UFOs. Another aura in background radiation, growing up. UFOs were everpresent. Not an issue of OMNI mag passed without some perversely sexualized mention of alien abduction; my school's book fairs were littered with baby UFOlogist pulp; unidentified flying objects were a favourite of Time-goddamned-Life books & Forteana; weekly, Robert Stack would intone that They were In The Skies, Waiting, Watching. "WHEN WILL WE FIND OUT?"
And, of course, there was the big guy's big divorce movie: Spielberg hisself gave me fuckin' nightmares with that TV tuned to static as the doors shook & light poured in every window. 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind' was more of an influence on my childhood than either 'E.T.' or 'Poltergeist.' Maybe someday I'll tell ya'll about the life-size, stuffed E.T. one of mom's friends made me as an Xmas gift. If you thought the film version looked like a lumpy scrotum... But selah.
In the 90s, I had my first & only alien abduction-themed dream. The imagery was essentially ripped from The X-Files. Though, to be fair, a far stronger-- and stranger! --influence was Murphy & Zulli's 'The Puma Blues', which felt closer to reality than any of the strained attempts by TXF to spoop me... And as I sit here this morning, Zulli's drawings of grays have more power in my imagination than any frame of 'Fire In The Sky', or 'Communion', both low-budget, Z-grade hauntings. There's a very personal power to Murphy's ruminations on the subject of extraterrestrial intelligence-- a sense that the main character's struggle to understand his father's obsession with the subject contained evanescent Truth.
The dream's symbolism was all swiped, of course: in my dream I'm laid out beneath the small cedar tree closest to my side of the house, unable to move, watching a circuit-mesh of lights scroll over the wiry silhouettes of branchwork, unable to look away, strangely unnerved by the sense that I'm being watched by an animal in my periphery-- a stray cat, not one of ours. As the hazy, glowing circuit scanned, I strained to turn my head, panicking, wondering why I was on my back in the scratchy uncut grass, wondering whose slitted eyes I sensed on my face. There was no sense of events before or after the dream, no prologues or codas, no previous dreams nor any concluding acts to that night's mental theatre.
I had just started keeping a dream journal, at 17, not that I needed one, given my recall for imagined events was photographic. Visually the dream was among the strongest from that phase of my life. It nagged me with its inexplicability, because *I* didn't believe in UFOs-- I was a witchkid, inclined to fantasies invoking magick & hauntings & curses. Little gray men were an irritant, grit in my mind's eye. My parents didn't credit such things with reality, as amusing as it had been for them, growing up in the 50s & 60s, to imagine. If they spoke of UFOs at all, it was to speculate about the united states government using foo fighters as a smokescreen for sketchy shit.
No, the dream's central image, of a literal Circuit of Lights, as seen through cedar branches, I knew what that was. It was literally a circuit pattern, composited from any of the hundreds of thousands of circuitboards I had seen & studied. Electronics & electronics repair was my dad's professional passion, a fascination he vainly hoped would inflict itself on his kid. I saw electricity as being on the other side of Nature, a trick we had harnessed, expressing lightning in mathematics & engineering: lightning, bottled up in industry. I didn't get the math part in the slightest. The equations necessary for comprehending electronics, that stuff slid right off my sloppy brain. Even as electrical components piled up in our barn, I was retreating from the profession dad was so intent on forcing me to take part in. I could fix a cold solder joint & troubleshoot a mechanical glitch, but when it came to reading an oscilloscope or measuring resistance I was absofuckinlutely hopeless.
So it makes sense that what actually haunted me about the dream was that classic "I always feel like, somebody's watching meeee" element, the paranoid sense that some living thing was studying my (intellectual) paralysis. The sense that I only thought I knew what was happening, beyond my field of vision, that the quote-unquote cat was not an actual cat. Cats were mom's totem; when I was a baby, my mother was literally performing Bast worship, caught up in Crowleyana and certainly higher'n'hell.
I mean, in terms of personal symbolism, the dream breaks down dead easy. I'd had a tougher time disassembling VCRs. Even at 17, I basically understood what all this shit was.
Today, it's a tough road, trying to make myself pretend for five seconds that UFOs are a Reasonable Assumption. PROMISELAND has a couple characters caught up in the then-new phenom of Unidentified Flying Objects, and that's why I'm poring over this tired-ass trope today. I need to be able to make myself believe, on these imaginary idiots behalf, that what's happening in the background of this intersection of Hollywood & occult crap is Real, rather than irreal. It feels kinda like a copout to make my rubes sped & too-drunk enough to treat UFOs as credible. Because that's what was going on, fer shure: everyone's brains were fizzy with benzedrine when they weren't ripped on cheap red lush. Like, the lights in the sky were strictly synaptic misfires, mannn.
At the risk of adding another five feet to the scroll of text above, I must explain that one of the main characters in PROMISELAND is artist, actor, and art-witch of obscure renown, Marjorie Cameron, the widow of Jack Parsons. Marjorie was a radio operator & mapmaker, when she was in the military during WWII, and she had resigned from the war for "matters of conscience"; after she took up with Parsons, she inhaled more cocaine & peyote than possibly even Dennis Hopper, and there were more than a couple of nervous breakdowns along the way. She wove a personal mythology involving the End Times and her own identification with the Babylon of Revelations and UFOS, claiming to have had a couple of Close Encounters of her own. She sounds like a fun, nutty broad, right? Like, her being a radio operator & that "matter of conscience" and the postwar invention of little green men as a coverup for actual weapons testing, that's all too perfect an expression of the period to ignore.
That Cameron would go on to live with, and star in, films by Kenneth Anger-- such as the very UFO-curious flick 'Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome' --only cements the need for an extraterrestrial dimension to this kitchen sink drama I've been writing. That shit was just In The Air, y'know? UFOs have always been an essential component of what I have come to term Amer-arcana.
So. Yeah. This one's just gonna peter out. No big point, no smartypants cinch to this essay. I'm wrasslin' with the omniscient skies this morning, only way I know how, by attempting a peek back to ask "WTF was that all about?" But I can't... quite... glimpse...
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