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The Dreamer's Paradox - Part Two

As promised, Part Deux :

Tests, Allies, Enemies: Our hero, at first mystified and frightened by the unfamiliarity of his own mind, soon obtains a degree of control over his actions and sets out into his web of beliefs and opinions with great zeal. In his mind, an epic battle takes place. Our hero, equipped with the doctrines of imagination, creativity, free-thinking, and righteous morality, launches himself into his subconscious mind with passion and aggression, waging a war against the contrived and artificial constructs of a mentally oppressive society. In the process of rebuilding his mind from scratch, he encounters many of the mental facilities that had made him a slave to certain ways of thinking. One by one, he destroys these forces and replaces them with their opposites.

This, the longest section, is about a war between the concepts of right and wrong. It is about free-thinking versus tunnel vision, creativity versus stagnation, imagination versus homogenous monotony. Essentially, this is a frantic and rapid battle of opposites, a journey through a warring mind, and the triumph of right over wrong.

Approach the Inmost Cave: Things take a dark turn as obsession begins to cloud his mind. Passion turns into fury, aggression becomes rage, and his goals shift from finding sanctuary within his imagination to becoming the ruler of his own world. Power seeps into his brain and corrupts his good intentions as he realizes that he is omnipotent and omniscient within the confines of his own mind. The way in which he reigns over his creation begins to resemble a totalitarian dictatorship. He is swallowed and consumed by the world in his head. He is suddenly shocked and frightened at the way his righteous intentions have lead to him controlling his own mind in the same harsh way that society had controlled it. He was slowly creating the same thing he was running from. Quietly, he sits in his world and reflects upon what he has done in horror.

This section is about how passion can turn into rage and how this rage can transform righteous intentions into wrongful actions. It is about the quiet and dark reflection of horror resulting from the destruction of a masterpiece, the terror at seeing a monstrosity come from your own hands. It is about the bleak realization of a failed plan and the resulting loss of hope.

The Ordeal: His silent horror turns to frantic distress. He became so worked up and thoroughly immersed in his own activity that he completely lost contact with reality. The world he was seeing was simply an illusion, a fabricated world that he built on a haphazard whim and became a nightmare. The lines between fantasy and reality were so badly blurred that he now found himself lost in a sea of manufactured relics, each designed to bring him happiness but delivered only disappointment and pain. His world was flawed and it was not real. In an attempt to slowly let the light of reality seep back into his ruined fantasy world, he inadvertently opens the flood gates and reality gushes into his mind. Sheer chaos ensues as his lost, isolated mind violently snaps back into harsh, bleak reality. This torrential flood of reality clashing with the mighty constructs of his illusional fantasy acts as a nuclear explosion, completely wiping the slate of his brain clean. His brain is an empty wasteland. When the chaos subsides, there is implication that our hero has died and is drifting in a blank abyss.

This section is about the anger and frustration caused by failure, but it is chiefly about the chaotic collision of fantasy and reality. It is about the evaporation of the line between illusion and truth, the explosion that occurs when the two are violently mixed, and the deafening silence of the wasteland produced by this explosion.

The Dreamer's Paradox - Part One

Over the next couple of day's I'll post the story outline for The Dreamer's Paradox. This story is based on The Hero's Journey storytelling paradign, so the names of these sections are only temporary placeholders. While the whole album will run together as one gigantic song, each of these sections will represent one track on the finished CD.

PART 1

Ordinary World - A world of murky transition between childhood and adulthood. Our hero is lost. Vague, idealized memories of his former carefree life teasingly remind him of how far he has strayed from the happiness of his youth. While he realizes how miserable he has become, he cannot tell why, since he appears to be living a good life that others clearly desire; he has a successful job, a very nice house and car, lots of friends, plenty of money, and many love interests. He laments the loss of his childhood carelessness and imagination, but admits it is probably impossible to revive these withered and dead aspects of his life. He figures something is wrong with him since he has met all the expectations of his society and should be living a content and worry-free life as a member of the elite upper-class. Depressed and miserable, he attempts to separate himself from this ordinary world that frustrates him by driving away from the sprawling city. At the end of his brooding drive, he ends up at the radio towers situated high above the city. As he looks down at the city, and metaphorically looks down at all the worker bees who blindly and unquestioningly toil for an idea of happiness that is forced onto them by society. As he does this, he sees himself.

This section is about our hero’s feeling of loss, despite his apparent gains. It is about the stagnant condition of the everyman. The feeling of knowing you’re miserable but not knowing why, showing all the symptoms but still being unable to recognize the disease. It is about trudging on and being tricked into liking it, even though it blatantly drains you of happiness.

Call to Adventure - Suddenly, he awakens from his own blind obedience to society, his job, his shallow friendships, and realizes that he has lost all his freedom. He hears the call of adventure as a need to resurrect the passion and vitality of his youth by escaping from a society that oppresses creativity and free-thinking. He needs to rid himself of the corruption of society that had corroded his mind and hypnotized him into thinking and behaving a certain way. The imposition of rules, standards, and institutionalized ways of thinking had led him to abandon his own memories, sabotage his own life, and dedicate himself to things he does not believe in. Yet as much as his realization fuels his desire to cut ties with the world he has become a slave to, he is reluctant to give up everything he has worked so hard to obtain.

This section is about the epiphanic realization that you are a slave, the anger that follows such a realization, an intense desire to do something about it, and the lack of will to carry it out.

Refusal of the Call - Our hero’s brainwashed mind warns him about giving up the life that society has told him to create for himself. Hesitant to give up his wealth and social status, our hero refuses the call. He tells himself he is too old to revert to the ways of his youth and that he is simply destined to drift farther and farther away from happiness. Frustrated with his helplessness, he drops into a deep depression and even contemplates suicide as a way to escape what he views as the inevitable spiral into a miserable life. He continues to function in society, goes to work everyday, pretends to be happy, yet sits awake at night thinking about taking his own life.

This section is about how society tricks you into obeying it, how it forces you to abandon your free will and imagination without knowing it. Our hero is unknowingly falling prey to these mechanisms even when he appears to himself to be breaking free of them. Ultimately, this section is about seeing the light but being tricked into ignoring it.

Meeting the Mentor - One night, he falls asleep with gun in hand and dreams of visiting his past self. He sees memories that have long been forgotten or destroyed, and is able to witness first hand how free his life was, and his past self teaches him that the key to this freedom is in his mind. Using his past self as a mentor, he is able to view his present self with a degree of objectivity, and it is in this manner that he can finally open his eyes to the full reality of what he has become. His former happiness stemmed from imagination and free-thinking, two things heavily suppressed in his society. Seeing himself so carefree and full of vitality tears his heart out and he becomes distressed at what he has allowed himself to become.

This section is about our hero’s encounter with his past self, the childhood memories that are uncovered, and the lessons learned from his past self. It is about the discovery of escape and how it can supposedly lead to true freedom.

Crossing the Threshold: He awakens from his dream and is disgusted by what he has become. He throws his gun out the window and screams in cathartic frustration. His life has shifted from one of independent freedom to one of a lifeless robot. What once was meaningful emotion and connectedness has eroded away into a numb reality devoid of original thought. Our hero vows to reverse this process by journeying inside his mind to demolish the beliefs and doctrines he had been brainwashed into accepting as his own. The threshold is crossed as he locks himself into his house, closes himself off from the outside world, and escapes into his mind.

This section is about the self-disgust induced by discovering yourself as a slave to the things you thought you loved. It is about throwing aside a life you once cherished in order to find a higher truth. It is about escape from the comfortable prison cell into a world of uncharted territory. Disgust begets resolve begets escape begets the unknown.

The Dreamer's Paradox

I've finally started recording what is tentatively called The Dreamer's Paradox, my next album. I sat around for a month or two, very carefully and meticulously diagramming what I thought would be excellent structures for these songs, but as soon as I sat down with a real live guitar to start recording... the structures just didn't work at all. Months of wasted work? Maybe, but then again, welcome to my world.

On a more upbeat note, the actual song I've been working on is sounding great - way better than anything on Anomalous Material in terms of production quality. I have a whole new method for putting these songs together and it looks as though it's going to work out swimmingly. These songs will have a whole new dimension and mood that Anomalous was sorely missing. And they'll have direction and meaning, another thing Anomalous didn't really have - the songs just kind of wandered around, taking you on a blind journey through a decidedly flat sonic landscape. Being a concept album with lyrics as opposed to a random collection of instrumental songs, The Dreamer's Paradox has a story that's more or less set in concrete and will guide me in recording it. This way, I'll know how to buildup and breakdown each song, exactly when certain plot points happen, and the precise moods I want to get across with any given segment.

The thing was designed to be like a musical movie, where characters and concepts each have their own themes that will reappear throughout the entire album in different incarnations. While mostly metaphorical and dealing with things that could never be put on film, the album's story follows a traditional storytelling pattern that is frequently used to make movies or write novels. I'll probably go into the story more later on, but it's getting bloody late and I have class tomorrow. Cheers.

Flooded

I have a billion and a half different projects going on at once right now. I built this website in two days from scratch, I'm desperately trying to work on my next album which is tentatively named The Dreamer's Paradox, I'm trying to finish editing a movie detailing the chonicles of my recent trip to Tahoe over new years, I have a ton of other film projects accumulating on my hard drive in their halfway finished stages, I keep delaying this animated movie I've been swishing around in the backwash of my brain, and on top of this I still have the regular school work and reading that I'm supposed to be doing but which I never seem to actually do. I've shifted to a nearly noctournal sleeping pattern because it's easier for me to do this kind of stuff at night. People say, "hey you lazy bastard, you sleep until noon everyday and you don't have a job!" Well, I DO sleep till noon, but only because I stay up till five in the morning working on all this stuff, and I DO practically have a full-time job, just uh... you know, one that I don't get paid for. Yet. Hopefully.

I'm not saying "boo hoo, I have so much crap to do and I can't handle it all" and I'm not saying "yeah baby, look at how busy and important I am" but I'm just sort of faux-whining because thats what you do in a "blog" right? Maybe this is me trying to immortalize my otherwise mundane existance by placing it in the infinite-yet-intangible storage facility that makes up the internet. Maybe this is me bored. Hey, I don't really know but at least I'm giving myself the illusion that I'm being productive, so shove off.

Anomalous Material Released Under a Creative Commons License

My entire album, Anomalous Material, is now avaliable to download for free in the music section. I have released it under a Creative Commons License, meaning that anyone can download, copy, distribute, display, and perform this work for free with several conditions. Credit for this work must be attributed to me, this work must not be used for any commercial purposes, and this work must not be altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. These conditions aside, you are free to listen and share this music to your hearts content. Enjoy.

There Goes the Neighborhood

Well, here it is, ladies and gentlemen. I have a god damn website with a god damn blog on it. A blargh, as I like to call it. Half of me feels like I've descended to the level of just another brainless moron with a web page who really has nothing interesting to say, and the other half of me sees the dawning of a new reign of terror that I will systematically and unrelentingly unleash on the wasteland people like to call the internet. Ah, the internet. It just sort of wanders around and doesn't go anywhere.

Actually, it goes to porn.