Right now I find myself totally fixated on this pretty 80’s term: Energy. If you can see all life as energy you can become the master of it: staying away from negative energy, seeing which situations sap your energy, and moving towards growth-oriented energy.

I first ‘experienced’ energy in a conscious form when I was living in New York about six years ago. Any Manhattanite is familiar with the swell of foot traffickers that sometimes overwhelms you as you’re trying to amble across town. Sometimes when I saw the wave of people headed in my direction I would half close my eyes and imagine them as energy, moving to and froe, nervously anxiously, sometimes slowly and deliberately. When I was able to ‘transform’ the crowd into particles I could navigate my way through the gaps with my eyes shut. Of course to do this one has to shut down all cognitive faculties. Reasoning has to take the back-seat. Reasoning is what turns on your internal dialogue and rationalizes everything, guesstimating where someone may step next or how fast.

At the moment I’m working with eradicating the energy ties that bind me to some of the people from my past. In rational terms we say things like, ‘I just can’t let go.’ But actually, it’s not only an emotional tie that binds us, but beneath that emotional tie is an energetic one. We focus on someone constantly and we’ve created a bond with that person. Our directed attention IS the energy itself. The same thing goes for others’ thoughts of us. I can feel when someone is obsessing about me and I experience this with anxiety, a sense of imprisonment and quite frankly, nausea. I have to use my directed attention at ‘pulling the plug’ so to speak on that person. It feels at times like some people are ‘mainlining’ me. And I’m sure I’m not alone in that sensation.

Ultimately, Intent and Concentration are vital. If I am around someone, a stranger even, who is irritable and has just had a fight with their partner, they will try to pass that energy on to me (usually by getting irritated with me or making me feel bad). It’s so important when you see that energy wave coming your way, that you duck or move out of the way. Otherwise, and we’ve all experienced this, you get wiped out by a human tsunami.

A couple of weeks ago, I was at the Three of Clubs with my friends Jena and Manish when a slip of an intoxicated tongue resulted in the invention of a new word, “frivial” (trivial + frivolous= frivial). We could not give birth to “frivial” without of course ushering in the concomitant “trivolous.” Somehow the hybrid words work even better than their original counterparts.

These two pubescent morph words have been on my mind a lot as of late. While working on heady articles on bio-art and design hybrids, which have been sapping all of my cerebrial resources, I have often come up for air and basked in their semantic energy. During one such recent mental sojourn, I wrote my ‘return of the moustache’ article for Salon.com for sheer amusement’s sake. It was a nice time-out from more pressing and intellectually fueled stories.

What struck me as really ‘off’ is that I got more responses (personal and otherwise) as a result of ‘The Stache is Back’ than I got for an article that ran concurrently in RES on organic and transgenic architectures (which put these in within the context of the complex 21C society in which we live). The moustache returns and people are ‘up in arms,’ or jubiliant. But write about something that relates to design, ecology and the biotech revolution and apathy seems to ensue. Obviously, we’re more comfortable with the frivial and trivolous daily details of our mundane lives. Don’t get me wrong, I too need frequent breaks from heavy thought. I just find it oddly amusing.

And the investigative reporter in me is busy breaking down another topic that seems important to me at this time. Intellectuals and scientists alike reside in some pretty serious, heady spaces most of the time. This constant analysis and pontification goes part and parcel with their personalities. How do these people unwind? What supplies them with the pleasure and relaxation of the mind and soul–the same simplicity that the average person perhaps takes for granted? Must they drift off into another state of being in order to leave the intellectualizing behind and embrace the whimsical, spontaneous and downright animalistic sides of existence? Is intoxication necessary? Do they swing from extremes (intellectually overindulgant to cromag man?) Can the intellectual side truly make spontaneous, Id-based decisions? Can the frivial and trivolous side make educated and thought-out decisions related to fun and adventure?

Last night I had a dream that I was living in a two floor apartment (not unlike the apartment I lived in in Amsterdam on the ‘grachten’). I had placed my furniture in a very odd way–the bed in the living room and couches in the bedrooms. But, in this dream, I was about to move everything around, to finally live like a ‘proper’ person–bed in bedroom and a grand living room with couches, a piano and fancy chrome reading lights. And, surprise, I am in the process of reaorganizing how I live at the moment, both on a daily basis and in a more general sense.

Dreams are a funny thing, especially when they get architectural. That’s when you’re really entering your mental space and moving things around in there. I’ve had dreams before where I discovered a hidden or ‘lost’ room in a big house–a room in the back that no one had bothered to look in. It was filled with cob-web covered furniture, all dusty, basically out of use. But I re-appropriated it. In another dream I discovered a grand hidden staircase that led me to rooms I’d never been in. And finally there’s my classic hotel dream (a dream of impermanence, I guess). In my last hotel dream I was in a large suite filled with birdcages–my role: to care for, and feed the birds.

Freud would have had a field day with my (or anyone else’s) dreams. Then again, so would Gaudi. The latter especially, had an innate understanding of how holistic the connection is between our living space (and its accouterments–furniture) and our subconscious makeup.

Like Carlos Castaneda, the Hindus and many philosophical astronomers, I belive in the simple fact that space-time is an illusion–or rather a limited viewpoint that keeps us encased in our 3-dimensional realities here on Earth. I also believe that our psyches exist very much on that physical level. Our spirits exist on a limitless realm that goes infinitely beyond 3-dimensional space-time.

All that being said, architecture and furniture exist in great part to define our habitation of this Earth, our tiny realm. The size and grandure of a house (in capitalist terms) defines how big and grand we are (or we think we are) in material terms. A bed, be it single, king sized, bunk or (yikes) water, defines our relationship to sleep, the people around us and our general social structure. A skyscraper kisses the sky asserting, without words, “the sky’s the limit.”

So, dreams of interiors–which I know I am not alone in having had–are somewhat limited excavations of an unseen psychological realm. Excuse me for sounding judgmental. The psyche is an important part of who we are, naturally. I just hope, some day to EXPERIENCE dimensions that defy classification and description, to escape from my psyche and dive into that vast metaphoric ocean of the spirit.