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Something Funny's Going On

(not ha-ha funny, strange funny)
(well, sometimes ha-ha funny)

by j jackson

I think I must be tuning in to others' lives and/or dreams. I think that when I meet and love a woman I seem to know, that it may be someone else's love I am identifying/empathizing with. Or else, I am interacting with her, we with each other, psychically, each as our complementary ideals:

1728, living room/dining room: the family is doing something, I can't remember exactly what; interrelating with an interesting sense of communion, maybe. Scene transitions to Saltsburg Rd. at Seneca. The interrelationship is disturbed by a (college) girl who "hurts" Jim and leaves, going over to Seneca (which is a college-like campus, but without school buildings; only a lake, trees, and a small, pizza shop-style restaurant. I go over to this area to find the girl who has hurt Jim, to get her to come back and apologize to him. Among the trees is an animal tied to a tree, a dog-like creature, maybe a raccoon without a bushy tail and markings. It thinks I am coming to set it free. Via its "appealing nature," it "talks" (without words, but in no uncertain terms) to me. It wants me to take it with me, to take it "home." But I ignore it (this makes me sad when I awaken) and continue on, looking for the girl. I walk along the lake and go into the restaurant. At first, the girl is working there as a waitress, but the scene transitions into a student union, and she sits at a table far across a very wide room filled with small tables that seat four people each. I see her, but I don't go over to her. She is now a former (in the context of the dream) lover of mine, whom I am still in love with. I see another girl sitting nearby who looks like her, and I think that I'd like to make her my girlfriend. But my love for the first girl prevents me from approaching the second. I walk to a nearby table and sit down next to a guy that I only slightly know. He's a potential boyfriend for the first girl, my former girlfriend, but our mutual experiences with each other (the girl and I) keep us from finding new lovers. The guy and I sit next to each other in silence. My former girlfriend walks over to us. She comes up on my right side so that I am between her and the guy. Motioning her head to the guy, she says to me, "Tell him we love him."

I turn to him and say, "We love you."

He says, "This isn't going to be one of those kinky relationships, is it?" I say, "Nope. Let me remove myself from between you," and I get up and leave them.

rai: Because she looks so much like the first girl (petite; short blond hair), I see the second girl as a chance to begin again, to continue the intensity of the relationship with the first girl, but to do it right this time.

analysis: Before I fell asleep, I was thinking of a former girlfriend with whom things did not go so well. I thought that it was an ideal sort of love affair, except that she was not the right girl for it. In other words, I loved her, but her personality (and probably mine also; or, more correctly, our mismatch) prevented us ever having a stable relationship. [She was too ready to flirt with other guys, when she drank. And I was always doing the same, but only in response to her, and all the time, because I didn't drink that much. But she would do much more than flirt, if opportunities, in the way of clever and/or assertive men, presented themselves; whereas I would never do anything more than flirt, always remaining self-sacrificially loyal.]

After a particularly effective dream, I can never seem to get back to sleep, not because I'm not tired, but because I want to remember what I'd just experienced; yet I don't want to go to the trouble of waking up enough to write it down. So I end up getting up and wandering around the house in daze, usually with the lights off, remembering, until I awaken enough to decide to turn on the computer and document the event.

When I get up in the middle of the night and go out into the office and turn on the light, the fish, half-awakening, will dart into a corner of the aquarium, trying to hide from a god who creates daylight at unpredictable hours. The fish know me, their god. In good times, they rush to the side of tank to greet me. But still, in the night, they are afraid.

I like my fish because they pay attention to me. I know they do this because I have them on a variable interval-ratio schedule that conditions them to rush to the side of the aquarium, eyeing me, looking for food every time I walk by, but I like the fact that it seems like they like me for myself. Who knows? Maybe they do.

This is the way humans are too, always. We want to think we have a higher motive, we want to think we like people for themselves, and for their spiritual essence, but we don't. We're conditioned by others to respond the way we do. We like those people who satisfy our physical and psychological needs, and we dislike those who don't.

The fact that we have each other on such an elaborately complex contingency management schedule that we can't possibly interpret it is no reason to believe that the schedule doesn't exist. How can we say, then, that we like each other for ourselves? Yet it seems like people like me for myself. And who knows? Maybe they do.

Eventually, unless I've slept for a very long time, more than five or six hours, I will usually go back to bed after I have written out all of what I want to remember. But on psychially productive days, I only start to dream again:

1) new workplace: leaving work, from the extreme north end of the building. Outside, gardeners are working, but they disappear, leaving their running hose behind. I see a Bigfoot crossing the lawn. I want to get someone's attention to prove I've actually seen it, but no one is around. His footprints are all over the place, but plenty of people have seen footprints before and most consider such evidence to be faked. I go around to the back of the building. The gardeners are there. They've turned into a gorilla and a chimp. I tell them about the Bigfoot, and we sneak around the building and see it. So, at least, I have verification that it's been sighted--but who's going to believe a gorilla and a chimp? We try to get back into the building to tell others, but everything is locked up tight. Bigfoot is heading in our direction. I hide down in the woods among the trees and bushes, but he's coming straight at me. But at the last minute, he turns away.

2) old workplace: a flirtatious Eileen is flitting around between others and me, making me jealous. It's the end of the workday and Joan is looking for a book she bought through the mail that had been sent to the company and been left in the office area. I look around the desks and find several books that aren't hers. Then I find an audio book entitled Laughing Out Loud. It's hers, so I give it to her.

3) Eileen and I in my Toyota subcompact on Verona Rd., heading south toward the Saltsburg Rd. intersection: Near the intersection, we cut down over the hill on one of those steep narrow side streets to Third St. On Third St, we pick up Leslie Neilsen at a house near Cursio's, and Eileen begins to flirt with him, as a fan, telling him how much she likes his films, etc. He's driving and I'm in the back seat. She begins a quote from one of his comedies, and he finishes the quote. We drop her off at her house on Third Street. I get into the front seat. We travel down Third Street to Verona Rd and down to the Sandy Creek intersection. The roadway is rough and bumpy, un-maintained. The neighborhood has deteriorated and looks decrepit (much like the atmosphere of Back to the Future, part three.) We turn left onto Coal Hollow Rd. Leslie hasn't been around here in a very long while and doesn't know that the new roadway bypasses the old one, so he turns down Old Coal Hollow. Matthew Modine is in the front seat now, and I'm in the back. Matthew tells Leslie not to go this way, but I say go ahead anyway and see if the road still goes all the way through. I kind of want to see the old area and haven't been down there in a long time. But when we are only just a short way in, we are accosted by young black kids who poke sticks at the car. Matthew and Leslie roll down their windows. I tell them not to do that. The kids poke sticks in at them. Leslie gets the car turned around and we head back up to the new road. I am in the front seat again. One of the kids beside the car motions to me to lean toward him so that he can whisper something to me, but I don't trust him, and so I tell him to get away and I begin to hit him on the head with a stick. We (had) bought frozen and fresh vegetables somewhere and we drive away, on up new Coal Hollow. I'm in the back again. At the top of the hill, I feel movement under the seat and I look under there and find two kids hidden away with bags of groceries. That was what the kid who wanted to whisper to me wanted to tell me, that the kids were under the seat. [There are people who have information for me, but I don't trust them enough to let them tell me. Instead, I beat them away with metaphorical sticks (words).] I hustle the kids out, checking their bags first to make sure they didn't steal our vegetables. I show the contents of the bags to Leslie and Matthew to make sure they hadn't bought any of the things in the bags. They hadn't.

I awaken, overwhelmed with the silence in the room.
The silence floods over me, settles into the pores of my body.
My ears ring with faux room noise, keeps the silence at bay.

I have a pain in my neck from having slept incorrectly, a problem I haven't had in many, many months.

Osama bin Laden is hiding in my basement. He's dead and his body is decaying, but his spirit has been released and is threatening to seep up into the house.

A mystery is deeply hidden beneath the mere facts of this web-novel, not only the mystery of who I am, as revealed in my documented self-therapy and in the various explications in my other documents, and not only the mystery of db [which, perhaps not so coincidentally, I use as an abbreviation in my personal notes for 'database'] as she represents an archetypal anima, and not only others who represent the same or other archetypes and/or motives, but a mystery in many other realms as well, only touched upon in dreams. The protagonist is a multi-faceted multiple personality, of which "I" am only the most superficial of tokens that I meet and conjure in my dreams:

1728, back bedroom: db lies on a very small single bed aligned east/west near the door. She's very young, maybe seventeen or younger. I lie on a different similar bed beside her. The beds are immediately adjacent to each other. We want to have sex, and we try to approach each other, but we feel the threat of her father on the stairs [in real life, her father died when she was very young], who turns out, I will see later, to be my father. We do not get together because he comes up into the room. My mother is also across the room in a huge double bed the whole time, but we didn't worry about her. I don't recognize my father when he comes into the room and I still think it's db's father. And maybe it is. Maybe there is a psychic component here that brings all of these people together, from this world and the other. (There are others in the room whom I don't know/don't pay attention to, other "presences" who are either bodiless or who are simply consciously disregarded.) I go across the room and try to go to sleep in a kind of wardrobe with a door that pulls up to enclose me. [Cf. Yellow Mud Street, by Can Xue.] It's all wooden, without bedding, and it's very uncomfortable, so that I can't get to sleep. I am vaguely aware, as I try to sleep, that I'm trying to remain asleep in my real life, so that I can dream. db comes over to be near me, and Mom is now sitting at a piano that is next to the wardrobe, in the place where the window should have been. She playing at (as opposed to playing) the piano. I get up and go over to it. The four of us (and others) are concerned with the piano. As Mom continues to play at it, Dad and I watch. I comment that it's a shame that it has been allowed to deteriorate the way it has. "Inside" the piano (as if it were also a wardrobe), the paint and varnish is peeling away, flaking off of it and making it look dirty and decrepit. I suggest that we begin to restore it by scrubbing away at the flaking finish and removing it. We plan to do this first thing in the morning. When I awaken, I make a conscious note that, if we are going to flake away the deteriorating finish, we'll have to tape paper over the keys to prevent the flakes from getting down into them.

I've been resisting interpreting dreams in detail. I don't seem to want to know what they mean. Their content determines my state of mind, as I wander through my present as if I am in still in one of them, life itself no different lately than the dreams I dream, the content leaking out into reality.

Nocturnal Nature

Sometimes, I awaken in the night, afraid, of nothing. I think,
I am somewhere else for a while, beside myself, lying, in bed.
I bring back with me, the places I go, two worlds juxtaposed,

yet held separate, by my awakening mind, only just beyond
the me I believe to be myself, but know I am not, when, I am,
dreaming, someone else, still in the dark room, concurrently

existing. I roll onto my back, to prevent the presence I am
from stealing upon me, unseen. As long as I face an unknown
existence, I am, safe, within myself. Everyone else, a part of

who I am, and am not, is, this other part of me. I contact
this nocturnal nature, I am so certain, is myself still in sleep;
yet others too, I know, and don't, are with me, always, quiet.

counterpoint

Life inside me
screams as if
my ears ring.
No sound
between worlds
I am and am not
is silence.

Another illusion

When I have a dream about someone who treats me in a certain way that is less than respectful, even if unconsciously, of my rights as a human, I awaken with a negative reaction, against the dream and against the person, in real life, if he or she is still alive. I counteract slights/overt behavior, usually angrily, but certainly always most definitively, as I am, in fact, reconstructing my own conscious self, when dreams expand me beyond the narrow daily self I am. The dream-people are, in most cases, aspects of this self, projected. I react against myself as I establish the other self I think I am, when I am someone else, unaccepting of a larger self that encompasses the world of social beings who, in contrast to the restricted world I live in, comprise the vast enterprise that is a universe of overlapping souls.

I would rather not live in this more expansive place, although I will always say I would, preferring to remain in a narrower "dreamland" that, although I seem to have more control (control here is illusory), does not work as magically to materialize both consciously and unconsciously the wills and whims of my eternally-seeking soul. The multiplicity, I fear, would be far too much, were it to occur on a continual basis, without the intervening periods we call awakening (which is more like a definition of dreaming when put into this context) to allow the reconstruction of the functioning ego to reassert its hold over the fragile personality we think is so predominantly strong so as to formulate a world that is not anywhere nearly so fixedly structured as we each will think it is, being a reflection of the ego we only think we are, when it/we will remain in flux, dreaming while awake, but ever-repressing the waking dreams, in order to keep our imagination of a world a secure and stable environment where we may safely exist, a place where people treat us the way we want them to by a force of our will when we decide how we want to be treated so that sensible souls act accordingly, so that they will not harm or offend us, meanwhile thinking and acting out of our sight in a far-different manner.

This condition does not so much exist in a dream world where more than we know is capable of being known, if we but figuratively open our eyes. But, when we are "awake," we don't want to know, and act to deny it as soon as we awaken, missing the richest source of knowledge, of ourselves and others, so as to remain ego-wise intact. I am an expert at the construction of my personality, but it is just another illusion, a separation from the organism that extends beyond us and is perceivable in dreams, if we are attentive.

It's this seething social organism that gets things done and makes the world seem secure. We might think we step aside from it, to work in isolation, we might think, when we're thinking about it, that we're thinking about ourselves, but there is no self apart from it. Everything we are has been introjected into us; our self-conception, our ideas, the very words we use, define what we don't know we are: Its creation. We are never less our real self when we are all alone. We dream our world up out of the depths of the unconscious and we awaken to a narrower vision and apply the dream to our lives unknowingly, as if we live in an unseen world that is only accessible when we are less conscious and on automatic pilot while we sleep. Which is the illusion, then, the waking or the dream?