fear_of_flying epitome of incomprehensibility Other_recurring_dreams than the oddly_specific_recurring_dream tell me I'm nervous about going in an airplane again. This isn't news. I'm a wimp about this, evn if it'll be my fourth trip in one (rounding things out to round trips). The dreams equate this with a general fear of heights: -A wire structure that looks like an electric tower has a "grain elevator," but this has nothing to do with grain. It's just an elevator that takes you about 100 feet up in the air and back down again. My brother and some of his summer-camp colleagues get there before me and go up and down on it, but I'm too late to join them and I'd rather not go alone. The emptiness of high-up air seems intimidating to face alone. -I'm on the roof of a Concordia building and I want to snap a photo of the orange-pink sunset. It's an oddly small roof, though, so I fear falling. But I tell myself I just have to sit firm while I take the picture - hold steady, don't worry - and then I can get back down. I don't fall, and the dream scene changes. -Another one attempts a shift in mood: I'm in a train, looking at another train go past. The one I see outside is a VIA one, with the distinctive logo (dream_product_placement, anyone?) I feel exhilerated and wish for the trains to start flying, and they do, or at least I see the other one hover above the ground as it powers forward. No one's scared. I'm dimly aware this isn't real, but that I need to hold on to the interested/excited feeling because it will help me combat the scared one. "I like traveling," I say to myself in the dream, "or at least I WANT to, because I'd be excited if I weren't scared. I need to get the fear out of the way." 220526 ... e_o_i There's a book called this too, and I have it! Read it? Not yet. Flipped through? A little. Jan, of various creative writing groups, thought it was funny I had a poem called "Fear of Not Flying" because the book was considered notoriously sexual when it came out. And more erotic than Sludge_Utopia, which is aspirationally plain-spoken but not often intended to titillate. "aspirationally plain-spoken" says she whose last name is incomprehensibility. But why are all these writer-women straight? There was this guy who wrote a memoir in French about his tall-tale partying adventures (Quebecois guy, but I don't remember the name or title - the Book Record file on my computer isn't updated). Anyway, he guessed very confidently that 75% of women are bisexual. You wish, Claude. (His name was probably Claude.) I wish? I mean, not that they'd like me or I'd like them, necessarily. But if someone with my orientation were more adventurous and wrote about their adventures, I wouldn't be averse to reading them. And I don't mean just about sex. I also mean traveling! (Like H.D.'s ex who traveled the desert? Brynn somebody? Orientation Orientalist?) Desire for flying, then. Except in trains and not airplanes, apparently. 220526 ... e_o_i Dream_travel changes the nexus of worry from "heights" to "trouble sleeping." Maybe nexus isn't the right word, but it sounds like Lexus and Lexus is a car. 220529 ... e_o_i So I woke up at 4:30 this morning, terrified of the trip I was about to take. Specifically, the flying part. Of being high up in the air, separated from any way of escape, of new settings, for seven hours. As the trailer for the Jurassic Park movie puts it: "Pull over!" "Airplanes don't do that!" ...or similar. Even in silly movies you can find things that resonate. Also? Erica Jong is hilarious, at least in the first few pages of Fear of Flying. When I couldn't sleep, I pulled the book out of a pile of old-but-new-for-me things I hadn't gotten around to sorting. It starts out "There were 117 psychoanalysts on the Pan Am flight to Vienna and I'd been treated by at least six of them. And married a seventh. God knows it was a tribute either to the shrinks' ineptitude or my own glorious unanalyzability that I was now, if anything, more scared of flying than when I began my analytic adventure some thirteen years earlier." Later on that page: "...it's also part of my personal religion that the minute you grow overconfidnt and really *relax* about the flight, the plane crashes instantly." 220611 ... e_o_i correction: trailer for the NEW Jurassic Park movie. Not the original. Reading on, more to note: -The narrator points out the possible whitewashing in the way pyschoanalysis is being "welcomed back" to Vienna after Freud was driven out by the Nazis in 1938 (the book is set around 1970, presumably, if it was published in '72 - so, closer to then than now). -She mocks therapists' habits of treating everything as symbolic. YES YES THIS IS STILL TRUE. In my experience. Even though the Freudian and Jungian methods are less popular now, you still have people treating X fear as symbolic of Y fear. I had a friend from choir give me some informal sessions (she said $25/hour, I said "no, not enough" and paid her $30 - The Art of the Deal) to help me with organizational problems and anxiety. She works with people with ADHD and had some helpful tips, but when it came to fears, she wanted to know why I was afraid of not having a water bottle on me. I said it was because I was afraid of not having water. She said, "But what does that REPRESENT?" and concluded it stood for a sense of security. Broadly, sort of? But it "represented" the literal fear of dehydration. Sometimes a water bottle is just a water bottle. 220611 ... e_o_i Boarding in about 15 minutes! I am nervous about everything, but I actually got here earlier than needed and brought the book Fear of Flying to counteract such a fear. Problem? Its cover has a quote in large print about how it's "audaciously sexy" or something, so now I'm embarrassed to be seen reading it (1972 publisher was anxious to flaunt how liberated it was; 2022 reader is all "write anything, but ahem! keep the cover modest and decorous!") 220612 ... e_o_i Also it has a barely-covered naked woman's torso revealed from behind a zippered screen. Possible relation? In the first chapter the narrator (Isadora is her name) calls her rather abstract sex fantasy a "zipless fuck" - not, one will note, a zippered one. Book cover, get things right. 220612 ... raze i wish we could all be on that plane with you to help make the journey as comfortable as possible. you're braver than you know, and far braver than me; i haven't been airborne in more than twenty years now (unless flights of fancy count). 220612 ... e_o_i Thanks, raze! The flight itself wasn't too scary, except when it was going through turbulence. My mind to the plane: "Stop shaking! Why are you shaking? Stop, wind, stop." Although there's more shaking and rattling on your average Montreal metro ride. I used my bolero-cardigan thingy as a neck and back pillow, and once to cover my face when the sun came in. It reminded me of summer camp, where my backpack or rolled up clothes served as a pillow. I couldn't stay asleep for long, though, because little things kept waking me up - like the turbulence, or chimes, or people stirring, or the smells of free supper served at midnight (which I didn't partake in, having already had supper, dammit). (Beautiful sunrise, all yellow and orange and pastel pink, at what was still 2:05 AM Montreal time). Fear of Flying the book was in my other bag, so I read about Language, Society, and Power after breakfast (rather pathetic - I'll get more to eat now). 220613 ... epitome of incomprehensibility While the cover beckons with a come-hither pose (and a quote by John Updike goes "Shock and awe, a WOMAN writing about SEX!"), the nakedness of the pages inside is about a lot more than that. It's brave, emotionally jolting, and probably my favourite book of the summer. The central conflict is a love triangle: Isadora is torn between her introverted husband Bennett (a psychiatrist) and uninhibited Adrian (also a psychiatrist). Oh yes, and her first husband was psychotic - which she details in a chapter-long digression that I just finished reading. The chapter lures you in with a character sketch, goes on to sketch the funnier idiosyncracies of Brian's mental illness, and in the end makes me mourn the sufferings of both characters. No, this isn't a book that holds back emotionally. But that includes the good as well as the bad, as harrowing as the bad stuff is. 220822 ... e_o_i Oh, and here's an example of me and reading comprension not quite getting it on: for pages and pages, I thought part of Isadora's description of her (second) husband said that he looked Asian. It took me a long time to realize he actually *was* Asian (to be precise, American of Chinese background). Pah at my assumptions of whiteness! The 70s weren't ethnically monochrome. 220822 ... e_o_i The next chapter about Charlie, the wannabe orchestra-conductor she dates, is a good deal lighter. 220825 what's it to you? who go blather from