Dream: Shakespearian King (and Snakes)

We join the dream in progress...

I went backstage to a performance of "King Lear" (although it might have been a different king).  Barack Obama was playing the titular king.  He came out in renaissance garb, with a mustache and goatee.  There were three or four generic dream important people (heads of state?) also backstage, but renaissance Obama walked over to me, much to my surprise.  He may have said something to me, but I can't recall it.  

Through a dream switch, I was playing the titular king.  I've never seen or read "King Lear," although I know it's about an old king and his three daughters.   I was anxious because it was opening night and I had no recollection of rehearsals or my lines (which is typical for my dreams).   In the play, I was following my twenty-something wife, who had long dark hair and wore a loose, gauzy, flowing white dress, up a series of stone steps.  The stage and steps were dark.  I was spying on her, in an Othello kind of way.  I've only seen an opera of Othello, but I know in a fit of murderous jealousy, he kills his wife.   I'm confused about the exact staging, because I think we walked up the theatre aisle, which turned into a wide stairway, which then branched.  The branching allowed me to get ahead of her and crouch behind some kind crenelated platform.  I watched two men come out of the shadows, stab her, and then flee.

This was my cue to descend the stairway and deliver a speech.  Someone off-stage buzzed a buzzer, which was supposed to prompt me.  I came down to her side.  I wasn't able to recall a line, and may have improvised something.  In my mind I wondered what my parents, who were in the audience, might think--and I could imagine the negative reviews of the play in the papers. 

The actress playing my wife was telepathic.  :What's going on, boo?:  she asked. 

:I'm blanking out on my lines.: I replied, also telepathically.

She said something along the lines of :You call for help.: 

A guard and an advisor appeared on the scene.  

There were a few more wildly improvised Shakespearian speeches about Love and Death while my wife artistically bled to death on the steps.  At one point I looked at the advisor and said, "Prompt," and he led me through a flowery soliloquy.

The dream transitioned out of a play and into an in-world fantasy.

I was the bitter king grieving from his mountain kingdom over his recently slain wife. 

After months of moping around, I was going to have my revenge on Europe.

Anachronistically, I and my peasants loaded up a convoy of semi-trucks, drove down narrow, winding, mountain roads and set up a gigantic carousel gambling house called, "The Deceit of Venice."    Yes, it was a casino; yes, it slowly spun around; yes, I was going to get everyone's money.

Snakes were in this part.  I don't recall the specifics other than a small white snake crawled over to me and bit me on the mons pubis (in real life I had to urinate? or the dog kicked me?).   At another point, I and a group of minions walked by a long sequined tapestry of a peacock, which looked like a bejeweled version of our peacock tile coaster, which turned into a very large, glimmering, scaled snake after we had passed it.

School Bus Vampire

As a result of reading Jung, I'm continuing to have very Jungian dreams.  In the latest most compelling dream image, a young teen boy was searching for a old toy.  We were in a kind of restaurant / BnB / forge, which was getting trashed in the search.  In the background were urn-shaped, stone Matryoshka dolls with very rounded bodies and small heads--they had been smashed open, but they were empty shells. 

The child used a power jigsaw to cut a realistic, yellow and black, toy school bus, about the size of a toaster-oven (or, I suppose the size of Barbie's 1970's camper), open.  Between the rows of bus seats, there was a Dracula-style vampire doll.  The child was slightly upset, because in cutting the bus open, a chunk of the vampire's cape had been cut off.  I'm not sure this is what the child was looking for.

This image was sandwiched between the usual, "odd driving someplace" and "airport anxiety dreams;" I've just remembered that a passenger gave birth in the airport anxiety dream (which is new)... so my dreaming self was particularly focused on images of birth and re-birth.   

The school bus is "a vehicle of instruction"?  The stone Matryoshka dolls are ossified personas?  

The Dracula doll (more Dracula than Count Von Count, and more Bela Lugosi than Gary Oldman) reminds me of a vampire story in an 1997's Gay Fairy Tales book:  but all I remember of the story was that the vampire "does unspeakable things to bodies," and something about thread through a small hole in a stain glass window.  And for a while, it seemed like Gay Vampires were a thing... so I'm guessing this is a metaphor for old notions about gay identity.  

Or maybe it's my undead self.  

Friday Hyjinx

I'm super-annoyed this Friday afternoon.  When I paid to park downtown, I transposed two characters my car's license number at the electronic meter kiosk; so I came back from a visit of an exhibit on European Medieval Magic to a parking citation for not paying.  Then I wasted about two hours trying to figure out how to contest the ticket and going back downtown to pick up a paper form before figuring out what had happened.  

Bleah.

The morning, at least, was charming.  I took the day off and went to the Cascades Raptor Center.  I was surprised at how busy it was; I guess I shouldn't have been--I think a lot of schools released kids for an extended Spring Break.  

I managed to visit with a friend who works there and got some photos of Jake the Peregrin Falcon.  It was Rat Day, so many of the resident birds had that for their breakfast.  

After the Raptor Center, it was off to the Museum of Natural History.  They have an exhibition of European Medieval Magic that a friend of mine curated, and I wanted to go see it.  The most interesting item to me was the narwhale horn: I hadn't realized how they could reach four feet in length.  I'd heard about witch bottles before (typically filled with nails), but I hadn't known that they were supposed to represent the witch's gall bladder.  

There was an actual love spell, which was supposed to be written in blood from the ring finger of your left hand, and which featured the ROTAS-SATOR square.  I found a recipe for soul-cakes, which I'll have to try; maybe I can put in some other design instead of simply quartering them.  There was a technology problem with a touch screen, so the most interactive part of the exhibit was a random plinko cascade machine where you could guess what kind of familiar you might attract by where a round chip would land after you dropped it in at the machine's top. 

In terms of story inspiration, I might be able to write something at the intersection of soul cakes, Tomtens, and cookies for Santa.  

Adventures in Math Art

The other day I saw a design out of an old Arabian dictionary.  It was two interlocking squares, joined together by arcs into one continuous line.  It looked like something I could copy with a straight edge and compass, and in fairly quick order, I was able to work out the underlying geometry.

I worked on a color version in InkScape.

The next day, I wondered if one could do something similar with two interlocking pentagons.  Since it's slightly easier to make a pentagon in InkScape than with analog tools, I sat down at the computer and worked out how to place the arcs on the lines.  Since I was working with pentagons, I decided to use red as the main color. 

The next day after that, I wondered what other polygons would work with the interweaving straight lines and arcs arrangement.  I thought hexagons would be too tight for the arcs to fit aesthetically, and two interlocking triangles would result in "Happy Hanukah" jokes from Mark.  So I set out to work with a septagon.  

This is where I discovered that the figures with angles more acute than right angles don't allow arcs to nestle into their corners so easily.  I had to experiment with septagrams with rays of various thicknesses before finding one that would work.

The arcs, it turns out, will have an angle of 180 minus (360/number of corners in the figure) and be centered on the intersection where two lines meet.   I think the double-square pattern came out the best; the other two are fine... and I have a feeling I could nudge the radius of the arcs and the thickness of the lines some to make the "spokes" of the pattern more even.

I like them, and maybe I'll put them into a story. . . 

Pruning

The other day we helped my folks prune an old apple tree.  I am trying to recall how long the apple tree has been on their property.  Generations of woodpeckers have left tracks of bores in the tree's trunk and major branches, and it has two major forks.  I'm thinking it must have been planted during the early seventies, because I believe it wasn't originally on the lot when they purchased it.  Oddly, I can't remember seeing the tree as a sapling; in my mind it's always been this bent up twist of apple-producing branches.  

I guess it would have been planted in their vegetable garden along with some other fruit trees--Mom was living the full County Extension Agent Life back then and recorded two or three garden-to-pantry instructional videos on food preservation.  The rows of corn and peas and sunflowers are long gone, but the apple tree's still in the center of the lot.  

It was severely pruned a few years back, with the result that it put out phalanxes of narrow wands along the main branches.  In the autumn, these become over-burdened with many little green apples, and it's gotten to the point where some of the branches will crack if there's any kind of windy weather.

Our goal was to take out only about a fourth or a third of the undergrowth, which took us about two and a half hours of hacking and lopping and sawing and pulling.  We'll have to prune again, maybe in the summer to take out any dead limbs, but more likely this time next year.

My folks seemed fine.  I had a chat with my mom about reading CG Jung; she was amused when I said that it felt a little like reading somebody's drunk poetry and concluded that it might have been gin, but it certainly wasn't tequila that old Carl Gustav was drinking because there wasn't enough naked people in his quasi-religious ramblings.

Atypical Friday

Happy Day After the New Moon.  This morning is atypical in that I rose earlier than I normally do, Mark had to leave earlier, and between various pet chores, I've got some quick time to blog.

I've been remembering more of my dreams lately.  Mostly they've been a mishmash of houses that are simultaneously our house and not our house, driving, and urination anxiety.  It occurs to me that there have been more people interacting with me in my dreams.  I woke up the other day from a dream where Mark and I had been arguing -- the dream ended with me singing from Avenue Q, "The More You Love Someone (The More You Want to Kill Them)" -- and was going interpret it at face value when I thought to wonder if dream-Mark symbolized a (wiser, more mature) aspect of myself.  

The stupid invasion of Ukraine is upsetting.  I find myself doomscrolling and wishing for superpowers that could stop the fighting.  It's illustrating the anthropology maxim that conflict crystalizes lines of division within groups.  I hope that folks here can clearly see the structures connecting the invasion to business,  policies, and politics in the United States (and abroad).  

More Jung

Continuing to read Jung.  He's just entered the desert of his soul and is having a vision with a red stone.  It reminds me of the ancient Egyptian concept of Re sailing the barque of the sun through the dual Netherworld of Duat / body of the goddess Nut (Night).   Jung even has drawn a dung beetle to go with this portion of the text.  Slogging through the ponderous, religious-sounding fluff, makes me sleepy -- but every so often an epigram will put in an appearance.  This round's is "Scorn cannot challenge you if you are not vain to the marrow of your bones."   

I'm not reading Jung regularly enough for it to effect my dreams much; or at lest I'm not recalling anything other than a notion that some dreams feel more fairytale.  The book's size discourages casual pre-bedtime reading.  I have tried some visualizations while dozing for ten minutes, which has produced some interesting imagery.  I can hear Dion Fortune saying, "...or to put it another way, I put myself into a trance and began to dream about her."   Unfortunately, the recall on my dozing dreams is incomplete.  If I were to get serious about examining my inner iconic/symbolic mindscape, I would nap with a pen and paper nearby.