rage. The player screams as the camera pans up, blood spraying everywhere. We can see the audience in the front row, and they’re all horrified, except for a dog who looks like Lassie who is also seated in the front row, a weird grin on his face (this dog was mentioned earlier in the dream, apparently he was a former canine skating champ). We then cut to a short scene where a bunch of old men briefly argue over what restaurant they should go to (one of the old men is the same guy who accused Colin of using a phony tape recorder).

Cut back to the hockey rink. The image is now on a TV screen, and I’m in a living room, watching the Miami Vice movie with my dad and my three younger brothers. On the screen, we can see the bear lying on its stomach, arms and legs spread out flat, its body obscenely bloated, and it looks almost like a bear rug that’s still alive. The bear is covered in blood, as is the ice all around it. The human hockey player’s head can be seen jutting out of the bear’s mouth. His helmet has fallen off and he’s still faintly alive. The bear bites down, sinks his teeth into the player’s head with a dull crunch, blood seeps out. I watch this, disgusted, as are my brothers. Then, in explicit slow motion, the bear’s jaws snap shut with all their might, and the man’s head explodes with a crunch, blood splashing everywhere, an eye pops out, etc. Suddenly, the scene on the TV switches to an event at the same hockey rink, only it appears to be later on as the ice on the rink is no longer bloody. A man starts skating, and the man is a famous skater named something phallic like ‘Sword’ or ‘Blade.’ I say to my brothers, “What the hell does this have to do with Miami Vice?” That’s when I woke up.

Comments:

There’s a lot of stuff here. The television, and the form of the cinema and the game, are used as a matrix to gather the disparate material together. The crisis at the end can be read two ways: the dream gives up on the effort to pretend that this all fits together; or it throws the question at the dreamer, challenging him directly to recall that Miami Vice is the key to the dream.

Now I’m going to “overread” this just to make the point (yet again) that like any other listener to a dream, I will have associations that may or may not be of use to the dreamer — in fact, they might be totally antithetical to the dreamer’s view and not very helpful. The only difference between me, responding this way, and another person, who might say instead, “I have no idea what is going on in this dream,” is that I’m resisting the impulse to discount and censor my responses — and I’ve learned to feel OK about doing that because I’ve disclaimed any authority to my associations, and at the same time, have often seen that they actually can be of use to the dreamer.

So for me, the keys to the dream are in the “Vice” in the title of the film and its interaction with the male partnership at the center of the TV show (the attribution of “Vice” to the heroes of the show instead of the felons they pursue is central to its popular success as well). The pattern builds up from the actual but unexpected reflections in the dream, to the fact that the two partners unexpectedly reflect each other, establishing the theme of identification—that is, forming a powerful emotional bond through mutual recognition of likeness, as same-sex friends will do. This extends to the “undercover” activity in the next scene and the continuing theme of not playing by the rules—which finally comes down to the bear, who takes the controlled aggression of the hockey game outside its constraints, revealing it as animal, naked aggression. (One can think of this scene as channel-switching —without losing either of the channels, so that they’re superimposed on each other — between a hockey game and a nature documentary.)

Therefore it’s quite significant that the dreamer experiences a scene with his father and brothers at the end, with the very pointed question about phallic aggression — reinforced by Sword and Blade—which, by the way, places the fact that Colin’s gun appears out of nowhere, seemingly just to be put away, in a very interesting light, especially if you consider what Freud says about gloves and compartment—representing the dreamer’s genuine quandary: How do males negotiate mutually supportive relationships in the face of inevitable aggression, sexual competition, and homoerotic impulses? For a really traditional Freudian, this whole dream builds up to the inevitable final image of the Primal Horde—on this thinking, the bear is now the dreamer’s totem animal, because the image of the bear resolves the conflict. If I were the dreamer, I would actually take this aspect of the dream quite seriously—but then, as you may have heard, I’m a big ol’ bear.

Sorry if this seems stereotyped—there’s an enormous amount of evidence for very different patterns of dreaming among males and females, with a much, much higher emphasis on physical aggression and phallic themes among males. But again: This is my “If this were my dream” reading, which may have nothing to do with the dreamer’s own associations. But I should say that the puzzlement I see here about negotiating one’s relations with other males doesn’t have much to do with sexual orientation, in my view. Of course, I’ll feel pretty silly if this dreamer is female.

32.

Tigersare

this is the dream that i still remember most vividly, maybe ten years or more since i had it: i was walking along one of the big sandy highways in my hometown of perth, western australia, with no exact purpose in mind. the beach was out of sight over a few low, scrubby dunes. i walked interminably then felt a tickle in my left hand. i looked down and the fleshy part of of the palm beneath my thumb was split wide open. my vision dropped suddenly and vertiginously into a dry, aching chasm in my hand. the skin inside was brown and cracked and the pain became intense, waking me up. i felt very disturbed about this dream for weeks afterwards.

Comments:

Well, it would be interesting to know what the disturbing feelings centered on. The transition between landscape and the dreamer’s body is a common dream theme (and has come up in this collection of dreams before); one of the interesting things it indicates is the poverty of traditional ways of conceptualizing the subject’s relation to the environment, as normally we see it as a set of stimuli that act upon us to create a kind of picture we passively receive. There’s a lot of interest in cognitive science now in how we project ourselves into a scene—that is, imagine the scene from the scene’s viewpoint and not just our own—just as importantly as seeing and hearing a coherent but objective presentation. (When we are perceiving other persons and animals, this is called “mirroring,” and evidently it’s capable of explaining aspects of human behavior that aren’t otherwise accounted for.)

So the theme here is: I am the desert; how does it feel to be the desert?; how am I like the desert?

The whole notion of the fantasy of looking inside the physical body to find out who we are is, of course, right at the heart of Dennis Cooper territory, and although it’s associated with other writers, I think it’ll be just about the main thing people will keep talking about in discussing his work.

33.

Killer Luka

went to Japan to stay with a family in a tiny apartment building on the beach. The stairs were made out of cardboard. For dinner, the mother threw a live crab on each plate. As mine tried to crawl off, I pet it, and it nipped me. The father reached over and stabbed it through with a chopstick. I watched the mother stab hers to death with her chopsticks, and then eat it, shell and all. Their two twin, little girls did the same, one crab after another.

As I continued to live there with this odd family, a fungus grew on the bottom of my feet. my skin began to bubble and peel away, and it itched like mad. In the middle of the night, I was sleeping on the floor and felt the skin of my feet being pulled at. I looked up and there were the mother and father with a small flashlight, picking and peeling my diseased flesh off with chopsticks and eating it. I faint.

It's morning and I walk in on them in the bathroom; they are naked and drunk. The mother is doing a headstand and the father is giving her a vaginal enema of sake. Once she is "full", he picks her entire body up off the floor, tilts her up and drinks her as if she were a human glass. I run and fall through the cardboard steps to the living room.

I am standing in a fog in the middle of their living room. My bare feet are buried in cold, gray pebbles. I breathe in and exhale and as I do so, the fog clears and disappears when I let go of the last of my carbon dioxide. I can no longer breathe, but instead I can see very clearly. I am on the beach of cold pebbles. The last of the fog recedes behind the horizon of ocean water. Everything is completely still and so quiet that I can hear my pulse echoing off the walls of my ear drums.

In the corner of my left eye, I see a smear of red. When I look, I see a rugged, crumbling stone rising out of the water just off the beach. It reaches upwards of thirty feet. It is made from cement blocks, but only the corner remains of this edifice - the rest of it having been eroded away a long time ago. On the top stands a japanese woman but I cannot see her face. She is wearing a long, bright red dress which flows down the rock behind her like a waterfall of taffeta. Her wet, black hair is cruelly whipped and dashed around her head by a wind that I cannot feel. She stares ahead to the sea, perched on her broken building.

Then I look to my right and I see the identical building remains crumbling into the water. There is an identical japanese woman in red standing on top, staring out and away. Neither of them take any notice of me or each other, but I know that they are sisters; they are twins. The entire beach spreads out before us, looking like a gateway into the sea, but not just any sea - a sea that tastes like wind but has no waves. I stare out at it just as the sisters do, and we wait.

In the exact middle of the horizon, a black spike appears and draws closer. As it nears, its immense size becomes clear. After awhile, I see that it is a lighthouse moving closer and closer to the beach. It is made of the same crumbling grey bricks, but a huge white flame spits up and out from the top. A sphere of gray water orbits the white flame, refracting the light and sending it blindingly out across the water. The light illuminates the bottom of the still sea. It looks like the surface of the moon.

The lighthouse draws nearer and nearer, but the twins on either side of me continue to stare out towards the horizon as if the lighthouse is not even there. Bleached strands of kelp are wrapped around it like a rope. I realize that the lighthouse is not moving of its own volition but that it's being dragged towards the beach. A man emerges, head first from the water, dressed in rusted, red armor that practically screams every time he moves. The white kelp is wrapped around his neck and arms and it's pulled taut behind him, connecting him to the lighthouse. He's dragging it onto shore. When he steps his last step from the water to the beach, he stops suddenly like he can't move. Red dust falls from his paralyzed joints like sprinkling paprika. His red armor cracks and falls apart and turns into hundreds of bright red crabs, scampering up on shore and swarming everything in sight.

I'm in the dark living room. The carpet is a soft, cold gray. On either side of me are the japanese twins who ate the live crab for dinner last night. They are dressed in red pajamas and watching the blank wall in front of us. They are covered in dust. They are giggling and clapping.

Comments:

Clearly, I don’t watch enough Japanese horror movies, but even I see echoes of Ringu here, and maybe others. The tie-in to horror movies comes especially in a dominant theme — the horror-movie exploitation of the nightmare theme of loss of agency, that is, perceiving oneself as object rather than subject. The predominating expression of this theme is the shift from eating to being eaten — the dream is concerned with the subjectivity of what is viewed as object, hence the eating of living animals (who are granted some kind of subjectivity) as food (experienced always as object). The fact that we don’t eat the life with the food (following Melanie Klein and objects-relation psychology, and may I just say that I really do believe this stuff) is established early in childhood as a resolution of the crisis of breast-feeding, as consciousness begins with separation and the dawning awareness of dependence and parasitism.

This puts a very interesting spin on the other repetitive themes of the dream, to my way of thinking. Twins often suggest either overdetermination of an idea or the representation of something in life that comes in pairs, especially in the body. The use of the twins to bookend the spike, the lighthouse, and then the man who emerges from the water, obviously suggests a focus on testicles (if the dreamer is male) or ovaries (if the dreamer is female) — either one is possible, if you take seriously the idea of a phallic imagination in females — that is, the development of a self-image that, as in males, takes the phallus as a center. I lean toward identifying the twins as testicles because the white kelp suggests the generation of sperm and semen.

But I myself would tend to read this dream as pre-phallic—that is, the resurgence through a dream of the worldview of infancy. That’s the reason for the emphasis upon ruins of something that existed long ago, and the dust that covers the twins, which may suggest the long-ago loss of the connection to the world—the infantile sense of an undifferentiated state— through the mother. Or not — I don’t feel certain of anything in this dream except that the landscape connects to the body, and that details like the red dress that flows down the rock are fantasies of body processes somehow. By the way, another very frequent dream theme is to visualize body parts and processes as living things, like the crabs.

34.

Catachrestic

There's a naked woman kneeling on a bed in front of me, and she's completely covered in tattoos. The predominant color is green, but there's a kind of triangular pattern, aimed upwards, inscribed once on her stomach and repeated on her face, that is made up of alternating bands of red and yellow. Her eyes are brown. She has no navel, but there's an asshole where her navel would be. She starts a kind of gyration, a dance. As she's dancing, she takes one finger, the index finger of her right hand, sticks it up the asshole on her stomach, then into an undefinable orifice, a long, puckered, narrow slit midway between this asshole and her vagina, and finally into her vagina itself, which is massive, yawning, and dense with many folds of flesh. When she takes her finger out, she holds it up for me to smell, and says, "Tomato juice." I know by this that she is pregnant.

Comment:

It is tempting to read this dream also as a transformation of an idea from infancy or childhood— in which the connection of the navel to sexual processes is established but unclear, and anal eroticism is the model for imagining genital eroticism, and the undefinable something between anus and vagina suggests a conceptual midpoint between the two, visualized as a spatial midpoint. The tomato juice, and the fact of smelling, as connected with pregnancy, also might come from childhood ideas of reproductive processes in the female, and the tattoos, which seem to suggest the markings on an insect, a lizard, or a frog, may also derive from a memory of hearing about reproduction in relation to animals — “the birds and the bees.”

Now a more interesting question might be: OK, but why this dream, now? Why this dredging up of extremely ancient ideas? The theory is that all the time to some extent, and sometimes to a large extent, dreaming sleep is taking us back to very fundamental ideas and conceptual categories — updating metaphors to extend to newly encountered situations, and sometimes failing to do so, so that the dream admits, by the negative feelings accompanying it, the inability to build new information into existing strategies. Obviously, this process is invoked only to the extent that something really matters to us — we don’t dream about trivial matters, even if the trigger for the theme may seem trivial.

So on this theory, some stimulus has turned the dreamer’s attention to the most fundamental questions about the nature of sexual reproduction.

35.

Statictick

This dream is recurring. I had it as a child, throughout and currently (almost my 40s).
Some background is needed. Growing up, I lived with my mom, located right behind the house my maternal grandparents lived in, a street over. My grandfather chopped open the fence that separated those backyards, allowing constant passage between yards and houses, and adjoining neighbors.

The dream involves a gathering or party of sorts that goes back and forth between houses. When I was young, it included neighbors and family. When I got older, certain elements crept in: who I was dating, other friends (some had died), and new friends.
----More recently, after a nasty breakup and a new gathering of friends on other grounds, it has shifted. The locale is the same, no matter how it appears in the dream. Sometimes I am participating and talking to everyone (some still here, others gone). I am never angry or scared; at the worst, I'm only observing.
----A few of these dreams felt like I was in college at U of M, though I knew it was the same backyard-to backyard deal. Others felt like I was in rehab, with the same group, and more old friends I'd only recently contacted. The yards and houses are the same.

Comments:

Well, it looks like the setting here, the relation between the two houses, is the spatial realization of the dreamer’s view of his life — that is, for whatever specific and individual reasons, he imagines his life as grounded neither in one nor the other but in a space between. As his life proceeds, new information, relationships, etc., are added to the setting— but the setting doesn’t change.

Folks here may be aware of the way of working with dreams associated with Fritz Perls and Gestalt therapy — it’s not really directly connected with Gestalt psychology, but it is a very natural movement out of existential psychiatry of the kind practiced by Ludwig Binswanger —who was a central influence on Michel Foucault, not so much acknowledged by people who emphasize his relation to politics and to Nietzsche. Anyway: In Gestalt dreamwork, you take the role of each image in the dream, on the theory that they are all means of representing your own state of mind, and you “dialogue” with the dream image — ask it questions and receive answers. This can be extraordinarily powerful — in my limited experience, especially when the dream images are very basic inanimate objects.

One way of following up on this dream, then, would be to just ask: Why am I here, in this space between? What are the two houses associated with? But a more emotionally impactful way is to play the two houses, play the yard, play the people or things that pass through it, and see what comes up.

36.

Tender Prey

i'm trying to find a mysterious back entrance to a warehouse apartment my friends Alex and Guy are living in. To get to the back of the warehouse I have to go through a deserted and dimly lit but rather grand hotel lobby then up some sweeping side stairs (gold metal) to a big landing from which several smaller, enclosed flights of stairs branch off. The doorway I'm looking for is at the top of one of these sets of stairs. I don't know which one, but it's in my mind that I'll recognize it because of all the papers and unopened mail piled in front of it.

I think at this point in the dream I do find it, but for some reason I have to go outside again suddenly - and afterwards I can't find my way back.

I retrace my steps through the lobby and up to the landing but things look a little different and I can't find the right stairway. I find a doorway at the top of one that looks right (piled up mail etc.) but it's not: upon entering I find myself in a different warehouse and through an internal doorway I see a woman all dried up and emaciated on the floor... almost a shriveled, ancient corpse, but she's alive.

I go to try to help her but she stands up and kind of gestures toward me (we're standing close) and I see that the back of her head is all flattened and dried up like a squashed paper bag. I say I'll go and get help and I go back to the landing to try again to find Guy and Alex's flat to use their phone... but I can't, I'm lost again, going up and down staircases, searching out a clue to re-orientate myself and wondering why I don't simply knock on another door and try to borrow a phone.

Then on the darkened landing I see a girl or teenager sitting on an ornate ledge in period (Victorian or Edwardian) clothing and hairstyle and she has this beautiful childlike face which is luminous, I mean literally kind of glowing in the semi-darkness. And next to her is a slightly older boy, in his mid-late teens, also very beautiful and elegantly dressed, with his hair in a classic side parting. And he's speaking to me in a soft Scottish accent and maybe kind of pointing out a direction with his hand. Suddenly two beautiful cats appear from behind me and seem to be simultaneously following me and running just in front of me. And the boy is saying something about it being cool that they've come.

Comments:

People here seem to have a lot of “big dreams”—very Jungian sorts of dreams, which one is tempted to look at in terms of Jung’s scheme of the psyche. The ancient woman and the young girl are versions of the anima, the projection of the Self as contrasexual image (if the dreamer is male). This is perhaps only helpful if you take the whole Jungian edifice into it; Jungian dreamwork is largely a conversion to the Jungian worldview.

But even so, it might make sense to follow the dreamer’s associations to see what the two women represent to him. The ancient woman is associated with neglect and abandonment, so she appears to be a submerged, left-behind part of the psyche, even a mother figure perhaps; the young girl is partnered by the boy, which suggests (in a Jungian context) an intellectual or “spritual” direction in life, led by a muse that emphasizes balance, equilibrium, the holistic approach.

Of course, in one way of reading, this dream has the very amusing feature of the “mysterious back entrance” that leads to the male couple Guy and Alex (if that’s what they are). The dreamer can’t find it; he’s cut off from other kinds of communication; and finally he has a hope of new direction from the girl and boy, who represent something different from the male couple.


37.

Winter Rates

This morning's dream. My mother says her friend needs dog watched after. The dog is big, maybe a St. Bernard. I am reticent but it is friendly. Looks up at me and smiles. I take it across a park to its backyard. There is no place to tie it up. There is a little area for it to stay in with a blanket as a wall. It keeps walking under the blanket. I walk back across the park. I see my father or some authority guy, a Paris Hilton looking chick comes out of a condo that she just finished cleaning for him. Hosing things off. She walks close to me and says "your nose keeps moving around your face." I really want to kiss her but cannot remember if I am currently attached to someone else.

I am in the library I used to work at. Two high school ex-friends walk by. They were in the popular crew that I abandoned for the pot-smoking musician crew. They nod acknowledgment but I feel like I am sitting alone in a cafeteria. There is loud music blaring in the library. My favorite Flaming lips album and the new Breeders album which I have yet to hear. One of my old co-workers is sitting next to a bum who looks like a zombie. who only talks about Jazz and cars in real life asks me "do you know why the human heart is like a horse race." and I say "like that George Jones song, the race is on?" He nods surprised at my knowledge. I am watching David Letterman and Paul Shaffer sits on the couch with a kid holding some sort of brown parcels. Paul gives the kid a kiss on the mouth and the kid seems genuinely frightened and freaked out and then Paul Shaffer sticks his tongue out menacingly and tries to attack the kid. I am watching in awe wondering why they didn't edit this out. Dave says something about always sponsoring Peruvian dogs in the past.

Comments:

This dream is about me. I’m the St. Bernard, and the Late Night Show the dreamer watches is his own dreams.

Well, maybe, maybe not. When I’m keeping a dream journal, I often find representations of dreaming itself, and of my intention to write in the dream journal. In my students’ dreams, I often find representations of the awareness that the dream may later be shared, and some anxiety over it. So it isn’t entirely implausible that the dreamer starts the dream with an awareness of my presence — and Dennis can tell you, the characterization of me as a St. Bernard is uncannily accurate — and after assuring himself that I won’t do any harm, throws a blanket over me to obscure my presence. At the end of the dream, he similarly asks why the dream does not more effectively censor its fantasies.

At the center of the dream are the two parallel kissing incidents—and the dreamer would probably have associations with Paris Hilton and Paul Shaffer that would make a difference —and the question about the human heart. (“Big dreams,” like scenes in indie movies, seem to really relish these riddles, rhetorical questions, or big messages.) So the dreamer might want to think about what kind of conflict the heart-as-horse-race suggests to him.

39.

Christopher

If we shadows have offended,

Think but this, and all is mended,

That you have but slumber'd here

While these visions did appear.

And this weak and idle theme,

No more yielding but a dream,

Bloggers, do not reprehend:

if you pardon, we will mend:

And, as I am an honest Puck,

If we have unearned luck

Now to 'scape the serpent's tongue,

We will make amends ere long;

Else the Puck a liar call;

So, good night unto you all.

Give me your hands, if we be friends,

And Bernard shall restore amends.

Comments:

The dreamer is William Frickin’ Shakespeare.

A really cool thing happened to me once that is going to sound very nerdy. Another synchronicity story. I was attending a conference on dreams at UC- Santa Cruz, where there’s an annual Shakespeare festival, and they were performing A Midsummer Night’s Dream. We didn’t get away from sessions till late and I went for a walk with some folks, and unexpectedly, as we reached the top of a hill, we found we were looking down into the amphitheater where the Dream was being performed. Just as we got there, Puck was starting this speech.


40.

Misanthrope

My mother, my 13 year-old niece's mother, and I are in the living room, all the lights off except for the TV. We're watching a movie. I don't know which one. We're just up late watching a movie. My niece's mom and I both hear something that's coming from the hallway, which is pitch black. She says, "No, I'm serious, I heard something, didn't you?" I say, "Yeah, I heard it, too." "There's something back there," she says. I go to the kitchen and grab a butcher knife, one we've lost or someone's taken - anyway, we haven't seen it in months. I walk towards the hallway, holding the knife up in the air. "There's only one way to find out," I say. I grasp the knife tightly in my right hand and hold it waist high, stabbing kind of underhanded into the darkness. I hit something. The blade's lodged in something. Something we all know is malevolent. Something we can't see. Something that pushes back. I wake up.

Comments:

So that’s the classic form of the Jungian Shadow figure — it isn’t even seen in the dream, its presence is sensed, and its threatening character is evident even if it doesn’t overtly threaten. Now, when you look at this dream without that Jungian view, it is a kind of rehearsal for all kinds of threats and dangers, which aren’t specified here; the point is to go forward and protect, in a state of blindness.

If you add the Jungian view to it, that Shadow figure is the “inferior” aspects of self — the disowned, denied aspects of personality — that have to be opposed or conquered, even if one cannot quite see what they are. This is not a satisfying resolution in Jungian terms, because the aim is to see the Shadow and come to realize why some psychic material has been relegated to this inferior position — for example, a pacific kind of person might grow by recognizing the aggressive aspects of his personality and integrating them productively rather than disowning them — but this is the kind of dream one might have, possibly, at the very outset of a Jungian therapy.

41.

Heliotrope05

I am in a dark basement with a clipboard. I am there to inspect something but I don’t know what. Behind me is an old wooden pair of double-doors with a single bare light bulb over it. I realize I am under the Rialto Theater. Off in the dark I hear a voice. I call out to whoever is there. Walking around a corner to my left, I realize that there is a labyrinth extending off into the dark. There is a lot of dust on the floor as if no one had walked there in a long time. I hear the voice again inside the labyrinth. Then I turn around, a bunch of business people with briefcases are walking toward a brand new set of double-doors across from the first pair. I worry they will set off the emergency alarm if they push open the doors. They are talking animatedly. I realize that they are just getting out of seeing a movie. These people open the doors and the alarm doesn’t go off. I follow the people out these doors.

I emerge into an empty garden filled with tall camellia bushes. It is late afternoon and sunny. I walk over to a broken fountain. There are curved concrete benches surrounding the fountain. The fountain bowl has been knocked over. A tall man with a blond beard and a long light brown coat comes out of the bushes. His eyes are bright, bright blue. He seems nervous and fidgets with his hands. This makes me uncomfortable. The man reaches into his inside coat pocket to get something. When he pulls it out, I slap his hand knocking a bent spoon out of it and into the fountain bowl. I can see that the spoon says, “now this” on it. He gets angry with me and asks if I want some coke. He takes a baggy with coke out and opens it. I say I don’t want any and turn to walk away. He lurches toward me and smears the coke on my face. I realize the coke is actually ashes and it’s in my mouth and my eyes. I am frantically trying to wipe the ashes off. I knew that the ashes were the cremated ashes of my father. At the same time I know that my father was buried. I think that I have been “initiated”. I get scared and run into the camellia bushes.

When I come out of the bushes I am in my home. It’s late at night. I walk out of the back of our house and onto the back patio. When I look back at the back door instead of sliding glass doors there are French doors, painted a bright marigold. There are “hippie” orange batiked cloth curtains through which a gold light shines. It is windy. Our yard is covered with vines and flowers. Fantastically lush and overgrown. There are people staying with us. Our house is a youth hostel. I walk out to our pool. The evening light is an amazing blue-ish color. There is a full moon and I can see stars. I know I have to get everyone away from our place because Greek hoplites are going to invade soon. I know they are already out in the back beyond all the lush plants and vines. Despite this I feel elated and want to look at the sky. It begins to rain.

I go back under the patio cover and move an old dirty mattress so that it doesn’t get wet from the run-off of the rain. A young guy who looks like Mike Heron from The Incredible String Band helps me to move it. I know that he is from Belgium. The rain stops. I look up at the moon. Clouds are passing in front of the moon very quickly. Then I see some birds way up in the sky, flying in front of the moon. They are illuminated in silhouette when the clouds break. I get very excited knowing that they are cranes. I go to the French doors and call for my mom. She comes out and I tell her that I want to show her something. I know that she is dead and shouldn’t be there. I’m really glad to see her. I point up to the moon but she smiles and looks the other direction. I place my hands on her shoulders and turn her toward the cranes and point. Then the cranes dive down toward us. When they get very close I realize that they aren’t cranes, rather that they are two Kirins. They stop in mid-air galloping with flames around their horns. My mom is laughing. She’s really happy. She says, “I love you. I knew you would.”

Comments:

I’ve had a lot of friends who died—what with being old and gay and all—and my mother, father, and brother all died within a few months of each other a few years ago. So I’ve had a lot of dreams about the dead, and many discussions about such dreams, many of them —actually, I think, most of them—with people who believe that such dreams represent actual, objective visits from the dead. Although I just don’t share that belief system, I obviously can’t rule it out. Anyway, it’s made me more inclined to see the presence of the dead as central, as the “reason” for the dream when they appear. So this dream seems — as it must seem to the dreamer — to kind of resolve his/her relationship to the parents, in ways that are appropriate to the relation to each — that is, the turn from the intoxicating substance (and there’s often a wholly non-moralist symbolism to intoxicants in dreams; they turn out to signify elation or transcendence rather than forbidden activity—something that confuses my students a lot) to a kind of union with the father (resulting in an image that is something like holy communion effected by sacramental wine—therefore, a kind of initiation).

Cranes and kirins, of course, are both auspicious. Is the dreamer Japanese? The mother’s turning away from the moon may have some culturally mandated meaning I don’t know anything about.

The rest of the imagery is just as mythic and, as I’ve come to think of it, Jungian. I’ve never remembered a dream of my own about a fountain in the center of a garden, but I’ve heard —well, I guess, actually dozens, and very often from people who had no idea that others had dreamt of the same image, This kind of thing is very convincing — and in this case, convincing of the idea that the fountain represents the source of selfhood, of identity, of creativity, sometimes of sexuality. Of course, the whole dream is also kind of like an Incredible String Band album cover. Brindaban, man.


42.

Summer

Recurring dream in which I am guilty of gross neglect of an animal: These only come about once a year, at no specific time of which I amaware. They're terrible. In these dreams, I come across an oldcherished pet of mine that has been sitting in its cage for literally *years* since the last time I checked on it and gave it food. Sometimes, it's my rabbit, Whiskers, or perhaps my dog, Annie. In reallife, those pets have been dead for years, but in the dream, I find theanimal, and it's been alive all this time, just waiting for me. Itdoes not move, because it has no energy, and it's stunted, starved tothe point of skin and bones, ancient-looking. (One time, it was even ababy that I came across in a crib, and then I remembered that it was mybaby! I had left it there for months and months, and had never oncefed it.) I try frantically to find some food and water-surely it willdie immediately if I fail-as I apologize profusely, tears pouring downmy face, but it's been so long that I don't know where those items arekept anymore. Or worse, even as I'm trying to fix the crime I'vecommitted, I'm already forgetting, getting distracted withconversations of other people drifting in and out of the dream. I always wake up crying.

Comments:

I’ve had this dream, too — with a baby, with cats, raccoons, monkeys, dogs and other animals. My mother had it, too. She thought it proceeded from her experiences with miscarriages—that her psyche had not accepted them and was still looking for the babies.

For me, these are just dreams about something I haven’t looked after, that I’ve allowed my waking self to neglect. The hokey way to put this is that it’s the child within, or some part of oneself that requires care, that is demanding attention. But it seems right. There are a million things each of us hasn’t done; I would figure everyone has a dream like this.

43.

David Ehrenstein

Ever sicne my stroke in 97 it hasn't been possible for me to retain any of my dreams (if any.)
However a suitable dream can be created for me out of

this image



which comes of course from "Gossip Girl."

Comments:

Oh heck, I have enough to do with reading dreams without making them up, too. You know the story of Daniel? He’s generally considered a derivation on the figure of Joseph. Joseph gets himself out of prison because he alone can interpret the Pharaoh’s dreams. Daniel, on the other hand, is summoned to interpret a dream that is troubling Nebuchadnezzar—but the king can’t remember it himself. I ain’t no Daniel.

44.

Lautreamont

My last dream, very recurrent…

I think I’m flying but I’m not sure. I can see everything from above, from the sky, from the moon, I don’t know. But it’s much more like if I were in a kind of gravity-zero something, absence of physical determination (?) – I’m not an English speaker, by the way.

I’m perfectly light & free & happy & gracious & philosophical & very horny. Naked in the sky, in the night, in the ether but I think nobody can see me.

I can do whatever I want with my limbs and my sex – long limbs & long sex : kind of, grabbing boys with these smooth tentacles, from the streets, from their schools & when asleep from their beds, trough the windows. I don’t know how this magic is mine, but it works, perfectly, and I rape the boys – no: it’s not a rape, because they love what I do. I do things that have never been experienced before. I can turn the boys inside-out like gloves, and fulfil the outside-inside of their bodies with my self, which is the utmost of all pleasures (for us, the boys & myself).

But then comes my father. He died twelve years ago, but he is still alive, and prosecutes me in all my dreams. As usual, I try to kill him. But as usual, he looks very sad & very fragile, petite & despaired. Burned by his lung cancer. Sad, sad, sad. But he hates what I do with the boys, and he says he will tell my mother. Usually, I wake up. Sometimes, I kill Him. Most of times, after having fucked the boys/killed my father, in my dream I have breakfast with my mother. It smells good in the kitchen - crepes au miel, omelette & coffee. She tells me how much she suffered with my fucking father, and how much she regrets not to have divorced before.

Comments:

Is there any chance that this dreamer actually is the Comte de Lautréamont? Cause this sounds like the kind of dream he would have.

So: it’s not surprising if this is a recurrent dream, because (it sounds like) it reverses a central conflict in the dreamer’s life. The absolute freedom of coming loose from the world indicates the liberation of the dreamer’s desires without restraint. Under these conditions, the dreamer can fulfill these desires without opposition or hindrance (of course it isn’t rape, because the dreamer is the ideal object of desire); not only is the father is eliminated, but then the mother is reconciled to the dreamer. And what’s better than crêpes au miel? There’s oedipal fantasy there, too: Omelettes and crêpes offer the same kind of symbolism as tacos.

Finally:

Bernard’s Dream

I am visiting Paris and I meet a married couple who tell me that if I want to go beyond the regular tourist sites, I should go to the Paris zoo, and watch when they clean the teeth of the owls and ocelots—it’s quite a show. I am interested and at the same time not sure if I‘ve understood them correctly. When I think about it, I think we’re speaking French but I’m not really sure.

I end up visiting these people at their apartment in a high-rise. The staircases are open, like in a Frank-Lloyd-Wright-style house, so as you go from you walk right through someone’s lovely apartment. I reach the family’s apartment by coming down, not up, the stairs. They are seated around the elegant dinner table in front of a great view of Paris out a large window, and they’re all --- father, mother, son, daughter — naked. I turn back to the stairs and immediately see laid out before me two blocks of American postage stamps. One set features a photograph of Freud and the other a photograph of Jung.

This goes back a number of years (long before Dennis lived in Paris, in case that occurs to you). I think it addresses how I feel about this activity of reading dreams. Go ahead, tell me what you think of it, if you want to.

----

p.s. There it magnificently is at last thanks to Mr. Bernard Welt.  Spend the next couple of days exploring and conversing and responding re. it, if you will, and I'll go do my things in Manchester then see you back here on Friday.  Thanks a zillion, Bernard and all of you who sent in your dreams.  To those who'll be in Manchester at the same time I will, see you guys  in a while, and to those who will be elsewhere, I'll try to get some decent pix to pass along.  As I said yesterday, I'll need to move along very quickly today if I hope to reach CDG in time for my little flight, so apologies in advance for my glancing and sound bites.  **  David, Thanks.  Clive Barker is actually a pretty cool, generous, easy going guy if you can manage to catch his fancy through his castle's heavy gates.  **  Lost Child, Me too, ha ha.  Thanks, pal.  **  Thomas Moronic, As I've said before, the queercore scene and era was the first time and maybe only I felt completely at home in a gay-centric environment probably because it wasn't in fact gay-centric at all but rather a super mixed scene with a shared queer sensibility and aesthetic.  I'm not into the idea of 'the good old days', but those were awfully close to 'the good old days'.  **  Tender Prey, Beautiful about Lynch complicating the game.  Great stuff.  See you tonight.  **  Mat, That sounds really cool.  It sounds more relaxed than the ones I read/heard about back in their early days, which seemed to be a lot more self-consciously tribal and chanty and stuff.  Anyway, very glad it did your trick.  **  Will Decker, It is going to be awfully cold up Chicago and New York way come January.  Who knows, maybe we'll get some other January US gigs in warmer environs.  It's possible.  Sweet of you to think of coming, man.  **  Paul Curran, Thanks, Paul.  Yeah, it should be okay in Manchester, although it's the first English language performance of 'Jerk', and it's going to be a nervewracker for G., J.,  & me 'cos the English version is still, in G's positive spin, 'fresh'.  Still, wish you could be there.  **  Bernard, An in person bear hug -- you heard me -- for your brilliance today.  No, Mark and Mitchell took care of the mag themselves.  They were very industrious, young, cute, and charming.  Four of the magic words.  **  Erik, 'Black Lullabye' is just gorgeous.  My hat's tipping.  On 'Ruh Roh', Mark knew some of the artists already through his earlier relationship with Ginsberg, and I knew some of them like Pettbon and Gus and Acker and Hawkins, et. al., so my connections helped a bit.  **  DavidC., Heavy finger crossing for Dominic on my end and surely the others' ends.  What's the job?  What's the good word?  **  David Ehrenstein, Hi, man.  **  Squeaky, Yeah, I wonder if Mark's out there.  Hi, Mark.  Hi, Squeaky.  **  Disco 3-way, I'll be away today, but back here tomorrow afternoon.  Try me then, and I'll write you too.  Sorry to miss you so far, but we'll get this nailed down.  **  Stan_cz, Hey.  Oh, on the Jack Smith Day -- cue my drooling -- the best thing to do is set the Day up in a text file.  If you use imbedded videos, put either the imbedding codes or links to the videos in the spots where you want them, and I'll insert them on my end.  Also indicate in the text where any images should go, and send the images separately as attachments to the email or to more than one email if there are a lot.  I'll assemble the whole thing on my end.  But if you have any questions, just ask.  Again, it's so incredible of you to do this, my friend.  Right, now I remember about the Malick being a long time dream project.  That's so unbelievably exciting I can barely contain myself.  **  JW Veldhoen, I saw 'Speed Racer' in IMAX.  If you want to see it for the adrenaline producing racing scenes, be prepared t ignore a lot of dumbness all around them.  High or not high, you are absolutely correct about the Scooby connection, yes.  **  Shai Hulud, Yeah, I'll be there for Seattle and surely for the NYC shows, if they happen.  Those are still iffy.  Obviously, it'd be fantastic if you and my others pals that live inside you could come.  **  Richard Eichmann, You're welcome, and thanks.  See you in a few.  **  THOM, Thanks much for the link.  I only got to sample a little in my haste this morning, but your work sounds really good, and I'll listen more lengthily when I'm back home again.  Do a European tour, please.  Or at least a Parisian one.  **  Slatted Light, Oh, good, I'm glad you're all right.  Me too, frankly.   I'll feel better if or once we pull this off tonight.  Take good care, and see you on Friday.  **  Steevee, He does suck with endings, it's so true.  Altman had an ending problem too, to my mind, though a much more minor issue in his case.  Endings are hard.  **  Mark P., Hey.  Good to see you again.  Yeah, I'd love to see your new film or any of your films.  There's a big yearly Paris queer film festival, though I can't remember its name.  Do you know it?  Maybe you should submit it there.  I can find out more about it when I get back home, if you want.  How nice that you found C. Bard Cole's book.  It's kind of gotten lost over the years, but he's terrific.  **  Math T., You and Pettibon and Tupac?  Birds of feather.  Ha ha.  Yeah, I can't believe 'Zelda' was region locked.  But at least we're together in our starting over duties.  I remember 'Blank Generation' being kind of crap, yeah.  I thought maybe the dated aspect would give it a new charm, but it doesn't sound like it.  **  Catachrestic, That's cool.  Ask me again if ever you feel like it.  I don't know that I want a Star.  It's just an idea.  Something to think about.  Casting a star against type or something.  Doing what Tarantino did with Travolta or whatever.  We'll see.  **  Katsim, I'm a bit nervous about the Manchester game timing, truth be told.  But fate will take its course.  Yeah, remind me about my thoughts about England once I get more time here again.  Thanks a lot, K.  **  Chilly Jay Chill, I saw 'My Blueberry Nights' on a plane, so I can't be a great judge.  It looked better than 'Jumper' and '27 Dresses', but, yeah, it's not even remotely in the same realm for me with the early Kar Wai.  Neal Stephenson?  Not for ages.  I remember enjoying 'Snow Crash' a fair amount.  Interesting.  I'd be curious what you think of it, as my memories are vague now.  **  Dungan, Remind me next time I see you in LA, and I'll give you a 'Ruh Roh'.  I have a small pile of them.  **  Chris, I'll save everything until I see you in a few short hours.  **  Jax, I've got some Fall on my iTouch, yes, and I'm with you about having them as my first Manchester association.  I'll blast some on both of our behalves.  **  Matt, Oh, you know, apples and oranges, right?  I mean Rothko doesn't do a thing for me, so we're even or something.  **  McGregor, Thanks, pal. I hope we'll get it up in your vicinity.  Dude, I want to meet you.  **  Spooge Pony, Uh, hi.  **  Fake Joe Mills, Uh, fake hi.  **  Christopher, I'll try to wander past the Midland Hotel.  **  Joe M., Tick tick tick ...  **  Blendin, Oh, such good ideas.  I'm stealing all of them except for the Barry Manilow one.  **  Creative Massacre, Yeah, France is a pricey place in general.  It's a problem.  They don't have scholarships?  Well, you can at least come over and check out the restaurants and storm into the kitchens and show them a thing or two.  I'll be your bodyguard.  **  SYpHA_69, I think Tokio Hotel is about 80% a visual thing.  Their records are whatever.  But that kid, the singer, is a very charismatic creature.  Gotta run, but see you on Friday.  **  Craig, Don't worry about your tone.  I love you man, thick and thin.  I just hope you get an upswing asap for your sake.  **  Killer Luka, Sorry the Mike Diana piece upset you.  You know I'm interested in representations of the horrific, both studying them and making them myself, and there's a big divorce for me from the real when I see something like Diana's stuff since I think it's only a portrayal of the imagination and nothing more, and I see a lot of talent and interest in Diana, but that's just me, and I'm sincerely regretful that you were affected so badly.  **  Right.  Sorry for the speeding.  I wish you all luck until Friday as I know most of you wish me luck.  Dig the richness of the Day, and do what I can not do.  See you again the day after tomorrow.  

Best of Ruh Roh

Back in the queer zine explosion of the early 90s, the writer Mark Ewert, who was my boyfriend at the time, and his friend Mitchell Watkins, decided to jump into the fray by starting a comix zine called Ruh Roh. They solicited new, original comix from all sorts of artists in all sorts of mediums whom they admired. The first (and last) issue ended up being a giant thing that took two years to finally get published with the sponsorship of the great NYC art gallery Feature Inc. It was really well received and quickly became impossible to find.  So Ruh Roh wound up being a one hit wonder, but it was quite an incredible zine featuring many one of a kind works that in most cases have never been seen anywhere else. I found a copy during my recent LA trip, and I thought I'd share a very small sampling of its contents with you.


Cover (Joe Coleman)




Allen Ginsberg



Clive Barker




Charles Ray




Daniel Johnston




DC





GB Jones




Karen Finley




Gregg Araki