Coming Home while preparing to delve back into the world of Zizek. ___ describing her dream as very strange while to my ears it seems completely mundane, a series of events which "did not happen" but seems like they easily could have, with the exception of the Great Danes insets the floor boards. Could be fascinating to delve into some dream interpretation with ___, to unfurl her subconscious on a page or through a hand-mind crafting process - ultimately that's up to her, in time & concentration.

The correlation between dreams & RPGs: prior is immersion into the ocean of the self, the later amounts to dissociation from "reality" in preference for a fantasy world. The comparison implies dreams are a fantasy - more or less than real, but not real strictly speaking - or else that fantasy games are a way of playing out subconscious desires in mundane existence - games as greater than the reality platform which hosts them. I'm dissatisfied with the comparison perhaps, or just my dialectical contrast to weigh them against reality: both are real & both are alternative realities existing simultaneously within the multiplicity of experience, each a choice of focus/awareness - lucid dreamers, gamers, augmented reality platforms, ontological modulation, words like "immersion".

My dreams are not abstract - my ideas are not abstract - I am interested in focusing on the concrete nature of reality: remember concrete poetry, musique concret, other theories of concrete art from mid-century. Abstraction moves away from representation, a non-objective non-representational modality of working through life & materials. I'm interested in creating scenarios to observe what is "actually there" - deconstructing the language of phenomenology as much as the experience of material arrangements. I need to meditate upon these differences, & return to my past notebooks to recount the many years-long personal struggle between this polemics. What I propose might feel abstract because of its removal from daily banal concerns, but I propose that being intoxicated/inebriated/inundated in the late-capitalist world of ideology is a more accurate description of abstraction.

Discussing the parameters of a dog kennel that accommodates both the human & canine comforts: to treat the fabrication of any new object as a series of design problems, puzzles to be solved, a delicate balance between pragmatic function & parsimony/elegance (of both function & aesthetics). The pleasure derived from our earthly possessions lies in the recognition & sophistication of these variables: dog kennel, new sofa, loft, work wear, in fact anything & everything around us. Sound byte: we say we live in a materialist culture but in fact the opposite is true - we succumb to the desire of the images (Baudrillard on seduction) without considering enough the material means of production. We need to focus more on the material, the concrete: the materials of the world, rather than the sensuous production of ideology >> begin Zizek monologue here.

*watch Zizek film "Perverts Guide to Cinema" with ___. Let's crack open a conversation about our animal nature & human perversions, the inner & outer reality ebbing & flowing in relation to the other, concepts of the self & other & void & soul, etc.

*also watch Adam Curtis' "Century of the Self" for personal review & to inspire new conversation directions with ___.