Thread: The Other Brain's Excursions into Dream World

Lesson in Politics #4

I am watching a wrestling match. This girl from a charity gets onto the stage. She sued WWE, and won the right to address their fans live on TV. She is obviously nervous: a small figure in a cheap suit with bad hair.

She tries to enter the ring, but falls down and hits her head. The audience laughs at her, but they also sympathise with her. They listen to her because they can relate to her and find her funny, yet also honest.

WWE have her back on again during intermissions after that. The audience always loves her, and they always donate money to her charity.

First Lucid: Lesson in Politics #5

I am Marxist Thom. I am a student and I live with a guy called Ben, who I enjoy getting stoned with almost every day and a girl called Clara, who is a permanently depressed girl who always has her head in a book.

In order to do more politics, I decide to join a NATO study group. It's full of the kind of people I wouldn't normally talk to: active, responsible guys in suits who want to be career politicians and support the continued existence of the capitalist state. But it's nice to do something, I learn a lot.

But as the weeks go by, and I find that I'm spending more time with the study group I kind of start to act like them. It's embarrassing to be the only person not in a suit, and I don't have time to get stoned every day.

My friends get worried about me. Ben tracks me down one day in a public toilet, and warns me in no uncertain terms that I'm starting to act like exactly the kind of officious wanker who we generally try to avoid at all costs. Then he leaves, and I find myself thinking about this as the NATO guys show up again.

"Are you excited about the exam?" One of them asks. This makes me think. Am I really excited about this group?

"No." I reply. They are shocked. This is not the expected response. "Politics is boring. It's necessary, it's important. But it isn't interesting."

I let this sink in, and realise I meant it. I'm not sure I want to be one of these guys.

"There's a girl in the toilets reciting poetry." The guy tells me. "Now that's boring! And weird!"

I know right away that that's Clara. "Let her be." I say. "She's probably working through something."

But he doesn't let up. He wants to prove to me that Clara is weird and that he's normal. She's boring, he's a young go-getter. I get angrier and angrier.

And in the anger, I get lucid.

I step out of Marxist Thom's body as Ben and Clara grab him and hold him back. Once they've got him back from the fight I use telekinesis to lock the door. Then I beat up these young future politicians. It takes seconds, every punch or kick I make lands on a pressure point and knocks them unconscious.

Later, I am in the office of a friend of mine, who is a counsellor.

"They say you knew to come back because of a dream." He says.

"Really? I like it. It's believable."

"But it's not true?"

"If I came here on a whim based on a warning from a dream. How is it that I arrived just in time for a fight in Wales at seven PM, when I was at work in England at five?" I smile, do up my shoes, and wake up.

Comments

Ben, Thom and Clara are characters from a comic I write every so often. I was thinking just as I went to bed that its strange I never dream of them.

So, the political lessons say that the key to politics is:

1. Practical experience over theory.
2. A matter of observing the world and keeping an eye out for irregularities.
3. Boring, but easy to excel in if you are organised and practical.
4. A field where you are rewarded for being honest and making human connections with people.
5. Something one should have a sense of humour about.

I think that the lesson of Marxist Thom kind of applies in reverse. Recently I have been more and more interested in Marxism. On this Revolutionary Left-Wing website I lurk on there was recently a discussion about tips.

The general consensus is that tips discourage proper class consciousness, are degrading to the workers, etc. But I like it when I get tips. It's a bit of extra money I can get something nice with. The Marxists are right, in terms of theory, but I don't think they care about the actual experience of the workers. They seem to take things a bit too seriously and tend to ignore individuals in order to talk about The People. This is a problem for me.

Nice lucid! It reminds me of a superhero comic book, or the Batman TV show, where once punch knocks the bad guys out.

Thankyou, I enjoyed dispensing some justice. Be it only against pretentious candidate types.

Lesson in Politics #6

I am a journalist visiting Animal Farm, spending time with the pigs. One of them offers me a chewy mint. I'm vegan, and I know that it has gelatin in. I try to tell this to the pig I'm talking to. But he just walks away.

I go and mention to their priest that there is possibly pig gelatin in a lot of food that is eaten by pigs on Animal Farm. He asks me if this has been mentioned in an official farm report. I tell him it hasn't.

After this, he ignores me. If it isn't going to cause a political scandal, he has no problem with cannibalism.

In lieu of dreams, one of my current projects is indexing dreams from my older journals. This is a list of the top nine dream symbols in my first journal, dating back from 2005, when I was 18.

9. Three Entries: Another Universe, Babylon 5, B, my Sixth-form College, Church, Cave, Colony, Dream, Dream Journal, Evil, Eris, G.W Bush, God, Homes, Hotel, Love, Nottingham, New Zealand, RPGs, University, Western Europe.

8. Four Entries: Another World, AL, America, Beach, China, Christianity, Dad, Family, Friends, Food, My little brother, JB, Mr. Southey, Space, Spaceship, Star Trek, TV, The Twins, Toilet, Work.

7. Five Entries: Bus, Buddhism, Magic, MO, Parents, Religion, Sleep.

6. Six Entries: Cars and Money.

5. Seven Entries: Police.

4. Eight Entries: Sex and War.

3. Nine Entries: Girl.

2. Twelve Entries: Death and my School.

1. Thirteen Entries: CB and Politics.

From this I discern that I was, to some limited degree a normal teenager. At the time I was a committed blogger, so it isn't surprising that political themes play heavilly on my mind. Mostly these dreams don't seem to provide any real insight. Mostly they present Politics as an Other to be afraid of. More often than not, the primary fear that is the fear that people are trying to make us afraid.

I am concerned by the reoccurring theme of death and war. It looks like I had a lot of fear when I was eighteen. Death especially was never tackled head on. I was a bit goth at the time, but even to this day I've never been able to face the idea of going to a funeral. I think my subconscious was presenting me with death in general because I was unable to face any particular incidences of death.

CB was a friend from school. In any dream where there were other people, he generally made an appearance.

The Witches and The Drugs

I am living with my friends LF and AC, my parents are visiting, but it is also AC's birthday and we are smoking some weed in his room. FS and some other friend of ours is there, there's two joints going round pretty rapidly, and everyone is pleasantly stoned.

AC brings out a cardboard box. "I want to do some drugs!" He tells me.

The box contains a Class-A "hard drug". What it is isn't specified. But I don't want anything to do with it with my parents in the next room.

"It's fine." LF tells me. "Your parents have seen you worse."

This is maybe true. And I'm embarrassed to think it.

Just then, while I'm thinking of leaving, some witches arrive. They want to evoke the goetic spirits using an octogram with four quarters. Their methodology fascinates me. It is a fascinating mix of ideas from ceremonial magic. When I ask about it, the two witches laugh, and tell me its cute when I pretend to not understand something.

They hold a rope and start chanting. The spirits of the dead, caught in this symbology, start to rise. They say trivial things about people, prophecies. I go to bed, the whole thing is scary for me.

The ghost asks to be released so the witches decide to leave banishing to a ceremonial magician - which is what I used to be before I decided to pack in religion. I wake up and find the room is empty of people, but ghosts are invisible and everywhere. I decide to perform a banishing ritual. But the words won't come. I wake up.

The Time War Resumed

I run into the twelfth Doctor with his companion du jour. I laugh and skip with them, really excited because I'm getting a lift in the TARDIS. It is parked in a display of antique Police phone boxes in a local park.

We travel for a while together, and get on really quite well. But after a while I settle down with a family. The Doctor keeps visiting us, maybe because it gives him some kind of stable home, maybe just because he is fond of my daughter, in fact he eventually starts to take her on adventures with him.

For a while, she is his companion, but while she's off with the Twelfth Doctor, the Thirteenth Doctor arrives to visit me. We've uncovered some kind of vortex which we can use to save Gallifrey. But there is a cost: to get back Gallifrey as it was at the very end of the Time War, it is necessary for the Doctor to look into the time vortex. The Thirteenth Doctor goes insane, and is restricted to a hospital on Gallifrey for his entire incarnation. Control of the TARDIS falls to me.

I spend some time building a power-base: I take Gallifreyan technology which pre-selects the best outcomes in situations of quantum uncertainty to your average class-division riddled capitalist hell-hole and rapidly establish a socialist utopia. While doing that, I make alliances with a powerful species that exist outside of the universe and contact a Second Human race, given how successful the first human race is in its future history, I believe that this new one will be a valuable ally.

But when I try to explain this to the Doctor on Gallifrey, this younger, more sarcastic female time-lord seems to think my attempts to change the universe are pretty meagre. But I can't stay to insult her back, we've discovered a Dalek incursion a few million years after the big bang. I have the only working TARDIS we have, so I have to be off.

Woohoo! Doctor Who themed dreams rock! I love your dreams already.

So sad about the Doctor!

But at least you got his TARDIS. It would be awesome if you have more dreams where you're fighting the Daleks in his place.