Tuesday 15 April 2003

Pic of the day: This is perhaps not the ideal time to tell your friend that your clothes are actually optical illusions. Anyway, this picture is from the anime Happy World. And it only gets worse from here.

Dreams & ducksex?

OK, this entry will start rather innocently. But I have the feeling that those who will take offense at the end - and I can think of quite a few - won't be much interested in the beginning either. And for much the same reason that I am not.

"Lucid dreams" - the ability to be self-aware during dreams - is now accepted as a fact by most sleep researchers. There was an informative article about it (in Norwegian though) in the latest Illustrert Vitenskap. They compared it to learning a new language: Virtually everyone can do it, but for some it is easier than for others.

They recommended first learning to remember your dreams: When you wake up, don't move until you have looked back at your latest dream and fixed in your mind what little you remember. The more often you do this, the more you will remember. Another way which has been recommended from the days of Freud, is to write down your dreams in the morning. I recommend combining the two.

Of course, most people probably are ashamed of their dreams. Either because their dreams are boring, or because they're not. This is exactly the kind of people who should skip this entry. Please come back later.

***

Once you are aware of your dreams after you are conscious, it is time to combine the two. The oldest way is simply to make a habit of looking at your hands from time to time. For some unknown reason, it is very hard to not be self-aware when looking at your hands. A more modern way, recommended in the article, takes advantage of the fact that we are terrible readers while dreaming. 75% of the time, a sentence will have changed if you read it again. So you make a habit of carrying with you a slip of paper with a sentence (such as "If you can read this, you are probably awake.") If this becomes a part of your life, one day you will notice that the sentence says something different. And when you look at it again, it has changed again ... Welcome to the world of lucid dreaming!

But I will not be your guide in this. I don't like lucid dreaming. I am responsible for what I do while awake, and that is quite enough. When I sleep, I want to just let things happen spontaneously. Some of my best ideas have come to me in dreams. And then there's the sex. I'd prefer not to be responsible for that, thanks.

The magazine article states that one of the common uses of lucid dreams is to act out sexual fantasies. I guess that beats acting them out in real life, somewhat depending on your fantasies. But what if you dream about things you couldn't dream about doing when awake?

***

I have written enough here for long time readers to know that my sexual dreams are not romantic or even nice. It is all domination all the way, ironically for such a nice person as I am. Carrying women over my shoulder without their consent, tying them down or simply holding them down, usually with their backside up. My dreams seem to like backsides a lot. I guess that's what you get from having goats as your sex-ed teachers. And Donald Duck. More about that in a moment. When I was young, the gender of my victims was more random. Incidentally I always climax or wake up before getting close to actual sex. It's the humiliation of the other person that excites me. You may or may not believe this, but I don't do that when I'm awake. Evidently I have the potential, though. Useful to know. Or perhaps not.

As a kid, my biggest turn-on was people being held upside-down. I have no explanation for this. I remember hating a friend of my brother for a long time because he had once held me by my legs. That felt like sexual abuse to me, and I was creeped out and angry. It's the weirdest thing. On the bright side, I sustained many happy erections as a child while reading comics, mostly Donald Duck and Daffy Duck. This fetish started as early as I can remember, as if I was born that way, and lasted until near puberty when I discovered the sexual excitement of first butts, then breasts. And then I kinda turned my back on all the stuff and tried to become a god. There are probably different opinions on whether I ought to have continued like that.

Today I found an old Donald Duck paperback in some paper that I never got along to throw away. Looking in it, I found that a couple pictures were cut out with scissors. But with my memory for stories, there was no problem reconstructing them in detail, and remembering why I had removed them. It's a long time ago, perhaps ten years or more, back when I still attended Christian meetings three days a week. Probably not a bad idea actually, but sad things happened and that paradise was lost. And evidently some measure of innocence along with it. And let me tell you by this illustration, innocence can be a terrible thing for a man to bear.

Now, bear in mind that this paperback was about Donald Duck, the children's cartoon character. He is far more popular in Norway than in America, ironically, but at the expense of Mickey Mouse. I guess it says something about national character ... Mickey is smart and heroic, yet humble; Donald is unlucky yet eternally optimist to the point of sheer hubris. But the target audience is definitely very young, here like there.

Anyway, this story was set in the Wild West. Due to some wild plot design, Donald was convinced to impersonate a famous female singer. Dressed in a long and rather tight skirt and a wig, his task was simply to mouth the words to a gramophone record. Even this went wrong, of course, but then bandits broke in and kidnapped the diva ... or so they thought. Instead they kidnapped Donald, who had the good grace to faint on the spot. One of the bandits carried him over his shoulder (uh oh ... here the scissors have been applied to the actual picture) and carried him out to the waiting horses. On arrival at the bandit hideout, Donald was still slung over the saddle, still in the skirts, and one of the bandits slapped his round rear. (This picture was also cut out.) Needless to say, Donald's nephews save the day eventually.

Yes indeed. Reading Donald Duck will teach your boys to dress up like women and touch each other's butts. Gay sex! And not just any gay sex, gay duck sex! Tar and feathers! How come the US military has never invaded Disneyland, helped the employees topple the statues of Mickey, and removed their weapons of moral mass destruction?

***

"Ah, ur-Lord. You have said that the Land is a dream for you--and that you fear to be made mad. But madness is not the only danger in dreams. There is also the danger that something may be lost which can never be regained." (Lord Mhoram, in The Illearth War by Stephen Donaldson.)