Dreaming of Reality TV

 I dreamt I was at a college dinner, one of those that they might serve to get everyone acquainted with the college at an orientation.  I was sitting at a table with all these other people, most of which were very odd, and there were television cameras all over the place, above and in the corners.  It was perfectly normal, except, I knew that the people I sat with had various psychological disorders, ones that would not get along well without medicine...etc... After a time I left the room and found myself in a large television studio, a place with large "habitats" where people were going about their daily lives, except with cameras everywhere.  Sorta like The Truman Show, except this one had an odd twist to it.  The characters in these stories were picked from mental institutions, facilities, along with normal people, all in an attempt to make a Reality TV show where the people in the situations were just a little more odd than normal, and watch the madness unfold.

I remember while I was working at Borders, that we had a running joke (at least, my coworkers did prior to me working there), that we were unwittingly a part of a Japanese Reality TV show called Happy Booktime Go!, where the strange customers and the strange employees interacted and provided hilarity for the viewers. It made sense, as some of our customers were indeed very strange.

But in my dream, they had more control over the people.  People were taken from one scenario to another, their memories wiped and replaced with alternative ones to match the theme.  Those that were boring or lost ratings were eliminated... as I saw people with machine guns around, for that purpose.  It was built into the show as a terror plot, or a bank robbery, or something like that.

Yes, it was a strange dream, one that I had prior to waking up, which is when I have the strange ones I remember, right before I wake up totally, coming out of the final sleep cycle.  It got me to thinking though.  All our television shows, whether they're actually called "Reality TV" or not, are similar to this. People watch Gotham or Modern Family, and they are just interactions between very odd people, some that deal in gruesome murders, some not.  Some have outrageous violence and sex, some don't. Some make commentaries on society using stereotypes (which may be true or contrived), and some are just made to humiliate people.  I don't honestly think that Chris Rocker is going to become any more loved after his stint on Survivor than what he was before.  He is societies' Joker, made up to be laughed at and scorned, to make everyone feel a little better.  We are better than him, at least.  Push your scarecrows over, and feel better about our lives.  I mean, we all lead lives that may or may not be difficult, but we can all be assured that the side show mentality of the television shows will pick people who are living much worse lives than we are, and it makes us feel good.

So why not pick those people out of the crazy farms, the looney bins, the Mental Hospitals, and put them in a place where they can entertain the rest of us.  There are enough of them, even in the smallest towns, that we would never run out of stooges to laugh at.  So what if they like running down the street naked with a lamp shade on their head... that's funny!! At least we're not like that!

It can easily go that way, you know.  The normal life is no longer appreciated.  Those that live comfortable lives want to see the way others live, so we can laugh at them and scorn their ways. We watch Hoarders or 16 and Pregnant and feel badly for them, even as we laugh at their misfortunes. And we turn the TV off (if indeed it ever goes off) and feel better about ourselves.  It's either that, or take medicine, and the other way is cheaper, and more fun.

I haven't watched much television since moving to Dallas, except for Football on weekends, and even then, I could listen to it on the radio just as well.  I love the Simon & Garfunkel line from "The Only Living Boy in New York," "I get the news I need on the weather report."  It's what I worry about the most, if I got rid of television and cable and everything all together.  I wouldn't have that outlet for looking at storms as they come in.  Sure, I can use the radio and the radar on the Internet which I can read as well as any meteorologist can, but the reassurance of the TV Weather Guy is something that has been coded into me since I was a wee child watching Gary England on CBS in Oklahoma City. So I think I'm going to dump cable, keep the Internet, and then hopefully by the Spring, I'll have an antenna strong enough to pick up the channels on the south side of Dallas (all the towers are in Cedar Hill, and Downtown Dallas is between me and them).  Until then, I'm going to unplug this thing and use it for computer games and other escapes from reality.

I have no problem escaping from reality, but I want to do it without making fun of other people.  I would rather do it with books, Audio or otherwise, and put the images in my head, instead of on my screen.

Flying Dreams

"To sleep--perchance to dream." Yes please!! I've never understood why so many people, including myself, would put off the sweet hours of sleeping just to play some meaningless game on their computer, or waste their lives away in a bar until 3am (not me), only to get involved in some potential nastiness afterward.  To me, there are worlds and experiences that can never happen in this world, just waiting inside of our own minds.  It's as if the creative juices in our minds swirl and take on images of their own.  It's the pleasure of writing during the day, knowing that, the potential creativity will set off some wonderful, bizarre plots in my head while I snore and the TV replays the latest sports highlights or some long ago episode of Suite Life on Deck. I often find myself in the mall (and as I've said before, the food court is huge!), usually working at Borders, which has never closed in my head. Or I'm at college (or some learning place) and I'm going to class, going around the large glass elevator in the middle of Atkinson Hall or around the Olympic-sized swimming pool in what was the old English building, but was torn down in a massive pile of rubble to make way for the library.  Those are the dreams I'd just as soon never wake up from, as they are quite wonderful.  To learn, to work at a bookstore, that, despite having to show customers where Sex Chronicles was way too many times, and cleaning up the children's section after the tornadoes (that were 3 year old children and their parents) hit, I would never want to work anywhere else.

Dreaming is so vital to our waking lives, because during that time, the brain can restore chemicals that keep us happy during the day.  Seratonin, Dopamine.  It's one of the things I always look at when someone has depression, because if they're not dreaming, they're gonna get cranky (see Star Trek: TNG episode "Night Terrors", Season 4, Ep. 17).  Now, it usually regenerates, but if I have a nightmare, say, me stuck in a classroom teaching, with students going out of control, then it will just as easily drain, and when I wake up, it feels like I've been run over by a bus. Then there's the dreams where I'm visiting an old friend, and I wake up in a nostalgic state of bliss.

There's no better dream, however, than the flying dream.  Look up "Flying" in any dream dictionary, and it will tell you that it's a symbol of escape, that something in your life was restricting you, keeping you chained to the ground.  Or it's a symbol of freedom, of having escaped from life and enjoyed some ubiquity for a time.  I can understand both those ideas, but when you've had the dreams, even in waking times, of being able to fly (and I'm sure most everyone has, ever since man saw a bird fly and wished he could do the same), sometimes it's just flying.  I remember looking out of my mom's 76 Mustang, as we drove on I-40 down through Oklahoma City, out the side window and imagining myself flying along side the car, whipping through and in and out of the power lines and the few trees that were there.

Dream flying is interesting, because I don't always fly the same way.  Sometimes, it's hard to get off the ground, frustrating, as if my weight kept me slow and struggling to get even a few feet into the air. The dream-symbols would interpret this as some sort of frustration I would have with my weight, but I doubt that.  Then there's the idea of going just a little too far off the ground, and being afraid of falling.  The falling dream is another thing all together, but I don't usually have those.  But those feelings of having your brain up atop your head, and being too high up, those feelings come regularly, if I get to high from the ground.

The best flying dream is the free-from-all-restrictions flying, and would look something like Bastian riding on Falcor from the Neverending Story.  Those are amazing journeys past lakes and cities and forests and straight on till morning.  Nothing could ruin my mornings after those dreams.



(I had to make that video large, and I switched it to the Atreyu-Falcor scene. Turn the volume up, I love that soundtrack!) Anyway.... Why I mention this now, is that we are all used to looking at things on the ground, with the trees and buildings attached to the soil and then going up. We don't see the world as birds see it, Until now. Google has changed the way we look at the world. With Google Earth, and Google Maps, we can now see world as the crow flies. And I'm quite addicted to it, willing to look at my county for hours on end, seeing the roads and where they go, finding trails that run deep into the forests, following railroad tracks for miles. I can fly to other cities, even ones that friends live in, and see their shops and streets. I've flown over roads in the middle of Spain, finding villages that clearly exist outside of the 21st century. Add that to the "Street-View" idea, and I can land and walk down those faraway roads. Travel without even leaving my chair. It makes my dreams even more real, because now my brain has a blueprint of how things are supposed to look from the sky, and it fills in those experiences when necessary. The best thing? I can fly anywhere I want, in worlds real or imaginary, and I will never lose my luggage.

These Dreams...or Rowing Your Boat

Decided to evoke the song lyrics by Heart. For some reason, the song evokes memories of myself sitting in the waiting room of my brother's speech therapist, Dr. Lauren Bradway, with her blocks shaped like letters and the green walls and the radio oozing out contemporary hits. I'm sure it was played during that time, because every time I hear the song, I think of that waiting room. So peaceful..

Songs will do that...just like smells or other sensations. The chemicals in the brain that make memories stay active for some time, as the memory fades back into the subconscious. A few nights back I had a dream, don't remember exactly what it was, but the odd part was that it had Betty White in it. I thought it odd when I woke up, and upon thinking about it, I realized that she had been on the $25,000 Pyramid show on GSN the day before, so the image got transported into one of my dreams.

It's also weird when I have the television on at night, for instance, on Fox News, as my subconscious hears whatever is going on in the world and uses some of it in my dreams. I remember one time I was in a college town, probably supposed to be Milledgeville, but it looked nothing like it, when missle started raining down on the neighborhood. Woke up and sure enough, the Israelis and the Palestinians were exchanging missiles at each other. Or when I have ESPN on I will more often than not be at a baseball game sometime during the night. Perhaps I should sleep with the TV off...

I say all this because my grandmother, Granny, has for years claimed that she helped my former boss's wife with car problems when Granny worked at the Landmark building in Conyers. There's no way this could have happened, as he lived in Maine at the time she worked there. But Granny can go into what type of car it was and everything. I realized that these false memories started about the time that her Macular Degeneration started getting bad. With her being blind, the only clear images she saw was those that developed in her mind.

Last Thanksgiving my grandmother broke her hip and is now in a nursing home, as her mental state has deteriorated to the point where bringing her home just isn't possible with us having to work. She keeps on telling us about different things that happen in the home that make no sense. For instance, she claims she was having soup one day, and it was good soup, but that chickens came in and ate the rest. I think that dementia, especially in her case, results from the memories of the mind's eye. In other words, dreams that are so much clearer than what she experiences every day, that the dreams become her reality. If she dreams that she got up, walked down the hallway and ordered food from the cook, then that's what she did. There's nothing, then, to keep her from thinking that she could get up the next day. Thus, she would never be able to be by herself for any length of time.

It's amazing how clear dreams and memories stay in the mind, even ones that aren't real. How people can believe in a story so vehemently that it becomes their reality. I daresay that the best criminals are ones that can actually delude themselves into thinking that whatever alibi they constructed was their reality. It would easily pass any lie detector. Just ask my grandmother about my boss's wife, and she will tell you without hesitation what happened, even though it was impossible.

It is a remarkable state of being, to live in your dreams, and have them clearer than real life. But also terrifying. That reality is only constructed by our trains of thought. It makes me think that maybe Berkley wasn't so far off in his analysis of metaphysics. Or, as the old nursery rhyme goes:

Row, Row, Row your boat
gently down the stream.
Merrily, Merrily, Merrily, Merrily,
Life is but a dream.

And maybe, for some people, dreams are but life.

Fleeting Dreams

Dreams can be a wonderful, terrible, amazing experience, and the ones you remember can seem as real as anything reality can bring you. I just had one, and it was one of those fleeting dreams that, if only I could grab on, hold the melody, capture the words, I could produce a masterpiece of such beauty. And it's all up there, in my brain, far out of reach of normal conscious thought.

I was adrift in some computer animated soundscape, with acoustic guitars and some lyrics, but the song itself was cacophonous, multifaceted, and breathtaking. And I know it's something that's in my head, and not influenced from outside sounds. You know, you'll be dreaming of a song on the radio, only to wake up and hear that same song on the radio that's playing in your bedroom. Or I've even been dreaming and had CNN on TV and suddenly the world I'm in gets bombed with missiles, which have undoubtedly come from the news reports from the Middle East. But as I woke up, I noticed no TV on, no music, only the irritating grind of my computer fans. So whatever melody and counterpoint and whatever was playing in my head was being created by my own mind.

They say we only use like, 10% of our brain, but what if we can tap into the rest while we are asleep, and our subconscious takes over? What marvelous works of literature or music could be given to the world if only we could remember them. I can remember dreams where I was writing poetry, but I wake up, and the words disappear into the rising sun. With that one, I've always wanted to capture that onto paper, because writing is something I can do. The acoustic guitar masterpiece I just heard I can't capture because I have no skills on that instrument. Amazing stuff. The muse so often stays hidden, and those who can capture those moments can go down in history as masters. What if they were just lucky enough to capture those few moments and hold on, and bring it through to the sunlight? If only we all had the ability to express those works of beauty that are hidden within.