Keep Back Or the Balloon Gets It. Galaxy-Class Tree Mangler. 3-D Still Life with Fence. Paw Problem. A Plane for Ronald. Patent Applied For. Soft Plague.
Marco McClean
First dream. A stereotypical movie-type evil scientist and
his assistant Nile Sprague overcome objection to their
experimental system by letting their captive manlike creatures
out into the world above through a tunnel behind polished-wood
panels. Three of the creatures slouch into town. This seems a
tremendous joke on the meddling townspeople who were insisting
on this very thing happening, and who now will be twice as
angry because they got what they thought they wanted. The
creatures aren't any better off and now the townspeople have
to feed and tend them.
I remain in the lab, defending myself by swinging a toy
balloon around on a stiff string. I brandish a broken-off
Swiss Army knife. My implied threat is that if the scientist
comes near me I'll pop the balloon. He and Nile wait
patiently. They have all the time in the world --more now than
before, because they don't have to deal with the creatures
/or/ the townspeople.
Next dream. The outline of a man who had previously not
cut diagonally, but cut perfect horizontal rings, now cuts
around a tree at all angles so none of the rings match up. He
wails to the forest, "You never understood my mark in the
[something]!"
I step out where I can be seen and say, "You deserve to be
the chief [something] lumber assessor in the galaxy of stars!"
The man doesn't have a face to read expression from --he's
just an outline-- but the motion of the outline expresses an
exasperated, "Huh? Wha?"
Next dream. I'm in the front doorway of the house I lived
in in seventh and eighth grade. The front yard is all
different. The circular front driveway is gone; in its place
is a stylized-ocean-wave-shaped patch of ivy roughly parallel
with the road (it's the Rhine card water pattern). A wooden
fence runs diagonally off to my left and stops at the driveway
to the back of the house. The land behind the fence is two
feet lower than in front. The fence isn't planted in the
earth; four-by-fours prop it up against the difference in
ground height.
There's a forest of olive trees off to my right, and the
neighbor's house is gone. I wonder, /Is this an older or a
newer time?/
I go over and put my hand on the cut edge of a fence slat.
It looks like weathered fir but feels like balsa wood.
Next dream. My (dead) stepfather Roland rides me downhill
on a horse through dry-grass hills to an artificially green,
landscaped, new housing development. The place is a
pumped-water oasis in the summer-dry California Sierra Nevada
foothills. It's cold, too cold for how poorly I'm dressed, but
I have a knitted hat and I pull it on all the way down to
cover my neck; there's a hole in the front for my eyes and
nose.
The housing development's eye-catching highway sign is a
huge, tilted house with every angle askew. Clever.
Around the back of the weird sign-house is the real-estate
man's shack. A big, stupid boy answers the door and yells for
his dad at the top of his lungs, though his dad is right next
to him. Their big, bulbous-headed dog menaces me. I close my
eyes and tuck in my fingers. "He won' hurtcha," the man says.
"He won' hurcha. /GET IN THERE!/" The dog goes back inside.
Was the dog the stupid boy?
Roland concludes whatever business he had here and we ride
away. I see myself on the back of the horse, reflected in the
crooked house's windows. Now I'm wearing a black and white
hooded cape. Our own two dogs follow along behind us (I don't
recognize them; one is some kind of useless poodlish rat-dog
and the other is a big, graceful, yellow dog with pointed
ears-- it's limping but not making a big deal out of it.
We get off the horse and examine the dog's paw; foxtails
have broken through the skin and pack the paw to bursting.
Roland says, "Dammit, we got through a whole year without
this." He jogs away to get a car to take the dog to the vet,
leaving me with the horse and the dogs. I take all the
stickers out of the dog's paw, get on the horse and ride back
up into the hills. The dog's fine now. Only now it occurs to
me that I should have waited for Roland. Oh, well.
Next dream. I'm driving a very heavy, very powerful truck
with a complicated transmission of several knobs and levers--
like the water truck I drove in Wyoming in 1979. I'm taking
truckloads of something (?) from the house Juanita and I used
to live in in Caspar (CA) around the right side of the house
and down a straight road to another house that's where the old
oil-tank foundation ruins are in real life. It's a dark night.
I make several runs without discovering or being particularly
interested in what I'm moving.
Now it's daytime. Ronald Reagan, at the age he was when he
was president, sits on a rock, listening to a portable phone.
On the phone, his daughter tells him everything that pissed
her off about his forgetfulness even before he got
Alzheimer's. She feels okay about talking to him like this
because /what does it matter now?/ He won't remember her
disrespect.
He's not even listening. He looks up at an airplane as if
he's never seen an airplane before. I think, /That's a good
airplane to start with./ It's an attractive airplane-- it has
a nice shape and it flies very slowly. The slower and quieter
the better, with airplanes.
Reagan's daughter's voice coming out of the phone rises
and falls like the sound of bees.
I notice that the rock he's sitting on is made of
concrete. Is that what I'm moving? Concrete rocks?
My dreams from Saturday morning, 2/16/2:
First dream. I'm in the very-familiar-feeling, narrow,
muddy cowfield on the right side of 101 going south, between
Petaluma and Novato. I have the feeling I've been in this
field before, in happier times. I recognize these
house-foundation-shaped ridges of pastel-green adobe, and I
know why it's pastel-green and why it's only a little harder
than congealed pesto sauce-- it's stiffened with green
horseshit instead of straw --and too much (or too little) of
it, so it's only a little harder than congealed pesto sauce,
and I know all this because /I'm the inventor of
capital-H-capital-A /Horseshit Adobe/. And I have to walk
across these structures of it to get into, or out of, the
nebulous boundaries of where I am in the field.
I'm under pressure to prove that it's possible to use
locally available materials to /get out of or into anywhere/.
The Horseshit Adobe ridges run up and across nice, new,
expensive-looking couches whose (ruined) upholstery is the
same color as the adobe. It doesn't occur to me to simply make
a causeway of the furniture and walk out across that. (Though
now, awake, I realize I'd have to have stood in the muck to
move the furniture.)
I investigate jump points-- places where it might be
possible to get a running start on a straight section of ridge
and jump over the intervening soup of mud and animal waste.
I'm like a 19th-century Scottish bridge engineer.
Superimposed on all this is a ride standing up in the back
of a pickup truck, leaning forward over the cab as it goes
along the straight but up-and-down section of the road I used,
when I was in high school, to ride my bike down to get to the
shortcut into the trails through the park area around Folsom
Lake. It was a very light bicycle and I could get up to
motorbike speeds on the long downhill, and there were
potholes. Nobody wore a helmet in those days, either.
Next dream. My point of view flies around in a big movie
multiplex after closing, when everyone's gone home. An usher
boy has been asleep on an army cot in the bathroom. He wakes
up worried that he'll be fired. Now I'm the usher and this is
an army hospital. Juanita has just found me after a long
search through official records. She walks next to me up a
hall, directs me to answer a payphone. I say, "Marco here. How
can I help you?" Juanita's recorded voice comes out of the
wireless handset and I carry it away, listening to Juanita
talking from the phone about geometric proofs while she walks
along beside me, saying nothing.
We come into a busy, loud, all-metal cafeteria-- metal
walls, floor, ceiling, tables, stools (bolted down), etc. The
place is full of Juanita's loud, confident,
Renaissance-Faire-type friends. I settle down to wait out this
ordeal. I'm not comfortable with these people. It's not that I
don't like them --I like them; I just always want to get away.
After awhile I have to go to the restroom, so where is it?
/It's right there.../ I go into a long, narrow, metal closet,
lock the door behind me with the metal button in the metal
doorknob, and piss into the single toilet-bowl-shaped
depression in the stainless-steel bench molded into the long
left-hand wall. The stream of piss is an erratic spray,
impossible to aim, and it gets worse. Why? I examine my dick
in the very bright light and discover that the German helmet
on the end is torn; it's splitting like cooked-soft porkchop
fat tears apart. There's no blood. It's white inside.
Other soft parts of my body are coming apart now --going
soft and tearing. I shouldn't move. I should sit down and hold
still until whatever's happening stops. /Why should it stop?/
And what if everyone in the hospital is in danger of this
and I'm just the first one it's happened to? I've got to warn
them!
The door is so far away. I try to shout but I can feel my
throat smoothly, painlessly tearing open from the effort to
squeeze enough air to make a sound.
When I woke, I felt a connection between the sense of my
body tearing apart in the dream and the sound of rain spitting
on the roof, though in the dream the tearing was silent. I
thought about that for awhile. It interested me that it
/seemed to mean something/.
I think this applies to when people mistakenly insist that
their dream has come true through some sort of supernatural
agency, or that they have, or had, the magical power to see
the future (beyond simple anticipation). The mind manufactures
connections after the fact. Coincidence provides fuel for
superstition, but in the absense of even the least remarkable
coincidence a sleeping or sleepy or otherwise disordered brain
often produces the feeling of connection and significance
where there is none, and a rich and profound feeling of deep
meaning may come along with this, as in a religious epiphany
and/or a drug experience and/or paranoid schizophrenia.
I have a friend who told me that years ago he heard /his/
long-lost old friend's telephone-like voice in a dream, and
immediately the phone rang and there was the very person's
voice, same pitch, timbre, cadence, and same words. My friend
insists on that sequence of events --dreamed sentence, then
real-life sentence-- because that's the way he remembers it.
I don't dispute that he remembers it that way. But memory
is not anything like a linear, unbroken strip of recording
film in a flawless clockwork mechanism; the brain is wet and
slippery and tolerances are not tight, especially in someone
who's subjected his brain to a vast pharmacopoeia of
incapacitating recreational drugs. I suggested that he was
sleeping, dreaming, the phone rang, he answered it, his friend
spoke the line and his sleepy brain inserted the data in two
places instead of one.
Now, that was a case where a person who sees the world in
mystical terms would rather believe that my friend saw --or
heard-- the future a few seconds in advance. There's no way to
prove either point of view, but my suggestion is simpler,
adequately explains the only facts we have to go on, and so
/is more likely to be true./
In the case of people who dream a situation that occurs
not right away but much later --weeks later; years later--
it's probably not due to an accident of memory position but to
the general unreliability of memory. People remember the hits
and forget or disregard the millions of misses-- hence they're
amazed at the million-to-one nature of the hits and they think
of them as evidence for psychic activity. And then those hits
get told and retold, further fooling the wider audience into
thinking something supernatural and psychic is going on, when
it just isn't. The astronomical number of opportunities for
such coincidental match-ups to occur, even sometimes to the
same person over and over, clearly doesn't call for bringing
fairyland into play, especially when so-called psychics use
well-known, well-defined, /teachable/ tricks of cold reading
(look up cold reading) to augment the false impression that
they have a line into the Other World or the future. There's a
tremendous amount of money in it, as with the New Age
religions and systems, Est, Eck, (etc.), psychology,
Scientology, the Lucidity Institute (of the recent ad-spam in
this newsgroup), and so on --not to mention the Old Age
religions-- because a tremendous number of people have not the
slightest grasp of logic where their feelings are concerned.
Reasoning powers don't come hard-wired in everyone to the same
degree. Humanity has spent thousands of years clawing its way
up out of shamanism and animism and pantheism and deism and
we've battered our way out of the clutches of the priests and
priestesses and the divine-right rulers and we're finally in a
position to dispense with all that superstitious crap, but the
overwhelming lot of people still want very much to /believe/
in everlasting life or absolute meaning or angels or
something-for-nothing on a personal level, and not a few of
them are willing to pay for someone to tell them what they
want to hear, and if they have the money to do so, well,
whatever. But they have the money because of the tremendous
wealth that came from a scientific approach to the world.
Ironic, no?
Oh, speaking of which, did you read about po' Miss Cleo?
She got a li'l too greedy. I predict that in the court case
against her for /three hundred million dollars' worth of phone
fraud/, hundreds and perhaps thousands of the millions of
people who paid her $50, $100, $1000, more, will come forward
and speak to the court about her in glowing terms-- about how
she saved their lives and changed their lives and made their
lives worth living by telling them things she and her staff of
psychics in the boiler room couldn't possibly have known about
them. And they believe. And (sob, weep, moan, gabble in
tongues) /please/ don't make her give that money back, nor any
money back to the thousands of people who were forced to pay
for what they were told were "free" phone calls and who are
understandably pissed off. Please, for she is a saint.
(Please. The average non-negotiable payment for a "free" phone
consultation to the Psychic Network turns out to be $60.)
That's what I predict, anyway. You watch and see if it
doesn't come true.
And ya know what? I think those defrauded people should
count it as a lesson. I think that when Miss Cleo loses the
case the money should go to early primary school education in
philosophy and logic --heavily concentrate the money in
trouble-spot states like Kansas where school boards have
recently let slide the hard-won separation of church and state
in favor of so-called scientific creationism and so-called
Intelligent Design.
-30-
yoda jedi
Well, you have very clear judgements about everything. This is why
you have so many particular (idosyncratic) adjectives in your dreams.
Have you noticed this? Galaxy-class tree mangler?
There is nothing wrong with 'knowing everything.' The real question
is, is Marco happy knowing everything? And only you can answer that.
I don't believe that you are. I think that you came to the dreaming
world looking desperately to be surprised. To be shocked. To find
something new and exciting. So you don't have to feel so damned old.
That is exactly why I came. To free myself from my prior judgements
about everything. I don't want to be 'right' anymore.
But, let's stick to the subject, because I do believe that I'm the man
who can offer you an explanation of the psychic phenomenon that you
can understand or accept.
The psychic phenomenon is the left-counterpart of reason and
rationality. They are related. In one, you can know something by
reasoning it. In another, you can know something by NOT reasoning it.
They are simply mirror-images of each other. You have a choice which
tool to use. But using one (reason / rationality) doesn't negate the
existence of the other.
Skipping forward, you have free will to believe whatever you want to
believe. Believe it or not (free choice there too), it makes no
difference to God what you accept or deny. God is not capable of
taking it personally. Anyone who says so, or anyone with a bumper
sticker on his car that says, 'If you're going to live your life like
there is no God... you'd better be sure !! ' with little red flames at
the bottom --- this person doesn't know God. For the God you are
seeking is Yourself. You are only seeking to be Marco. Who you truly
are.
Free will is given to you .. to everyone ... but it's not necessarily
a 'gift' for someone with such an autocratic and indulgent nature as
yourself. And I mean that in the nicest possible way. I felt pretty
much the same, and still do. Free will is not all it's cracked up to
be. By which I mean, I am much more inclined to simply take away the
free wills of other people in any given circumstance, for my own
personal gain. It's much faster. Instead of believing in psychic
phenomenon and trying to explain it to you, I would rather just take
your free will away from you in order that you see it for yourself.
Unfortunately, that is impossible. You can not even take away your
own free will. How could you?
Objective truth is not autocratic, and you are expecting it to be.
You have assumed that if God existed, he would be like you, slamming
his fist on the table, commanding worship from his puny and controlled
subjects. Forcing his will upon everyone with his Almighty-ness.
Is that not so? Didn't you already have a picture of what God would
be if God existed? Don't deny it. You believe that God doesn't exist
because you would be a different way if you were God, no?
Think about it before you answer. That is all I ask. Think about it.
Every good scientific discovery comes from a desire to be wrong about
assumptions. Are you so sure that you want to be right about
everything that you've said in your post? Wouldn't you rather be
wrong?
Only you can say what makes you happy. That's why you have free will
in the first place. Me, I am happier having a little mystery in life.
I have never seen God (at least not the God that I have wanted to
see) but I have my hopes.
Marco McClean
> Is that not so? Didn't you already have a picture of what God would
> be if God existed? Don't deny it. You believe that God doesn't exist
> because you would be a different way if you were God, no?
>
> Think about it before you answer. That is all I ask. Think about it.
> Every good scientific discovery comes from a desire to be wrong about
> assumptions. Are you so sure that you want to be right about
> everything that you've said in your post? Wouldn't you rather be
> wrong?
>
> Only you can say what makes you happy. That's why you have free will
> in the first place. Me, I am happier having a little mystery in life.
> I have never seen God (at least not the God that I have wanted to
> see) but I have my hopes.
JJ, happy people don't dwell on whether they're happy or not. And whether or not
God exists doesn't interest me. And no, I don't have a picture of what God would be
like; I have all the pictures of what thousands of others insist God is like, and
they're all equally boring.
If you get a kick out of reading my dreams, I'm happy. I only write them out
because I like to.
You base the things you say to me partly on your screwy interpretations of my
dreams. But my point of view in dreams is not who I am. I remember learning in an
anthropology class that certain primitive tribes made public policy based on dreams,
and that there was one tribe --I forget the name-- where if a man had a dream that
one of his wives was unfaithful, he was justified in killing her in real life for her
behavior in his dream. That's just crazy, and anyone who isn't crazy can see that it
is.
yoda jedi
Well, who cares who other people think God is? The Gods that the
humans have created are all ones more or less based on fear. The
religious thinking therefore has always been, you had BETTER care ...
or else!
Yet you already know that that is unnatural. It is unnatural to care
what other people think or say that God is. But you are wrong in that
you don't have a picture in your mind about what God is. Your God
does not exist. And that, by itself is a picture of God. We can say
that you believe in a God that does not exist.
What I am driving at is plain. There is no way for there to be
not-God because when not-God is God, God is 'not' -- which is another
form of being, is it not?
The reason the God question is important is that it drives directly to
the heart of Life and Life's experience, by definition. The name
'God' is given to that sublime form of human experience. The concept
of God is bonded to all good existential questions. All good
inquiries about the meaning of life will naturally reflect one's views
on God.
This is particularly the case with you. You don't believe that God
exists, is this correct? You don't believe that dreams are
meaningful. And I suspect that neither do you believe that life has
any meaning or agenda. (To be fair, I never asked you, I just assumed
it).
I am working on the assumption that you are relatively unhappy.
Again, your testimony may differ. But what I have seen in your dreams
is a dissonant, gritty, teeth-grinding experience of Life.
I see less of it now than I did before. But let's just stay with my
assumptions, because I am going somewhere with this.
No one is going to argue that being able to kill your wife because you
dreamt she was cheating on you means that you live in an advanced
civilization in which dreams are held up as important, prophetic or
meaningful.
However, there is meaning to dreams. There is meaning to life. Life
can be understood. Life can be manipulated, created, analyzed.
Hidden and deeper meanings, larger understandings ... are all
available to you.
I am saying, have always been saying, that you can put this off for as
long as you like. You can deny this. But my experience has been that
life doesn't end when you die. My experience, direct and personal,
has been that life never ends. You -- Marco -- can never die.
You can take my word for this (unlikely) or you can see for yourself.
But what I am saying is that, as long as you can never die, why not
use your intelligence for good purposes? If life is truly
meaningless, and it is, in a sense, why not manufacture meaning for
it?
I am saying and I have been saying that your views on God and dreams
create your experience on God and dreams. If you are happy with your
experience -- and I do not really have the right, ultimately, to tell
you if you are or not -- then by all means, continue believing what
you believe.
If you are not happy with your experience, and long for a greater
experience, I can make good suggestions on how to do that, given your
gifts and talents. And the first suggestion that I would make, if you
wanted a greater, larger experience of yourself ... would be for you
to open your mind.
Forget about psychic ability. I mean just open your mind to the
possibility that you might be wrong. Open your mind to the possiblity
that life's deepest truths are all axiomatic (which you are remarkably
close-mineded to). Open your mind to the fact that there are people
on this earth who aren't idiots. Who have thought long and hard about
things, whose guidance is to be trusted and valued.
I have observed from your dreams that you have difficulties with all
of the above. Not a personal attack, by the way, just an observation.
If you open your mind, you might be surprised. Surprises can be
pleasant.
I'm done. But I'd like to say more about dreams and psychic ability.
Think about dreaming as what is on your left mind. What you are
thinking now is what is on your 'right' mind. These minds are both
always thinking. You are merely moving from one side to another by
waking and sleeping.
What you do, think, and say during the day can be on your left mind at
night, just as what you do think and say during the night can be on
your right mind during the day.
Next time you are lucid, think about this. You will find, in the
dream state, it is MUCH easier to observe that the dream state is just
a mirror image of your waking state.
Now for the asymmetry. If you are of two minds, which could we say is
'you'? You mentioned before that you don't see yourself in your
dreams, and that is true: you don't. That's true with everyone that
they see more of themselves in their right-mind than they do in their
left.
Psychic ability, as I said before, is just the left-brain counterpart
to rationality and reasoned thinking. They can't exist without each
other. Knowing something through illogic and knowing through logic
must BOTH exist for anything at all to be knowable.
Think about that. You'll see that it's a trapping of relativity.
When you define a think, such as logic, you have to have a not-it, and
a nether-it that contains logic and illogic.
These are much easier to understand in the lucid state. So you can
try it if you want. I gotta go now. I hope this has been
enlightening, or at least interesting. My boss is glaring at me.
Gotta go.