I woke from a dream this morning suddenly. There was no transition from asleep to awake, I was one, then the other. In the dream, I was high on lsd with a number of friends, we were travelling in a bus. It was my bus, red and gold and blue but built more like a ship, with outer decks that shoes needed to be grabbed from as we took a corner too sharply, for fear they would careen off into the road? Sea? Ethers? It was a jovial adventure, the sky filled with patterns of colour and clouds of wavy lines and streams of conciousness realized.

I’ve often thought in physical form. What is manifestation after all? I desired to be the girl in the house at the end of the road near the ocean at the end of the lane, and here I am. If my reference to Neil Gaiman’s story is to be superimposed on my life, I’ve just realized that would make me Lettie Hempstock. Hmmm….perhaps I’ve just forgotten my name. Names are power. But I digress. My ruminations that I might be a delightful “fictitious” character will have to wait for another time. Right..thought made reality. I’ve seen music take form, numbers evoke colours or pictures in my mind. Could this be the same thing? This isn’t the first time I’ve manifested a dream into reality, unlikely it will be the last.

The ability to manifest the thing one thinks of, the thing one desires. I’ve been very fortunate in my life to more or less consistently end up in exactly the situation I needed to be in, regardless of whether or not I intended to. The outcome rarely resembles the place I expect.
(Paris is the exception. Paris was exactly what I expected, joyfully so. I will go back someday. Soonish.
Also, how perfect that my blog should be titled the phrase that is on Man Ray’s tombstone as he lived and worked and is buried in Paris.)

I’m tangenting like crazy here. Simply put, I had a dream that was vivid and colourful and awesome. Most every night is like that. I’m terrible for writing my dreams down. I have this blind arrogance that because it was so vivid and colourful and awesome, I won’t have any trouble remembering it. And while I will hang on to snippets and fragments throughout the day, they always become dimmer and fade. But this dream, because I came from amidst a psychotropic experience into full wakefulness immediately, I retained for a time, the song that was playing. In the dream, I was hyper aware of the song. My friends were all around me having conversations, remarking on the stars, the cosmos, the intrinsic connectedness of the all, I was focused on the music. There was a piano melody, ascending. I love a bass line that walks down, a piano that falls up. Any song that I love with every fibre of my being tends to have one or the other, if not both.
I came into wakefulness carrying this melody, like orpheus from the underworld. And like him, I looked back too soon. Instead of sitting at the piano immediately, I wandered into the kitchen humming it and turned on the kettle for tea. By the time I was back in the living room, the melody had morphed. My concious mind had superimposed a more familiar tune onto my dream song. In the dream, I was fully aware of the effect the song had on me. I said to no one in particular, “I should learn this on the piano.” I did manage to hold onto the lyrics,
“And if you still believe me,
I’ll take you for a ride
We’ll end up on this….(carousel?)
In a traffic jam
On the other side.” I can almost hear it, when I look at the last two lines of that. But it’s elusive, the way one would expect a dream song to be.

The frustration I feel about losing it is not profound, nor even dramatic in the slightest. Is it a song I’ve heard before, transmogrified within a dream state? Is it my own mind using my subconcious to create? How many songs do I write in my sleep that I don’t remember upon waking because it’s typically a gentler transition? Is it in fact an unconcious remix of the other side by the scissor sisters, a song I’ve listened to so many times I could sing it for you with my eyes closed? Also, I love that someone has made a video for it using mainly christopher eccleston doctor who footage. Is there a possibility that anything I think/imagine/create could be original?

There’s nothing new under the sun.
I remember the frustration I had at age 12 when I started to hear music often enough to notice similarities within songs, as though the pop stars of today were just rippiing of the pop stars of yesterday, were stealing from the pop stars of the day before and so on through the ages. My mother pointed out, “there are really only 7 notes. How much variation are you expecting?” Just for the record, that also blew my mind.
We could argue flats and sharps and diminished sevenths and dominant fifths and enigmatic onomatopoeia all day long but I was staring at a piano and the basic idea is correct. A,B,C,D,E,F,G. Or if you want to solve a problem like Maria…Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, Te. Yes I know the sound of music didn’t come up with solmization, also known sometimes as solfege, as a system of musical education but who reading this isn’t thinking about Julie Andrews as Fraulein Maria right now. Especially as I just keep talking about her….

TOTAL TANGENTIAL ASIDE!!! Eleanor Parker, the Baroness in the Sound of Music also played Lenore in one of my favourite movies, Scaramouche. In both films she competes for the man she loves with someone more pure and virginal than she. I wrote a whole damn blog about it and the realization that even if it meant losing the man I love enough to beat with a frying pan before we have caravan rocking sex, ideally I will never trade a life of passion and vibrancy for a calm and virtuous one. It’s seriously one of my favourite posts. And by the way, if you do click on the scaramouche imdb link, totally ignore the horrifically awful synopsis. “After Andre Moreau finds he is the secret bastard son of a recently deceased noble, he realizes that it his own sister that he’s romantically drawn to.” Um, who would watch that? Goddamn. That is fucking bad.
How about this instead?
“After Andre Moreau watches his young impassioned and impetuous friend killed by a member of the aristocracy for publishing subversive material suggesting the (un)balance of power needs to be addressed, this carefree rapscallion makes it his mission to see that he be avenged, while sorting out the mystery of his illegitimate birth. And there’s some hot girls in it too, including the baroness from sound of music, the girl who got killed in the shower in Psycho and Marie Antoinette! Also starring one of Audrey Hepburns’ husbands!”
Seriously, it takes place just before the french revolution. Napoleon is in it! For about 12 seconds, but whatever!! Stewart Granger (hot!!!) studied and for a time was considered the best fencer in the world because of the work he put into this role. No one hooked him up to a computer and jacked him in and he came out saying, “whoa, I know kung fu.” Or fencing, or whatever. And the way he kisses….oh my….I wish someone would kiss me like that all the time…damn.  Ok, tangent finished. Thank you for your patience.

I remember reading that someone, maybe RIchard James wishes that once he had started making music, he had never heard music again, so as to maintain an originality that is impossible when inundated with the creations of others. (I have no idea where I read that so cannot under any circumstances verify it’s truth. I don’t even know it was him, but he is awesome and linking to him within this post just seems fine to me because while his music won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, it should be acknowledged that he’s pretty fucking awesome.)
But I get it. The reality is, everything we do, say, write, create, dream is influenced by everything we have done, read, seen, heard. We can’t help but be affected by the things around us. Sometimes I wonder how much of it is built into our cellular structure though. How much we carry with us through time, as well as space.

We are a conscious collective of collective unconscious.

We are having the experience of the all according to all we have experienced.

To put it another way that is pretty much the same thing reversed…nope, I’ve got nothing. I’m thinking about it way too much to come up with anything good. It just feels like it makes a better case for clever when one can come up with three examples of something. But whatever, I’m not here to impress anyone with my clever. This is a place where I get to ramble and ideally come out the other side with some semblance of forward movement.

Unless I end up on a carousel, in a traffic jam, on the other side.

That was totally unplanned but pretty sweet.

Are the things I think and dream merely the sum of all the thoughts and dreams of those who come before me? Would Man Ray approve of my using his epitaph as the title for my post? Do dead men care? I like to think they’re unconcerned, but not indifferent.(BOOM! Full Circle!)

I think it’s a pretty good way to be. I’m working on it.