I realized recently that I do not have good dreams, all are nightmares in one form of another. I cannot recall a time when something dreadful has not happened in the dimension of my dreams.
God is my ward.
My tastes concerning artwork, music, literature, and even movies has always been on the darker side. As a child I loved the crooked architecture and twisted limbs of A Nightmare Before Christmas. The movie gave me dreadful nightmares. I still recall my mother being trapped in a cage of fiery bars in my Walden Hall playground, Jack was nearby with a chainsaw laughing maniacally, lunging at me everytime I tried to free her. Yet I kept watching the movie. I also watched too many movies, or at least clips, from Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, Child's Play, and the sort. My parents did an excellent job of explaining it was all entertainment and "ketchup for blood," but in one's dreams reason sometimes goes through the door and all one is left with are wild images and emotional reactions. I don't like slasher films now. Not because I'm afraid of them, rather the opposite; I find them to be cliché, poorly written, ridiculous, and overall boring. By the time middle school rolled around and all my peers raved about Scream, which I think mostly was because it made us feel more adult-like, I had no desire to watch it. "More of the same," I thought. So there was a dilineation between what sorts of darker arts that I enjoyed. I wanted mystery, suspense, a twisted nature that wasn't so overt as the slashers provided, something...subtle. Subtlety provides mystery, which preyed upon my desire to know things.
Today it's still one of my favorites. In middle school it was MacBeth and The Giver. I still have a poster I drew for it, the scene in which MacBeth takes dagger in hand to betray and slay King Duncan. The poster was drawn with only a black pen, shadows ran down his face, the whiteness remaining was flesh, a sickness about the eyes, the shadows crept along his face like tentacles instead of well rounded figures. I wrote an additional chapter to "finish" The Giver for an assignment, in which the main character and the girl make their way to a private home where his mentor had stayed, an enclave from the rest of the world out in the wilderness.
In high school it was more dystopias, post-apocalyptic literature, and the sort: Anthem, Mad Max: Beyond the Thunderdome, etc. I began to draw more my senior year as well as philosophize for the first time, though poorly in both fields. My art was dark, twisted treelines, machinations underlying their bark, sometimes exposed. My philosophy was brutish, cynical, I fell for such poor reasoning as provided by Ayn Rand and the sort, though I still believed in God. How odd. Selfish philosophy, though I somehow wanted to hold onto this idea of selflessness. I was an antinomy of sorts.
Undergrad. More of the same, I often visited literature and movies from prior decades, enjoying them more. The end of the world and strong philosophical themes of the graphic novel Watchmen intrigued me for months. I loved Fallout 3, a video game set in post-apocalyptia, where I made the choices of good and evil. I good destroy entire towns, killing everyone, and they weren't bystanders in games like Grand Theft Auto - these were characters with backgrounds, personalities, they had pains, desires, hope. But in such a world I longed to be the beam of light. The entire game I spent helping others, destroying those who sought to kill the innocent, to bring pure waters to the people. I know games are often seen as a child's sport, but in such a vast world, there was character. Though not as well written as a novel, it put me as a character in the story, I determined my actions, my fate, my story. And I enjoyed the Biblical passage provided in the beginning which contained the key to the end of the story:
He said to me: "It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. To him who is thirsty I will give to drink without cost from the spring of the water of life.I obtained a taste for music which I say has a "haunting quality" to it. I'm still not sure how to pinpoint it.
-Revelations 21:6
Post-undergrad/Pre-Grad/Wesley Year/Summer. The nearest I can define this haunting music is by listening to the band Portishead. This is the kind of music I thrive on at night. More Fallout 3, Cat's Cradle for it's apocalyptic theme, Watchmen the movie reignited my love for the story though I was by this time much familiar with the philosophical tradition associated with each character and the fallacies the author made with some, Melmoth the Wanderer for it's Faustian story - a mix of devil deals, madness of the mind, and loss of one's soul.
I am not comfortable with this world. I am a pilgrim, in search of a homeland.
My writing has been shaped in such a way that I find it only possible in two situations, either for therapeutic reasons or when I'm depressed or in a dark mood. The latter is only possible when life is bearing down on me or I deliberately create an atmosphere in my room that is dark. I situations where I have tried to write otherwise it always ends up horribly. Even now I only like writing because this piece is therapeutic. When I am joyful I find I cannot write in any shape, although I long at these times to write creative fiction. But alas, I always find I cannot. The creative juices run dry when it is not either dark or I am emotionally depressed. It's sad really. I long to write a novel, even if it is poor writing, even if only I read it. But the times when I want to, I can't.
Anyway, I do not know the source of my dreams. They are sinister, malicious, I do things that I despise when I awake, or if in third person I watch with horror as "I" do things I find morally reprehensible.
For it is from within from the heart, that evil intentions emerge: fornications, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, malice, deceit, indecency, envy, slander pride, folly. All these evil things come from within and make a person unclean.Talk about antinomies. I'm just not in the mood for deep philosophizing right now, just summaries. Descriptive, not argumentative, an English professor might say.
-Mark 7:21
For it is not against enemies that we have to struggle, but against the principalities and the ruling forces who are masters of the darkness in this world, the spirits of evil in the heavens.
-Ephesians 6:12
The Eucharist is a wonderful thing. For it is the body and blood of Christ in some sense, though I have not decided in what sense I believe this to be true. In taking it one becomes in communion with God, is forgiven of sins, and is provided strength for future endeavors. Whether my darkest dreams be something more akin to Mark 7:21 or Ephesians 6:12 ultimately doesn't matter, as Communion contains the solution either way. But my taste for knowledge motivates me to discover which, for if I am to ask for forgiveness, if that be the case, I would first need to realize something is wrong with me. Call it conviction, guilt, shame, it's all the same really, it is the recognition of wrong doing. So long as the feeling stems from knowledge of violation of Goodness, then it is a proper emotion. I have acted in accordance with both via conditional propositions littering my prayers, as is my custom. "God, if this....then please...but if that...then please..." Heh, I like to cover all my grounds.
Still, my interest is piqued, and if I am to do something about it, I need prayer and contemplation. I have kept decent track of my dreams, though I have not written them down if the plots were either too simple or uninteresting. Perhaps I need to keep track of them all. Either way I have enough to begin ordering them categorically by subject or motifs, and not just chronologically as I have done traditionally. I seek to find patterns, and will ultimately use something from my childhood to create a manifestation of my dream world in which I can "explore" them. I'm using an old program I used when I was 12 to create a SNES-esque video game with levels/rooms for each dream, hopefully placing categorically similar ones next to each other. So far I've got a few rooms of snowy mountains and trails, a tiny maze, an underground gave, and a series of railroad tracks floating over an open sky, the moon in the background. I'll create little pixeled figures to span across certain ones perhaps, each representing one of my parts: mind, emotions, flesh, and will named Anselm, Erastus, Acario, and Hezekiah respectively. I still seek to know my Spirit, so long as I do not know him, he cannot be named. All are me, Blake. Though Blake is not any one of them. It's all very childish looking, but it's suiting since these dreams have been around for so long.
I have one that has repeated since I was a child. Nothing terribly interesting happens, but I always awake in pain. And I wonder where my mind every got the idea for it. Maybe it will have it's own room. And maybe the Spirit will be locked in stasis, a priest might be a nice figure for him, for I do seek to be of His holy priesthood. And a Eucharist-centric world, an altar in the middle of the world symbolic to my being.
I enjoy making the little world, a homeland for my dreams, perhaps I can be joyful and creative after all.
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