THAT MORNING

I'm reading Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel. Not a graphic novel, but depth psychology drawn as comics. Alison's parents, brilliant but distant & unreliable, made her mistrust love; she learned to love ideas not people. She still can't relax and be herself even on her analysts's couch; she acts compliant to keep conditional love.

She's describing me. My parents were brilliant but unreliable, I live in my head, loving ideas and art but not people. People let you down.

THAT AFTERNOON

I transcribe my dreamjournal from early 1983. Sensitized by Bechdel, I see it's largely self-therapy using dreams and books as prosthetics, since I couldn't afford a therapist. I worked hard at it, and did get better--but did I complete that work?

THAT EVENING

I walk up the hill to rehearse with our band, the Krelkins. Make some rough recordings, tests for our first CD. Fatal flaws in every take, but that's no surprise--they're complex original songs, fiendishly difficult. We knew they'd need many takes. Long haul!

THAT NIGHT...

Five agents from five bureaus hound me, out to silence me for my five crimes. Cops and spies, FBI and CIA, American and foreign.

Curiously, inside those trenchcoats and slouch hats are actual hounds--well, hounds and other big tough cartoon critters working as secret agents, cops and private eyes. I'm trapped in funny-animal noir!

One good thing about my five hounds: they and their agencies don't co-operate at all! On the other hand, they don't get in each others' way as much as I'd hope, either. So I pretty much have five separate struggles and five separate defenses, one for each:

1. The hound of pain & inflammation: I fight this hound with exercise and turmeric; during attacks, add low doses of acetaminophen.
2. The hound of recurring fever, clumsiness and brainfog: I fight this hound with antibiotic supplements & herbs--vits A, C & D, zinc, cat's claw (Uncaria tomentosa) and Chinese wormwood (Artemisia annua).
3. The hound of allergies: I fight this hound with exercise, Siberian ginseng (Eleuthera sp), milk thistle (silymarin), diet (gluten triggers attacks) and avoidance (solvents, pollens, animals). These help longterm, but for acute attacks I need to research allergy meds.
4. The hound of emotional caution, from unreliable parenting that taught me others let me down, only books ideas & art can be trusted: I fight this hound by facing that I'm lonely, horny and ambitious, then taking emotional risks--openly seeking fun, friends, love & respect.
5. The hound of subclinical autism (Asperger syndrome): I fight this hound by not trying to pass for human! Learn what works socially and emotionally for me. Ignore conventional wisdom; I'm too different for much of it to work.

Remembering, barely, all five. Ha!

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• Symbols: next to none. What's to interpret? You learn to understand dreams by doing dreamwork over years--but your dreams learn to be clearer too! This dream's explicitness is what decades of dreamwork will do.
• Trenchcoated animal agents: along with Are You My Mother, today I also read Blacksad, a French graphic novel done in watercolors but with animal characters including hounds. Detective noir. Themes included inherited illness and a coverup of a drug's Thalidomide-ish side effects. The dream's Blacksad references imply that my recurrent illness has, like Blacksad's crime, multiple causes--genetic vulnerability PLUS infection PLUS some family coverup a la Bechdel. It's about the only symbolism I see in the dream.
• Hounds #1-3: familiar! I follow these prescriptions daily. I'm getting better at facing Hound 5, too. But...
• Hound #4, emotional caution from unreliable parents: less familiar! The dream agrees with "Are You My Mother?" An unsafe childhood causes emotional reserve. My 1980s journals show I used dreams as my therapist and slowly improved. But illness and poverty were more urgent, so from 1990 on I worked on those instead--bigger payoffs! Hound 4 reveals I'm still lonely, and why. Only action cured my poverty and illness, so action, not further analysis, may be the best therapy for emotional reserve too.
• Just FIVE hounds? I had other severe life-issues I defeated one by one, taking 2-3 years on each:
  • 1964-66: Fragile, sickly. Life-threatening fevers--and I got bashed at school, too.
  • 1966-69: Forced therapy. Fend off my shrink, who molested dozens of kids (died in prison)
  • 1970-72: My first written dreamwork. Quickly turns shamanic--flight, magic, ESP. Hide!
  • 1973-76: Struggle with gender identity & sexual orientation. Act out, sigh!
  • 1977-79: Girlfriend batters me. Guilty, I'm slow to escape. Try psychodrama. Educational...
  • 1979-80: IQ/genius--I was a child prodigy, bashed in school for it. Research other prodigies.
  • 1981-82: Subtler family influences keeping me alone. Tackle with dreamwork.
  • 1983-84: ESP & shamanism--no boundaries, but powerful advice. Hard dreamwork!
  • 1986-90: Told my illness is psychosomatic; try therapy. Fails. Begin writing dream-tales
  • 1991-94: Escape suburbia & find a therapist I trust; test medications (useless)
  • 1995-96: Find severe gluten sensitivity, maybe from untreated Lyme. Improve.
  • 1997-99: Evicted! Buy & renovate our co-op house, an exhausting, expensive project
  • 2000-02: Build the World Dream Bank, ongoing project. Autism pays off!
  • 2003-04: Build Planetocopia & start band, The Krelkins
  • 2005-07: An art degree and two intense relationships. Learn I need a LOT of solitude
  • 2008-09: Solar power for our co-op; the Dreamverse Project (dream picture-poems)
  • 2010-12: Learn ethical/social investing and go from poor to rich. Autism pays off again!
  • 2013-14: Give up on western medicine; find effective treatments of nonprescription herbs.
  • 2015-16: Face my furriness: the Cendancers (centaurian Barbie sculpture) & Foam Furs (big soft dream-creatures)
  • 2017-19: Study autism & Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, a mutation causing my autism. Oh, and record a CD...

  In short, the Five Hounds are just stragglers of a HUGE pack. O my fucked-up readers, take heart! You CAN beat your Hounds--sequentially. Wrestle one at a time! As Emily Dickinson never wrote in "Ample make this Head":

  Be! The Matter's straight. Beat the hollow Hounds. Let me, One, rise up in Joy-- Thunderfront of Clowns.

  
  
• Only five problems left, then, right? Well... more may be latent. For example, lingering physical illness still makes dating hard, though I'm getting close. If I keep healing and start to date, maybe a High-Heeled Hound will totter up: Love Is A Bitch. But she might just be Hound Four in disguise.
• Hounds 1-3, I recall in detail, but Hounds 4-5 are hazier. Why? Because just as I finished typing the dream, a power failure crashed my computer! Hadn't saved as I went; lost all I'd written. Retyped it hastily from memory, but by the end my recall was already fading. Sigh... Freudian sabotage is trivial next to TECHNOLOGICAL sabotage. Oh, Freud was right that we resent Civilization--why not? I pay my power bill and still get blackouts! Hmm... if I were feeling megalomanic I'd add... SHAMANIC sabotage? What if I caused that power failure? Oh well, Occam's Razor says look to the simplest cause first. Telekinetic sabotage is exotic; what's plausible is a civilization of idiots.
• ACTION: Focus on these five hounds for now. Especially Hound 4--the hound with the best cover. For now, my best tactic with Hound 4 may just be to spot her--notice how I distance.

Dreams can get this clear--once you've peeled your blindfold off.

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