Recurring Dreams of Alien Invasion

For the past year and a half, my dreams have been invaded by a persistent alien theme, so much so that lately when they show up I think, "Oh crap, not these guys again."

My recurring alien invasion dreams started out as intense and frightening; not quite nightmares, but memorable and disturbing.

Over the past eighteen months these dreams have gradually taken on a more cartoonish aspect.

I no longer feel afraid in them. I no longer feel susceptible to alien capture or mind control, although the invaders are always trying to win me over.

Meanwhile, how is everyone else doing?

Let's just say, it's not going well for Planet Earth.

In my dreams, most humans have already fallen for the alien schtick.

No one ever sees the aliens directly. When they do show themselves it is in human form, usually in a uniform of some sort, yet everyone understands that this just a meat-suit, not how they actually appear to each other.

Really, we have no idea what they look like.

What everyone notices instead (in fact can't help but notice) is their airships. The airships are huge, silver, and unavoidable. You can't really run from them. You can't hide.

The ships are for us, not them. They are not 'in' the ships, they are just gathering us into them.

Their pitch to humanity is this:

"We can help you guys. Join us. We know what we're doing and we can make each of you into the highest, most realized personal form possible. Why would you not want that? Isn't that what everyone wants? So join us. We can help."

Most people do join them willingly, but shortly thereafter the joiners begin to change rapidly, to mutate into some bizarrely specialized form.

So, say the aliens decide your genetic code predisposes you to computer work. You soon grow to be a part of the computer, you stop looking like other humans, you instead take on a fleshy form compatible with what you are doing, Maybe you meld with the computer at head and hand level.

Once you are assigned a task, that's all you do, and you claim to be happy about it.

Basically, you become a slave, but a seemingly happy one. Bizarre to behold, but totally efficient.

If you decline the aliens' offer of help, they keep after you. They mean for you to have their 'help' one way or the other. They are constantly after you to join.

In the dreams, I don't want their 'help'. I'm horrified by the whole spectacle.

The only fully human creatures left on Earth are me and a few other misfits who won't join.

Just the Way It Is

I used to worry about these dreams. I worried that something was pressing down upon us, (or at least upon me), and that I was missing it. I thought the dreams were prophetic, a warning of some sort.

But lately I've been seeing these dreams as simply an imaginative reflection of how things actually are. As a species, it seems we are actively and rapidly transforming ourselves into an alien force: mutable, cancerous, bizarre. Comic, yet lethal.

Bad for Earth and all its other creatures.

Indeed, in our rush for profit and efficiency, for ever newer and better technology even before we know what to do with the stuff, we seem to be losing our humanity.

Once this interpretation occurred to me, I began to think outside the box.

More on that in the next post.

Truly Alien--Jeff Vandermeer's Southern Reach Trilogy

Image courtesy of Bujo at Flicker CC

One thing that has always bothered me about ufologists and alien hunters is their surprising lack of imagination.

In 99 out of 100 alien movies or UFO treatises, the aliens are more or less our size, more or less bipedal humanoid creatures like ourselves, who more or less happen to share our madness for technology and also like sex with Earthlings, a lot.

I mean, seriously?

No one ever thinks that aliens might be microscopic, or bigger than multiple sperm whales, or comprised of something so strange as to be unrecognizable to human beings as life.

In fact, science is still arguing about what life is, even right here, on Earth. Definitions elude us. So, how can we look for life beyond Earth if we can't even quite understand the life in front of our noses?

The strangest life of all might be the life behind our own noses.

H.P Lovecraft understood this kind of existential strangeness, and understood how and why people avoid it. His imagination spawned worlds; he created an entire mythos around his unique and awful perception of our plight.

Lovecraft is rightly celebrated today, not just for his unique linguistic tics (settle down you eldritch cynics), but for the dense, murky tone of his writing, the way the words conjure up horrors so alien, so ancient, so beyond our most esoteric ramblings that even seasoned Lovecraft readers still shudder involuntarily when they read them.

Enter Jeff Vandermeer with his Southern Reach Trilogy.

Writing in the shadow of Lovecraft, Vandermeer takes language and chops it up in such a deft and horrible fashion that the reader is almost imperceptibly knocked off his or her personal linguistic moorings, whatever they may be, right along with the characters. In this way Vandermeer forces the reader to experience, if only vicariously, the end of personal identity and all the horror, wonder, and madness that necessarily accompanies that loss.

Vandermeer is not forming a Lovecraft tribute band with this series. He doesn't write like H.P. Lovecraft. Arkham is a good thousand (million?) miles away from the unnamed stretch of southern coast that comes to be known in his trilogy as "Area X", a mysterious tract of nature that is invaded by something preternatural and undefinable.

And yet the story is informed by Lovecraft, because early on it lays out the existential horror implied by loss of category.

Philosophy students will recognize what seem at first like gratuitous references to Jacques Derrida and Deconstructionism, but the Southern Reach Trilogy is not some dry exercise in intellectual snottiness. Although not an easy read, the trilogy zigs and zags between startling, even poetic descriptions of the natural territory and dry, irritating expositions of the inner workings of the minds of various characters.

The effect is to mire the reader inside Area X along with the characters; no small achievement, and it isn't until the last page that you realize you won't be able to forget the experience.

Annihilation, the first volume, is a good read, if a bit choppy. The choppiness is easy to forgive or ignore, because the story is original and interesting. You want answers to questions that are raised here. I, for one, could hardly wait for the second volume, Authority, to come out, even while resenting the fact that I had to wait.

But Authority, is a slog. Those questions keep the reader hooked and pushing forward, even while thinking, "Why are you doing this to me Jeff?" He has his reasons, which unfold in the final volume in ways that startle and satisfy and prove that answers are beside the point, really.

The final volume, Acceptance, really sings.  Parts of it are quite beautiful. Written in all three persons (first, second, and third) the events feel natural and preternatural all at once. At some point after finishing the final volume, I realized that I'd just read the first jazz horror novel.

Honestly it's quite brilliant.

I don't want to say too much more, for fear of spoiling the experience for readers new to the Southern Reach, but it did my heart good to see this genre reach these heights.

I think Lovecraft would have loved it.

I know I did.

Stephen Hawking Says Aliens Are Real But Probably Dangerous

The hot minute item du jour is that famous physicist and mathematician Stephen Hawking says in his new Discovery Channel TV Show Stephen Hawking's Universe (previews May 9th at 9:00 PM) that aliens are probably real but are probably not friendly.

Hawking bases these opinions--which he admits are speculative--on probability theory and direct observation.

Given the number of possibilities for life beyond Earth, Hawking says that alien races are statistically likely. Given what usually happens when one culture drops in on another for the first time however, Hawking believes an alien visitation is probably not going to result in anything resembling peaceful sharing, space brotherhood, or warm woo woo fuzzies for all.

Hawking cites the arrival of the first white people in the Americas and the effect that exploration had on indigenous peoples as an example. Even if aliens didn't mean to harm us initially, they would likely carry germs and social practices that would detrimental to our health. They'd be looking after themselves, not us. As anyone would, really.

But the greater likelihood is that they'd drop by specifically to steal our natural resources.

After all, that's what we do.

Hawkings asks, why would aliens be any different?

The Thing From Another World

Yesterday TCM ran The Thing From Another World (1951), one of the very best of the 1950s alien invasion flicks. I hadn't seen it in awhile and noticed the following threads for the first time:

1. The alien was kind of a cross between a prototypical 'Grey' and Frankenstein. Stockier than a grey but bald, tall, and emotionless with huge creepy eyes and a keen interest in breeding, he was supposedly way smarter than us but spent most of his time staggering around making 'grrrrr' noises whilst looking for blood. 
2. The snowy, arctic setting was a great visual Cold War metaphor. 
3. It struck me that when you get megalomaniacal scientist types together with bumbling military types nothing good ever comes of it, and that has not changed in 59 years. 
4. The tall reporter guy could be Jeff Goldblum's dad. I don't think he is, but he could be.
5. That woo woo background music during the scene where everybody pokes at the severed alien hand is classic. I can't get enough of that music. I wish I could make that sound here but you can't really even spell it in a blog so I guess you'll have to watch the flick to hear what I'm talking about. 'Woo woo' is as close as I can come to it. 

I get frustrated by alien talk today. It always sorts into the True Believers versus the Skeptical Debunkers and that whole kabuki argument is so boring.

I think a LOT is going on with ufos and alien abduction reports, but no one ever is the slightest bit interested in my alien perspective on it. I figure I have enough material, thoughts, links, and news items for a blog on specifically that complaint, so here it is.

Stay tuned. If you get bored while wating for the next post, go watch The Thing From Another World. 

It's still awesome.