But my awareness in my sleep seems to be increasing. I am doing work while I am sleeping. It’s piecemeal, haphazard work. Images and ideas appear to me, in no order.
For example, last night I saw an image of a man I’ve known some time, and came to realize that the whole of his long life has been strongly conditioned by how he was potty trained, so many years ago. Large systems form from small things. Freud was not wrong about this. An entire Lebensgestalt can be inferred, sometimes, from the type of soap someone uses.
And I saw how Neurofeedback, one day soon, might be used as a tool for increasing love. I saw a man and a woman, in a virtual reality space, sharing the visual readouts of the part of their brains which create beauty, love and connection, and merging these images in wonderful ways, in real time.
And it must be said, that the gift of love is much more strongly given to women, in general. Men are often confused in relationships with women (and, I would suppose, with each other, both in hetero and homosexual ways) because this language does not come naturally to us. Protectiveness comes naturally. Sexuality comes naturally. Love does not. It is a sort of foreign language in some ways, that we learn to speak with varying degrees of fluency over time, to the continual frustration of women, who cannot understand this. We say we love women, sometimes, because we have to, but a very large number of us (I feel) are not entirely sure what it is we are supposed to be feeling. It feels good being with the woman, and we call this love. This is quite sufficient to get married and have kids, but perhaps not sufficient to stay married in a great many cases. Statistically, this seems a reasonable statement to make.
And finally I was dreaming about the Rust Belt. I was up there last week, in a Union town, or what used to be a Union town. I got in and out without incident, which would likely not have been possible 30 years ago.
I have long blamed the decline of Detroit and everything attached to it to greedy Union bosses, and stupid members. But what I saw was that there is also a CULTURAL element to this whole thing. Unions make people feel like they belong. They are not quite a church, but not quite not a church either. I know around here, the third shift workers go drink in the Union Hall parking lot when they get off at 5am or so, until the local bar opens at 6am. There they all are, sitting in the dark, with six packs they brought in coolers. It’s a fellowship, of sorts.
So giving up all that, or risking giving up all that, through Right to Work legislation–or through the types of concessions needed to keep jobs local–is probably LEAST of all an economic risk. It is a lifestyle risk. I had not seen that.