Dreaming With Iconography, Etc.

In the past several nights I've had torrid overnight affairs with Johnny Rotten/ Lydon, Peter Tosh, Keith Richards, and my platonic guy friend from age 13 (Craig). All three of them are currently married (except Tosh -- who's dead) and I awaken each morning wracked with guilt and frustration, as my dreams are sometimes confusingly realistic. Also, in the case of Keith Richards, I was afraid I may have telepathically contracted HIV or at least, Hep C.

Do you think he woke up thinking something like, "Why in the hell did I cheat on my supermodel wife with that strange dark-haired, person -- atop a birthday cake, no less -- while she extolled pretentiously poetic in American with flat vowels and explosive consonants?"

(Why do I so often dream about technicolor birthday cakes? I mean, it seems every month or so I'm eating technicolor birthday cakes, making technicolor birthday cakes, making it on top of technicolor birthday cakes, etc.)

My more vivid dreams often involve my feet, as well. I am very aware of my feet and the physical sensations involving them. For example, in my Giant Anaconda/ Chicken Fight Olympics dream, I could feel the snake spines rub against the soles of my feet. In my waitressing/ poker game dream, I could feel the glass of hundreds of needle stick tests breaking under the soles of my shoes. That's just 2 examples.

In The Science of Sleep, writer/director Michael Gondry shows us he is a knowledgeable tour guide of the dream plain. He's come to many of the same conclusions I have, although his dreamscape is much different than mine aesthetically and symbolically. One similarity I noticed was the feet-dreaming thing. Stephane dreams he is skiing and can't move his feet from where they have sunk in the snow. He awakens to find them in a mini-freezer, placed at the bottom of his too-short bed. Another is the bond that can exist between and among dreamers. Stephane describes his dream connection with his next-door neighbor Stephanie. It isn't telepathic, he says, it's as if they're on a loop -- like a loop of tape or film.

I relate very much to the term Loop. First of all, I live in a city that calls its heart the Loop -- so named because of the area surrounded by El tracks moving from the outlying areas to the center and around and out again.

I also have an ongoing theory that people travel in loops. Look at the faces around you -- you'll see what I mean. Case in point: there is a thin pale man with a very large nose, horn-rimmed glasses and longish, dark hair. He works somewhere around the same large hospital that I do. We often take lunch at the same time, in more or less the same place, even though I never take my lunch at a fixed time. If I take the El home (anytime between 4:30 and 6pm) he is on it. Also, I've run into him twice at the grocery store. This has been going on for 3 years, so about 2 years ago we just started saying hi. One day, about 6 months ago, the sandwich/bad pizza place we were both getting lunch at was completely full, so I asked if I could share his four top. (I had fantasies of him offering me sections of the Sunday NY Times he had with him, as I had nothing to read.) But he acted all annoyed, "Fine, go ahead" so I didn't sit, but sighed and stalked off in the manner of a haughty and bruised peacock -- but we're still cruising on the same Loop and went back to simple hellos.

Of course the question is: How did I get myself on a loop with Johnny Rotten, Keith Richards and the spirit of Peter Tosh? What does it mean (besides the obvious fact that I have a musician problem)???
I suspect I could be over thinking the whole thing. Some might even say I attach too much significance to the unconscious -- but please bear in mind, that our society tends to suffer from an acute and chronic case of Too Much Yang. Furthermore, what do you expect? I come from a fervent pack of Irish Catholic proto-pagans and a city whose cartography and urban planning was created based on the premise that the vast fresh water body to our east -- Lake Michigan -- comprises half of the geography of the city, so that the streets were numbered accordingly and nearly all of the shoreline is public property. So the underwater/ unconscious is half of who we are and readily accessible to all.


And finally, a note on my changing personal icon. Last week, the red and purple La Loteria Day of the Dead La Sirena I have been using as my icon for the last year, disappeared and I couldn't make her come back. So I found this image (by Yolanda Fundora) of Yemaya with 7 watermelons, the kundalini, a crescent and a split fin and I tried to work with that, but didn't like how it looked on a small scale. We are now back to the red and purple skeleton Sirena as I found the image stored in some bizarre pocket of the computer's memory.

Happy May Day... Workers of the world unite and enjoy the ancient fertility rites!