NOVEMBER

When I first created my website, I considered adding a dream journal section. After going through recounts of my dreams, I decided against it. It's putting a magnifying glass right up against my psyche. As you may well notice, I prefer to be viewed through the lens of a stained glass window. It's obscured, it's artsy; it's there and you can try to make out the shapes through the blurriness. Maybe I might put up a dream journal some day. My earlier dreams, though, were very psychosexual and/or violent. And I can imagine why.

Besides the intrusive thoughts (or V2K brainwaves, as one offbeat acquaintance suggested), I consume all my porn at night, right before I go to sleep. It's been my nightly ritual for years, how I ended every day. I probably consumed way too much porn, but a lot of it was out of necessity. Each night I would have a new sexual craving, seek out way too much porn to satiate it, and then bookmark the rest. Since my tastes differed every night, I would end up with more than I consumed, and the amount of porn I had saved grew and grew, adding to my desire to consume it all and be done with it, but obviously this cycle fed into itself. At one point, I was finally convinced to delete it all, and that was that. After all, I figured, if I wanted it so bad, I didn't doubt I'd be able to find it again. If something I desire exists publically online, it is nearly guaranteed I will eventually find it if my desire is strong enough. Sitting in bed, that was the one time of day my head was full of nothing but sex. I use the past tense because these days, masturbation hardly excites me any more and I feel no desire when I am not at that moment looking at porn.

The reason I mention all this is to explain that it seems an obvious explanation for my constant sexually-themed dreams. But it also leads me to segue to another point of discussion. Dreams, especially lucid dreams, create a space where an individual can do anything they want. And it has made me realize that there is very little I want. Or rather, very little worth carrying out. Look no further than Maslow's hierarchy of needs. The bottom two are obvious. I eat, I sleep, I take care of myself to a reasonable degree. As an aside, viewing this pyramid, I notice there is no section for personal desires, but I realize this is a hierarchy of needs, not wants. Well, let's just pretend for a moment, there is another section above the top section about personal pleasure. So everything above the bottom two is what would fit into "anything I want to do."

If you've already forgotten because of my loosely organized rambling, this is about lucid dreams, as well as the overarching question of what would you do if you could do anything. After all, in a lucid dream, you can do anything your imagination can create. Going up the list, this may be forming relationships, intimacy, perhaps communicating with a lost loved one, doing something like climbing a mountain, simply having a moment to yourself inside your imagination, or we can go up to that final section, personal pleasure. What might this mean? Eating junk food in your dreams while you're on a diet, meeting a celebrity, living out perverse sexual fantasies? Well, I used to have frequent lucid dreams. As you may well imagine, when I wasn't having violent, sexual dreams because of my subconscious, I was given control through lucidity and having violent, sexual dreams because of my own conscious self. Though when I woke, I always felt a little strange about doing it. I can go deeper into this later, but one thing at a time.

Well, there you have it though, my own answer. I was merely living out psychotic sexual fantasies, every time. And so something occurs to me now, looking back. My desires from back then haven't changed. I don't live for much. Art and sex. I create art. I create stuff in general. I feel good about doing it. That's that. I masturbate. Nowadays, I don't masturbate as much because it doesn't appeal to me so much. And I've never seriously considered having sex with someone else. Having sex with someone I don't already have a deep connection to seems to me to be entirely pointless outside of the physical pleasure of the act itself, and at that point it's hardly better than masturbation. Following this line of thought, I can't seriously consider having a deep romantic connection to someone either. Call it a self esteem issue or call it being realistic, the label doesn't matter when the outcome is the same. So to summarize, the only two things I could possibly want to do in a dream are create art or have sex purely for the sensation. I'm not interested in imagining a relationship that will cease to exist when I wake up, and I don't care to make art in a dream for the same reason, so that leaves only the dream sex. It seems like a waste, but there's nothing else I can think to do. It doesn't matter so much now, as I'm speaking in retrospect. I haven't had a lucid dream in a while.

Now back to the earlier thing, about the violent, sexual dreams that were supposedly my own lucid actions. Well, having intrusive thoughts for years can really mess up one's mind. Mine manifested as presumed desires. I want to do all these things, and obsess over them. Even though they make me feel bad, they are my true desires. I may not like it, but I'm just a bad person. Etc etc etc. So I wonder if the same thing was happening in dreams. I did these things in the dreams because I thought I wanted them, and dreams were a safe outlet to do them without facing the consequences, but I was never happy about it waking up. To this day, I don't know my own thoughts or desires. The long term damage is seemingly irreversible. But I try not to think about it often.

I have other things to say. Tonight, I filled my sleep-deprived head with so much far-out information, it's completely frazzled. What came of it was an idea for a short story that I may one day write in the future. If I've written it, I'll hopefully remember to add an edit below with the title. Now then, I've also had some ideas. I began writing this entry with this section specifically in mind, but ended up writing everything above instead. So now, I can't really remember if I had anything else to say. But I do remember one important thought: For any insanity you may be skeptical of, be it supernatural or spiritual or anything else, I believe the human mind and imagination are so powerful that they can simulate it to offer the same experience to whoever may claim to have had such an experience. For that reason, I don't mess with such things, because our minds are scary things.

As for another thing: I had another identity crisis the other night. Nothing more to say there, so that's that.

There is this idea that sex doesn't need to end with the orgasm; there doesn't have to be a finish line that one rushes towards. This concept was first brought to my attention by one ljrmr (who I consider an inspiration of sorts in their depiction of sex, or whatever profound act they are disguising as sex). Frankly, I disagreed with the idea. How do you just stop without a clear end? Or more crudely, what's the point when cumming is the best part?

It is tonight that I now understand. There is pleasure to be found in a nice little spell of soothing, sensual relaxation.

(11/20/20 edit to this entry -- I am testing out a feature to add the lines below to this earlier entry)

Switching topics: I have taken care to hold my tongue more often, as part of a personal experiment. More thought is put into each word I communicate in conversation. What I keep to myself now is eye-opening.

Switching topics again: I once read of a treatment for HOCD in which a young fellow, who had thoughts of stabbing his father to death, sat down with a knife next to his father, who would periodically say "please don't kill me, son." I understand the intention but the mental picture terrified me and I cried after reading it. Since then, I've sometimes had this idea enter my head of being locked in a room with a bunch of people, maybe kids just to add to the depravity, all grabbing at me and pleading "please don't kill me, please don't rape me, please don't hurt me" and things such as that. A room built for psychological torture as I see it.

I am intensely aroused and disgusted by my own physical appearance in equal measure. On a different note, I'm listening to Miles Davis on autoplay. His "Quiet Nights" album is good writing music.

A late night bull session gets the gears turning. Many thoughts arising as of late. For instance, here's a thought experiment. How little does it take for you to feel bad about someone's death? If I told you someone died, you have no reason to care. "Someone died." So many people die every day; it's common knowledge. "A young woman died." You're able to picture a real person now, just barely. "A young woman named Mackenzie Fenton died." A name hardly means anything. In a way, it distances you further again, because you know many young women but do you know any young women named Mackenzie Fenton? What if I described her death in grisly detail? You'd probably be more shocked by the death itself than you would feel bad for her as a person. She's a schoolteacher, this Mackenzie woman, with a brother and two sisters. Okay, too bad for her relatives. Which brings me to another point. What if I told you Mackenzie Fenton was my aunt? Well, (in this hypothetical, you know me personally) even then you'd probably feel bad for me and not my dead aunt. Now what if you talked to my aunt only once? If she was rude, maybe you wouldn't care much about her because of one sour experience before she died. But if she was nice, maybe you'd care a good deal more. What a cruel world to snuff out a nice young woman. Well, still you don't know her all that well. Maybe it was some small talk, that one time you talked to her. But maybe you both had a heart-to-heart, and she gave you some very good advice you took to heart. Now, you might really care. You begin to realize she was somewhat important to you deep down, even if you only talked once. Maybe you can forget she is a relative of mine and this and that, and you only know her as someone with which you talked once, but you'd still care, maybe. You get the idea. Something to consider. The reason I bring this up is because I talked to someone online a bit ago, and something interesting happened.

As you may be aware, the human mind is wild and illogical. We think and feel things that often don't make sense but there's hardly any point in trying to rationalize it. Maybe there's a psychological explanation, but who really knows. I often try to leave my body and look at things from an outward perspective. Now on one particular day, here is that interesting thing that happened. I talked to someone online, as I have already mentioned. A few minutes of brief chat, our first meeting. I message them and we talk a bit and what comes out of that is a few nice messages back and forth and they have this kind of energy about them. You could call it an unadultered passion. Passion for living and feeling. Enviable, to say the least.

They got a real nice spirit. But life is cruel. And so I stop and think to myself for a moment, and I know in the moments afterwards I would really feel bad if I found out they died. After only one interaction. A very pleasant one, undeniably.

I speak to many people. I don't care about them. Or, rather, I don't think much of them. Maybe they present to me a funny anecdote later on, but otherwise they are nothing to me. I don't know why I may care more or less about losing someone. It doesn't speak to how much I may like or dislike them. It could have something to do with the level of emotional honesty we have, because it cements the idea that they are a human worth of life. Which sounds like a solid theory. But I know better than to try using objective logic on subjective feelings.

That's that.

I'm putting in the work to develop some proper art skills again. Hopefully, I'll stick to it this time. Once I finally overcome perspective, I'll be closer to tackling anatomy and proportions.

That's that.

Dreams. I had this thought late last night... What is the process behind my work -- and here I become aware once again how self-conscious I am referring to my 'work,' or acknowledging that I am some sort of artist at all. That's a big title, really, artist, but I digress. The process. The meaning. And so yesterday a parallel made itself apparent. What are dreams? It's the mind creating stories, nonsensical or others, and feeding them to the dreamer. Some people like to discern meaning from dreams and some believe there is no meaning. Even the dreamer does not always know. So there we have it. Understand?

Oh my goodness. I just finished making the whole navigation menu system for the blog section. What a pain. So much tedious work. And it could look better. But I do not care.