my dreams have been intense lately.

i just had to wake up at like 7am to write down one about micah bleeding out and possibly dying. crazy.

i’ve started posting all of my dreams here again.

i need to stop sitting in bad positions too, as i am doing right this second. i’ve been having some circulation problems lately. i should get a physical soon. i should take better care of myself…

i am listening to oldies. i am thinking about death.

not in any suicidal way, mind you. i just woke up with death on the mind (dream excerpt from facebook, below), and it can’t help but have colored my day in a rainy shade of grey.

Dreamt I went thru the death sequence of my Caucasian male equivalent. It began like a movie intro, w/ highly-stylized credits alongside images of “me.” Dream-time shifted to real-time during this sequence, so striking it roused me from sleep to lucidity. I began to will the sequence’s continuation, but an awareness of pressure on the left side of my skull forced me to wake.

>>> responses to my asking people to share their death experience dreams:

rachel:

Since I was little I would have dreams where a mob of people were being chased by some force or creature that we knew was coming, where we just knew we were doomed, and rather than running I would just give in and decide that I’d rather die than keep running in fear. Two of these I remember well. One where I was helping an entire classroom of little girls in nightgowns escape through a broken window out into the snow, waiting to be shot and just went out in the hallway to take a bullet in the face. Another was a grocery store and everyone was running and screaming and looking for places to hide. The whole dream was from the monster’s point of view. I decided to walk out into the center checkstand and end it all.

john:

Here’s one that I’ll paraphrase briefly. Me and this other person are running from a spectral figure who appears to us as Hurley from Lost. We keep running from him, and he’s one step ahead of us all the way. Eventually, we think we’ve gotten away from him and decide to go hide out in a restaurant, just to find him there, apparently just finishing his meal and bullshitting with the owner. The message is clear, we can’t get away. I start to walk out of the restaurant, then get kind of annoyed and decide to confront him. I roll into the restaurant and say, “hey, what the fuck, why don’t you just kill me?” To which he stands up, looks at me kind of joke menacingly and puts his hand on my neck. He then projects a future scenario to me (which I’m not really comfortable talking about). I see this thing from multiple perspectives and after the vision is done, he just kind of laughs and tells me: “Dude, I can’t, becuase of that.” He then proceeds to laugh and tell me: “that’s going to be awesome.”

max:

well, i haven’t had any crazy dreams in a while, but a couple weeks ago i was meditating for about an hour a day everyday and it started getting kind of crazy. during one session i imagined i was a fish. at first i was imagining the basic feeling of swimming in that kind of body, almost like i was a mermaid. but suddenly i just became a fish. i had trained myself not to react to negative emotions, to just feel them. and it was really scary! i was actually a fish! and suddenly i was in a school of fish and there was this instantaneous connectedness to them. i was sort of in the middle left of the school. i could zoom in and out to see myself but felt the movement of ‘myself’ only. one movement by one fish was every movement by every fish — but each fish had their own will. we just all felt eachothers’ will. there was a kind of electric telepathy. then suddenly we were frantic and it took a minute to realize why: we were being chased by a shark! and then the school broke up and i was alone, swimming by myself having no one, and i tried to hold on to the feeling but then i became myself, and i cried a little because it was really realy really fucking sad. yeah. it was sad because i lost all my friends and family. that’s exactly how it felt.

careen:

I dreamed that I saw a ritual dismemberment in process- there was the body without four limbs or head, upright. I understood that the body was mine just as the medicine man was hacking off the breast with a sharpened stone. there was not a feeling of pain. I remember ‘ascending’- that I understood I was leaving the vessel, and there was a strong sound of acknowledgment of the spirit leaving the body. not a keening per se, but a cry- aiaiaiaiai

i rather like to explore the concept of death in an open way. we are so frightened of it as a society. i am not unfrightened of death, but i think i live life pretty well with it in mind. actually, aaron and i recently had a conversation about whether we’d want to pass away in sleep or to have an interesting death. he had an uncle pass away in his sleep… painless, i guess. guess the dude was sleeping and then his wife came to lay next to him to take a nap, and they slept together, and when she awoke, he was gone. our mutual thoughts on the matter were that perhaps a more interesting death would afford one waking moments of reflection… for maybe you don’t get those in sleep? or maybe you do. it’s a mystery…

in any case.
so many of these old ’50s songs and such center around themes of youthful death, and dying… or if not that, just general overwhelming sadness. why are they so very sad? and then… why is the music, by contrast, so cheerful???????????? music is so much a ‘mood’ thing… how did they perform and dance these songs, singing these absolutely devastating lyrics, without considering the very apparent duality????????

randomly picked a video to watch last night because i couldn’t get “the machinist” to work (see below)… and came across this ted talk with patricia burchat, a physicist. she talks about dark matter and dark energy, and how they are two different, contrasting partners working together to expand the universe while bringing it together at the same time… essentially. or so my sleep brain thought. perhaps you should watch.

there’s this trailer for terrence malick’s “the tree of life” which will be coming out sometime in the near future.

the trailer is fucking -beautiful- and the film seems to cover heftily the concept of duality within oneself, which is ever, ever present. fuck, is it ever present! i don’t know how it plans to cover such a lofty topic — not that i am proposing that this is the exact topic of the entire movie but it certainly seems a notable portion — in such a short time period.

other than all this, though, i am crazy into this song right now: bobby blue’s “sincere replies”.

granted, i am listening to the damien jurado and richard swift cover, from this remarkable free album of covers that the two came out last month or something. it was an instant like, but now it is like a… FUUUUUUUCK. so good. listen below.

i will be embarking on a series of papercuts. soon. very soon. hefty.

peculiarities.

two people now, that i’ve happened to see through other people’s facebooks, have died the day right after their birthday… how… bizarre… one guy has a horoscope on his profile next to his thing, which is creepy post-mortem.

anyway.

i don’t even know what i would do if someone close to me were to pass away. never had to experience. hopefully will never have to <– not possible. hopefully won't have to experience anytime soon. <– possible, but it's be really shitty if i did never experience it, because that would mean i would either have no friends at some point or i would beat all of them in death. ALL THESE OPTIONS SUCK.

with the internet culture it's interesting how people come to mourn friends who have passed away… with tagged photos… with mysterious e-messages left to dead individuals…

you wonder if you pass if people will know. somehow they seem to find out, though. the chain that potentially leads people to know about one's death really, really fascinates me. how would it go down were it me? and because my friend circles are so fragmented… how many somewhat close friends wouldn't even know? i wonder. it's fascinating to think about.

the way it should be.

I’m listening to… Bright Eyes’ Cassadaga album.

I don’t know if this is kosher to re-post, but I’m doing it anyway, considering I’m going to link to the original. I woke up at 10am this morning after going to bed at 4am last night again. My sleep schedule is so whacked, I tell you. But whatever. Or maybe it’s not whacked. I wake up refreshed… so maybe it’s good. It’s strange, though… I wake up with a halt, and immediately a buncha thoughts start pouring in… it’s like my body has been wanting to wake up all night (and in the event of last night, I did wake up like three times) to harass me with thoughts, but I force it to sleep so that my mind will STFU.

I woke up and was a bit of a zombie, staring off, not doing much other than listening to Bright Eyes… I told Jeanette that I didn’t know what to do with myself for the moment. She told me to go to gdgt and I told her I hate technology, so she directed me to a blog entitled, Matt, Liz, & Madeline. I hate the way this guy writes and I essentially find reading his blog to be a really painful experience (due to the spacing, mostly), but there was an interesting two days in his life where his baby was born and then his wife died within 48 hours afterwards. I’m going to copy and paste a clip from this post below. I found it particularly sweet…

the memorial service for liz

is in less than

7 hours.

i was thinking about

the rather

unconventional memorial service

we had for

liz

in pasadena…

first,

we turned off

the standard funeral music

(on eagle’s wings)

and replaced it with some

of our own

(arcade fire, smog, sun kil moon, steve reid ensemble, etc).

funeral director came running in

and turned it off

thinking it was a mistake.

i gave him hell for it.

it was turned back on.

then the service started.

and i don’t remember anything

after that.

i apparently said, “fuck”

as in,

“this fucking sucks”

and i was told

(after the service)

by the same funeral director

who shut down the

indie-rock funeral soundtrack

that i was the first

person to ever utter the

word, “fuck”

in his chapel.

i don’t know

if he thought it was

awesome

or

if he was pissed off.

not too sure

how things will

go

in a few hours

but,

the soundtrack will remain the same

and i’ll likely be the first person to

say “fuck” in the chapel

at lakewood cemetery

in the mpls.

That being said, Jeanette was saying that the internet basically banded together to help him cope and get by as a single parent, giving his sympathies and advice. And a year and a half later, I wonder… with so many people wrapped up in his blog (obviously) and why it got famous in the first place… I feel like moving on for him will be difficult, or even maybe taboo in the eyes of some of these social observers. Just saying.

r.i.p. michael.

Michael Jackson is DEAD. What the fuck!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!? Bernie Mac dying was weird, but Michael Jackson dying is soooooooooooooooooooo surreal. :0 :0 :0 Sucks for all those concerts that were sold out in record time in London!!!! All 40 shows with the King of Pop, down the DRAIN.

Don’t do drugs, kids!
Don’t eat like a slob, kids!

Why do celebrities always die of heart-related things?!!!

CAN YOU IMAGINE THE SHEER NUMBER OF TIMES MICHAEL JACKSON’S NAME HAS BEEN MENTIONED IN THE PAST 24 HOURS!!?

MUST BE INSANE!!!

moths and shit.

Oh man.

I grabbed a cup to catch a moth, because I NEVER kill bugs. I always just pick up spiders on a piece of newspaper and have them run all over it… and then just throw the newspaper outside because I’m scared of actually touching them or whatever.

When Mike came home just now, a moth flew in with him. This was the HUGEST fucking moth ever, like, the size of a quarter or larger in one direction… so I grabbed an empty cup and tried putting it around it but it flew away because I did it too slow. So, I was patiently waiting for it to land… so I could put the cup around it and catch it again, but Mike’s like, “Give that to me,” and he grabbed the cup from my hands… and I figured he was going to do what I was OBVIOUSLY trying to do. But no. He grabbed that, and grabbed one of my DVDs, and smashed the SHIT out of it.

Defeated my purpose entirely.

Fuck. -__- I feel bad.