The Desk and Florence Farr

I dreamt I was working on a desk, trying to sort out a problem with its configuration, much as I had been out at work just yesterday. In my dream, a lady with long blondish hair tried to help, but she kept getting stuck inside the desk. It was a big desk with a complicated mechanism for adding and removing components and crawlspaces in which people were supposed to maneuver. I don't really remember much more than that, just struggling to work on sorting out a desk with a helpful lady, not too dissimilar, I might add, from the ladies I have been reading about in "Women of the Golden Dawn: Rebels and Priestesses: Maud Gonne, Moina Bergson Mathers, Annie Horniman, Florence Farr" by Mary K. Greer.

Mary K. Greer is quite the scholar, no two ways about it, and here I had been formerly impressed by Donald Tyson. Well, Tyson's adulation of Mathers is now called into question by all sorts of revelations. Mathers does not seem like such a great character really in this book.

I think the lady in my dream may have been a thought-form of Florence Farr, who impressed me the most. She died of breast cancer in Ceylon in 1917. Mathers on the other hand died of the Flu epidemic of 1918. It would certainly seem that the practice of magic has no power against physical maladies such as cancer and other diseases. I think the evidence is overwhelming that if you want to be healed, medical science is the first stop and the last stop.

I read about Florence's troubles and travails in the above book. It seems to me she had a rather hard life, short on money much of the time, and although a successful actress, once she got into her fifties, no theatre was interested in her anymore, which is the usual case in acting. The young are what people want to go to see, the young and the beautiful, for their intensity and energy. Of course, the same is true in every profession.

I would have liked to have known Florence Farr. She had an affair with William Butler Yeats as well as Bernard Shaw, led the G.D. in London, and fought with Mathers and held her own ground. She was interesting and powerful in her own right, but also seems to me to have been gentle and kind.

Best Dream of 2018

I had my best dream of 2018 last night, best because it was vivid. I was at a party, and by that I mean a pleasant social gathering with good and gentle folk, and I was seated beside a large and talkative, crafty woman with many ideas and much wit, who was talking to me about things I no longer remember upon waking. It is often the case, that I dream of being talked to, even at great length, and when I awake, can remember naught but the faintest outline, or possibly a single phrase. I do recall one of her friends bringing me a good drink (non-alcoholic, quite naturally, as I no longer indulge in intoxicants), and then she turned to me and with some charming witticism, induced me to rise and fetch her a drink. She said she liked a soda called "The Bossman," which I recognized as a sweet citrus carbonated soda.

Upon waking, probably due to allergies, this being ragweed season, I thought she might be my boss, for one, a natural enough assumption, or else a thought-form based upon the detritus floating through my mind, and possibly an amalgam combining my boss with a charming personality I watched on YouTube not long ago, a young, black woman talking about her religion, Wicca, in mild, gentle and reasonable language. I liked her and thought she was smart.

I don't recall anything of deep or profound meaning in the dream, but I did enjoy a rather nice conversation with an interesting entity in my dream, even if I remember little more than a dozen words of what was said! (And of those words, some permutation of "fetch me a drink" was the gist!)

I do think one of the most potent attractions in the practice of Wicca and other minority religions is quite simple and based in psychology. The mere fact that a religion does not have many millions of pushy advocates on its behalf is the attraction. That it can be practiced in solitary is quite useful. That it is adaptable and open to a certain degree of experimentation and improvisation is almost unique. Christianity and Islam have both become rather stodgy by comparison, full of rules and group-think and group-activities. The room for personal revelation and personal relationships to the Divine seems limited and dismal in those religions, which surrender spiritual power from the individual to the shaman. Where power and politics get involved, spirituality flees. Also there is the fact that, being new, Wicca has not accumulated, yet, such a large number of terrible scandals, and may it never do so, but I fear, in time, it too will succumb to human frailty, as humans do what humans sometimes do, which is to fail. Yes, everyone and everything suffers a setback once in a while, that is the nature of things.

I am more an admirer of Wicca than a practitioner. The ambivalence I feel for Nature is the main reason. Wicca is really tied to Nature, to the observance of days on a calendar and a rather sentimental and emotional regard for things living and dead. The great outdoors and to a lesser extent, environmentalism, both political and personal, are both key to understanding and participating in the faith. I have never cared a fig for the phase of the Moon and doubt I could start now. To me, the Moon and indeed the planets are abstract notions. I admire them rather vaguely and am aware they are there, and like to learn about them, but don't really see them as influencing me that much. After all, they are material. If the Moon could influence me, then how much more so could the floor beneath my feet, and perhaps I should study the phases of the floor, and learn what angle it lies at, and the composition thereof. No, I dwell in the realm of thoughts and really always have and never liked camping or spending too much time in the rough. I hated going camping in Scouts. I like all of the conveniences of civilization and the wondrous artificial comfort zones we have created with our science. Science is the magic of the material plane we dwell in, whereas magic is of the spirit.

Of course, another big attraction to Wicca for many women is simply that there are many female Wiccans, and the relatively smaller number (I imagine) of male Wiccans tend to be feminists or at least open to the notion of equality between the sexes. I do not know what qualifies a man to be termed a feminist in the eyes of a female feminist; perhaps no man could qualify. It is true that some feminists really are down on men, but this is probably because of the misbehavior of so many men, the brutish louts, who behave with reckless criminality and abuse and outrage the gentle sex. There must be some reason that all the wars have been waged by mostly men, and mostly men inhabit the prisons of the world and do the violent crimes of the world. That reason has to do with testosterone and the negative aspects to it that are reinforced by culture and upbringing. I am not sure what the solutions may be, but the best, it seems to me, is to evolve a sexless mortal, with neither gender, for what need have we of gender, if a laboratory offers a better option. But that is far into the future, when I have already checked out, I think.

Zombie

My dream seemed commonplace and unscary, only because it was inspired by the many zombie shows. A friend of mine, who I cannot even remember, came to school, but he was dead, and his body showed signs of being, well, past its prime. People complained, but not in a hysterical way like you would think. The more I think about the premise, the more it seems illogical. He was pale as a ghost, and certainly did not act normal, but was not threatening in any way, just, well, dead--animated dead.

I don't know what the significance of that dream was, or what possible relation it would have to my life. I don't even know the friend was or if it was indeed a friend. I think the whole thing was a bad TV show. I decided, no more wearing a pentagram in bed.

Death Dream

I dreamed I was twenty again and driving my father into a deserted parking lot behind a closed shopping mall late at night. There was something work-related I had to check, a malfunctioning outdoor gadget of some kind, and I parked the car beside it. Another car pulled up. I shined my flashlight at the occupants. They got out, two men, armed with pistols. I was face down on the ground, begging for my life, and one thug smiled at my pleas, then put a bullet through my brain, which ended my life. What happened to my father, I don't know, but likely the motive of the attack was robbery, and the callous killers could brook no witnesses. It is deplorable, the tiny amounts of lucre that people are willing to kill other human beings for. It is not like I drive an expensive car or wear gold jewelry.

Upon awakening, I observed that the dream bore little relation to my current life, as I have no mortal enemies and have not been a victim of violent crime, at least recently. Perhaps I was visited by a traveling spirit that had seen the scenario. Or perhaps it was a memory of a television show. Television displays murders often. I guess it gets peoples' attention.

Of course, I will die in a certain amount of years, and that fate is unstoppable, even if I manage to elude the bullets that zip by in mad, modern-day America, where every hothead ends his life while taking out ten or twenty others.

So, what of it? I will not have any worries after I die. I will rejoin the earth, become one with it, and give up this individual identity known as self. The constituent atoms will reform into something else. And eventually, the earth will die, along with the universe itself.

I do not believe the self is so precious that it must be preserved forever. I believe the self is disposable rather, a base thing, prone to selfishness, driven by needs such as hunger and greed, and not really that fine. The dissolution of self could almost be regarded as a liberation of sorts. We cling to self and to life out of nostalgia and familiarity. One comes to realize that what we think of as the uniqueness of our self is actually replicated in many other people, who have the same drives, the same motives and desires. We are not really that different in the end. And the world keeps on spinning even after we are gone.

In Close Proximity to Another Person

I was sitting up in bed, late at night, and next to me was a woman, also sitting up and using a laptop for business. A television played across the room that I seemed to watch while actually lost in a daydream. Both of us were, at a minimum, naked from the waist up, with our lower halves concealed under the covers, and clearly we had a history together, possibly a long one. I felt comfortable, and then confused, because all at once I remembered that this was not my life, and I could not possibly be the person in the bed, and who were these people, anyway? Then I woke up.

Possible influences: last night, I watched two intense episodes of Mr. Robot. They are always intense, though. Mr. Robot may have been the conduit. Also, one beer with strong Hops content, decaffeinated tea, and Ramen noodles.

Most folks would, I imagine, brush off as a mere dream the above, but my eyes have been opened to the possibility of soul flight by a Mr. Donald Tyson, among others. It may be just possible, I think, that in a severely limited, weird, often ineffective manner, our minds are capable of visitation with other minds. This is not to be understood in the manner it is portrayed in film, but rather in a prosaic, and as I said, severely limited manner. It is like walking through the fog of war, and catching glimpses betimes of things, elusive, fleeting.

Nomi Marks

I dreamt about the above character in Sense8, a great Netflix sci-fi show. I did not associate her with the show and could not place who she was. She was this highly-placed, important woman at a company that I also worked for and was very busy, just like in the show. She may have worked in HR or R&D or been an executive. She seemed nice and helpful to me and gave me water, followed later by grapefruit juice. I can't remember much that is specific to the dream other than a pleasant exchange, not a conversation exactly, but some kind of shared understanding. What we actually said to each other, if anything, is lost. The esoteric writer DuQuette opines that drinking in a dream is like drinking the waters of Lethe, but what is true for him may not be the same for me. The Nomi Marks entity was good, trying to recharge my batteries through these beverages. Offering drinks was a kindness, nothing more.

Through Wikipedia, I learned Nomi Marks is played by Jamie Clayton, a transgender woman. I like Clayton's work in Sense8. She appears interesting and genuine somehow. That is why my mind has incorporated the character in my dreams.

Doing and Thinking

I think that individuals are capable of surprising changes, including improvements, in their beliefs. If my father were alive today, I believe his views on marijuana would change, just as he changed his mind on the subject of homosexuality. When I was a boy, he was a big homophobe, referring to gays as "perverts" and probably worse. He never invited any gay person over to his house and had no gay friends. All of that is ironic, because his son was gay and would have turned out better if things had been normal rather than paranoid and ignorant. At the age of nineteen, when I came out to my father, he decided to educate himself on the subject of homosexuality for the first time. He read books and discussed the subject with others. His views underwent an alteration for the better.

I had a dream of my father last night. I dreamt that he searched my room, as he always used to do. It was his favorite pastime, rationalized as necessary, due to my typical teenage vices of cigarettes, alcohol and pot. He boasted of confiscating my vaporizer. I then pointed out that A.) the thing cost over a hundred dollars, and I really didn't appreciate having to buy a new one now, and B.) I was an adult now and in fact I was his equal, because I supported myself and was independent in every way. Moreover, he was elderly, and it was I that looked after him, rather than the other way around.

For item C, I pointed out that everyone with an education had by now accepted that marijuana was, well, not necessarily health food, but a medicine, and certainly not any more dangerous than alcohol, or for that matter, aspirin or coffee. My father was a learned man that liked to read magazines of the world's opinions and discoveries. In 2016, the truth is out there, for those that wish to listen. My father sagged his shoulders and said, "We know different, now. I was mistaken about this, and I am sorry. I concede to Science." Because Science was his God. And science has spoken about the medicinal plant, a gift to mankind. He apologized for having confiscated my vaporizer but had already destroyed it.

Perhaps in a way, my father's spirit was apologizing for all those searches and seizures, for all those angry scenes, a pointless parade of imagined parental duty. People do tend to act automatically, like robots, behaving in ways they have been programmed to do, rather than pausing to consider the merits of things. Perhaps there isn't always time or energy left over from doing to indulge in much thinking.

Hurricane Season

Remember those huge computers that scientists in white lab coats operated in 1950s and 1960s-era science fiction movies? I dreamt one was in my front yard, and I was trying to understand how to use it, because a hurricane was coming, and the contraption could predict the hurricane's location and severity. When I awoke, I knew exactly what the dream was about. It was obvious to me. Hurricane season, indeed. I only hope that I can sleuth the system in time to deal with the weather.

I Stopped Breathing

I had a dream last night that I had stopped breathing. I actually did, too, which woke me up.

In my dream, I was six years old again and walking to the bus stop in winter. Standing there were the bullies, a boy four years older than me and a girl five years older than me. Both were twice my size. They were never satisfied unless I was crying or otherwise distressed and made it their mission in life to ensure these things from Monday to Friday.

I remember them now, but I doubt they remember me at all. I can recall both their first and last names, their physical appearance, and the address of their homes. That's something that bullies don't tend to think about, the possibility that their victims grow up and remember. Bullies don't tend to do much thinking.

It was unfortunate, growing up with such people for neighbors and schoolmates, people whose only concern in life was whether they were big and strong enough to lord it over someone smaller. Part of the misfortune was the opportunity cost. If their spaces had been occupied by people that were interesting and friendly, I might have made a good friend. As it was, they were completely worthless, offering nothing except abuse. They were a waste of space.

As I grew bigger, these people stopped being bullies, because they did not have the size advantage anymore. Bullies are cowards, after all.

The girl changed. I met her once and she was unusually polite. I asked her why she was acting so different now, and she said she had matured. She may have even apologized for past behavior, but I don't remember. She played the repentant monster, but she was still a monster. I could tell. There are smiles of happiness, and then there are smiles that serve as a mask to conceal what is beneath. She had shown her true self to me long ago, and I remembered.

The boy was always the silent type and remained so. The only thing he was interested in was his skateboard. I never saw much difference between him and the skateboard. Anytime he was asked a question, there was a delay as he calculated the minimum number of syllables needed to provide an answer. Usually a grunt or a shrug or obscenity was the pinnacle of his expression. He had seemed scary when I was little, but part of the scariness was his size and reptilian personality.

These are the monsters that lurk in the mind and every once in a while come out at night.

Judgement Day

At the end, I emerged from darkness and stood before the watchers of the world. 

I said, "I gave what I was given. I did what could be done."

Among the watchers, truth prevails. Everything is known.

The light consumed what I was before. 

Annihilation,

Recombination and regeneration.

There have been others. 
There are others. 
Before the breaking of the world, there will be others.

The wheel spins
and so it goes.

I thought about Judgement Day as I woke up this morning. I do feel a general sense of satisfaction over my life. I've avoided some bad things and chosen some good things. I sidestepped many of the snares and pitfalls of this world. I found what was good and helped it along to the limited extent that my abilities permitted.

Judgement Day means different things to different people. Upon reflection, my dream could occur to a saint, an ordinary person or even a suicide bomber. People have such different ideas about God. Who is right? That is one of the problems with religion. It is possible to adapt the same meme to different uses.

I think that hearing so much and so often about God from so many unpleasant people turned me off from religion. They inoculated me against religion. My intellectual immune system eliminated the weak germs of door-to-door proselytizers and televangelists. I developed adaptable and effective antibodies and am now immune to all strains of religion.

I reuse the material acquired early in life and spin it into positive things rather than throw it away. I retain certain feelings about divine retribution, divine oversight of the world and even divine intervention. Because I like people and want to understand them, I continually absorb a certain amount of the beliefs of my friends and relatives. Until I open myself to another person's thoughts, they remain "other." I have to step inside their mind. I have to look around and see what there is to see through their eyes. Once I drink of their thoughts, then they become understandable, predictable and a warmth and intimacy may develop.

A Recurring Nightmare

In a recurring nightmare, I am back in college. I have forgotten about one of my enrolled college courses. There was some confusion during enrollment, and the class slipped beneath the radar. The forgotten course is a weighty subject like microbiology with many homework assignments, a lengthy paper, and a brutal final exam, and I have not done anything. There is one day remaining before the final exam, and I'm panicking. My straight-A record will be ruined, and I've come to doubt all the things about myself that fill me with pride.

Rhea

Rhea is an unusual name that arose a few nights ago in a dream, and I wonder whether it has any significance to me at all. Wikipedia reveals the name to be that of a Titaness and the mother of the Olympian gods.

A possible connection to my life is that I have been playing "Age of the Titans" recently, and in that game, out of all the available gods and goddesses my civilization may worship, I select Gaia, the Earth-Mother, who was the mother of Rhea.

There are competing versions of Rhea's identity. Some believed her to be the same entity as Cybele. This sort of confusion is common in ancient mythology. Virtually every god and hero has multiple versions of myths regarding his exploits. I am not favorably disposed to Cybele, because ancient worshippers of Cybele were known to both self-castrate and completely remove the penis as a form of religious devotion. That is distasteful to me, but perhaps to an ancient transgender person, it would offer liberation from a man's role in ancient society, and Cybele would grant social and religious sanction to perform the deed. Forever after, such a devotee would be regarded as a priest of Cybele, perhaps, and lodge in the local temple, exempt from draft and other male duties and functions.

I do feel a strong connection to the earth and to living and growing things, so I am favorably disposed to Gaia and her daughter Rhea. I think that life is beautiful, mysterious, and worthy of study.

Vampire Dream

Today was Friday the Thirteenth, after all.

The night before, I went to bed late, around 0500, and had a nightmare that derived from "True Blood." Vampires were stalking my friends and I, and we were hiding out in different houses to escape, but somehow they would find us. I don't remember blood-drinking, a vampire-myth that I always found implausible, but they drained our life-force by painful touch. Each vampire had marked one of us for his own. In our absence, each vampire would starve, because they could only feed upon us and no one else. Starvation caused the vampire to lose their looks and become hideous, monstrous, savage-looking, which made them scarier. When they fed upon us, they recovered their looks. I remember the dreadful knocking on the door and then the door being opened and the monster coming in to find his prey and feed.

I awoke and found it most curious that I was dreaming about vampires, but then again, I had spent much of the night before playing Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, and my player-character happens to be a Demonspawn Necromancer that had mastered a spell known as Vampiric Draining. I achieved final victory with this character in "The Pits" scenario of Sprint.

Later in the day, I found myself alone in a big empty building that is supposedly haunted by a noisy ghost. My friends have sworn that they have seen and heard this ghost. Of course I am skeptical, but I kept my skepticism to myself, because I have learned that people who believe in ghosts do not like to hear the opinions of those that do not. It is the same with religion. No believer really wants to hear the opinions of an atheist, especially not in person. In social settings, my object is to get along with people, not to persuade them of my beliefs. This blog is like the vault for my private opinions and philosophy.

I was asked if I felt scared to be working in the haunted building all alone, and I replied I was not. I thought to myself that if I saw a ghost, it would be a very good thing, because it would serve as a refutation of my opinions, and I would welcome the evidence. I would not say that a ghost is proof of the afterlife, because it could be many other things, but I would like very much to see one, even if I would feel frightened. I am willing to feel frightened if the reward is seeing something far out of the ordinary that will give me new knowledge. There was a time in my life when I called upon deities and certain supernatural beings to reveal themselves to me in any fashion whatsoever, but they did not choose to trifle with me. A supernatural event might have led me to belief, but such did not come.

I did not hurry and was not timid when I worked tonight. But I did not see or hear a ghost nor anything out of the ordinary. I believe the human brain is very creative and imaginative, and sometimes I wonder about ghosts, and I am willing to meet one, but I never have, and so I do not believe in ghosts.

Classroom Dream

I dreamed that I was in a classroom with many students sitting on those old-fashioned wood and metal contraptions they used to use back in the day, with a hard wood writing surface and chair with steel legs and a steel compartment under the chair bottom to put books and papers inside. Those things could be broken, as some boys discovered after trying the better part of a school-year or multiple school-years, but not easily, and they could be repaired, too.

I was young again, I don't know how young, but at the age when sitting in such an old-fashioned desk would have been right, and reunited with my best friend at the time. We were aware of the passage of the time, so this was not a flashback to the past, but a reunion in Heaven. We realized we hadn't seen each other for--what is it now, twenty years? More, I think. Thirty? Of course we remembered the reasons for going our separate ways. Yet for whatever reason, we were back in the place where we first met all those years ago, doing mindless busy work we used to do in school. The teacher, who had no face, no name, and not a very memorable voice either, had assigned a score of questions to be answered by reading a chapter in our textbook. I don't know what the textbook was about. Something incorrect or inaccurate, no doubt, and not written very well, like most textbooks in school.

I was euphoric at being reunited with my old friend. The magnetism was strong, like magic, and I was curious. I had many questions, but these were left unasked. He was friendly and seemed to understand everything. He was serious about schoolwork as he always was and working on the assigned questions, which he finished before anyone else. I took his notebook--I had that privilege with him that I didn't need to ask--and began copying his answers into my notebook to save myself the effort, smiling all the while.

A few moments later, at the far left of the classroom, another student raised her voice and denounced the fellow sitting in front of her, who had copied her questions just as I had copied my friend's. The teacher reiterated that she expected us to do our own work. I looked at my friend's face and he had one of those expressions I was so familiar with, that look of rebuke. Blushing, I returned his notebook and began working on the questions myself.

Upon waking, the dream seemed less charming. Perhaps it is seldom that young friends part on amicable terms. He was the more popular one, the one that knew how to manipulate others. I was not adept at reading social signals, which is so important in our world. When he decided I was no longer useful and could be replaced by someone else, he played pranks on me that he found amusing, fooling me again and again. Back then, I was what you call stupid. Book-smart but not street-smart, which is often fatal. He was cold and adept at making cold decisions. I don't envy whoever he is with now, if anyone at all. If I had had a choice, I wouldn't have dreamed of him, either. He is not the sort of thing I like to dream about.

I think the dream was just an echo of the past. Memory is a funny thing. Facts are stored in memory, of course, but also feelings without regard to the alterations wrought by time. I used to feel a certain way about him, and that feeling is recorded somewhere, just like a fact would be, even though my current feelings are different. The unconscious mind revisited an old memory covered in dust somewhere in the attic. I wonder what the trigger was? Perhaps last night's watching of the first episode of season six of Mad Men. The accuracy of that retro 1960s show amazes me. Upon reflection, I think the antique fashion and style of that show certainly triggered a memory from my distant past, a past I'd perhaps be better off forgetting.

Working Dreams

I dreamed I was in a classroom, sitting at a desk, which was true for about twenty years of my life. Behind me sat my new boss, an older man, although this didn't make sense because there's no boss in a classroom setting, but there he was, a superior officer in our organization. He asked for the cards that I had brought from home. These, he said, must be kept for safekeeping. I was set against that, but he insisted. I gave them to him only with the greatest reluctance. I felt sadness, then anger. Then I reflected that the cards I brought from home could not possibly matter to him at all. He was only doing this to press my buttons. He was trying to provoke me, to see what I would do, to test me. Someone had spoken against me, someone had put him up to this. This revelation, this insight into the truth of the matter, filled me with calmness. I could not be angry or sad, because negative emotions were what the enemy wanted me to feel. I must be strong, superior to them. I said, "You think that I'm arrogant. If I were arrogant, I'd be suffering. But I'm not." And it was true. He studied me for a moment, nodded and said, "You may have the cards back." They were in a safe by his desk, which I opened to retrieve my cards. What was on the cards? I don't know. All of this is abstract. I don't know who the boss was--didn't recognize him. Don't know what company I was working for or why I was in a classroom. The dream seemed to revolve around arrogance and whether it will defeat me, whether it has defeated me before.

My second dream, I was invited back to my old company to work on something. I can't remember whether I have done that before. I will have to ask my partner. I have had many dreams where my old company invites me back to work on something just for a week or two as a temporary employee. I do my work, earn about a grand or two and then leave again. I had this scrap of paper in my hand with scrawled handwriting telling me what I needed to get done. I thought I understood it--simple enough, same stuff I used to work on back in the day. When I walked in, some people were surprised to see me, and I spent the morning in introductions and hellos and chit-chat of no very great consequence, such as I had observed many a time. My old working buddy came up to have me work on something she needed. I miss her. She was pleased, amazed to find that I remembered so much and could do some of the things that I used to do before. But then a qualm upset me. I felt that I may not have read the note in its entirety. I decided to review its contents once more. My suspicion was confirmed. On the back, which I had neglected to read, it said to call this number immediately and talk with so-and-so.

Dreaming of My Enemy

I dreamed of my enemy last night. Why, I don't know. I haven't seen him in twenty years. Maybe he died, and his passing somehow touched my unconscious. Don't scoff at my supernatural hypothesis, reader. There is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in your philosophy. His father died early of a heart attack, and so perhaps now that he is reaching the same age as his father. . .

He isn't my enemy any longer, of course. Twenty years has a way of erasing such distinctions, at least for me, and for the relatively mild wrongs wrought by that nothing. I don't care enough about him to even search the Internet and find out what he is up to. I've tracked down others--old flames, friends, and acquaintances, out of curiosity in the past, but once my curiosity was sated, I always had the feeling of "so what?" It doesn't really matter what they are doing now, or whether they are not doing at all--whether they are dead. Once so many years pass by, then people are strangers, whatever they might have been before. Absence doesn't make the heart grow fonder after all.

He was hell on wheels back in the day, and I used to think of him as my archenemy, as indeed he was for a time, but then we got older and ceased to care. The last interaction I remember with him, he was standing by the side of the road. His car had a flat tire, and he did not know what to do. The fool hadn't carried a spare like I always have done. He probably did not know how to change tires. I said not a word, but kept on walking. He could read the look on my face well enough to gather that I wouldn't have lifted a finger to help him. That was what impressed me the most about him, that he could appreciate the consequences of his past actions.

What was my dream about? I don't recall. Maybe it was an erotic dream. He wasn't bad-looking, as enemies go. I don't remember him having a girlfriend, even though he trumpeted his homophobia to everyone, like a pathetic badge of honor. I thought for sure he was a closet case. He palled around with the best-looking guy in school, his very best friend, and didn't spend any time with girls at all. There always seemed something fake to me about his loud avowals of desire for females. I have known a lot of straight guys in my day, and they didn't feel the need to run down gays.

The night before, I think I dreamed about the upcoming phone interview on Friday. I remember a strong premonition that things would not go well. The tension caused a spasm in my left calf, which woke me up. The muscle was like a rock. It was bruised the next day from the long-lasting spasm. I detest spasms, but they do occur on rare occasion, the body turning on its owner.

I don't think much of that premonition, because almost all phone interviews go ill. Phone interviews are just a quick and cheap way of weeding people out, when somebody has a ton of applications. The odds are all against a phone interview. If somebody is serious, they will meet in person.

What use are premonitions if they foresee likely events? I want a premonition that will make me rich or give me an opportunity to work and earn money. That's the kind of premonition I desire. I don't trust poor psychics. And I don't see why psychics would need to sell their services. I don't want premonitions of unhappy events, either. No more damn spasms. I want premonitions of good things that could happen to me, if I do a, b, and c.

Marriage Dream

Rarely do I remember my dreams, but I suspect they have some subtle value, so I take care to record them on my online journal here.

I dreamed of a coworker today, which is weird, because I scarcely think of him at all if he's not around. He's a nice elderly gentleman and good-looking for his advanced age. Let's call him Ricardo. He was driving my husband and I to the house of his mother, the richest widow in town. In the front seat was a man that Ricardo introduced to us as an investor who intended to purchase all the property the widow owned--and she owned a sizable chunk of the town, being a millionaire many, many times over, yet unpretentious in the way of the rich that possess a certain dignity and taste. Ricardo told me he intended to marry the man and thus retain his property. The marriage would be for the sake of dirty lucre. We drove to the widow's house, where she was not hearing it. Ricardo went to his knees and proposed to the businessman, but the widow turned her back on them in contempt.

In real life, the widow has been dead for years. Ricardo is not gay, but married to a woman, and is not her son. I am not sure how or why I connected two entirely different people, one living and one dead, in my dream. I think even my sleeping mind realized the dream was a farce and could not be real.

Dream of my Father

I just realized that the title of my post is similar to the title of Obama's book. Oh well, too bad. I don't think one can copyright a title, and there aren't many possible configurations of a four-word title anyway. Somehow I don't think a lawyer's going to be sending me a nastygram about it. Irrelevancy does have its advantages.

I can't remember a good dream about my father. Last night, I dreamed I was still living in that house, a teenager, and he was busily searching my room from top to bottom, as he often did, searching for contraband, weed being top on the list, followed occasionally by other things, such as paraphenalia, like a homemade bong, or a lighter, or even matches, or ashes, or rolling papers, or tobacco or clove cigarettes, though I stopped smoking them later, nasty habit. He was tearing apart my room, throwing my things on the floor, because he was "suspicious," his favorite word, and when he did look at me on occasion it was with a leer, letting me know he enjoyed this little game, it was a lot of fun for him. I called him what he was, a sadistic bastard, and he pretended to be outraged and grounded me for weeks or months or took away my favorite possession, my computer, on which I spent all my free time programming in BASIC, so that I would be spurred on by boredom to go out with my friends and buy weed from somebody. He loved it, he loved every moment of it, the battle of wills between us, making me suffer and watching the expression on my face. I knew he loved it because he would smile and laugh at me, "hee hee hee hee hee," more like the cackle of the wicked witch from the Wizard of Oz, and congratulate himself on being such a good parent, such an upstanding moral example. He loved prancing around, acting the moralist, the man who never had sex with his wife anymore, who let her do all the housework while he sat around watching television all the time or napping. Always he was at war with either my brother or me or sometimes, for a special treat, both. He always found the thing one of us loved and took it away or made it scarcer. The Grinch he was. And Mr. Grabby Hands besides, although he put a cork on that once I reached the venerable age of twelve.

Weed was expensive in those days and difficult to come by, besides being pretty weak. It was mostly stems and seeds, the shake of the Colombian harvest, and for those of you who do not know, stems and seeds have little or no THC content. Most THC is located in the buds, while some is on the little leaves next to the buds, and a very small amount is in the big fan leaves, but next to nothing is found in stems and seeds, yet they contribute much weight to the product of a dealer selling to inexperienced kids like me, maximizing his profit. I never had a good source, but always somebody taking advantage. In truth this Colombian had the same effect as a weak beer, but my father's rationale was that marijuana was illegal, so it was forbidden, end of story, no negotiation. It didn't matter that the marijuana had little effect other than as an antidepressant. Occasionally he did find alcohol in my room as well, and since I was underage that too was forbidden, but punished much less since it was not very illegal, only a little bit illegal. Later on I concluded that weekend alcoholism was okay in his book so I adopted that practice, drinking on weekends.

I didn't do many other drugs due to my dread of their effects, because I wasn't ignorant about drugs at all. Coke was available, but I thought it was stupid putting something up the nose and never felt tempted. I still don't understand the appeal. My brother rolled up a dollar bill and set up some lines for me once, twice, three times, different occasions. I only tried it once, because of his incessant urging, a half-hearted try, just to shut him up, and I don't think I got more than a line snorted, and it was weak stuff to begin with. I didn't feel much of anything. Probably mostly baking soda with a little bit of ground-up caffeine pills and cocaine, was my belief then and now. That's a perennial problem with coke, it isn't easy to get the genuine product. Glad I skipped that train, but it certainly wasn't my father's doing. Coke would have been a lot easier to hide in my room.

If he didn't find any weed, that meant I had successfully concealed my stash somewhere. He never was satisfied I didn't have any, that was impossible in his ideology, because all resistance and all obstinence and disobedience was the result of marijuana, nothing else. He was absolutely convinced that marijuana was the sole representative of Satan Incarnate. I think it was his fanaticism on this point that persuaded me to keep using marijuana, because I began joining him in his game, finding the amusement in it. I decided he wanted to find marijuana, he was just putting on that he didn't, and that was probably true. He always had a big sense of joy every time he found something and was frustrated and dejected when he didn't. So this was a big game between my father and me that we played for years until I was eighteen or so.
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by igor 04:20 4 replies by igor 09:32 0 comments

The Bank Teller

I had a funny dream last night. I was at the bank, waiting to cash a check, and one of the tellers, a man about my age, made a snappy comment about me. I don't recall what he said. Unfortunately, my recall of dreams has always been spotty at best. The minute I wake up, about 75% of the details are gone, leaving only the skeleton. At any rate, the teller had a mustache and unkempt hair with cowlicks going in every direction. I thought that was odd, as bank tellers tend to be neat and conservative in their appearance as a rule. He made a snappy remark, and I retorted with something like, "Why don't you comb your hair?" and the other bank tellers laughed at him. He made no reply. Then I went over to the little table set aside for customers to sign checks, and I signed a check that someone had written to me for $500. I did not recognize the signature, but it was someone from New York, judging by the address in the top left corner. I went to the same cashier, let's call him Mr. Clown, and he performed his job in a professional manner without making any further remark.

I started having a bad feeling about the check, because I did not know where it came from. Was it a forgery of some kind? Since I didn't have any recall of the check's origin, I decided that it must indeed be fraudulent. I told Mr. Clown to give me the check back, that I had changed my mind about cashing it. He smiled and said I had made the right decision, because he had doubts about the check's authenticity as well. I took out one of my own personal checks and wrote myself a check for $500, withdrawing from my own account.

That was the end of the dream. The only basis the dream has in reality is that I recently withdrew $500 from my checking account--via the ATM, not a personal check. I have not been inside my bank in several months and have never had anything but a pleasant experience with bank tellers. However, I have had an increased rate of forgetfulness due to adopting a new schedule with many new tasks and duties and many new risks and potential problems. I think the theme of the dream is "Vigilance is Required," because it was vigilance and caution that moved me to halt the cashing of the suspicious check. I think that the bank teller was actually another copy of myself, because my hair has a tendency to stand up, and each morning I have to apply a wet comb to keep it down. I like to use humor to offset anxiety and lighten otherwise tedious or stressful situations, so Mr. Clown was me serving as the butt of a mild self-deprecatory joke. I'm not sure why the check was from New York, but I have given some thought in the past to the idea of moving to New York and perhaps some day I will.

Failure

Many a night, for the past year or two, I've had the same dream. A comprehensive examination is scheduled tomorrow, and I just found out about it and haven't enough time to study. Or a twenty-page essay is due tomorrow, or in a few days, and I don't have enough time to conjure up something reasonable. Or a class that I signed up for has been meeting for months, and I only just remembered that I had signed up for it. I feel a panic and an urgency. Then I recall, as I wake up, that I'm not signed up for any class and have no tests or essays due. What a relief! The dream hasn't any basis in my past, other than a few instances when I was surprised by the syllabus, but in those cases I pulled all-nighters and studied enough to make a passing grade. I did really well in school, and if I had things to do over again, I should have gotten a Ph.D., and then I'd be set for life as a teacher, without the problem of knowledge's obsolescence which has set me back in the computer programming field.

In today's economy, companies don't want to talk to anyone that doesn't have two years' recent experience in the latest and greatest computer languages. They are unwilling to train and do not esteem experience, education or aptitude. There is absolutely no hope at all in the job market.

I may not understand many facets about the world economy or international trade, but I know this much. I am a good computer programmer. I think that if someone like myself can't find employment as a computer programmer, then the U.S. is in deep trouble. This country's day in the Sun is over, and the world is changing into a different sort of place, and I don't know whether Americans are going to like it very much.

by igor 04:20 8 replies by igor 09:32 6 comments