3. advent: trim up the tree with christmas stuff

night gallery or genius mode

Occasionally I wish that I had better recall of my dreams. Mostly they evaporate too quickly and I’m only left with the nagging tug of something forgotten, and regardless of what techniques I try, I am usually only able to remember my dreams as I am dreaming and they all come back in many layers with similarities that tunnel through. Although I am far from sure that I am loosing anything particularly creative, profound or prophetic by not remembering or if that’s just the preserving nature of dreaming, I do sometimes manage to retain, with some effort, not so much the content but rather the mechanics of an idea that I dreamt. I woke with the impression, already slipping into vagaries, whether ones nightly imaginings were responsive or pre-programmed.

I have experienced of course the alarm clock or other noises or physical urgencies ingratiating themselves an instant before waking, and I wondered if whole themes weren’t triggered by the mind’s chemistry responding to being too cold or overheated or other subtle stimuli. I also recollected the possibility that dreaming run on a fixed schedule, that maybe one dreams ones entire life as the subconscious sees it, or pre-determined segments of it, like a radio station’s broadcast day, with different scheduled hosts. Thanks for joining us for the Witching Hour, and next we’ll be playing you through 0400 with some familiar classics like impossible staircases, small dogs, driving from the backseat and vertical warehouses, but first here is a one-hit-wonder from the eighties, repetitive Tetris stepwise motion. I wonder if what strikes us as memorable or contemporary—or even as therapeutic or cathartic, in dreams only sticks because anything and everything is cycled through and the waking mind latched on to a coincidence of memory and revises, rewrites the whole evening’s play-list in a way we can make use of it in the here and now. Dreaming’s clearing-house, I suspect, is both responsive and on a certain timetable but maybe the masks that the waking and sleeping brain put on each other make such analogies very limited.

muttation

Though I feel woefully inadequate to offer relief to the unthinkable tragedies of the headlines and do not want to be another haunting voice to those who suffered loss, especially for those without intermediacy and far-reaching empathy, it is the hard things that sometimes one must do: that the author of the Hunger Games franchise hails from the same small community strikes me as something curious and unexpected. It is surely nothing to detract from the gravity of the situation nor the serious discussions that need to take place in the aftermath, neither is it any condolence or help for healing.
Far from glorifying violence, which I believe the American media unfortunately does with its cause-celeb, striding on the necks of facts to try to be first to get the story without regard for the consequences of inaccurate reporting or of making matinee idol monsters to be understood rather than allow us to contemplate those enduring monsters that we create and tolerate, the stories were an allegory inspired by seeing the same kind of terrible juxtapositions of war and violence and the anodyne chasers of misfit reportage filed under culture and lifestyle and usually for the benefit of sponsorship, the stories were allegories questioning the same kind of spectacle and of the horrors that go unseen by institutions and estate.  Redressing injustice is not a matter entertained due to customs imbued. Shield laws are in place for other crimes, meant to stave off premature incrimination and allow the law to pass judgment before the media and public has already decided, and though there is no innocence to protect or peace to be recaptured in such cases, maybe allegory for the outside world is a better format in order to avoid the vicious trap of fame. These terrors need to be seen and should be consigned to history, but the unfiltered unfolding of events and hastily assembled biographies and backstories do not help law enforcement and responders once broadcast, and I fear only serve to propagate that awful virus of twisted, angry logic when all involved become instant and intimate characters on the world’s stage that the audience is keen to analyze and interpret.

mood-lighting or ginger-snap

The old high gate towers undergo a very neat transformation with Christmas time when they’re strung with lights and the outline gives the stone the glow and the rich, earthy hue of a gingerbread house (Lebkucken Haus) with icing, especially from a distance.

On the interior, within the city walls, a different sort of Space Invaders light show was beamed on that tall canvas to pique the shopping mood on the cold night of the seasonal market and a lot of different stalls lined the historic city center. Surrounding buildings were also bathed and splashed with spotlights of all different colours.