Teenage Ninja Brushes With Killer Whale

Patterns are emerging. 

At one dream a day, the patterns in these dreams might not be so evident. But we also have a backlog of dreams. I can tell you: Your subconscious minds really like houses and roads and puppies, bicycles and blankets and bathrooms. Several recent submissions are about the transition from teenage angst to adult anxiety, about possession by and exorcism of malevolent spirits, about the multifaceted nuances found in Japanese culture, and about Delphinidae—orcas, dolphins, pilot whales, etc. This subject of marine mammals seems extremely pressing. Why? Let's find out.

Today's delphine dream is from Isaac in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We'll have two (yes, two) more such dreams tomorrow. But for now, Issac's contribution to the 31 Dreamers:

I wake up in a room filled with lotuses and ankle-high water.
This room turns out to be my room but bent out of shape, longer and taller.
I get up, my pajamas being soaked, and open my door.
The water floods out into my hallway as I turn and go into the bathroom.
I look at myself in the mirror.
It turns out I'm Naruto from an anime show that I have never watched in my life.
I see that the faucet is running and the sink overflowing onto the floor.
I laugh.
I am then transported through the dream world into an airport bathroom.
It's totally grey.
The walls, floor, light bulbs—everything has been painted over in a boring grey.
I pick up a toothbrush . . .
. . . who happens to be Shamu the killer whale.
I put toothpaste on Shamu.
I look in the mirror and I'm still Naruto.
I brush my teeth with Shamu.
I wake up.

In typical playground-conversation-at-recess-time fashion, I'll ask our readers: In a fight between Naruto the hot-tempered adolescent anime ninja, and Shamu the eight-ton killer whale, who do you think would win?

One kid immediately shouts, "Naruto! He's a super-ninja with the power of a nine-tailed demon fox! He can shadow-clone himself and shoot energy balls and summon giant toads!"

Then another kid says, "Yeah but if the fight were in the ocean Shamu would win. He'd just swallow Naruto whole. Definitely Shamu."

A third kid pipes up, "Yeah but Naruto can use his powers to make a whirlpool! Even in the ocean he'd kick Shamu's ass!" And the kids bicker a bit. bringing up every argument from, "Well Naruto's just a cartoon," to "Well Shamu is just a marketing scheme for Sea World," until finally the most media-savvy of the bunch chucks in her two cents worth of wisdom:

"None of that really matters. What really counts is which one rules it in cyberspace."

The kids run to the school library to Google™ the two contenders and look at the number of matching searches. The score:

Shamu: 881,000 entries. 

Not bad for a whale.

Naruto: 109,000,000. 

That's right—one-hundred-an-nine million G-hits. 

More than 120 times that of Shamu.

No contest.

Isaac, your dream shows that you are facing some growth, change, and also fear—mostly a fear of being bored. You're in your room, which is an extension of yourself, wracked and disfigured by growing pains. It's a homey room with all that foliage, but the slowly rising flood waters are telling you that maybe it's time to move out. Time for a change of scenery. But there is some fear in that water. Your hallway gives you passage into a place of contemplation: the bathroom. In that contemplation is the source of your fear, running nonchalantly like water from a tap but flowing past your comfort zone. And you are not quite yourself. You think all this is funny? Or are you laughing because you're a little uneasy?

Your contemplation carries you to a future place: another bathroom, beyond which are all the different directions you can go in life—airlines which await your patronage, ready to take you anywhere you want to go. But for now, in the future before your flight, you stand soggy-ankled in that boring grey bathroom. You have to go through this tedium and all the rituals that come with it before you get to even figure out which direction you're headed in.

What else Isaac? Oh yeah—you're Naruto, blond-haired, blue-eyed, Japanese animation superstar whom you've never actually seen in action. Does that kid ever smile? The only times you can find him not looking totally pissed off is when he's sucking face with some anime babe, and even then he doesn't seem quite satisfied. There's a fury in this character and you can see it in his big ol' manga-fied peepers looking back at you from the mirror. That reflection of yourself is ready to explode. But you don't want that Isaac. So you try to keep it together and do your duty in this boring-ass bathroom. And that duty? To brush your pearly anime teeth. But the instrument that you reach for has its own teeth. Worse than that, its breath stinks like raw seal meat. But you just maintain your cool and do your thing, and that thing is to squeeze minty gel on the orca and stick it in your mouth, blocking out the flavor of rotting fish.

Isaac, when I put myself into your pajamas I want to laugh too. I also want to lighten up, wipe that serious expression off my face and relax. But I'm not in your pajamas, Isaac, you are. Are you in a position where you can walk down the hall, turn off the faucet, find a mop and clean up this mess that you're in? Or is the best thing you can do to keep moving through life in a slightly soggy state and keep putting Colgate on a killer whale? 

While you think about this question, why not hop on the Blue Line and go spend an afternoon at the New England Aquarium? Walk up that spiraling ramp, stopping to look at all the little tanks along the way. When you reach the top, stick your hands into the water where you can pet the starfish and the horseshoe crabs. Look into the eyes of the fishes and listen to what they have to say to you. Spend some time waddling with the penguins and get a seat for the dolphin show. Maybe there will be a killer whale there, if not the dolphins will do. Inhale deeply—can you smell their breath? Get back on the subway and on the way home, stop somewhere and pick up the book of the day: the manga version of Naruto. When you read it in your room late at night, compare Naruto's path through life with that of a marine mammal. Then, find your own.

This Is The Grassroots Work I'm Gonna Do With You

Today we flip from from winter to summer. While we in the Northern Hemisphere shiver haplessly in the dark, the days are long and hot in São Paulo, Brazil where this just came in from Frederico, our latest member of the 31 Dreamers' dream team:

I'm in a southeastern Brazilian country house in the rainforest. Maybe I’m a teenager on vacation from school. With me are three other teens. Our routine is to wait for the bus from the city, which stops on the dirt road uphill, and take it back and forth from our country house to the city. In the house is a priest—a left wing priest from the days when Liberation Theology used to be more common in South America. It's always nighttime. I'm thirsty.

It's our last day at the house and we walk to the dirt road to take the bus back home. We wait for hours and I'm still thirsty. The bus is late. The priest reminds us that we should bring our bags to the bus stop. I know that the bus is nearby, I see it coming down the road, but the road is so curvy that its headlights fall outside the curves instead of lighting the road ahead. I'm relaxed though, because I know I'm one step ahead of my friends—my stuff is already packed.

I go to my room to get my backpack and my camcorder case (I’ve never owned a camcorder in real life). I go to the kitchen to drink a cup of water from the terra-cotta container and I see a lot of posters hanging on the green wall. All of them have anti-racist messages. There’s one with an Afro-Brazilian woman wearing a dress and a hat, and another paired with it depicting a female chimp with the same hair and dress. These images were extracted from government propaganda, and they were put side by side on the posters to denounce the racism of the military dictatorship. Then I notice I'm in the 1970s and that the house is a clandestine school where the priests teach the local population. I realize that both the priest and I are Afro-Brazilians.

The priest is also in the kitchen, hanging some posters, when a third Afro-Brazilian guy steps in the room looking for the priest. He's has an afro and a beige 70s-style suit. He tells the priest that he’s doing very well with his grassroots work there and wants to invite him to do the same thing on the coast. The guy invites the priest to the living room to meet some friends: a guy of Japanese ancestry with long hair, a mustache and grey 70s-style suit, and a fat white guy wearing Ray Ban glasses, his hairy chest poking out of his half-open shirt. It's clearly a set up—these guys are cops and they’ve come to arrest the priest. Suddenly the priest draws his gun and shoots the Japanese-Brazilian in the heart. The fat guy shoots the priest in the leg and the priest shoots back, killing the fat guy. All this happens as if in a kung fu movie, with those zoom-ins and close-takes in slow motion. Finally, the priest grabs the afro guy before he can get to his gun. The priest chokes the afro guy and points his gun at the other guy's head, and says: "This is the grassroots work I'm gonna do with you."

I wake up sweating because it was a really hot night. I go to the kitchen and finally drink my glass of water.

Frederico, you've been watching a lot of movies, haven't you? 

Your dream is also rife with a few subtle and noteworthy cultural items that I'd like to draw attention to:

1. São Paulo (a.k.a. Sampa) is the largest city in South America, third-largest in the world, surrounded by Brazil's biggest industrial park, beyond which is a vast expanse of fertile farmland.

2. Japanese Brazilians are a huge ethnic group, constituting the largest sector of the Japanese Diaspora. There are more people of Japanese descent living in São Paulo than in any other city outside of Japan.

3. Afro-Brazilians account for more than half of all people of African descent living outside of Africa and make up over half of Brazil's population.

4. Brazil's Military Dictatorship was supported by the U.S. to oust a democratically elected leftist president. The junta ruled the nation from 1964 to 1985.

5. Liberation Theology is an activist movement created by Brazilian Catholic Marxists in the 1950s and 60s who officially recognized capitalism as a sin.

Now that we've cleared up these fun facts for our non-Brazilian dreamers, we can move on.

Frederico, I'm guessing that you lead a compartmentalized life. Your dream has you commuting between the tranquil country and your home in the bustling city, making this trip every day (or night actually—it's always night in your dream) without ever really seeing the path in between. This can reflect the dichotomy between any number of situations: home, work, school, friends, family, loved ones, hobbies, responsibilities—pick any two. You are comfortable in both places and, unlike your peers, you're prepared to transition from one to the other. But they remain separate parts of your life. Are you worried about that? Not really. You just grab your bag and go. However you are thirsty—there is something that you want that you're not getting, and you go looking for it before you leave this place (or situation) for the last time, possibly to never return.

When trying to find this desired thing and you are faced with a "corrected" version of the past. In the dream it's a commentary on racist aspects of your country's junta, outside the dream it is likely that it's you, noticing something about yourself, some way that you used to be that has fallen out of favor. You face this thing, simultaneously wanting to highlight it and to wipe it out—so much so that you assert an identity (Afro-Brazilian, in the dream) that erases any possibility of complicity with flawed past notions (represented by racism in the dream). You are beside yourself—the lefty priest is there and he is you as a liberator, a corrector of flawed ideas and corrupt actions. And the show is about to begin.

In they come: the cops in your head—rivaling the fuzzy racial rainbow coalition from Barney Miller—each a different aspect of your personality that your internal warrior-priest must defeat. The first one seems cool—he looks like you and your priest and seems to share your ideas, your values. But really he is all talk. The next cop could be alright with his long hair, but that third one—no way! He oozes sketchiness like the chest hair oozing out between the buttons of his polyester shirt. Your priest calls the shots and you just watch. This isn't quite the cold glass of water that you'd hoped for. Then that soliloquy (pictured at the top of this post) . . . is the kind of action you really wanted to take?

Frederico, there might me millions of approaches to tackling whatever "the grassroots work" is that you're dealing with here. I'll put two in the crosshairs of your metaphorical viewfinder:

The first is the Super Fly Approach, as epitomized by the 1972 film of the same name (left). The protagonist in this film (whose name, coincidentally, was "Priest"), eschewed the grassroot SNCC/Black Panther types for the simpler politics of the gun. The problem with this tactic when dealing with "cops in your head" is that they aren't like your average city cops, they're more like ghosts. Bullets—even metaphorical ones—go right through them and they will always come back to haunt you.

The second approach is one actually called "Cop In The Head," as described in the book Rainbow of Desire by Brazilian theater artist/ex-politician (and survivor of torture at the hands of the military dictatorship) Augusto Boal (yeah, I tend to plug Boal a lot). The Cop In The Head technique, put simply, invites you to take these cops out of your head and put them on stage in front of you. Recognize them, name them, and deal with them. 

Frederico, whether you read this aforementioned book or not, you can meditate on its idea. In the meantime, I advise you to invest in a camcorder—you obviously have a cinematographic mind. And always have a glass of water ready at your bedside. It may come in handy.

Take Me Black Where I Belong

The second of the 31 Dreamers is Kim who currently lives in Okinawa, Japan. Kim's dream:

So I was trying to get home to my dad's house, AKA what used to be my parents' house before my mom died and what is now owned by someone else because my dad lost the house. Foreclosure cit-ay! But the long country road my parents' house was on was instead Naha's own Kokusai (AKA "international") Street, which is cheesy and horrible like Haight St. [San Francisco] or South St. in Philly. And so the Tennessee road was lined with karaoke and snack bars and shit, but the people on the street were American frat boys who kept making fun of me and I couldn't figure out why. I blacked out on the walk home and starting running barefoot, kept trying to get there but the road never ended. I found a bathroom and went in and was in a stall and a Japanese girl in a kimono was in there, speaking to me in Japanese, and kept picking up pieces of shit off the floor (that were mine) and her face was also covered in my own shit. When I was leaving the bathroom I saw that I was wearing a leopard print skirt and my face was made up in the Japanese "ganguro" style. Insane! I never made it home.

Kim, some years back I read an article by Joe Wood in Harvard's African diasporic journal Transition entitled "The Yellow Negro," about the subset of ganguro (Japanese for "blackface") who specifically parrot African-American styles of appearance and culture. Transition's byline for the article: 

Like their white American counterparts, Japanese kids dig hip-hop, graffiti, and break dancing. In the clubs of Tokyo’s Roppongi district, however, what separates the real from the poser is blackface: darkened skin and curls. Joe Wood wonders whether the Japanese minstrels are trying to be Janet Jackson . . . or Al Jolson.

Then there are the ganguro who darken their skin but lighten their hair (see picture) giving the appearance not of Japanese girls who are trying to look black, but either as Japanese girls who are trying to look like white girls who are trying to look black (e.g. the "orange" tan job prevalent on American college campuses), or as Japanese girls who are trying to look like black girls who are trying to look white (e.g. straight and/or blond "not natural" hair that all the hair salons and dollar stores in my neighborhood specialize in). With the painful complexities and history of race and racism in the U.S., this has been an all but taboo subject outside of academia, a trend that's likely to change as we see more and more people with a visibly "trans-racial" identity (cf: transgender issues were far more invisible a decade ago than they are today). In Japan—a country without a history of Europeans enslaving Africans, and whose social and popular culture is both hyper-accelerated and über-homogenous—is it little wonder that ganguro is what it is? Well, yes, it is a wonder. Now that that's explained, let's move on to your dream:

Clearly Kim, there are places that you want to go back to that are no longer there: a house that doesn't belong to your family anymore; a parent who has left the world of the living; a country road that's been swallowed by commercial sprawl. You want to reconnect with the history that you desire—your feet are bare, making contact with the earth under which bygone things are buried. You are running but you cannot achieve your goal because what's gone is gone forever. 

At the same time you are conflicted in your own role and identity in these matters. Remember when that Tennessee country road seemed so blasé and the idea of Haight Street or South Streets seemed so cool? A lot of alienated young people had the same idea, and so the Haight Streets and Kokusai Streets of the world were created by and for all the people who just didn't fit in to where they came from. These places were probably pretty great before the subcultures that birthed them reached critical mass and were co-opted to become the marketing schemes that they are today. And in the eyes of many, these places are still great—look at how many people flock to South Street in Philadelphia on a Saturday night! But they are not your people, and this is a past that you disavow.

And now your dream has you in Japan, and one of the locals is picking up your own fecal matter and showing it to you—reflecting it back at you like a mirror. And then you see yourself as someone who has bought into the vicious cycle of identity consumerism: a European-American, trying to be a Japanese person, trying to look like an African-American, who might be trying to become . . . European-American.

The dream's imagery is a bit fatalistic, but the message is positive. You obviously recognize the pitfalls of this cycle and so eschew participation in it. You are surrounded by people who bombard you with a fratboyesque cluelessness, yet you stay strong. You know where your roots are and celebrate their strength. It is true that the shortest path homeward is to never leave the house in the first place. But you are wise to travel—to see the world and experience different ways of doing things, and for this reason you perceive the changes in the places that you've left and are more critical of them. You are also more critical of your own changes and the person who you once were—you want to reclaim the desireble parts while shedding the detritus. You want to find that perfect place, free from bogusness and cacophony of karoke bars and fast food. And so you keep running, non-stop, to find your beloved Tennessee country road.