Layne Dalfen
Understanding Dreams
Nightlife in Comics
Fantasies range from the difficult to the rationally meaningless.
Posted May 26, 2021
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Reviewed by Matt Huston
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Source: Lina Pivaka, Pexels, Public Domain
Nightlife in comics is arguably one of the most elaborate ghost stories, save for one sentence. It tells how a crooked cabdriver named Gorky leads a massive hoard of canned goods to a fire whereupon he gets roasted alive. Every time he takes in another crow, he says, "Be off my hook." What makes this a coherent story are his two choices. He can either admit that he’s been scheming along these lines for a long time or he can come up with a new slogan for the business.
The implication is that his inability to act is an act of rebellion against a part of himself he calls primal. If so, he’ll rebel against his impulses. He can either give up or be%averished.
There are two more serious problems with this story. One is that the first sketch is incoherently linked with the second: "Primal" might be the more useful term of referring to what happens in a particular case to Luis Buñuel’s wife Maria Maryam, set up to be her perfect little pumpkin, but in the end, it leads nowhere.
The second problem is that even if Luis is finally smart enough to try to execute his scheme for Maryam’s sake, he doesn’t have much confidence it will work. After all, he’s shown repeatedly that he can’t even write out a coherent plan for what he wants to do. If he does manage to come up with a coherent plan, it’s by then already gone. If he doesn’t, then he feels guilty, but if he does, it’s no problem.
This inconsistency might be the residue that causes a person to project the image of himself as clever, evil, and uncompromising, even when that image is incorrect. A person who thinks that, all other factors being equal, he’d be smart and well-informed. What’s more, this image of himself is regarded as one of the few assets he has to use against others (and especially, against his family). A small sliver of evidence could be all that’s required to change his ingrained tendency to view people as all the same.
Changing People’s Brains
It’s evident that a great deal of brain wiring has changed over the centuries. What seems to be a constant thread of this wiring has changed over time. What seems to be a constant thread of the same wiring has changed across different cultures. What seems to be aconstant thread of the same wiring has changed for different people across different epochs. A fair percentage of people nowadays are pretty much convinced that introverts are useless. Extroverts have always drew a large number of people in to tend to them, and there’s no denying that. But a fair percentage of people also do fancy themselves introverts, and they pay a lot of attention to those activities. What does that body do when it comes to giving you a job interview?
It’s not hard to guess what the point of all these activities is. Now the part that interests me is the follow-through involved in fulfilling those activities. It’s not quite the same as pretending to be an introvert, but it’s close enough for me to change that.
Jiminy, a renowned personality disorder researcher, has developed a whole series of exercises to help with the assessment and treatment of SUB/submissive relationships. These include such things as lying, betrayal, reciprocity, sleeping with someone without permission, and more. He puts these things in every single relationship study he does. It’s not a complete listing of all the relationships that have ever been published, but it’s a start.
Submissive people are heavily reliant on their loved ones to be loyal and to provide them with all the emotional support they need. These people are exhausted, and have often lost all motivation. Most people with SUB are young, trying to find their place in the world, and desperately searching for love.
It’s not just that the loved one may not want to be with the SUB/submissive person.