THAT DAY

I'm reading Dream Telepathy by Montague Ullman, Stanley Krippner & Alan Vaughan (1973). They open historically--vivid psychic dreams conveying news in plain images to non-experts; nothing arcane about them but the 'how'. Such peak performances are rare, by definition. The magic word "anecdotal" can't dismiss them; that's like claiming an ice-dancer achieving a triple Lutz must be lucky or a fraud, since you can't. Sorry, no.

The heart of the book is on the Maimonides experiment--a response to critics of the Rhine experiments, it was better designed and controlled than most mainstream psych experiments of the day. The subjects quite clearly dreamed of their targets above chance, though no triple Lutzes--the dreams are dull, lacking explicit warnings or advice. Only the most experienced dreamers spot patterns ("every dream tonight had green, and cats, and conflict, and the only tactic that worked was...")

Then Robert Van de Castle, the star subject in the Maimonides study, describes his participation in the Wyoming replication run by skeptics who knew it'd fail, so they cut corners to save time and money--failed to replicate!--then denied obvious hits so they could report firm, safe negative results. Ah, science...

In the evening I walk up to my friend Hallie's house to sing improv with her and two others. She's reflooring the loft where we sing; feels airy. Look out the bay windows and sing to the street below. Gotta keep the loops and phrases short and limit chord changes, but even simple singing's better than none...

THAT NIGHT

I'm watching a Nancy Drew-ish mystery on the CW network. Typical CW strengths & weaknesses--competent if not brilliant acting, atmospheric sets and lighting, but a weak script--stilted lines, silly plot.

The stars: Twilight Sparkle and her friends from My Little Pony. Only they're not ponies--nor human actors. Centaurs! Odd ones, with My Little Pony heads--cute, equine, big-eyed--and gracile, leggy builds. More like deer than horses, yet with spindly little horsetails not stubby deertails (which they can't have--fundies would boycott the show as Satanic! Since, as we all know, "the devil's in the deertails.")

Sorry. I just dream them.

Now I'm not watching TV--I'm on the set as they film it! The action flows through a big airy barnlike space with open beams. To stay off-camera, I climb up and watch from a high-up beam, like a leopard draped on a branch.

And... those stubby tails bare such BONY butts. I normally like slender, so the fact they're so naked yet so unsexy is really odd. And not chance. Flat lighting, dull tones and angular lines help keep them looking butch and plain. Uglification takes work.

What's the motive here? Why strip all femme from cartoon characters who gloried in it?

Now the animation's full again--smooth 3-D work. But the showrunner still hates long hair and tails; didn't just clip them short, but always flips them away from the camera, hiding them. That bares everyone's faces--and butts. That should be sexy to a furvert like me, but it's less so than normal pony manes and tails. Realize I like long hair... at both ends. Flowing manes, fluttering lashes, expressive brows and a mobile tail can be pretty in themselves, and they let you flirt--hide, reveal, express feelings (sexual or not) in a way harder for a bald head. Or butt.

At last, for a minute, I see the show from the characters' level, and with their big eyelashes, manes and tails restored. They just plain look better--and of course one point of My Little Pony was that pretty, colorful and femme do not equal stupid.

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• Open barn, view from above, stripped-down and unsexy: Hallie's upstairs room where we sang! Did my dreams find our singing too stripped-down?
• Big-eyed characters in Nancy Drew mysteries: a name-pun. A man wrote the Nancy Drew books under the pen name Carolyn Keene; one target in the Maimonides experiments was a big-eyed "Walter Keene" painting, really done by his wife. The only two Keenes I know are both genderbent aliases! The dream links them.
• Director trims tails, manes, eyelashes to unsexify furry actors:
  1. I'm starting to plan pics for my dream Dragonfly Bus--three actors play a catgirl, a faun & a centaur. I've been too shy to paint them as sexy as I saw them; but unsexy is false to the dream. Its theme was exactly this suppression of love and sex.
  2. The book quoted biased and flat-out-false reviews of the Maimonides experiment, and the skeptics' shoddy replication study, rigged to fail. Replace ESP with sex, and you get the ugly censorship in my dream. Anything to keep that awful, squishy, girly fringe stuff out of our clean, spare, masculine science (Ha! Of all the soft sciences, psych is the queen of mush).
• ACTIONS:
  1. Sing more complex music with my sister Miriel and the Krelkins; Hallie's improv group is too basic for me. Wild music, not tame!
  2. Add the most vivid historical dreams from the book to the World Dream Bank, not the bland ones in the Maimonides experiment. Wild dreams, not tame!
  3. Draw the furs in Dragonfly Bus as beautiful, with luxuriant hair and tails, not stripped-down and spare. Don't let waking inhibitions suppress the truth. And I do have waking inhibitions--the dream's warning is clear. Wild desire, not tame.

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