Michael Jackson & Dreams

Time Magazine Cover, March 1984

Someone’s passing can bring out the worst in those gathered round, but when the person is famed and fabulous then a situation develops whereby the best is worshipped while the worst may turn to obsession.

It still feels unreal that Michael Jackson no longer walks, sings and dances upon this earth and the promised concerts exist only in shadows caught by the camera. It’s taken me awhile to begin to write of the mixed feelings, the mixed emotions relating to an artist so startlingly gifted, of an individual so essentially troubled…

Still in considerable shock from the news of his passing, I recently checked, as part of my weekly routine, an Asperger’s Syndrome site. Predictably, it was flooded by messages from distressed fans.

Someone had written that surely Michael Jackson, a talented individual who’d battled misunderstandings and extreme projections most of his life is also an Aspergian. Then followed a tide of agreement. We’d recognised him as one of our own, one uniquely gifted in his own special arena but not terrifically good at many other things and out of depth in a society whose basic presumptions may be malicious.

A large factor in my experience of Asperger’s Syndrome is the grief and alienation I felt as a child, a process leading me to the study of education, psychology and philosophies later on. As I remember, as a-social as I was in the early days of schooling, I was still able to talk my way into the homes of happier people to observe the ways they interacted with their children.

(We didn’t have television then, so unlike Michael, I didn’t learn about human relationships from situation comedies, but rather from what I loathed in feral Australian country towns.)

My childhood feelings regarding the well-being of children as the essential basis of the well-being of society was such that I was sure I would have a career as an educator. Failing that, I would find fame either as an Artist or an Author.

Now that I understand Asperger’s, I also understand why I never survived or coped very well with the politics of school or even the situations of literary or artistic in-groups or even ordinary office environments.

I could work one to one and I had some success with the administration of creative projects, it’s true, but such projects frequently involved folks even more dysfunctional than myself and most of the projects eventually came to grief….

All the same, even in terms of a considerable amount of voluntary and part time work, I continue to study. The development of learning and cognition is still an inspiring topic and research into the cultural variations regarding these theories is as absorbing as ever. For more than three decades, I’ve also studied dreams and various theories and researches relating to dreams.

Obviously, our earliest consciousness is the dream state and I feel that it’s a part of the power of artists to operate in the world of those dream symbols able to communicate far more deeply that the lofty mostly unreachable stratosphere of Pure Reason!

Back in the nineties I had a couple of dreams I thought might be prophetic.

(I must say here that my prophetic dreams are usually pretty banal.  In my own experience, dreams which are realised immediately, such as a dream of a person who I’ve not seen or thought of for a very long time, who’s then encountered unexpectedly the next day is an interesting phenomenon but usually one of no enormous import or significance.)

In my experience, prescient dreams which occur well in advance of an event, those which would probably not be remembered if they were not recorded, represent profound affect and impact.

Entangled in a long term relationship disaster, I was astonished when I re-read my dream books, to discover that I not only had dreamed the circumstances of the future meeting of that partner in sorrow, but his name also occurred in that dream… ten years before that particular disaster commenced.

OK, it’s a reasonably common name, but….

Around that time, I also dreamed that I was desperately searching for my sister who was nowhere to be found. To re-read that dream in a state of grief shortly after her death twelve years later was a shock to say the least. (These days I dream that I forgot she hadn’t died at all and she’ll appear sometimes to offer the pithy advice so much a part of her personality in life. She then always departs before I’m ready to see her go.)

Such dreams occur as if they are a part of strange moving paintings, as if sometimes they are somehow two-dimensional. At other times it’s as if they belong in different universes where inanimate objects may become animated, where animals talk and things change shape and caricature may be the rule.

They are more like crazed cartoons than the everyday world of the waking really.

Every so often my dreams have travelled to the larger world, the world of famous people. Shortly after the marriage of Charles and Diana for example, and long before the media hinted that there was any hint of marital difficulty, I dreamed that the Royal Marriage was unravelling. In this dream the couple were desperate, they couldn’t change a baby’s nappy and there was shit everywhere. In such ways dreams aren’t usually naturalistic. If anything, they’re a looking glass world possibly able to reflect and prophesy certain events symbolically. Sometimes.

Jung believed that The Child in terms of dreaming is an Archetype of The Self, the person or process that has integrated both the shadowy fearful side and their conscious side of an individual. Therefore, after the royal sons were born, I never supposed that there was any neglect about nappy changing, but that there were shadows in the environment which might possibly cause things to get somewhat stinky.

And thus it would be so in the real world.

After writing dreams for so long, it seems to me that they are something of a mish-mash of impression, (a digestive system for the mind or the psyche perhaps).

A component of wishful thinking may also be involved; at other times a caricature may present itself, for example, when in the wake world, the dreamer is behaving foolishly. (This has happened to me and you'll have to believe it because it would be too much of a side-track to particularize here.)

I also believe in the reality of the occasional archetypical dream where profoundly terrifying spiritual insights may be presented. Sometimes a dream simply makes such an impact that one feels that it MUST mean SOMETHING.

OK, it’s also true that in physiological terms, dreams are a part of our ongoing participation in life and in learning. No matter how isolated a person may be, their conscious life is an amalgam of impression and information about their place in the rest of life and in sleep, the impressions are sorted and more or less organized.

In my experience it’s rare that a dream will offer the kinds of dreams that Alison Du Bois  apparently experiences in the television show Medium.

Only once did such dream come to me as if it was a prophecy and it was so vivid that when I eventually watched Medium I was reminded again of the dream.

Two dramatic events appeared that night regarding two very famous people and since then, whenever I saw or heard about those characters who were the subject of that particular dream, I’ve wondered if the dream events would turn out to be prophetic.

(For a time, as a devoted and rational student of the irrational, I was tempted to consult with the Rationalist Society to compete for the prize they put up for anyone who can prove the irrational… an irrational procedure in itself since all one has to do to prove the irrational is to look at the tabloid press!!!)

The first part of the dream involved the assassination of a very popular public figure who, as far as I know, remains safe and well. I hope that he continues that way for a very long time. The second part of the dream caused me a lot of grief in my sleeping world and yet with this dream there was also somehow no surprise.

I dreamed that Michael Jackson committed suicide.

There seemed to be something fearfully logical in such a dream when Michael had already embarked on that disfiguring plastic surgery so surprising for such a naturally charismatically beautiful young man.

I always found his immense talent absolutely mesmerising and while I couldn’t count myself as one of the many millions of Number One Fans, I  always followed stories about him and noted and enjoyed his new music and was as awed as everyone by his astounding performances.

My first insight into the troubled reality of his origins had come with a sketch he drew of himself as a child.

I’m surprised this drawing hasn’t re-emerged recently as the media trawls through all its opinions and discussions of the man’s life and death. In those days I'd tried to save it for a scrap-book but then became so overwhelmed by all the material I collected I couldn’t organize even a fraction of it for the said Scrap Book project. (How much easier it is to keep scrap-book information and pictures with a computer these days!)

The sketch showed a small and frightened child huddled in a corner with such an expression of sorrow and isolation on his face! It was not only moving, it was in itself a brilliant self-portrait, and one showing a powerful awareness of the artist’s own childish physical presence…. but the posture of the child, the facial expression and the body language wrung my heart!

Joe Jackson may have decided that the most rational thing to do in young Michael’s case was to toughen him up, to force him to learn to deal with the slings and arrows associated with celebrity and to provide a harsh crucible for that amazing talent to emerge.

Joe Jackson may have succeeded in everything he tried to do as his son became beloved the world over as ‘The King Of Pop’, but those actions didn’t help the self esteem of a talented sensitive child.

So Michael’s brothers teased him about his wide nose.

The first nose job was therefore understandable, but the child in him sought a more idealised beauty. The suggestion that he tried to look like Diana Ross is a little bizarre since Diana Ross is a beautiful black woman and the nose the poor boy chose for himself was very Euro. The report that Michael went for the surgery because he wanted to look as little like his father as possible makes some sense, but the eventual nose, the chin and the shape of the face he paid so much to create was closely similar to that of one of his beloved friends, Brooke Shields.

Brooke had stunned New York with her beauty around the time that Michael was first running around New York, performing as the clown in The Wiz.

Of his first meeting with Michael in February 1977, Andy Warhol recorded,

“Went home and did some work, then at 11.00, Catherine… [Guinness]… and I went over to interview Michael Jackson of the Jackson 5. He’s very tall now, but he has a really high voice. He had a big guy with him, maybe a body guard, and the girl from The Wiz. The whole situation was funny because Catherine and I didn’t know anything about Michael Jackson, really, and he didn’t know anything about me – he thought I was a poet or something like that. So he was asking questions that nobody who knew me would ask – like if I was married, if I had any kids, if my mother was alive.... I told him, “She’s in a home.”……

We tried to get Michael to dance and at first he wouldn’t but then he and the girl from The Wiz got up and did one dance….”

(Andy Warhol of course is the artist who later painted the portrait of Michael for Time shown above.)

It shows a development of the shy kid who only knew about reality through television soap operas. It's a portrait of a person who was by then arresting, fascinating and awesomely talented. I’d be curious to read the actual interview conducted by the person Michael assumed to belong to the kind of soap opera family he never really succeeded in finding.

The debonair Fred Astaire later commented that he thought that Michael’s dancing was aggressive. I suppose Michael did channel an aggressive persona in Bad, but to me and to his millions of fans it seemed that his dancing was simply magnetically sexy.

After all, the era of smooth expensive cheek to cheek elegance wasn’t exactly cutting edge movement by the time that Michael’s Jackson’s video clips rocketed to the top of the charts.

Michael’s elegance and gravity defying talent was to me like a living dream, and an enrichment of people’s psychological life.

And eventually, for all his amazing success, for the new spin he brought to music, dance and super stardom, he was insomniac. And like Elvis, his ancestral Father in Law as it were, he refused il-legal drugs.

(Unlike Elvis, Michael didn’t go so far as to apply to The President for a Sheriff’s badge in order to arrest illegal drug users, but like Elvis, he entered a similar twilight world of prescription medications.)

It’s clear from the constant rehashing of the accusations of hanky panky and the subsequent ordeal causing him to leave his Neverland behind that Michael probably never recovered even a basic psychological equilibrium after the traumas of the examination and of the trial.

The truth is that many children today, thanks to the processes of Media and Culture aren’t innocent and the evidence showed that it was a set up. The kid simply guessed Michael's private bodily characteristics and the whole thing was as bad a nightmare as the old dramas of his own childhood according to those closest to the man.

So Michael was wise after that to pay primary attention to his own children.

Seeing his kids with Michael's family at the funeral and hearing daughter Paris speak of her father, my daughter commented,

“That man was NOT an abuser!"

I agreed. In fact, I never believed that he was because although he was naïve in terms of certain behaviours, his impulse felt as mine had been, to honour children and their safe lives to the best of one's ability and to treat them with respect and kindness.

So once Michael was into his years of fathering, I'd  already begun to think that my dream of his suicide was like a movie about something unlikely and impossible. No one who loves their children wants anything else but to be there for them as long as possible.

So it seemed and it still seems unbelievable that he died.

He’s joined others who I think of  who mixed too many prescription drugs when they were going through too much and thus took too much from too many doctors…I’m thinking of Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe, Heath Ledger, Elvis Presley, my own grievously vanished sister….

Death by the kinds of drugs taken by Michael or any of the drugs these other individuals took obviously don't amount to conscious suicide. Surely all these people and the many more who’ve died from wrong prescriptions or from being over prescribed had much to live for.

I conclude that the suicide element of my dream reflects a fact in my psyche which is that ever since I was personally prescribed drugs which almost finished me off, after my sister died with an a quantity of drugs in her system which had me very worried, after many such things I’ve seen and experienced, I’m very scared.

I’ve experienced outright aggression from Doctors when I’ve refused some of the drugs my sister took in such good faith. One Doctor in particular released highly dangerous confidential information rather than believe my stories of life long physical weakness, damage from sport injuries and operations gone wrong and the accidents of bad dentistry.

When I eventually told her I’d developed a phobia about Doctors, she hit the roof.

I’m not saying that some of the psychological medications don’t have their place. I certainly wouldn’t advise that certain medications be dropped without expert support.

I guess I’m simply trying to say that in terms of some of the things I’ve seen and experienced, something about some of those medicinal orientations just FEELS like suicide to me.

I pray for the safety and the well being of Michael Jackson's kids.

They had and have a beautiful father.

Michael and Brooke, Brooke and Michael.

Getting There

Rain falling and I'm remembering.

Two people I seemed to be as a child.

First born for a couple of decades in Old Jindabyne before the dam, I postured and pranced expecting admiration and laughter.

Then Daddy left us behind.

It's in the memoir, all that.

Muma and me, there we were remembering the old times and no-one spoke of them.

The world grew silent, no-one ever saw me and I thought to myself, am I here, is this a pretence?

Thus was the first breakdown and the first horror dentist.

There's a lot already written, a few books.

One time I believed in music per se.

If a person believes in music, perhaps they shouldn't get to know musicians.

I don't know Bob Dylan although he advises me with regard to my writing in my dreams.

(Dream On!)

A poem published while worlds fall apart.

I have got the hang of the things gone wrong in my life.

I've been writing in my note book.

There is another horrid abscessed tooth. Awful.

I ain't whinging about it all.

I never knew about the Asperger's or the effects of bad dentistry and so on until recently.

I got me facts together with the 'Education' shit I went thru in this country.

It's in the note books.

Tryin to get a couple of my essays published overseas.

Noone here in Oz seems to be interested in the process of accumulating and investigating the processes of belief and knowledge.

Especially those I once believed to be open minded and honourable people.

I guess the next post should deal with illusions as I look out from my imaginary Beach House over a quiet pale sea!

Asperger's & Bullying.

Last night I dreamed that I was back among the bullies, that there was one man who was sneering and denigrating me and taking away my means of working. It was depressing and unbelievable, yet very familiar. Those kinds of things have actually happened to me and as much as I hate it, I'm still trying to work out a pattern of getting beyond other people's rubbish and rubbishings.

Bullying is the sort of thing which can occur in response to a condition like Asperger's Syndrome. For the Aspergian, ordinary communicative signals may be difficult to read. Then, when misinterpretations flourish, inappropriate honesty is no help at all. Neither is any form of curiosity which ranges beyond a group mind.

Flying into Melbourne one evening long ago, I was met by a few friends.

It had been a long flight and someone asked me how I'd passed the time.

'I read the Book Of Daniel from The Old Testament,' said I.

They looked at me with what I realised later, was some horror.

It took me more than a year to realise I'd got myself mixed up with people who, while they were nice enough to meet me at the airport, inexplicably, they had no interest in Biblical Studies.

I suppose if I'd mentioned The Book Of Daniel to Nick Cave or Bob Dylan (had I known them) or to any number of mystically inclined folks, it might have been the start of a most interesting conversation but I hadn't encountered such folk back then.

It was also three years before my first encounter with Dr Norm Habel whose Comparative Religions study course would bring such joy and it was also a good three decades before I learned about Asperger's Syndrome.

Thinking back to those ancient Melbourne days, I'd have been better off lying. If I'd said that I spent the flight absorbed in various trashy magazines , that would have been acceptable, but even if I'd had the wit to think of that, my automatic corrector would have jumped up and stopped me.

I wasn't much bullied at school. Initially I was in a sort of daze, didn't hear or notice anything except my own thoughts which were basically about how I thought children SHOULD be treated.

We were at least read to at home and I remembered those stories better than I remember my first few clouded years of school, where I only ever woke up to find myself in Serious Trouble with some Teacher or other.

I was well into Primary School and considered to be Hopelessly Retarded before I finally learned to read for myself and that only came about because we had a sporty relative who'd got into the newspapers. Thus I learned that the written page wasn't solely fancy and talking toys.

Reading brought momentous change and suddenly my lack of social skills didn't matter so much.

The Library became my refuge, although every so often I'd emerge with an idea for a new Playground Game, teach it to anyone who would listen, and play joyously for a few weeks until my mind would again wander off of it's own accord and then I would follow the said restless mind back to its place in the Library.

Fortunately my Mother was a Teacher and she made sure that other staff members let me read what I liked.

When I was in my early twenties, I visited my Mother who was still teaching at that same School and I was astounded to note that two of my games were still being played by a younger generation of kids.

I felt that even if I hadn't studied what I'd wanted to study, that even if sport and injury took a great deal of my time and created far too much attention, that there were still ways I might one day fit in once I got over my breakdown.

Even without the Doctor's diagnosis and the horrid drugs he gave me, and despite my mind's different kinds of pacings, things had gone seriously wrong in my adolescent years and whether it was called Neurosis or anything else, I knew that things wouldn't work for me until I escaped my family. It's obvious that so strong an impulse will mean a necessity to re-discover the family later and I more or less did and have developed compassion for the kinds of messes which can skew the lives of perfectly nice people. In my teens and early twenties, I was chiefly aware of confusions and broken pathways.

I'd had no particular desire to perform at Sports. It just happened, an inheritance from a very sporty Grandmother I suppose, but suddenly there was all this attention and turmoiled feelings of all kinds abounded. My siblings were furious. Jealousies and rivalries seemed to pour themselves in front of me. I think that the first serious bullying I experienced was from my younger siblings and the more I tried to escape, the more relentless it all became.

And all that time our Daddy was out drinking and gambling all our family money including the money that was supposed to have taken me to Private School to learn Classics and Art and so forth and, as I'd imagined it, to quietly compete only if I felt like it!! A small Country Area School offered no such opportunities. I was the only one in my Intermediate class to pass English after our Teacher taught us the wrong books. I was the only one who had (accidentally) come across the books and poems we were supposed to have studied.

We may all know and begin to understand the extent of our own problems without really comprehending the situations of those close to us. Thinking and writing of those times makes me realise how much our Mother suffered then. It wasn't simply that she'd lost the life of Culture that she craved and was working three jobs to keep food on the table. The worst part of it was that the person she loved was a bit of a Bounder.

It's strange how love may anaesthetise the obvious. It was us kids and especially me, the gawky grump who she blamed for her unhappiness. I've had my spell of work in schools. I came home glazed by Personality Onslaught, she came home with her armour still bitterly intact.

As the psychological tensions increased so my temper shortened and the only way I could make people leave me alone was to think of nasty things to say which, while they were things I didn't mean, were fairly striking on account of my rapidly increasing literary repertoire, so I was branded with the bully brush too and that was odd because any occasional experimental skirmish into bullying ways was always a failure for me. (My timing was always frightful, there'd be an older sister around the corner or my chosen victim would just laugh and jeer back.)

The one or two times I accidentally succeeded at being truly mean I regret utterly.

Yes I was bitterly jealous of some children, but after one or two bouts of name calling, even those feelings faded into my curiosities about behaviour and it was as if my Schoolmates and Teachers were all characters out of someone else's book.

As a small child our brattish next door neighbour beat me up regularly. She was smaller than me but she had me terrorised. I ran to my mother crying one day to say that Little Miss had threatened to bash me again and my Mother said,

'Well, bash her back!' I was astounded. Such an idea never occurred to me.


In the end I didn't bash her. I got myself a coat hanger to help me face her off and tremblingly told her that I would bash her back if she took one more step. Arming myself probably wasn't a good idea because she was aggressive and I wasn't. It could have been very bad but I was unexpectedly lucky.

Just as I got ready to throw down the coat hanger and run for my life she backed off. I was astounded.

A Counsellor I've been seeing recently explained to me that all bullies are in fact cowards, so maybe that's our explanation here. (I think it should be said here though that not all cowards are bullies. For some of us peace-loving souls, bullying is too risky. As an older person though, I do argue back in the face of attack these days.)

(Question, is the early cowardice and basic urge to flee one reason I found I could run at speed in later days?)

Anyway, my life's path was pretty much set then. Retreat back to the Ground of Knowledge at every opportunity. Emerge renewed. Try something else. Talk with people who understand. Try not to explain too much. When people look glazed, it doesn't mean they are interested. If you find a good game, then you might be able to talk others into playing it. In the meantime, keep learning.

I guess the point of going back to the family is important, because by now there have been several occasions when I've got to the point of loving another person very much and suddenly again I'm under attack. There also came particularly strange times during the Nineties and beyond when I was seriously endangered.

That has been a very strange set of experiences especially if I've brought my verbal talents to bear because then the bully will claim it's them that's being bullied and well they are more convincing these so-called 'normals'.

I've learned more than I ever expected to know about Psychology in the meantime because of course there are plenty of books about Domestic Violence and so on.

To consider how a person constructs meaning in their lives one must focus on notions of Good and Evil. I thought that sort of thing to be clear cut and decided for myself that such forces are a sort of continuum relative to circumstance.

But if someone bashes or begins a campaign of slander and if they assume that my only good is to acquiesce, then I must disagree and I must get beyond the situation that those kinds of precepts landed me in. I wish it was as easy as a coat hanger backed up by bluff, but it isn't, so I'm searching through my options.

I've had a phase of reading the Biographies and Memoirs of successful people. That is satisfying. Recently I pulled out some of the more mystical books from the Seventies. My Library is a bit of a shambles after the violent incidents and much of it is lost but I still have some books on the Kabbalah.

Now there are a few interesting pathways there!