Dream 28-29 June 2006: "The Brick Wall Man"

Last night I had a dream where I saw a peculiar man whose skin was made of red-brown bricks like old factories and their chimneys and smokestacks in my hometown. He looked like a man-shaped wall, eyes hidden behind some sort of dark peeping holes, so it seemed he could see and hear me quite well. I asked him why did he look like this, and he told me his story.

"Once I was just like you, a person of flesh and blood. Maybe it was the traumas of my childhood and youth that caused me to become like this. My family, teachers and other children who kept bullying me all the time made me this. Military service and my abusive employer made me this. My sarcastic professor at university made me this. My pathetic and desperate efforts with girls made me this. Gradually I saw my skin harden, die away and turn into this hard stone-like substance. It was like some metamorphosis in a story by Kafka, except in didn't turn into any cockroach, I turned into a brick wall of a man."

Still amazed by this sight, I kept asking the brick man questions as to why and how and other things like that. How did he eat, since his brick face didn't seem to have any place for a mouth; and what if he had to go to the bathroom?

"Well, that's the really peculiar thing here. I don't eat but I found I've got this powerplug in my armpit, so I can load myself and stay sustained with electric currency. And because I don't drink and eat, therefore I have no need to urinate or defecate either, which makes things considerably easier in my current form. Once I forgot to load myself and found myself getting extremely weak until I couldn't move anywhere. I already thought I was going to die but fortunately some friendly passerbys got a car battery with them through which they were able to resuscitate me. After that incident I've dutifully kept plugging myself in every night for a reload before going to sleep, like I was a mobile phone."

So, he was still able to sleep after all?

"Yes, and that's the weirdest thing here. I have to sleep like an ordinary person, and I do have dreams. Usually I dream about being in my former shape, where I can touch and feel and taste and smell things as a man of flesh and blood, and it's always great to have these dreams, walking there through meadows and forests in summer with their myriads of different odours and feeling the warmth of the sun and gentle breeze on my skin. Then suddenly, I wake up and find myself back in my cold and hard, lifeless stone form."

How did the other people react on seeing him?

"First they're amazed, of course, but quite soon they become used to it like they get used to the bums asking for money, so they know how to stay as far away from me as possible. On the street little children always point their fingers at me until their parents tell them that it's unpolite to stare. Teenagers are the worst, always shouting at me and making rude remarks. Every now and then someone wants to pick up a fight, but they will only get their knuckles hurt trying to hit me. Sometimes they try to kick me but seeing that my heavy stony mass won't let me fall down, they normally get bored soon and leave. Once a gang tried to pour gasoline on me and burn me but it was pretty useless too, since my body is basically like a firewall."

Had he tried to get any medical help to this condition of his?

"Once I went to see a doctor, a dermatologist, but he was totally helpless in front of me. They thought my case held some scientific interest, though, so I was thoroughly photographed by some medical students. Someone has allegedly written a paper about me in Korea, or so I hear. They also tried to get some skin samples (or whatever you can call them) of me, but their equipment only broke down since it was too hard. Obviously I'm impenetrable. The army experts say I probably could be able to take a nuclear attack and stay in one piece. Well, trying to get state pension based on my medical condition proved to be quite useless, too, there being no actual physical fault in me. So, now I live on unemployment benefits and try to get myself a job but I think no one wants to hire a guy who looks like their backyard fence."

Did he have any theory about why this had happened to him?

"Beats me, hell if I knew. Sometimes I think that this skin of bricks is not for my own protection, to keep me safe from the rest of the world, but to keep the others safe from me. Sometimes I'm afraid of my own thoughts, all the amount of hatred that is hidden inside of me. When I think about all the people who have hurt me or tried to... or who laughed at me, ridiculed me, thought I was next to nothing."

Then he told me about his hateful fantasies and dreams, some of which really filled me with disgust and put a fear in me.

"Yes, I think there's somewhere a real monster living inside this brick wall, and it's important that he stays inside and never gets out. Some really horribly things would happen if he ever did. Probably it's this armour of mine that also keeps me together; without it I would probably fall apart, unleash the hell inside of me which would destroy everyone and everything."

Speaking this, he had become very agitated, and suddenly I noticed a crack had appeared on his brick skin. At this moment I woke up.

Feb' 06 Dream III

[Mr. Sandman - a dangerous lunatic?]

If there ever was a dream to make one to demand refund, and to cast serious doubts on Mr. Sandman's sanity, this was definitely it.

This time my trip to Slumberland featured an imminent court case against me, and they had gathered together all my alter egos by subpoena as material and character witnesses. One after another they testified as to how ruthlessly I had brought them into existence, only to gratify and justify my narcissistic and petty ego. With a growing sense of anxiety I listened to these harrowing statements which could not but lead into one inevitable conclusion: that my character was totally false and rotten to the core, that I was no good: a Public Enemy Number One to all that was proper and decent in this society. Most of all I was accused that I had demanded the right to define my identity (or more accurately: identities) always according to the present situation. Nobody knew if I was animal, vegetable or mineral. I was more slippery than an eel on vaseline, more evasive than mercury on a slide.

The court adjourned; my sentence being the harshest and cruellest of them all: that my own conscience was to act as my jury, judge, bailiff and warden, and I was to pass my own judgment on myself. The sentence was to be carried out on lonely, sleepless nights; in the impenetrable gazes of people, meaningful silences and the conspicuous absentness. I already started to suspect that even my shadow was more real than me; my suspicions grimly confirmed when I was given a restraint order to stay not nearer than four blocks, three parked Japanese cars and one menopausal (and therefore constantly irascible) metermaid away from my shadow; for whom, additionally, I was to pay monthly maintenance (that is, to my shadow, not the metermaid).

Feb '06 Dream II

It's funny how some of the most deep-seated realisations sometimes come to us only in dreams. During this dream I painfully understood that all my life I had been only myself and no-one else. Imagine the horror of finding yourself trapped in one and same body, day after day, year after year, decade after decade. No wonder if one starts to feel claustrophobic. To be able to see oneself one needs a mirror (which does only show one's reverse image, not what one really is) or having oneself photographed or filmed. Unless one being some sort of yogi, there is no chance to leave one's body behind, that clumsy prison of weak, crumbling flesh; one's eyes a 3-D TV camera inside one's skull, one's nose protruding between those; one's ears stereophonic microphones. Why not seeing through someone else's eyes, someone else's point of view, in someone else's body; with someone else's consciousness, experiences and memories? It was not fair. Only by absorbing oneself to a book, movie, music, alcohol, drugs, sex or physical exercise, one could have some sort of hope of forgetting oneself, if only momentarily. Or without a body entirely, only as some sort of uncorporeal mind observing. -- It felt like I was on the verge of being enlightened, or, finally losing my mind. Anything to forget one's solipsism.

I also saw you in my dream. You wanted to switch off your brain for a while by watching bad TV shows, any Hollywood blockbuster movies produced by Jerry Bruckheimer and political debates between presidential candidates, but my problem was that I felt I was never thinking enough.

There in my dream those with under-140 IQs were officially frowned upon by the mental hygiene eugenists. Demagogues and finger-pointers had a field day at the opportunists' sandbox called politics. Government held exhaustive recruitment campaigns to get more cops to the force, who would keep the suburban poor at bay. But no worry, they were kept pacified as long as the tax for alcohol was low. Sexual paranoia was tangible in the air (you've browsed through your Freud, so you are aware of what those snakes and spiders stand for).

So it was only suitable that there was also a poll in this dream of mine: "Under which category of these sexual deviants you fall: a) a fat schizophrenic cyberstalker who spreads his masturbation videos in the Net, b) a 65-year old photographer whose fetish are women's high heel shoes, c) an extreme right-wing nationalist bigot who fantasizes of saliromantic sodomy between different races and those who don't share his crypto-fascist political beliefs, d) a poor melancholic bastard believing in the dated notions of romantic relationships and eternal love."
I decided not to answer, but dastardly jumped into another era (as you know, transitions defying all logic are possible in dreams).

Now I was standing at Tampere's Keskustori square in 1905 where the cigarette-smoking working class President in his rollerskates gave the Red Declaration, and the advertising agency Bob Helsinki sang Marseillaise. Then the President shot Governor-General Bobrikoff with a waterpistol, while Lenin was strutting around wearing ladies' lingerie and Manolo Blahniks, handing out daffodils to the Imperial Guard. Mata Hari made a daring escape from SMERSH with her jetpak, only to be strangled to death when her scarf caught in the open-spoked wheel of Isadora Duncan's automobile. Affectations can be dangerous, indeed.

After this a spider hatched her eggs in my nostrils. I didn't suspect anything until baby spiders started crawling out of my nose and thought I was their mommy. At this moment I was shaken enough to open my eyes.

[previous dream]

Another Dream (In Four Parts)

1) She was power-dressed for the presidential erection and betatesting nuclear weapons: she said that whenever surrounded by her fellow conservatives, it would look good on her CV. Her horde came dressed for their party convention in expensive suit costumes, having haircuts that cost more than what a single mother from the suburbs made in a month; they flashed their predatory carnivore teeth between their wide and hungry blood-coloured lips.

2) Either having a low self-esteem or delusions of grandeur (which are both basically the same thing), we pursued our wild, haunting daydreams.

3) Fear was oozing from the walls of the school building as I walked down its deserted corridors. In this area the children were taught from the beginning by their teachers that they were nothing, would become nothing, and the biggest hope they could ever have in their lives would be as the slaves for the power-dressed carnivores. They were taught to lie but in such a way that they would not get caught, otherwise they would be in a for a harsh and humiliating punishment. A teacher would burst suddenly into unexplainable bursts of rage and without a warning attack the nearest unsuspecting child.

4) In the near future corporate executives would organise hunting expeditions in their Land Rovers, armed with laser-targeted night vision rifles, to the slum areas to prey on and kill the poor and unemployed.

[previous dream]

My Dream about Russian Lady Cops

I just had the strangest dream. I was sexually harassed by these Russian women cops fresh out of Academy. They wanted to know if I was a t*rrorist and if I had any secret information about Finland's plans to join NATO in the near future. I tried to tell them that I was just a poor boy from Tampere with not a nickel in my pocket and didn't know about such things, but suffice it to say I was not believed.

I don't want to tell you the harrowing details of how exactly I was tortured but it involved a contraption of ostrich feathers, gearwheels and some everyday kitchen utensils, with a considerable amount of margarine. After my ordeals at the hands of Czar Vladimir's finest, the 101st Cheesecake Brigade, I was both physically and mentally exhausted. Their staff sergeant, a thick-set middle-aged matron in dark blue uniform shouted instructions to her troops: "Davay davay! Fork him, pork him, Peter Tork him!"

"Please, don't pull my Rod Stewart so hard!" I cried in anguish. Needless to say, my pleas went unheeded. Gladly I was saved just in the nick of time by the near-divine intervention of the Montgolfier Brothers who took me to their Chantilly lace balloon hovering over the Red Square. Barely dodging Russian anti-aircraft artillery our Mathias Rusty vehicle took us to our asylum in the sky. We saw ten thousand karate nuns ascending, Saint Peter saluting them with a Masonic hand signal. All the archangels were there with their trombones, playing Dixieland jazz. Buddha gave us the OK sign and winked. Suddenly the archangels shouted in unison to me: "Duck, you schmuck!" but it was too late, and the asteroid which killed the dinosaurs hit me to my gulliver. Exactly that moment I woke up and found myself lying on the floor.

A Fever Dream

I spent the early week sticking Eclectro Lounge's posters on bulletin boards. On Wednesday I felt the first symptoms of flu coming, and on Wednesday night fever rised. I was so hot that one could have probably fried eggs on my skin. I shivered under three blankets, and was probably a bit delirious since I had strangest sensations; half asleep, half awake. Time was lingering on painfully as if in slow motion; I had to rationalize my every thought and movement as if they were not self-evident any more: more like fragmented instead of the every-day normal, "automatic" state of continuum -- now I'm moving my hand, now I rise from the sofa, now I walk from the point x to the point y. It was all a bit like being drugged. From cold shivers my teeth started chattering against each other, and soon I realised it was rhythmic and accelerating as in shaman's drumming, probably meant to be trance-inducing. I was wondering if I was going to have an out-of-body experience.

Then, I don't know what happened but soon I dreamt (if that's the right word for my state of mind) of being back in the suburb Kaukajärvi of my childhood, and strangely I met myself as a child; a little boy in his flared trousers living in his fantasy world. And the most peculiar thing was that I was both myself as a child and as an adult, feeling as if being in a sort of "double exposure". It took place at the street of Järvikatu, near the pub called Kivitasku, where I used to buy Space: 1999 Trading Cards from a kiosk.

Me as a little boy was scared and lonely. Me as a grown-up tried to consolate this little boy, telling I was him, coming from the future the little boy was always dreaming about. I told him the future of 2005 was not exactly the sci-fi world of space stations, moonbases, and interstellar adventures (not at least yet), but fantastic in other ways such as with the Internet, mobile phones and so on (this probably sounds naïve now but remember I was not in my normal state of mind, it was more like being in the middle of fairy tale); there was not going to be a nuclear war (not at least by 2005), and everything was going to be fine in his life despite of all hard times he'd be through. I took him by the hand, and we flew over Kaukajärvi. And that's about all of it.