Been using hypnosis to increase my dream recall and incidence of lucid dreams.  Just had another lucid dream this morning, where I was sliding down an underground river (cataract, really) toward a lake and I knew that it was a dream and I had to just relax and “become the water” in order not to drown.

 So I just had an idea for a sequel to the Matrix trilogy.  Everyone cool now knows that reality is breaking up, the spirit world is getting closer, everything is synchronous.  my movie is set in a high school where a guy who watches “the matrix” all the time suddenly starts having lucid dreams, realizing that the Matrix really is a metaphor for some real kind of paradigm shift — and starts haunting this really cute girl’s dreams.  he picks a few other people he’d want to be friends with and forms a dreamgang — but then the other dreamers recognize him in the waking world so he has to explain to them how he developed this ability, then they all develop it —

BUT THEN of course they realize there’s a biggger war of control going on and dark forces chase them around the dream world etc. 

the key is that it could be a true story!  lucid dreaming really is “hacking the matrix”, stories of the supernatural are totally more realistic than news accounts of daily life . . . etc.  so the whole point of the movie is that world culture has hit the crisis point where everyone knows “reality” is a lie —

and furthermore all the psychic combat and the nasty creatures and stuff can be depicted with total realism, no exaggeration, based on stuff that’s really going on right this minute!

Been sick for a couple of days, kind of a climax to two weeks of running around Chicago getting acclimated to a city I’m not embarrassed to live in — a big change from Grand Rapids.  There’s nothing good about Grand Rapids, you know.  I suppose some day I may fall back into that “but it’s nicer in the country” mindset, but the people aren’t nicer or more honest — in fact there’s a higher percentage of disastrous failures.  Bitterness and lying abound.  It’s worse than Hollywood because no one’s even glamorous or wealthy.

 Sigh, I just had to give a shout-out to the cosmos — I blew off most of the people who ever read my blogs back in Michigan, so I am now truly calling out to the thin air — but that’s okay because I can see the spirit world pretty clearly now.  Speaking of which, I have to go off to the fourth dimension now so whatever beings are reading this, thank you for your attention and I’ll be seeing you.

 I am the total cosmos!

So I’m moving to Chicago soon, to be a little fish in a big pond.  That’s quite all right — I’m sick of Grand Rapids, sick of prowling around the same four neighborhoods, sick of hanging around shopping malls just to get the feeling of being in a large crowd, sick of forgiving everyone and everything around me for being second rate just because it’s only Grand Rapids . . . so I’ll finally be where cool things are actually cool and I’ll have to compete with people who actually are at the top of their field, which is good for me.

 I’ll also have to clean up my act on the web; about ten times as many people will read my writing, and about one tenth as many will care what it says.  I have an opportunity to “remake” myself in a way — I’m not denying who I was but I get to choose who I want to be in this new setting.  I’m arguing with spirits about that these last couple of days . . . I guess I’m a writer.  Really I’m an intuitive, and I hope to pick up some extra cash doing readings for people, but as an intuitive I have to express myself artistically for some reason . . .

I’m reading Brett Easton Ellis now, “Rules of Attraction” a blast from my past (language is destructive) . . . in fact so much a blast from my past that last Saturday I got raving drunk and actually groped this girl I know.  I was reliving college, being a teenager in the late 80s when the reality was being sucked out of popular culture.  someday perhaps I will be able to express the nature of this time warp.  The late 80s was a very astral decade, what with MTV and all . . . everyone realizing that society was based more on visual impressions than any kind of logic or morality.

Listening to “Team Sleep”, awesome record.  Also picked up one by Popol Vuh down at Vertigo.  “Rules of Attraction” mentions The Thomposon Twins several times . . . interesting to know that this millionaire author was hearing the same music I was back then. 

 there’s no point to this post except a snapshot of my life and an exploration of the concept of “work”.  life is a lot of (sometimes apparently meaningless) steps that eventually lead somewhere . . . I have this fucking blog i should do something useful with it.  my next post will be useful.

I was wondering whether I should have posted that stuff about “the dark power”.  I was a little wary of actually channeling one of my spirit guides — by which I mean typing just what she told me to type.  However that Saturday I was at a show and this woman I know suddenly started telling me she needed someone to put he “Dark Power of Satan” into her.  What a coincidence!  So it was totally arranged as proof that I was on the money with a lot of that earlier post.

But of course there is no Satan, only the dark power of choice.

April 17 2020 – As it turned out later, most of the people I knew at that show were creeps and they may have read my blog and were setting me up for some bullshit.  That was that scummy burlesque show I hung around with.

Not coincidentally, having posted all this about Metallica, there was a Metallica song playing right before the Potatoe-Babies last show.  Those guys are way awesome, and I would never say anything bad about them so it just goes to show that everything’s subjective and way way complicated.  But it’s also true that even when they’re singing about how cool high school shootings are, Potatoe Babies are funny.  

The hardest part about keeping track of these energy transformations is keeping it going past the first step.  Once the ball gets rolling things happen so fast that it’s almost impossible to remember what has happened, let alone describe something so ethereal.  So let’s go in bits and pieces.

 All that stuff I wrote about Metallica is a memory of a really horrifying experience I had at one of their shows almost 20 years ago, when they got the whole crowd chanting “Die! Die! Die!” with their fists pumping in the air, lights sweeping the crowd, frighteningly reminiscent of film footage of fascist rallies, and I had a horrifying flash on the basic power of society — the power to command obedience.  I asked a bunch of people after the show why they were doing that, and none of them could really answer me, although there was something along the lines of wanting everything bad in society to die, which is kind of a crap answer and at the time I thought it was basically a copout.  At the time I did think Metallica were ugly thugs, especially since a little while later an old woman got kicked to death in the stairwell of her apartment building and the paper said the perpetrators were chanting Metallica lyrics (though you can’t believe everything you read in the papers, and really you can’t blame artists if their fans are assholes).  I’m older now and I try not to make those kind of judgements (unless I’m really pissed off).  But while I was writing I was going back in time, digging up a horror story . . . It was a kind of trance in which I could feel my attention descending into a “lower” level of consciousness. 

At this point there are three possible routes:  describe what I was personally going through at the time and why this experience hit such a nerve, go through all the observations on the magical symbolism of political power, or get back to what happened to my personal energy after I wrote those last posts. 

Maybe none of them would be necessary if I could understand objectively the “taste” of heavy metal music, the way it enters into the body and directs the attention toward a certain energy state.  Then maybe I could figure out what the spiritual purpose of it is, how it benefits the individual.  Because I am sure that it is somehow necessary for a person’s development to indulge in that kind of powertripping.

Metallica concerts exist according to the will of God, and everybody in Metallica and everyone who listens to Metallica has a soul and all of these souls have their own purposes of which I know naught.  Unfortunately this is also true of the Ku Klux Klan, and that terrible evil version of Islam to which suicide bombers subscribe.  This is not to put Metallica anywhere near those other groups in terms of malevolence, but just to point out that even if all souls are equal it is still necessary to make choices of conscience. In other words, just because everyone has their own path doesn’t mean that there are not paths which are more or less “spiritual” or “skillful” or whatever — and I am convinced that this is an objective truth and not just a matter of opinion.  Life is confusing, but it is not all subjective. 

 My question has always been, given that power is necessary in this World, and that the Earthly powers that govern society are generally dark, who is responsible for what?  Life sucks for most people.  Can you truly condemn anyone for “selling out”?  Despair is a real thing and the music of despair serves a purpose for people who cannot find a way out of it.  What is that purpose?  Why does the “congregation of despair” have such a strong appeal?  And am I supposed to care?  Is it any of my business?  Doesn’t the world go on as usual no matter what you think about it?