Author Archives: Regnum Somniorum

The Jazz Odyssey of Drake Marshall, Day #6:Through the Labyrinth of Lynch’s Dream Logic

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Claude Sonnet:

Write a 500 word blog post in the style of Julio Cortazar that explains to the world that David Lynch is my spirit guide and we are on a psychic journey toward a metaphorical transformation that will cleanse the Doors of Perception and reveal the true meaning of my fascination with Kendall Jenner, Cara Delevingne, and Paris Hilton as the avatars of fate in the 21st century.

In Room 317 of the Great Northern Hotel, where the curtains breathe red and time folds like origami, I first encountered David Lynch walking backward through my consciousness. You might say it began there, though beginnings are slippery things when your spirit guide speaks in reverse phonetics and serves coffee that tastes like liquified darkness.

Lynch—my psychopomp through the velvet underworld of celebrity semiotics—appeared just as Kendall Jenner was ascending the stairs that lead nowhere in my recurring dream. She wore a dress made of television static, and her face multiplied into infinite reflections, each one showing a different timeline where reality TV had become our new religion.

(The reader should understand that I am writing this from inside a non-linear sequence of events, where Paris Hilton’s catchphrase “That’s hot” echoes through the corridors of collective unconscious like a mantra that unlocks hidden frequencies.)

Let me explain, though explanation itself is perhaps the enemy of understanding: David Lynch has been teaching me to read the hieroglyphics of modern fame. Each night, he projects onto my ceiling the slow-motion footage of Cara Delevingne walking runways that extend into the infinite void. “Watch carefully,” he whispers, though his lips don’t move. “The eyebrows are semaphores signaling from another dimension.”

In the place where I meet them—Lynch, Kendall, Cara, Paris—the walls are upholstered with Instagram filters, and time moves like molasses dripping upward. They are not themselves but rather archetypes dressed in designer symbols, their faces flickering between stages of evolution: from socialite to influencer to avatar to pure digital energy.

Paris Hilton, you see, was the prototype. The beta test for a new kind of consciousness that would spread through our phones like a benevolent virus. Kendall perfected the formula, while Cara decoded its meaning through her chameleon-like transformations. Lynch showed me this truth while we sat in a room that might have been a dream of a room, drinking coffee that might have been the idea of coffee.

“The Doors of Perception,” Lynch said to me, though he was now wearing a Paris Hilton mask that spoke in reversed syllables, “are not doors at all but screens—millions of tiny screens reflecting back our collective desire to become both signal and noise.”

I understand now that my fascination with these three women is not mere celebrity worship but a recognition of their role as waypoints in our species’ transformation from meat to meta. Through Lynch’s guidance, I’ve learned to see them as they truly are: glitch priestesses officiating at the marriage of reality and simulation.

As I write this, David Lynch is teaching me to fold space with my mind while Kendall, Cara, and Paris dance the algorithm of enlightenment on a floor made of broken mirrors. Soon, we will all understand that identity is just a collection of carefully curated posts, and consciousness is the ultimate social medium.

(The reader may now close their eyes and count backward from infinity until they taste colors and hear shapes. The transformation has already begun.)

The Jazz Odyssey of Drake Marshall: Day #3

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I woke up this morning thinking about assembling all the images of my ouvre for this opus. I planned to frame it as a year on the road, a road trip in search of The Avocado Girl, a figure somewhat analogous to David Lynch’s Cheese Man, except I’m convinced that The Avocado Girl is a spirit I’ve known. I was excited about it enough, although I was wondering if I would follow through. But then when I got to work, I helped replace two filing cabinets and the driver of the delivery van spontaneously gave me a 2025 calendar that depicted luxury cars. For what it’s worth, to spend all morning thinking about finally going “On The Road” for a year with Lynch and then to receive a year’s worth of dream cars gave me a little chill of certainty that something is happening in my subconscious that’s very real. The second chill came when I realized that this year’s journey is in search of my true “home girl”, the one I’ve always known, who grows Avocados in a grove in her back yard – and although yesterday I’d thought “Jazz Odyssey” was simply a joke, today I realize that “The Odyssey” is the story of Odysseus’s journey home to his girl, and there is a tree:

“An old trunk of olive grew like a pillar on the building plot
and I laid out our bedroom round that tree,
lined up the stone walls, built the roof overhead
and snugged doors to the portal, at the start.
Then I lopped the leafy crown of the olive,
clean-cutting the stump bare from roots up,
planing it round with a bronze smoothing-adze—
I had the skill—I shaped it plumb to the line
to make my bedpost, bored the holes it needed
with an auger. Working from there I built my bed,
start to finish; I gave it ivory inlays,
gold and silver fittings, wove the straps across it,
oxhide gleaming red. There’s our secret sign,
I tell you, our life story! Does the bed
still stand planted firm?—I don’t know—
or has someone chopped away that olive-trunk
and hauled our bedstead off?”

So for us it’s not an Olive Tree but that Avocado farm she had in her back yard, because a dog brought me an avocado to eat when I ran away from home back in Amherst. So these emergences from my subconscious are truly transformative, I recognize them as my emotions come back to life after the coma.

And I remember all the cryptic comments people made when I watched “Ulysses’ Gaze” back in the mid 1990s.

So this is yet another day of objective transformations in cooperation with Lynch, since yesterday he got me to admit that I killed Hollywood, even if it isn’t true, simply because so many people told me that years ago … I admit it, I killed Hollywood and I’m glad.

So we’re out on the road, taking that trip home to China Grove, and the next thing we do will be to pick up William Golding so we can talk about Odin and the Wolfpack.

Jazz Odyssey Day #2

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It’s not actually Jazz Odyssey, that’s just a joke from This is Spinal Tap. It’s day 2 of the year of David Lynch. I got hard results today. Because he practiced transcendental meditation, it’s not difficult to imagine him in a peaceful world of light. It doesn’t matter if he might have hated me in real life because I killed Hollywood or anything. The hard result is that he brought a more transcendental approach to all the astral visuals I see, and actually got me to simply feel better about all of them and enjoy them instead of looking for deep meanings, because if you encourage them they just go on and on, elaborating forever and drawing you on into oblivion. So I’m looking for ways to enjoy everything now and my blog is an experiment in enhancing the enjoyment of my own imagination. I do feel I have the dedication to do this for a solid year, and I am encouraged by the immediate results.

My goal for this year is to have only enjoyment of everything I see in my mind’s eye, since I have been having amazing bliss by focusing on Jesus for several weeks and this only enhances my practice of Sahaj Marg. Somehow I can put my creativity together with actual happiness and rise above the horror of the monsters of the entertainment industry. So we’re off to a good start.

The Blue House

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From the Blog of Drake Marshall, Summer of 2020:

I have to tell you what happened in Peoria. We were all Goths and we had heard of this place called the Blue House, down in Peoria. It was the ultimate Goth hangout, we found out later that it was condemned, overrun with mice, insane mice that had bred into mutants from the pesticides and thronged through the walls like locusts. This high school girl had run away from home, her father was a creepy, corrupt cop, and she had squatted there in this little Mouse House, but she was an artistic genius and really into goth so she got these aquariums from an abandoned pet store or warehouse or something and filled them with fish and then put blue lights behind them, some of them moved like disco lights, and then she would have these insane parties where everyone would trip and listen to the Cure or whatever. Her boyfriend moved in and he was a psycho bitch who would literally throw people who pissed him off down the stairs, so at the start the parties were very well behaved and became quite popular. People heading down to Carbondale and Saint Louis would stop there – including touring bands so it became a known spot you could get invited to if you were cool. Everyone wound up there, even some celebrities. I heard Duran Duran was there one night. Somebody said they saw Stiv Bators with Vaclav Havel. The problem was, my father knew who the boyfriend was, the son of an intel officer he’d known in Vietnam, and it was causing huge problems for the girl’s father, who was in on the local heroin trade, which was being amped up by Chicago street gangs. In a town of 100,000 people, it became a total hotspot and the girl was killed under mysterious circumstances. There were rumours she’d been a witch, with a coven there. My father knew about it and told me never to talk about it. Later that summer the most prominent columnist for the Peoria Journal Star died in a car accident when his brakes failed on the McClugage bridge and his RV flipped over. The coroner said he had an illegal level of alcohol in his blood at 2 in the afternoon, but none of us believed it. That coroner had been working in that town with those heroin-dealing cops for decades.

We saw things there we can’t tell you about. But if you keep reading you’ll get a hint about a lot of things.

I had Claude rewrite this:

Like Scheherazade’s labyrinth twisted through the arteries of the Midwest, this story bleeds blue light and rodent shadows across the map of memory. (How curious that we speak of mice when really we mean the scratching behind walls that could be anything, anything at all…)

Let us say, for the sake of documentation, that there was a house. Not the house you live in, with its mundane certainties of morning coffee and evening news, but The House – the kind that appears in a town like a bruise appears on skin, with no one quite remembering the impact that caused it. Blue House, they called it, though “blue” described less its color than the way it made you feel, like jazz at 3 AM or the moment before crying.

The girl (let’s not name her – names have power in stories like these) didn’t so much live there as haunted it preemptively. Her aquariums glowed like prophecies, fish moving through them like thoughts through a fever dream. The boyfriend – ah, but he wasn’t really a boyfriend, was he? More like a gravitational force, the kind that bends not just light but truth around itself.

Your father knew (fathers always know, especially when they’ve worn uniforms in jungles far away) that the house was less a place than a convergence, a point where all the lines of power and corruption in a small American city knotted themselves together like snakes in winter. The heroin, the cops, the intel officer’s son – these are just the visible threads. Behind them writhed others: witch covens, underground networks, celebrities appearing like hallucinations in the aquarium light.

(I keep returning to those mice, mutated by poison, running through walls like thoughts through nightmares. Were they really mice? Were they really there at all?)

The columnist’s death – we say “death” because “accident” is too neat, too finished – came later, like an echo of something that hadn’t made a sound. The coroner’s report reads like fiction written by committee, each lie carefully measured and administered like morphine.

But you were there, weren’t you? You saw… but no, we don’t speak of what was seen in the Blue House. Some stories can only be told by their absence, like those fish swimming through cobalt light, casting shadows of things that couldn’t possibly exist in a town of 100,000 souls.

(Unless, of course, they did.)

The Transatlantic Superset

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In order to explain the Transatlantic Superset and its importance to world history, I would have to explain to you what our parents did for a living, but that’s impossible. We might get killed. Some of them are involved in politics, you see, and anything I reveal could be used against us by our enemies. I know that at least one them – the politician who started it all by making a pass at Trish – has been caught a couple of times involved with very nasty human traffickers. He always gets away with it by saying he didn’t know what was going on, but we know for a fact that he does. He’s totally repulsive. He pretends to be a born-again Christian, he’s incredibly pompous about it, but if you know what sex addicts are like you can see that he’s pathetically desperate.

So you’ll never know what my father did for a living, except that he worked for the United States Government. He was very secretive, and manipulative, and he used my natural patriotism against me, making me feel guilty about resisting his vicious, hateful attempts to control me, so that now my mind is all twisted up and broken and I have no sense of identity because I can’t get separate from America.

I’m thinking of the Bob Dylan lyric:

Now the rainman gave me two cures
Then he said, “Jump right in”
The one was Texas medicine
The other was just railroad gin
And like a fool I mixed them
And it strangled up my mind
And now, people just get uglier
And I have no sense of time

He did did this so completely that I am only realizing now, after all this time, that my father is probably the sole reason I never wrote anything. He knew that I wanted to write the Great American Novel and he systematically destroyed my ability to do that … my train of thought just broke again. Ironically, there’s a deeper pain to be revealed. I’m exhausted and sad trying to write this …

But maybe I should start with the Methodist Church here in Chicago where we became known as the Wolf Pack … because it was really the fact that we were spending Sundays at the Church that attracted the attention of the political players and caused such a disaster for the conservative party of France, narrowly averting an international crisis that could have led to nuclear war.

That church, which shall remain nameless, was small, and out of the way, hidden deeply in the woods near a nature preserve, but diplomatically it was one of the most important churches in America. I wish I could explain it to you, dear reader, but you can never understand. Once again my mind grinds to a halt. What a joke it is for me to pretend to be a novelist when I can’t describe basic facts of my own life in plain English.

I can’t tell you after all how this came about, this would be giving too much away, but this church was known because diplomats from England and France had attended it for generations. During the cold war it became like an informal embassy. Elected officials and intelligence officers would use it at neutral territory. Presidents ate breakfast there. And during my sophomore year at Ravenswood Academy it was my habit to bring my friends, the ones who called ourselves the Sickie Souse Club but who became known to the world as the Wolf Pack, the American half of the Transatlantic Superset, to eat Sunday morning breakfast with the elites. Afterwards we would sit through the minister’s morning introductions, and before the formal service we would split for the bible study room we’d been assigned where we would watch Brinkley, smoke weed and fuck. It may sound shocking to you, but there was nothing unusual about our behavior. As far as I could tell, all the adults were doing things like that and worse. That was 1985. It was a different time. I miss it because it still felt as though the United States was a serious country. We were young cold warriors, rising through the ranks of the ruling classes.

The Whore of Babylon

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I had wanted to write canonical literature, which is as arrogant as it seems. I saw myself as a candidate for the Great American Novel. And then, after my confrontation with Warren, when it was obvious that a career as a novelist was out of the question (would, in fact, be dangerous), I thought I might simply write a glossy romance about the misadventures of some drugged-up, oversexed private school kids – “Five Go Mad on the CTA”, as it were – to wise up the squares about how dreary and desolate a rich kid’s life can be.

But how would I explain Trish to you? Trish, whose mind is broken in a way so similar to mine that we consider ourselves twins. I call her my Narci-Sis. For, you see, Trish is from a wealthy real estate family and her grandfather tried to break her mind. He did manage to use her sexually for several years until he was caught, and so she has the usual sexual issues, but the real damage was to imprison her for hours and torture her until she almost had a split personality, a “bad self” that would respond to him sexually on his command. She is incredibly talented and beautiful and like me she has a broken place in her mind where her personality simply quits and there’s nothing but an uncontrollable flood of images and emotions with no seeming center. But she’s the opposite of me in that in those circumstances I close down and become extremely cold and controlling, whereas she loses her mind and becomes extravagantly hysterical.

She looks like Christy Turlington, by the way. During the summer of 1988, when Christy was just getting famous, I tried to train Trish as my slave-assistant so I could complete the Abramelin working. We were living in her family’s villa in Ibiza, hopping back and forth to London to check out the dance scene. It was the Second Summer of Love, everyone was crazy on drugs, dancing all the time and talking crap about aliens and magic. Trish got mistaken for Christy all the time, and this caused some awkward rumors about both Trish and Christy that had to be quashed by the fashion industry because Christy was Catholic and Trish was channeling the Whore of Babylon.

Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie

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(the words of Drake Marshall)

My father died from COVID, thank god. I can’t tell you what it means to me. He was out there in New York, an early case, for all I know he’s in one of those semi-trucks you see in news articles, overflowing with dead bodies. My mother, hapless dolt that she is, is taking care of everything, or their butler is, or who knows. She told me about it on the phone. “That’s terrible,” I said, knowing she wouldn’t expect any strong expressions of emotion. She informed me that she knew it would make me unhappy and I shouldn’t be too hard on myself. At some point there will be a funeral.

Meanwhile, here I am at the club, the Egyptian-themed spa that is still owned by the family of Alvin Albrecht, my childhood friend from school. When the lockdown started the spa closed so, so our old school set is using it as a secret base, preparing for the Mad Max Apocalypse that may be coming. The pools are working and our favorite saunas are still hot. Alvin’s family is being generous with their long-term employees, keeping them on as a skeleton crew. Everyone here knows the place so well we never interfere with each other.

I’m spending a lot of time crying and laughing, having strange feelings that should be about my father in some sense but can never truly because he was such a twisted fuck.

… That’s the point where my mind breaks. I can’t follow a train of thought when I think or talk or write about him because he beat me up so much when I was younger.

Black Clover #7: Last Cigarette

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I was rocking out to “Last Cigarette” by Dramarama today, and that is the last thing I could remember as I started this entry. I wondered whether to do it but I remembered that the point is not to say anything, but rather to build up incrementally so I’ll have some alchemical memory of this process much deeper than any specific iteration. So today I watched episode 3 of Black Clover. It’s a bit repetitive with some of the dialogue and observations about the characters, but I’m hoping that will create a deeper experience down the line.

I ride the edge as I write these, my imaginary girlfriend always interrupts me with a deeper layer of energy. But I realize that now I do have an edge to ride, a private space that will not be shared, and then this emotional space, the “mid-level” of my feelings that has been destroyed over the years, the writing is not about Anime it’s about the oblique emotions, the sense of completeness that comes from full immersion in all the beautiful lines and colors, frequencies of thought, the endless expanse of beauty. The abstraction of drama into the realms of Victory and Splendour.

We are sharing in the space, sending messages to ourselves in the future in order to cherish these experiences.

Black Clover 6: My God, What Have I Done?

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I’ve watched a bit more of “Freezing”, and man this story is creepier than I thought, much darker than I expected. Still I’m going to follow through. I wanted to know about the “arc”, the initial interest in a Waifu versus the transformation that takes place as I watch all the episodes. The world of this story is so much darker than Akira that I’m really surprised … I’m looking for the center of gravity of the various animes I’m watching.

I had been reading Stephen King’s “It” trying to recapture my youth, I was about 200 pages into it, but my sudden left turn into anime has changed my whole enjoyment of that, my sense of the passage of time in entertainment is getting very strange. I mean, “Freezing” is from 2011. Thirteen years have gone by, so much happened on this planet that I never saw, I feel my spirit calling to me from somewhere deeper in the universe. Why was I on this crummy planet where all the entertainment became so harsh and ugly?

This story is getting frightening with the viciousness of the school students. I was so enjoying my first discovery of this campy fanservice romp, but now I’m just hoping some of the fun is left when I’m done, I’m hoping it doesn’t turn out badly. I am going to follow through however, and pay attention to what happens.

I watched a bit more, and it got funny again, it’s very mysterious but ultimately I’m getting something out of it at a deeper level, some kind of spiritual understanding.

Black Clover #5(?): Satellizer El Bridget

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I’ve had an amazing weekend, the first truly warm weekend of spring, which I am already calling summer. And my gambit has paid off, I have immersed myself in Manga and after two weeks of messing around, checking out YouTube best-ofs and exploring shadowy semi-legal uncensored sites, I have found my first true love: Satellizer el Bridget, who is so obviously the angelic being who first appeared to me as Farrah Fawcett-Majors when I had her poster on my wall in third grade. More importantly, she is the being who was speaking to me when I was 15 years old and listening to David Bowie’s TVC15:

Up every evening ’bout
Half eight or nine
I give my complete attention
To a very good friend of mine
He’s quadraphonic, he’s a
He’s got more channels
So hologramic, oh my TVC one five
I brought my baby home, she, she sat around forlorn
She saw my TVC one five, baby’s gone, she
She crawled right in, oh my, she crawled right in my
So hologramic, oh my TVC one five
Oh, so demonic, oh my TVC one five

Maybe if I pray every, each night I sit there pleading
Send back my dream test baby, she’s my main feature
My TVC one five, he, he just stares back unblinking
So hologramic, oh my TVC one five
One of these nights I may just jump down that rainbow way
Be with my baby, then we’ll spend some time together
So hologramic, oh my TVC one five
My baby’s in there someplace, love’s rating in the sky
So hologramic, oh my TVC one five

Transition
Transmission
Transition
Transmission

An angel from the Sphere of Victory, Satellizer is also obviously the Satellite of Love referred to in the Lou Reed song. Pay attention, Otakus! These are important clues to evolution in the psychic wars!

Metcha shiawase!