classic

Mental health day.

dream - o21626: escapes & avalanches, in no particular order

The dullgreen fluroescent throb of artificial light as I cross the transom.  Every upstairs is a further level.  A whisper of air kisses the arch of my bare foot and I bend to slip free slats of hardwood, revealing yet another stair.  This access narrower and even less lit than the last.  The passage littered with aged newsprint.  Headlines from forgotten papers fluttering like agitated birds in the subgreen.  I hear a rustle, a granular grating of stone against stone, and step backward from the secret passage.  A bricksize rhomboid clatters, redounding off shelving overhead like a pachinko pellet, setting off other avalanches, wrecking surfaces, wrenching brackets free, the whole storage system collapsing in fits of tumbling slats, dust rising and boobytraps raining all 'round.  Looking on the collapsed egress, I sigh.  Siegfried sighs.

"At least we aren't climbing down that."

dream - o2o626: mask off

Traveling with Siegfried through Japan.  Intimate rooms, golden light sprawling into partitioned shadow, across tatami, spilling through ricepaper all the colours of stained glass.  The other guests don't trust my face, and it's easy to see why:  streaming tears, eyes strained by rictus of repression, gasping for breath.  I feel my self-control slipping.  Begin slapping myself.  The blows don't land with any force-- because you can't combat yourself.  I can't, at any rate, the schizoid impulse to destroy my own reflection stutters, dims, all wind going out of the internal storm.  All that's left is sorrow at humiliating Sig, who has to account for my strange behavior in a stranger's home.  The scene recedes in my mind as I wake, shaken.

Walk to Montrose bird sanctuary, thinking the whole thing over.  When I get there, a finch is on a branch, peering at me.  I raise my hand and it flits to light on my fingertips.  Flies off.  Return home feeling better.

dream - o2o226: line to the moon

My grandparents' house, the living room.  Empty except for myself.  The faux-western ornamentation on the shelves heavy with their absence.  The edges of the collected Zane Gray gone papyrus.  The cut glass candy dishes dim with accumulated dust.  The rotary phone by granddad's chair rings, a jangled robot exclamation of alarm.  My grandmother's voice on the other end-- a voice out of darkness, out of naked space, distant as the moon.  They don't believe their son could have acted the way I describe.

"He couldn't have done those things," she says, and using a damp washcloth I carefully wipe between the rows of exposed nail ends protruding from where the padded headrest was.  Busying myself with cleaning, dusting granddad's favourite recliner, I listen patiently to the denials, only occasionally asserting the abuse that became my birthright.  In my mind I trace the call, visualizing from whence grandma's voice originates:  a faint blue line describing an orbital trajectory, overlaid on infinite black.

Observing the lunar surface around me.  Pitted ash underfoot, inverted cones & craters in the hundreds of thousands, fine as the dirt floor of a barn and as suggestive of antlions, the vista assumes primacy and the "reality" of my grandparents' room falls away, except for the dull weight of the plastic reciever in my hand, against my ear.  Without any energy I protest, anger dead and suffocated, wondering why no-one ever believed me.  Imagining the moon in its arc, circling in sync with the denials of my dead family.

There:  center of the coal-gray plain I'm standing on, a singular light, a miniature moon, phosphorescent as the soul's own glow.  I study it, no longer truly listening, feeling hollow, ageless, indifferent.  Wondering why I am trying to make my case, when there is no jury to agree, no justice seated on high, no opinion to court.  Grandmother's voice fading as I permit my receiver hand to drop.  Tracing paths through the vacuum with my mind's eye.  Lit by the brittle sphere of imagination. Waiting in wonder.

dream - o12426: the rotted synagogue

There is dark, the dark of gables two stories high overhead.  A blackish poodle runs through the incense-scented ruin, pulling a chain of dust behind him, sewing discord through the pews, encircling the bimah with his rough little whoops of alarm.  The dog is as unknown to me as their owner, but I follow anyway, thinking perhaps to gather the little noisemaker into my arms.  He eludes me and the urge to escort him out fades.  Lit by faraway dusk leaking through boarded-over twin windows, a bundled crew of parkour athletes lift a scroll from within the sundered ark, laying it cattycorner atop the reading table, knocking free charred fragments of fir, the char bouncing with a glassy clatter between the traceurs' feet.  The young men carefully unspool the scroll, "reading" the red line of the EKG as it charts the events that led us here.

I am the only other person here, besides these young men in their military surplus, and do not recognize them beyond their profession.  Their voices do not form words so much as an atmosphere of forgotten song, and it draws me in:  I stand below the railing of the bimah, peering at the end of the scroll as they spool it, scrying the QRS complexes for signs one might identify with sound.  Meaning eludes me.

Did I arrive with these men?  It feels like I arrived after, or independently, and we only converged here by chance.  They do not acknowledge me; in fact I might well not exist, were it not for the evidence of my smudged hands and the bounce of my tread through the boards in this sundered place.  The disturbance of the dog fades, perhaps having found a way out, leaving me behind.  Wordless chanting descends all around like constellated motes in a sunbeam.

sleeplog - 1o3o25

Well, my sleep time is definitely improved.  I seem to be having more vivid dreams, too.  Dad cameoed, which has thrown a shroud over the day overall.  Would say as cognition / art ability goes, today was tanked.  I can function well enough to ad lib a pot of vegetable soup, but as far as being able to make art, eh.  Tried doing a reading on the beach but cam died.

What is this, day four?  Averaging two cups a day, as recommended.  Got my missing issues of 'night life' in the mail.  Will be good to read those.  Hitting the middle of 'The Magician' by Zeischegg-- a tough gnarl about hitting bottom, spiritually, which I grok generally & today in specific.  On volume 4 of 'The Summer Hikaru Died' by Mokumokuren; infinitely better than the anime.  This manga in specific has had me wondering why no one has done a graytone anime; b&w + tones would have worked for this adaptation, in specific.  Money is, natch, the answer.  I do not have a commercial mind.  But you knew that: you're here.

Hitting a lot of Death Grips these last couple days on the mp3 player.  I'm not sure that's a positive.  At least for people sitting close to me.  Is it a good sign when you're in your forties going on fifty and Stefan Burnett speaks most clearly to your sense of Place, in this time & space?

Is anything around us a good sign?

Most of the beach recordings this morning were on that subject, instead of recording a reading from The Burroughs Folio.  The idea with doing readings from that & DENIZEN is mainly for myself to "act out" the speaking parts, so I have more of an idea how to depict the body language of the speakers.  But I was either off-center, incoherent, or the equipment was outta wack.  By the time I settled into doing 'The Secret Dreamer' the battery had died and I hadn't realized, so today's main interval of clarity was lost.

Selah.

sleeplog - 1o2925

Very solid night's sleep, and was able to return to sleep without any trouble.  So 5+ hours straight, plus an extra 1.5.  Woke feeling refreshed.  Not how it's been, at all.

Know I dreamt, but can't remember specifics.  Mainly senses of fabric texture & lighting; I know the dreams involved daylight.  Light[ing] is a significant aspect of my dreamlife.  So it's a good sign that I was dreaming about something lit by the sun.

On the "psychedelic" front, yesterday noticed further incidences of the (only slightly stunning, disorienting) aforementioned Clarity.  Art & problemsolving on art was easier.  Chores & tasks flew past without the standard stumbles.  The only point at which I'd say there was that pseudo-psychedelic glimmer was, after Sig returned home?  I noticed having subtle difficulties with visual focus.  Sig would be at an average distance from me and my glasses seemed to hamper my ability to home in; so I ditched them for a bit.  There was a distinct sharpness to my vision for a solid hour, to the extent that my bifocals were simply in the way.

Normally I can't see across the fucking room.

Normally, since the accident.  My vision had been degrading subtly before the skull fracture; afterwards glasses became a necessity.  I'm not saying the lion's mane has "cured" anything, but it does seem to have an effect on my optic nerves.  Yesterday was the first day of taking two cups of tea.  So we'll see what-if-anything happens today.  This could all be purely placebo / delusion.

Reading seemed to be easier, as well.  Blew through 130 pages of Christopher Zeischegg's 'The Magician' in an afternoon.  I've always been able to read fast-ish, but processing & retaining information has been dodgy, and sometimes it can be a foot-dragging chore to Make Myself read, if I'm not in the mindset.

Thus far the medicine seems to be an asset.  Of course nothing is certain or diagnosable straightaway; this stuff could take two weeks to have an actual, cumulative effect.  But I'm paying careful attention, and there's *something* going on, of the positive variety.  So roll on, tomorrow!

Azure Pantry / the Burroughs Folio - Kiki (1)

in progress.  one of a series of six portraits to be used as chapter stops in the Azure Pantry.  each portrait will precede one of six dreams; the dream sequences from Azure Pantry will have a limited print run, separate from Azure Pantry & Denizen, bound together as the Burroughs Folio

that's the plan, at any rate.  this is the third portrait.  i've already got ian sommerville.  thought i'd posted him already.  guess that goes up tomorrow.  still moving toward finished pencils on this one.  next up is inks & colour.  probably cop out and just colour the background...  that's what i've done with the others

"finished" pencils, a little later...

i no longer am certain whether he looks like the historical Kiki, whose name is not recorded.  i only have one photo to work from.  but he'll do for "my" kiki

(actual final pencils)

i know, i know, the hands look like shit.  i'll figure out how to fix it in the brushwork.  that's how these things always go:  i find the final line in The Doing, wielding pen or brush or whatever the final medium is.  the backgrounds will probably be chalk and graphite with some brush whereas the sky should be a chalk blue with pure cloud, so those regions of paper should go wholly untouched

dream - o52525: gift from out of time

A day trip back home.  The old homestead has been bulldozed, dust still settling.  None of the libraries have survived.  My grandparents' house, altogether gone.  The tiny pond, filled in; the towering magnolias in the front yard, vanished, the bases of their stumps scorched out of the earth.  Back at the campo sancto, the family land, there's some vestiges of the past-- the quonset hut I helped my parents erect remains due to the concrete foundations, but the wooden ends of the vast, corrugated steel drum have been burnt out.

Despite these minor erasures, the land itself is rich, verdant, flowering.  I note the freshly turned clay at the edges of our old dirt roads, the evidence that the bulldozers have been here, too.  The barn still stands, but it's completely vacant & coalblack within.  The clean, subtle sweet scent of dogwood, clustered by the rotted pens to either side, their bleached paper blossoms with punched-tab leaves trembling in the breeze.  The land has never seemed so vacant, nor at ease.

In what remains of the trailer, some piles of old books.  The front porch remains level, but the interior of the trailer is as buckled by collapse as the last time I saw it, fetid with the scent of black mold, my mother's collection of vinyl fallen forward into the pit in the floor, every gatefold sleeve sick with mildew.  I remain on the porch, at the threshold, uncertain.  Turning to the Bally 'Old Chicago' pinball machine to the left of the washer & dryer, I thumb through the books stacked on the glass.  The top volume is a collection of E.C. Segar's non-Popeye cartooning, something I've never seen before.  Tucking it underneath my arm, I step off the porch...

Tempus fugit, and I'm seating myself at a table with Rob James, mom's best friend from Anniston high school.  His Lennon frames glint as he nods hi, and he peers with interest at the threadbare canvas cover of the Segar book as I slide it over.  A forgotten part of mom's collection, it seems.  We both appreciate the clean bubbly arcs of Segar's pen, the pages upon pages of warmup sketches & practice lines, and I ask him if he likes it.  He says he does, so I say, "Merry Christmas."  Rob looks good, not the slightest indication of M.S.; no tremors, no hesitancy in his hands; and he smiles with genuine affection, the radiance of his appreciation sweeping in an upward arc from the art on the page to my adult stranger's face, like a sunset in reverse.  "Thank you," he says.

I do not tell him he's welcome, for the dead are always welcome here.

promiseland: struggling w/ omniscient skies

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...

sleep / riddles

It's barely felt like I've dreamt this week.  Today woke with the memory / impression of holding a stuffed animal, some kind of lion, dressed a bit human in a navy hoodie pullover-- the impression is visual as well as tactile, even though in the dream I'm looking at a kid who maybe resembled me, holding the toy.

It's hard to say if the kid was me.  I don't have third-person dreams of myself much anymore.  It was a common experience, as a child, to dream of myself seeing myself, disembodied.  That became less common as I aged into being a teen, and even further in the rearview as I took to caffeine & nicotine & alcohol.  There came a moment in my early 20s, living in my first apartment by myself, when I had a full-on out-of-body experience.  Obviously in retrospect it was a common nightmare, maybe a nighthag-- it was around this time I first became aware of my occasional sleep paralysis --but seeing myself from above, in full light, realizing I couldn't regain access to my sleeping form, gave me a vertiginous sense of panic, and in my noncorporeal, disembodied state, there was nothing for it: I was not my body, and I could not return to it, and that realization slammed the gate on the dream.  Cut to black: fade up: I was awake again, on the couch, staring directly into the painful blur of the frosted globe overhead, wondering what had happened, and why I hadn't turned off the damned light so I could have had a peaceful night's rest.

Somewhere in that phase of my life (I'm fairly sure it was firmly Before, but if that chronological placement is true, it disquiets me because the out-of-body dream takes on a premonitory tone) I had a significant overdose of mushrooms, and that led to a disembodiment of sorts as well; in the weeks and months afterward I was prone to seeing myself in dreams in the third person.  This became such a constant I began to think I had stopped dreaming in first person p.o.v., and even noticed a tendency, in my memories, to visualize myself as though an outside observer to my own existence.

None of these things are standard, anymore.  I sleep like an ordinary human, albeit a human who's had a fair bit of brain trauma.  A human who pedals an imaginary bicycle in their sleep, a human who wakes in midsentence & mid-shout, every now and again.  Sometimes I'll dream about myself in the third person, or about being someone else altogether, but all in all, I feel whole & healed.  That said, I'm also no longer myself:  I don't really relate to the kid I had been.  I don't have most of his memories.  Most of my school years are vague unknowns, the classmates & staggered early attempts at friendship have all but evaporated.  It's hard to reconcile that aspect of my consciousness, and it worries me, time to time, that letting those threads completely slip will lead to a greater unraveling of memory & mind in the future.

But it was interesting, after all these years, to have caught a glimpse of the blonde kid with blue-green eyes who I remember sharing a continuity with.  He wasn't a bad sort.  He didn't sleep great.  He had nightmares.  He didn't know how to talk to people, and felt like he wasn't really supposed to, the majority of the time.  He was always more comfortable walking in the woods & studying bees farming queen anne's lace.  He didn't have many stuffed animals, that I recall.  He'd inherited one of his uncle's favorites, a limp dachshund with a hard silly plastic face & rolling, weighted eyes, and that was a comfort to sleep with...  But it was mainly the crocheted blue and green and white blanket he'd had as a baby, his very own Linus blanket, that had been the main companion and comfort.

I'm not sure the kid I woke up dreaming about was me.  He looked at me like a stranger.

I wonder what the dreamer looks like, to the dream?

dream - o3o525: across the water

It's the Atlantic: that perpetual widescreen roil, salt taste wafting in, and the clouds are fine ripples of unwound cotton.  I am standing on pink sand, looking out over the ocean for the first time in what must surely be a decade, marveling at the vista, as a toothpick-thin, perfectly vertical geyser erupts out of the horizon.

Whale spume, I think, as the eruption spreads in an upwardly-rising coil of smoke, billowing outward.

Missiles, I realize, as the ICBMs begin their dispersal, contrails flowering into crystalline horror.  Nuclear missiles?  There is nowhere to go, I explain to myself, my mind's voice steady but barely heard beneath the increasing wind.  Idly wondering where they will fall.  Idly wondering, whose fault was this?