Wonderland (Sweet Dreams Made of These)

"It would be so nice if something would make sense for a change."
Alice, Alice in Wonderland (1951)

The first complete pattern I investigated on this blog, focusing on Beyonce Knowles and her association with the number 3 and the triple goddess allegory, was inspired by Anne Leibovitz' photo portraying Beyonce as Alice of Alice in Wonderland for Disney's 2007 Year of a Million Dreams promotional campaign, which ended officially on January 1st, 2009. The photo was one of a series of 12 in which various celebrities posed as iconic Disney characters. Rachel Weisz dressed up like Snow White, Julianne Moore became Ariel from The Little Mermaid, etc... like so many things, it would be a mistake to assume these choices were arbitrary, but one can only speculate on the reason why Beyonce reminded the Disney casting exec of Alice. For the purposes of this pattern, however, the choice resonates soundly on a few levels.

"The Matrix is an exercise in ambivalence, and at the very heart of that ambivalence lies the Dream. "
http://whatisthematrix.warnerbros.com/rl_cmp/new_phil_clark.html


Beyonce photoshoot from Giant Magazine

Wonderland is a dream. It's been a while since I'd seen Disney's version; I had to re-watch the Lewis Carroll classic again before I understood this. Alice doesn't come to Wonderland by falling down a rabbit hole, she enters Wonderland -unaware- when she falls asleep while listening to her sister read to her under a tree on a river bank. The concept of the dreamstory as a primary plot device has always struck a strange chord with me; ever since I first saw The Wizard of Oz.

Dorothy's trip to Oz didn't happen when a tornado picked up her house, but when she was knocked unconscious by storm debris. In Disney's Peter Pan, Neverland is subtly revealed to be a dreamworld when Wendy Darling wakes up by her bedroom window, with her two brothers fast asleep (In the original novel, J. M. Barrie says that Neverlands exist within the minds of all children). A couple of posts back, in Sacred Sex, I postulated that Neverland represented a fourth dimension, a trip we take in our heads, once I found innocent little Tinkerbell's connection to Absinthe. It is quite possible that the dream journeys these three little women take are simply plot devices; Wonderland, Oz and Neverland are very different "trips" after all, with no apparent connections between them, besides being dreams. Well, almost.

http://www.amazon.com/Lost-Girls-Alan-Moore/dp/1891830740

Between 1991 and 1992, Alan Moore (writer of Watchmen and V For Vendetta) and Melinda Gebbie released Lost Girls, a graphic novel centered around Wonderland's Alice, Oz's Dorothy Gale and Peter Pan's Wendy Darling. The women meet in a chance encounter at a mountain resort after their respective dream trips (Alice is an old woman, Dorothy is in her 20's, Wendy is in her 30's) and discuss -get this- their sexual exploits involving characters from their famous stories. Moore reportedly wanted to use Lost Girls to upgrade pornography as a literary genre, but the work's staggered release was clouded by the controversial portrayal of teenage girls having sex. I'm sure, knowing Alan Moore, that Lost Girls finds interesting ways to push the boundaries of modern decency, but the cover art seemed more relevant to the pattern than the stories inside. The medium is the message, after all.

Blond, brunette, redhead...

Could Lost Girls be Alan Moore's sly homage to the triple goddess veiled in teen sex? Probably not, but for the purposes of the pattern, conscious participation isn't required. By having these particularly trippy characters share their erotic fantasies in order to uplift pornography, the three-as-one theme is directly entwined with the dream-realm concept and Sacred Sex. Given this recent discovery, and Beyonce's aforementioned affinity for the feminine triplicate, you can imagine my elation when the pop princess' "Sweet Dreams" video was released a few days ago. Right on time...

"I'm going outta my head / Lost in a fairytale / Can you hold my hands and be my guide?"

Out of the six videos released from Beyonce's I Am...Sasha Fierce this one is by far my favorite.

Since analyzing "Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)" back in the(Bee)yonce(Know)les, more than a few bloggers and journalists have noticed the three-dancer pattern repeated in the videos for "Diva" and "Ego". The three-as-one-dancer idea could arguably have just been chalked up to stylistic trend until this, but here the idea is laid bare as a) Beyonce's dancers materialize out of thin air, b) shots of our star with her two back-ups are intercut with shots of three (synchronized) Beyonce's [above] and c) the camera pans past three (un-synchronized) versions of the reborn golden robot Bey.

In an article entitled Beyonce's Shattered Dream, Yeshua over at MK Culture pointed out that the robot version of Beyonce emerges after she smashes her mirror; this points directly to the second book in Lewis Carroll's original Wonderland story, Through The Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (where Alice steps through a mirror to get to her dream world)...

...and alludes to Neo's crossing-over/awakening scene in The Matrix, where a shattered mirror is re-formed by his touch. Both Wendy Darling and Dorothy Gale encounter The Looking Glass in their transitions also; Wendy dreams of Neverland while asleep at her bedroom window, and Dorothy is knocked unconscious by a piece of a broken window frame before she dreams of Oz. This pattern thread helps explain the inclusion of Tinkerbell's mirror scene in Peter Pan...

She gotta big Ego...

...and makes some sense of this image from Beyonce's December '08 photoshoot with Giant Magazine;


In front of three Looking Glasses (windows) looking through a Looking Glass (scope)

I digress.

The "Sweet Dreams" video opens with Beyonce struggling with an intense nightmare while a sinister lullaby plays. Seconds in, we are clued in to her already slightly fractured reality by the disjointed editing and music. Her body begins to levitate, which is a blatant reference to possession magick and trance, and if that wasn't enough, we are alerted to the presence of another being by the single white dove.

[image lightened to show detail]


Levitation denoting possession in The Exorcist

The Messenger is The Medium / The Media is The Message

OrangeMoon's analysis of Beyonce's Sasha Fierce possession, as featured in the(Bee)yoncé(Know)les, seems to fit in quite nicely here, but even before the Beyonce pattern, I connected possession to enlightenment via hyp-gnosis and the Medium a la Patricia Arquette in Know/Now/No/Gnosis/Hypnosis. This concept is reinforced further as Beyonce experiences a false awakening -her eyes open, but she is upside down, in Wonderland- and lets out a chilling scream before she begins to dance [played backwards].

peep that rainbow halo; this is not demonic

The symbols of reversal seem to resonate soundly with the Wonderland theme, where up is down, insanity is logical and all is nonsense. That is, of course, why Alice created Wonderland in the first place; her reality made no sense in her impatient, childish perspective, and she wished for a world in which "nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't."

"...The tale plays with logic in ways that have given the story lasting popularity with adults as well as children. It is considered to be one of the most characteristic examples of the genre of literary nonsense..."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice%27s_Adventures_in_Wonderland

"Literary nonsense refers to a style or motif in literature that plays with the conventions of language and the rules of logic and reason via sensical and non-sensical elements. The effect of nonsense is often caused by an excess of meaning, rather than a lack of it"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_nonsense

On May 29th, 2009, three films opened here in the US; Drag Me to Hell, Up, and What Goes Up. I'm sure there's pattern-confirming symbolism in all three, but to be honest, I have no interest in seeing any of them (maybe Up). The red/blue dichotomy of Drag Me to Hell and Up was first brought to my attention in Up and Down at The Sync Whole, but it took this analysis of Wonderland for me to see the connection. Drag Me to Hell: demonic possession, seeing red and the feminine descent (down the rabbit hole),

Alice and the Seer from Drag Me To Hell

Up: enlightenment, into the/out of the blue, and the masculine ascension (second star to the right, straight on [up] til morning).

I don't want to speculate on the circumstances surrounding Micheal Jackson's death; again, that's for another blog (for now), but a pattern is a pattern, and as my fellow g8tors at The Sync Whole know, MJ is knee-deep in the synchronicity.

The images below, then, shouldn't have surprised me, but they did.

In the months leading up to Micheal Jackson's passing, all of the top-tier celebs associated with hyp-pop started wearing MJ-style jackets and shirts. Nothing seemed strange about this; as trends go, throwback Jackson Jackets [jack-jack?] were right on time with the 20-year cycle of style re-processing that has become normal in western culture. Another example of things happening exactly as they should, I suppose.

Mike's influence on these stars is not limited to musical styling; I believe MJ's death helped usher in a new age and that the effects of this event will not be fully known for many years. For the purposes of this pattern, though, there is no shortage of connections.

Peter Pan & friends on auction at Neverland Ranch

The most obvious pattern thread involving the androgynous angel Michael Jackson is his publicly stated desire to be Peter Pan, evidenced by his long-time residence, Neverland Ranch. Through the allegorical dream realm and the triple goddess, I've connected the Beyonce trinity with Peter Pan's biggest fan, Wendy Darling, as well as Wonderland's Alice and Oz's Dorothy. If Micheal Jackson were in Wonderland, he would undoubtedly be The Mad Hatter. Besides being called "Wacko" at the height of his stardom, Jackson was known for his trademark fedora hat, a pop culture trend many people don't know he started.

In Moonwalker, Jackson transforms (again) into a hare to escape obsessive fans, reflecting the Mad Hatter's sidekick, the March Hare, for the music video for "Speed Demon". Before his trance-form-ation, a scaled-down Isis of Liberty comes alive to chat. Immediately after, Tweedledum and Tweedledee join in on the chase for good measure.

As for his Wizard of Oz connection, well that's easier. He plays the Scarecrow in The Wiz alongside his idol Diana Ross, and in Moonwalker, the film ends with a dazzling special effects sequence in which Jackson becomes the heartless Tin Man (and a damn cool Transformer).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtJ6bXnoQxE

After watching Moonwalker again, I started to see Beyonce's "Sweet Dreams" robot rebirth in a new light. The processes are quite different, but both of their robotic transformations involve chilling screams, shattered [looking] glass and atypical awakenings; the image of MJ's glowing robot eyes being flung open was burned into my memory as a child. Beyonce's upside-down awakening into her robotic dream self had similar shock value, and similar significance.

The Beyonce robot in "Sweet Dreams" mimics Neo's awakening in The Matrix by realizing her power to control the shattered chaotic elements of her fractured ego/reality/dream. We see her calmly gain control of her two robot alters; they move lifelessly in sync while she motions with her arms towards them, and if you look closely, you can see that she also directs the flow of glass shards around her.

"I choose the Matrix."
-Cipher

In the first Matrix, Cipher is predictably played as Judas, Lu-cipher the snake, but I always wondered what would've happened if the agents succeeded and Zion fell. There were two gems of gnowledge that most Matrix fans overlooked: the Elder admits to Neo that Zion's "free" citizens are still slaves to machines, and Cipher is right when he tells Trinity he and the crew are slaves to Morpheus' dogmatic doctrine. Part of me wanted to see Cipher become an actor (a star), eating steaks and smoking cigars in ignorant bliss, plugged in, re-awakened into a lucid dream of his own design.

"I don't even see the code anymore. All I see is blond, brunette, redhead..."

Due to a new analysis of Terminator:Salvation, I'm beginning to see an upside to the Robot Agenda and a reason to discard the fear associated with it. The self-aware robot is an allegorical symbol of the blossoming self-awareness of man. Our atypical awakening is happening now, and could not have happened without the unifying pattern threads of the internet, our virtual reality Medium, our second life, our waking dreamworld, our Matrix. She is our robot goddess, screaming I AM into each of our sleeping heads against our will, spreading her Legs to reveal [re-veil?] the carnal cosmic truth we've always known: she is both sacred and promiscuous; the freed mind can manipulate the matrix/web/pattern/dream as easily as the enslaved. It must. There is no spoon because we're all mad here. Waking up in Wonderland, the dream is ours to create.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqjaI0P4sI0

Sweet Dreams.