Tuesday, July 2, 2013

Test Vote Dummies and Beth Airlines: Monitoring a Strange Election Campaign

I am in the audience, waiting for a female presidential candidate to arrive for a speech in an American town, somewhere in the middle of the continent. The whole thing is being televised, including a song-and-dance act onstage that is a commercial for Beth Airlines. The performers are dressed in old-fashioned Western style – check shirts, bandannas, boots – as if for “Oklahoma”. The song is outrageously commercial, with the date of a sales event. I think, as I observe this, that it really may be true that corporations run American politics and that an election is a choice between corporate advertising strategies.
    I observe two test voters. These are dummies with featureless facers that can be molded like clay. They are called “pannequins”, evidently a play on “mannequins”. Behind the apple pie-sweetness the stage show is meant to project, there is clearly a very cynical, controlling agenda. This is confirmed when I sit with some of the party strategists. I am appalled by the racist views of one of the men; he speaks of almost every ethnic group with foul-mouthed contempt. I call him to order, telling him he is talking like “a racist redneck Jew”. This doesn’t faze him.
    My role here is entirely that of an observer – though I lose my objectivity when disgusted by the commercialism and the racism at play in this scene. I feel, inside the dream, as if I have been landed here not only from another time (there’s a 1950s feel to the scene) but from another world.

I woke from this dream at 3:33 a.m.

Feelings: Neutral, curious.

Reality: I have never heard of “Beth Airlines”. I know a few women named Beth, but none of them is likely to run for high office. Maybe the name of the airline is a clue to the identity of the woman running for president in the dream. I heard her name in the dream but it is gone now; I don’t think the candidate is Hilary Clinton.
    I'm not sure of the location. Oklahoma is possible. I was there once, decades ago.
    There is a period feel to everything here, as if we are in the 1950s. But I suppose things could be staged – or simply unfold – in this style anywhere in the United States between the right coast and the left coast. The creepy “pannequins” (dummy voters) are creepy, especially if they reflect emerging technologies of control.
     In regular life, I am unlikely to be monitoring an election campaign, though this would certainly have been possible during my “past life” as a journalist. Have I stepped into another alternate reality?


Questions:
Was it another of my parallel selves who was monitoring that strange election campaign? Many campaigns try to treat voters as dummies, but are those "test vote dummies" also a creepy technological possibility? Who is behind Beth Airlines? Why am I in this dream on the first full night home after nearly two weeks in the U.K.? Is it some kind of homecoming?

3 comments:

cobweb said...

Hi Robert, Some personal thoughts on this conundrum....As you say you have just come back from the UK, could Beth relate to the Queen and could the song and dance be an indication of all the cover-ups for underlying unrest at the centre of everything in the US and the world at this present time. As an observer you watch and wonder but seem to be powerless to change anything even when you observe the exposure and are moved to challenge. It is interesting that dreaming this dream made you consider if it might be a connection to a time when you were a journalist, a time of more analytical pursuit perhaps.
These thoughts are not offered as a "If this was my dream..." sort of comment but as a stream of conscious triggered by reading your entry...I wonder if you are being challenged to look beyond the 'show' at what lies beneath.

James Wilson said...

I like these kind of dreams. Being on a very different place than where you usually are, talking to people with whom you normally would never exchange a word (in this case because of his weird ideas) and being in an atmosphere that no longer exists (the 50’s) I feel often refreshing after these kind of dreams.
If this was my dream; and I didn’t know what Beth Airlines could mean I would start playing with the words. ( I don’t know if you heard or read the words Beth Airlines in your dream)
Could it mean Bed Airlines? (a reference to traveling while dreaming)
Bet Airlines? (sometimes you can compare and election with a bet)
Bethel lines? (maybe you heard the words wrong) Don’t know what it could mean but it sounds intriguing. (Bethel Airlines sounds like an interesting plane to catch 
You don’t have a question about the date that is being mentioned in your dream. If this was my dream; then I would consider whether the date is could be a marking point. In case events from the dream are going to be played out in waking live.
Further I would ask myself the question if my feeling of being in the 50ste could be an indication to identify this dream. Did something important happen in that period which can be linked with my dream? And give me another perspective to look from at this dream?

Naomi said...

Maybe you are hooked into a future reality regarding the state of human affairs in terms of an elite pressing forward a agenda. Or most importantly, the attitude toward humanity that is held.

Looking back, the 1950's was a turning point in the geopolitical world at large.