A dream in synthesis

[the_fantastic_ms_fox]

This dream synthesized:

- years of lucid practice,
- a progression on gender
-an overdue return to the sci-fi elements common to my dreams.
- some issues that have been turning over in my mind

It occurred in a late morning that followed a night of stress-related insomnia.
    I feel proud to have had it. 

     Dreamer's commentary in red.
          Waking in blue
               Dream in green.

Battlestar. CnC.

Adama says something about love to the crew. "Love can bring you up; love can bring you down," or something; cliche but nuanced, complicated, contradictory.
    To most of the crew anyway. 

Starbuck is around, isn't she? I need to talk to her.
    Steel-eyed viper jockey with a death wish and all that.

Lucidity starts...

A-shaped halls and desatch'd lighting. I must be dreaming.

                        ...around here?
    

I think about it. Maybe she's so damn cranky because she's MtF. I mean. Seriously

 

No.
    Seriously.

Observe: Starbuck in the 1978-1979 BSG Original Series

            and in  the 2004-2009 Reboot.

See?

   Everything is better with a sex change.

 

Yes, yes. That makes sense.

That's why she's elated sometimes and cranky others.

    "I remember it. It never stops hurting," she'll mutter into a bottle

Plus it's a war and trans medicine is kinda near the bottom of Dr. Cottle's priority list.

    Cylons, water shortages, we can handle. Getting vag-blocked, not so much.

Why the fixation on Battlestar? Why does it show up in my dreams more than any other sci-fi motif?

First, I have watched a lot of it. And I've watched intently. Not as much - not nearly as much - as I've watched Star Trek, but between Star Trek and Battlestar I started recording my dreams and I started transition. The former made me aware. And the latter showed me that other worlds really are possible. That dreams are stories. And good stories are blueprints.

Second, I like the world. Not as in "I think it's well constructed." But as in, "part of me would rather live there." The characters in Battlestar generally share the purpose of "improving the lot of the whole of our species." Admittedly the bulk of humanity in BSG is dead. And the bulk of the survivors are pretty miserable. But the main characters have a goal. It is just, actionable, and realizable. It requires innovation, insight and teamwork. Their world is organized. They go new places. They're polytheists, and the wise among them do not assume that their goes are just.. Their leaders are usually not assholes (except for Roslin's abortion decision). They even have gender-neutral bathrooms. It is a world that most people would hate to be a main character in, but in which I would, whether I was happy or not, thrive.

Why the fixation on Starbuck?

1. Two extremely close friends decided that I "downloaded" a lot of my gender from her.

As in "we're watching Battlestar together and thinking, oh hey, there's Amy again."

("Downloaded" is basically the teenage gender-imprinting process taken-for-normal in cis people, which can also be observed in adults who are transsexual and/or baby butches/faeries.)

(I did this a lot during transition. I'd see a butch and unconsciously impersonate zer. Then see another, repeat. But I dreamed about BSG, which indicates that it soaked in.)

I should point out that said friends met me long *after* the mid-transition debacle with the CFS (which was created to serve us...). Where I had a fight.  When my grasp on certain social norms... slipped. I started dressing in green milspec pants, wearing tank-tops and spending most of my week at a BSG set (admitedly, "the set" was SFU and I where I was working at the time, so that's nothing surprising)

But I also sewed a BSG outfit and wore it to work on Hallowe'en.
       ...and on at least three other occasions that in no way called for it.

Plus, I discovered a talent for sublimating personal crises into fracking up the opposition.


2. She is the closest thing to an MtF butch on TV.

(See above link)

There's not a lot of butch-spectrum people on TV. There's really not a lot of MtFs on TV.

     Or rather there aren't a lot of butch-spectrum characters; or MtF characters.
                  I mean, cis actors and cis writers of course.

So if you're looking for MtF butches,
                       you take what you can.

I search. A hallway begins, but ends in mirror.

 

In lucid dreaming, I have learned not to walk through walls.
    Because there is a whole lot of nothing on the other side.
It might be an endless series of blank rooms, each darker than the last. Or just a void. Like the place of my dreams was a set, generated while I looked the other way.

But it's in the way. And reflecting everything except me.
    There is someone in there.

I might as well fun with it.
   I submerge my my face in the quicksilver of the mirror into the big black behind it.
     I feel it stretch and ripple over my mouth, and I blow bubbles.
 

 

Is there someone in there now?

 

What's is this mirror? A surface that emits photons with at an angle and frequency approximate to that of incidence?
   A barrier.
      A thing I look into for confirmation.

Artistic.
   Aggressive.
      Not terribly good at self-preservation.
         And with something to prove.

 

There she is. Or maybe she's cissexed. And she's cranky because the series is done. In the past, thank you.
    She's a perfectly happy fiction that's had her run, her death, and is now being ressurrected, purposed by some wacky lucid narrator.

      "Look, let's make this work"
 

When I make stories, I usually repurpose them to fill cultural holes.

Ever notice how fanfic makes characters gay, but it rarely makes them trans? Ya, some switch gender, but it's cis-for-cis.
 
We talk. She stonewalls.

"Look: Kara get me information; I'll get you... drugs? You want drugs? Fine."

 

I leave. I get it. I return. She wants more.

Frazzled, I encounter another crewmember in the hall. She likes that I'm here. I think she knows that I am a stranger here. A smiling rough quickie follows.

 

Since I moved lucidity from trying to control the world to just being aware of it and nudging it now and then, my dreams have become a lot more anonymously sexual. I do wonder why.

 

Moving on.

Finding Starbuck again.

She's messed up again. Hurting.

   I don't know what I can get her so she'll talk,

      to get her to move over to my side of the story.
                                           And once there, open

 

--------
Conclusions:

 

Consider authorial intent. Who sets canon? Who has the authority to interpret the story as not seen or heard? We often assume it's the writer, after zer vision has been through the Hollywood wringer.

I don't like that.

Interpretation is fun

It can be a way of unearthing kinky queer content.
   (I wish I could find a better example - you know it's out there)

It can even be the cornerstone of... most religions?

And reading, viewing, is better that way. It turns a text into something for the reader.

What if if Charles Schultz showed up and denied any queer content in peanuts?
   (I doubt he would, in part because he's dead, but mostly because he's kind of awesome about kids and gender) 
 

What if we found a "writer's commentary" for the Bible?

It would not improve either text.



BEGIN SPOILER
 

Starbuck is not new to this tension between authour and viewer. There's a scene (to which I can't link, sorry) where she gets piano lessons from an apparition. The fans went "holy shit - Starbuck's a cylon/human hybrid and that's her dead father, who is that missing Cylon, the emotional/artistic and very-much-murdered one!"

    And several extended storylines resolved beautifully.

Until the lead writers said "uh... no. That's not what it was at all! She's like an avatar of this deity that no-one cares about and that guy was a multifaceted angel-messenger thing I guess and..."

Seriously?
   Frack the writers.

     Their job is to make an awesome story,

         here they failed
               and the audience succeeded.

   In film, best practice is drop your ego - the best idea wins.

 

END SPOILER



 

Why this dream?
 

While I was up in the night, writing dialogue, I looking up the Delphic ramblings of the Hybrids on Battlestar. (Dephic ramblings - demonstrated preference suggests that this is how I like to talk to my gods) Which I'd not seen in years. And that reminded me of Starbuck. And that reminded me of stories I love, and archetypes I swim in.

Chris, a character on the upcoming webseries, The Switch, by Fire Thief Studios, shares a piece of the same archetype that Starbuck does. Through this character, and this archetype, I am trying to make a social move with regards to gender-variant transsexuals, a move that *should* help expand MtF acceptance in dyke culture.

I will likely be playing this character.
     But I wonder if I can cut it.

Stories have characters. A set of common characters refers to an archetype. Archetypes are person-information bundled. They help us interpret the world and our place in it. They are a seed-idea at the crux of mythology, something like a god - shaping and re-shaping world as we shape and re-shape them.

And Hollywood has seriously fracked up the archetypes.

Movies tell us too much. And Hollywood tells it wrong.

Movies have writers. Who have to have time to write and social networks with social capital. And they have to get their material through the movie/tv-production machine.

But movies have actors. Actors who, in being on camera say, "I am this archetype. I am not you. I am really not you. The role is filled. The archetype it points to only chooses people who look like me. So the people who fill the important roles look like this."

"This" usually being every kind of visible privilege you can name, with some lighting and makeup to norm it up beyond the real.

And the story is written to please the network (the owners), and the network (the owners) demand shows for what they see as the lowest common denominator - which it somehow confuses for "every kind of visible privilege" even though, after "we're all endotherms" the next lowest common denominator I can think of is "most of us do not look like hollywood actors, and most of our lives definitely do not."

Most of the heroes that movies and tv shows us are as normative as possible. Gender expression. Height. Race. Class. Age. Ability. Weight. Etcetera. Even - no, especially - when we can make them look however we want. 

Don't fit the norms?
   Well, then
       You can't be the hero, the agent of change. 

(A normative hero who fights normative battles to restore the normative status-quo)



What comes out of this? What's the effect on our culture?

That's complicated. And depression.

I can't tell you all the details, but I can tell you the effect on my subconscious. Because I know that the media I consume shapes my dreams.
   The world, the stories, and who I am in it.

       Hollywood steers my dreams.

          The fuckers.

I know this because I have kept track of what I dream, and when I dream it.

 

And I doubt that I am alone in this..


This needs to change.

The stories need to change.

The actors need to change.

The archetypes are sick and must be healed.
 

 

This is why I'm in film

To fix busted archetypes, and heal our collective dreams.
 

Besides, it's a good job.

I'm decent at it.
I like it.
It does good.
It pays better than other things that satisfy the above requirements.
And it lets me talk to the gods.