Conspiracy to Murder

I had the weirdest most stressful nightmare... I dreamt that some of my male friends murdered a girl and hid her body.

What a horrible thing to see a person you love doing! But not so much, as in most dreams, what you "know" is not quite what is real in the waking world. I was at a party, and parts of the setting looked simply like any garden, parts like the old garden at my grandparent's house which always features prominently in my dreams. I knew the guys at the party were "my friends" but I could honestly not recognize many of them. I recognized my exboyfriend whose nickname prompts me to dub him C. and one of my friends from high school, an artist who I very much admire, let's call him S. Both of them are among the nicest people I've met and neither murdered anyone... even in my dream. They were just at this fateful party.

I remember walking around and seeing a group of these guys talking and chopping something up with an axe. Next day I was to hear them discussing the incident and was able to put two and two together and figure out that what they were chopping up was the body of a young woman. She had died as a result of a stupid party accident, was the vague idea I had in my dream.

I remember being furious at them, absolutely FURIOUS. I remember a bunch of "adults" were discussing the event and had the typical justification of "let's not ruin the lives of these young men" and I was LIVID. My father was among these parents and miscellaneous adults and that made me particularly hateful of the whole reaction.

I got into a fight with one of my friends. I think I got the stressful feeling from this bit, but also a bit of exhilaration, because I knew that what I was doing was the RIGHT thing. I told this friend that what he and the others had done was an EVIL thing and that I wanted no part in it. I took my stuff and left.

I was very afraid in the dream but also so angry I managed to avoid the fear. It turned into one of those dreams where you are running from someone. I knew my friends knew I knew... They knew I disapproved and would go to the police even if what I had seen was not very clear and even when I really didn't know quite what happened. So I was running because I was logically afraid of someone trying to do something to get me to shut up.

I remember how determined I was and I remember, strangely enough, thinking that they couldn't scare me! I lived alone! They had no leverage over me! (I have no idea why this had any sort of relevance to my dream predicament)

I woke up just after sitting down someplace and meeting someone who was to play the role of good Samaritan. They would help me out. It would be okay.

Another friend of mine appeared in the dream as well, a girl we'll call Y. She appeared when I was very angrily throwing rocks at the house where the party had taken place. She came out the backdoor, which also looked very much like the back door of my grandparents' old house. She wanted to tell me she very much supported me leaving and calling the police and I told her very emphatically that she should come with me! She couldn't stay here! It was dangerous!

For one reason or another she wouldn't come with me, but she told me what the stupid party accident had been about. The guys had made this girl climb into an air vent.... because she was small and thin? For a bet? As a dare? I don't know, but she had died there and they had panic and somehow they were very much responsible.

I think Y had decided to stay at the house because the young girl had a baby and neither of us had any idea where the baby was or who had kept it.

At the moment it was a maddening and stressful and outrageous... but I woke up half-relieved, that I had done the right thing and not let my friends get away with murder... even my oniric friends...

Dream Libraries

(Transcribed from my iPhone voice notes)

I dreamt of a huge library. I think in my dream it was the Library of Alexandria or something like that. It was hidden underground and we were going there through an expedition... It looked a little like the Disney movie Atlantis.

There were lots of boxes and chests, colorful containers of great secrets. Eventually I had to fight... Well, no, it wasn't me. The main character of my dream had to fight some sort of Satan-like figure. There were lots of motifs in the dream that looked kabbalistic. The main character character of the dream was like an angel of wisdom, who started out as a human being, incarnate... she had to wake up to this identity of hers.

There were tarot motifs and it reminded me a little of the movie the Ninth Gate.

In the end, she had to take all the objects that had survived the fight, the disaster. They were huge chests full of things. The chests opened like puzzles (in real life I have a wooden box that opens like this). And it was not just that these huge chests were full of books and scrolls, or even full of magical things... they were like doors, providing access to other dimensions. They were magical themselves.

And one of the chests... someone was going to have to become the guardian of this chest. Little by little they were going to have to release the information in this chest. The way it opened, this chest... this puzzle... it could take you to different places, if you opened it correctly or in different ways.

When we opened it, people who weren't the guardians of this chest, it took us to see a place that looked like the fields of Elysium... and there was an enemy of ours there (must be all the Saint Seiya I've been watching lately).

The guardian of this chest was Polly, my cat, and she had to learn how to use it and teach me how to use it myself. And it seemed like I wasn't the first person who had to... well, once more, not me, but rather the main character of the dream... The main character was not the first person who would have this role, as guardian of all this information, all this knowledge, but rather, it was something to be inherited, something to be remembered.

There was a sort of battle in the dream, and we lost a lot of this informaton, of the chests and treasures carried by the expedition. And it was a tragedy, because so much knowledge was lost. We had lost these things because of that devil-like figure, this dream-Satan who kept trying to trip us up.

It seemed like a sort of illumination, like reaching an awareness of one-self. The protagonist of the dream had to realize that she was the guardian of all this knowledge, all these magical things, these talismans, little by little. She had to wake up, little by little, to her role as the person chosen to take care of all of this.

(Told you I had a cat puzzle box)

Review: A Brief History of Time

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I used to look at this book and think that it was written for very smart people who understood math... which I obviously didn't. That's why I never set out to read it. I'm a literature student, and I naively thought that science, especially science as "complicated" as cosmology, was not meant for me. But recently I've had to do some research on astrophysics related stuff and I decided to give myself a chance and just try and read the damn thing. It was popular science book, so it should be simple enough?

HA!

Well, half of it I understood and and the half that I did I probably misinterpreted totally, BUT it was incredibly interesting and I learned so much! Even though somehow I feel LESS smart after reading it, I'm very glad I took the chance. As per the advice of some people, I'm going to be watching documentaries on some of the topics that were most difficult for me; mainly the chapters on quantum and particle physics. I flew through the chapters on black holes, they were super interesting and not quite as hard to wrap my head around.

I'll probably have to read the whole thing again with a pencil in hand and three other books, but I don't regret starting my research with this. If nothing else it taught me that even though I'm bad at math and understand half of what I read, there ain't no such a thing in science as "not for me".

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Review: The Virgin Suicides

The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Having been a suicidal teenage girl, being friends with lots of suicidal girls, still suffering from depression... this is a strange book to me. I remember watching and being fascinated by the movie. I loved the book's prose, what lots of people have written about it, how evocative, hazy and sensual it is.

But while reading I kept remembering that it was written by a man. Someone here wrote that the book is more the story of the boys watching the Lisbon girls than of the girls themselves and I believe that. I like those sort of books though, the ones written by men romanticizing and idolazing women, showing us how they view us as incomprehensible but tantallizing creatures.

I guess that's why Sofia Coppola wanted to direct it, thought at times the sheer distance and bafflement of the boys is faintly offensive. Girls locked up in a house and not permitted to go to school or get a job or find any way out of their situation and you wonder why they killed themselves? No shit Sherlock...

I thought the most real bit of insight the boys had on the Lisbon girls was when they realized Lux had made advances on them only to give her sisters time to die in peace... I wonder why the author let Mary live only to kill herself again? I would have let her live, the way the author let Lux have sex: a reminder to the narrators that their mythical suicidal virgins weren't as suicidal or as virginal as they wanted to imagine them to be.

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The Garden and the Riddle

As always I've abandoned this blog for the last four years. Half of it is because I had a horrible anxiety crisis that left me BARELY hanging on for a couple of years, with just enough energy to work and finally finish my studies (all I need to do now is finish my damn thesis!)... but also because said anxiety made it supremely DISTRESSING to attempt the introspection required by journaling. I HATED having to think of my life and avoided it when at all possible.

I got very into audiobooks because they let me exist without having to face the silence. Even music wasn't cutting it anymore...

I'm feeling better now. I feel like this last month of August I took the first REAL break from working I've taken since 2011 when I decided to work on my degree again. Last year I managed to finish the last bit I needed to graduate other than thesis writing. But I was in a financial hellhole since my job wasn't really paying me anymore. There was a huge earthquake in Mexico City and I felt very much adrift and uncertain...

For the first time in years I have savings and was able to take a LONG vacation where I didn't have to work at all and where I could just read whatever I pleased and draw whenever it stuck my fancy.

I hadn't realized how much I needed it. I needed it so badly that I'm finally ready to start journalling again. I needed something to jumpstart the journaling so I decided to start writing down my dreams again, as long as they seem at all interestin. I might eventually just decide to do a physical dream journal, the bullet journal was fun.

This is what I dreamed last night:

I dreamt of a girl who was very beautiful. She seemed wealthy too, a real catch. The sort of girl who is always being pursued by someone in a shakespearean play. She lives in a garden she was building herself. She seems to have servants, handmaidens... friends, certainly someone who could serve as a confidant. She is hiding but doesn't know why? There is a pond and flowers and trees in her garden but she shares it with others. There are animals in her garden: tame iguanas (probably because I just saw a couple of them during my holiday), her pond has fish in it and of course there are kittens frolicking around, though I am not sure of these last.

She is speaking with someone, gossiping, beneath a canopy of trees when she sees a man come inside her gate, over the cobblestone path.

She knows this man.

He is tall and very handsome and he is looking for her. She greets him warmly... too warmly. They have been intimate before and she wishes to be intimate again, but he stops her kindly. He hasn't come to see her for this but on behalf of someone else. Is it his lord? Yes and no. Certainly the person he speaks for is important but I sense they are more equals than not and that this man is doing the lord a favor, because he knows her. He comes with a marriage proposal for her.


She has never seen this lord, she much prefers the man instea. But the man says: Marry him and he can make you a garden just as beautiful as this one and you won't have to share it. Somehow this is important to her; after all the work she has put in here she is loath to leave her home, but a garden she won't have to share sounds lovely. She is intrigued. The lord lives far away though... in the moon? It gives me a sort of Sailor Moon vibe, with a beautiful, powerful home where none should be possible. Her new garden would always be among the dark and the stars, no beautiful blue sky, though a night garden has its own peculiar charm...

The man brings her another token from her suitor: a riddle! And this truly catches her attention with an element of vanity. This lord has sought her out not for her beauty or her wealth but for her intelligence. Somehow this riddle is as much a gift as a cry for help. The implication is that if she marries him and solves this riddle for him, she will set him free. From a curse? From a promise? It's not terribly clear.

There is a sense that her suitor cannot appear to her until she has solved the riddle. I have been reading about Eros and Psyche and might have gotten the idea from them. They are also a love triangle like Tristan, Iseult and King Mark, in that the girl much prefers the envoy to the suitor, but also like Cesario, Olivia and Orsino. Yet this suitor is smarter than the other two, for he offers her gifts that will interest her as well as flatter her and that show her he sees her clearly for what and who she is.

I don't remember the riddle, but it was long and very beautiful. It had sumbols, letters, and numbers. The symbols turned into letters, turned into numbers. They were both at once. It seemed to be an animated riddle rather than a spoken one, appearing on a screen... but also like a shadow play. I remember the last two digits of my year of birth appeared, 8 and 6.

The girl was very much intrigued and would consider the suit.

Though kind to her friends, her confidants and the envoy, she reminded me in her intelligence and beauty and vivacity of the more insolent and headstrong version of a character I am working on right now.

I woke up as she considered the marriage proposal.