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.

Essentials from Other Worlds

On the Fourth of July 1978, I bought a blue exercise book with the intention of recording my dreams.

The year before, I'd begun to study Comparative Religions at Adelaide Teacher's College in South Australia. The first year previously had been an astounding journey through the Religions of the World, Ancient, Modern, World, Tribal, Secular, Theistic, you name it.

If that seems to be an unlikely field to cover in one year, I must add that we had a stunning teacher, Dr Norm Habel. Norm's work was extensive even before he began to teach Comparative Religions. He'd started out as a Pastor in the Lutheran Church, and then as an Old Testament Scholar, he went on to publish many works, most notably a commentary on The Book Of Job.

My previous years had been a time of Breakdown, Turmoil and Bad Medicine, during which time my daughter was born in early 1973. It was also when I completely lost faith in Government Processes, The Media, My Christianity and You Name It.

Crawling gradually into a new reality and reading the works of various mystics, I was astonished to find the words of the Gospel coming into my mind constantly...'Judge not lest you be judged' etc etc. The words of Jesus had a new startling impact, but over time, I found I could not longer relate to the Church of England, my old well-beloved Religion.

(Much later I tried, but they'd changed the Service the week before and the Service was a shambles.)

In the years following my Religion Studies, I felt my daughter should have some experience of a Spiritual life. We were living by then in a small country town and I took her to the Methodist Church. They were without a Pastor for the first year and the services were gamely taken over by the members of the congregation. It was wonderful to hear these simple hearted people struggling to communicate aspects of their faith using examples drawn largely from television. The Folk Religion stopped when they got a stern Pastor and I left the services to attend to my studies.



The Religion Studies course, well, I heard about from a friend who passed on a pamphlet he'd picked up in the Theosophical Bookshop.

Out of curiosity, I turned up at the Teacher's College that first week of term, taking my small daughter along. She wanted to play, she needed my attention and eventually I went outside and listened through the door and I found myself to be hooked.

Norm Habel is a most extraordinary speaker, a rhetorician in the old sense, a story teller and one of the most charismatic and knowledgeable performers I've ever encountered.

In terms of learning, it was as if I'd come across a cache of precious jewels.

Fortunately the receipt of the pamphlet coincided with the introductory lecture.

As a result of that inspiration, I found baby sitters from my circle of friends and began to attend Adelaide Teacher's College twice a week. Even the notebooks I still have from those times sparkle with astounding phrases and poetic summaries of the various philosophies. It was almost too much to be virtually converted to a new Religion twice a week, but it was also too exciting to avoid. Norm was able to speak from within all these different aspects of human spirituality and communicate the world view, the rituals and living reality of culture after culture.

I knew that I'd got hold of something important, a way of understanding with a great potential to heal.

The following year offered another brilliant teacher, Dr Basil Moore. We began with Religion and Philosophy, and again the atmosphere of excitement and challenge was inspiring. The following term's Religion and Sociology seemed more mundane and I skipped a term, impatient for the third subject of the year, Religion and Psychology.

One of the most exciting books of that year had been Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance. Like most of his class, Basil was fascinated by the experimental teaching techniques suggested by author Robert Pirsig. Basil therefore decided that the term's work should be driven by the class. Accordingly, he set a list of theoreticians on the subject and included himself in a programme whereby each of us would prepare two papers relating to an aspect of Psychology and Religion and we would then read our papers to the class.

(Basil would take this further in a later year by not simply grading our essays for us, but dividing our marks between his grading, the average suggested by classmates and the grade we'd decided for our own work. The final mark would be an average of all three. I recall that I was the only student whose classmate averages hovered between the barely passed and the high distinction.)

When it came to Religion and Psychology, I fell into disadvantage, or so I thought, almost from the outset.

When it came to the second date, I couldn't attend. I can't recall why. Either my daughter or myself had fallen ill. I only remember my frustration that the class was going ahead without me.

Whatever was wrong was righted by my attendance for the second week, but my pleasure in attendance received a severe blow. All of the proposed papers were taken except two.

The two papers left for me to puzzle through were both to be on the subject of Carl Gustav Jung and that was strange. The previous year I'd missed a class where topics were shared out also. My fellow students and even Norm had suggested I might be interested in Ancient Egyptian Religion and I'd said 'No way', (having previously encountered a few maniacs who were obsessed by the same).

Back then, I missed a class or I was late, and yes, I ended up doing my paper on Ancient Egyptian Religion and it was totally fascinating.

The same people I'd come to dislike with regard to strange ideas of Ancient Egypt were also mad about Jung.

I decided then and there with all the arrogance of youth, that I would do my utmost to disprove Jung.

Hence the Blue Notebook.

The first dream, as I predicted, was mish mash, the most important factors being that I was on a road, I got stuck in sand and was embarrassed and upset. At the end, perhaps the most important point, 'I'm looking for my family.'

I'd studied Freud for awhile during my University years. The University time had been disrupted by a breakdown and wrongly prescribed largactyl as well as several distressing confusions. I didn't think that Freud had all the answers even though the conception of the Unconscious was a fascinating idea. What more could Jung say?

I managed to write the more general paper which dealt basically with Jung's theories and his time and place, but when it came to the second topic, I was stuck. "What was Jung's influence on Modern Science." OK, I'd read overviews of Scientific Theories, I looked at Scientific Magazines in the library and I'd never given up on my interest in Biology, but as for the 'influence' on Science by someone I perceived as more mystical than Freud ever was, I was stuck.

I managed a kind of presentation for the class outlining the ideas of how Science was seen in the Nineteenth Century and quoted Jung's allegations that he too was a Scientist, but it wasn't much. I complained to Basil that Jung's work seemed to range too widely for me to summarise his influence on anything (if he had influence at all) and if he didn't have an influence, then why?

Ah, Education was a brilliant force in my life back then. My teachers decided that the third year of Religion Studies would include a 'Special Topic' subject where the student could put together a thesis on a topic of their choice.

Although Basil taught Educational Psychology, he felt that he wasn't expert in the area of Religion and Psychology and the following year, the Department hired an American expert on Jung who also knew a lot about Hinduism. That was very exciting until the moment I met the new chap. Yes I checked my notebook since I wrote all this. Stephen Gadsen was his name.

We were introduced and we found that we had not one word to say to each other. Other staff and most specifically, the expert on Indian Religions found themselves in the same boat. It turned out that he hated our College, he didn't like us and he loathed Australia. Where his dreams lay we had no idea because he was out of there in a few weeks. Some things don't work out. I never even dreamed of him. Should I google him?

In the end it was Basil, the hard headed Marxist who supervised my Thesis, which turned out to be no end of a Good Thing.

Unwillingly, I'd launched myself into a sea of Jungian information which I still felt to be profoundly irrational. I continued to write out my dreams and along the way I gave up any idea of disproving Jung.

When I brought my work to Basil, I was running it by a Logician with an enormous knowledge of Philosophy and philosophies. Basil helped me to phrase many notions I found irrational so that at least the intentions of the statements were clear. That year also, I noticed that there would be an Australian Association For The Study Of Religions Conference hosted by our College. Recklessly, I put my name down to read my glimmer of a Thesis toward the end of the year, plenty of time, as I thought.

That's another story.

I write of all this because I recently contacted the AASR again and am now again on their mailing list.

I write of all this too to explain the work with dreams. Last year, for the first time I stopped writing my dreams and the loss of that particular habit felt very strange to me indeed.

The last dream written in the mauve book was recorded on 28/9/08. It involved the former Principal of the Teacher's College, the person who eventually amalgamated all the Teacher's Colleges into The South Australian College Of Advanced Education.

Occasionally, from time to time, I've stopped writing the dreams, sometimes for six weeks or so, but never for this long. I should add that in December last year, I was seriously ill from Dental infections, a phenmenon which has become something of a national illness in Australia since the Howard Government removed the major proportion of funding for training in the Dental area.

I hadn't quite imagined that I would stop writing the dreams. I'd bought a new pink dream book long before I ran out of the mauve book and I kept opening the new book wondering if it would stay unfilled. The dreams in the mauve book had been sagas, many of them exhausting. Somehow it had all become too much.

Then, on the 9th of May this year, (the anniversary of my little sister's death in 1994), I dreamed that I was with my now adult daughter who was reciting Wordsworth.

Suddenly we were both surrounded by a group of very wonderful people who were concentrating their strength onto us and I decided that that dream was a pretty good one with which to begin anew.