Notes, Notings, and Common Refrains

So I want to write down my impressions while they're still there.

Started out navigating a city with a companion or companions (my mother? peers from my online life? That's foggy, but I remember the vague sense of being in conversation) in my motorized wheelchair -- not the one I currently have, but a mashup of previous chairs, and mostly like the chair I had in college and grad school.

Crossed the street and found the curb cuts okay (probably inspired by the opening to this video on YouTube, which I watched a bit before bed, last night)

We came to our destination, which was an historical building / museum of a former mansion/castle (there was some connection to Pre-Revolution French nobility... I think), where we were about to join a group tour.

And at first, I was really excited at the sight of a ramp right at the front, instead of around back, in an alleyway. But as I got there, it turned out that what I thought were ramps turned out to only be structural supports for the foundation, and the only real way to the opening exhibit was up a flight of stairs.

We complained to the woman leading the tour about how that wasn't fair, and she hand-waved away our complaints saying they'll just get people to carry me inside (a recurring feature of my almost-nightmares is how my subconscious just borrows whole cloth from my waking world experience)

The next scene I remember is everyone, including me, seated inside, at a banquet table, being served a multi-course dinner, and having conversations on various topics.

The conversation turned to disability representation in popular media (particularly TV and movies) and how some supposedly "positive" representation is actually detrimental, because it erases the actual discrimination that disabled people face, and makes systematic ableism seem like no big deal. And the example we used in conversation was the TV Cop procedural Ironside, with wheelchair-using IRL Raymond Burr as the title character.

And this is the point where the dream went semi-lucid, and I remember saying to myself: "Ooh! That's a great! I'm going to have to use that!"

And the reason it's detrimental was because although Ironside was a capable character who continued to be treated with respect and still able to do his job, even after becoming paralyzed and using a wheelchair, was that every set for every scene in the show was purposely built around his chair -- even one scene I watched where he was on an airplane, and able to wheel his regular manual wheelchair down the plane's central aisle. Every doorway, every hallway -- even in apartment buildings where suspects lived on the poor side of town -- was wide enough for him to get around independently. (I should probably make a dedicated post all out the special kind of copraganda in Ironside, someday -- thanks for reminding me, subconscious!)

And at this point in the dream conversation, I cited my mother (or maybe my mother was there and added this bit herself), as giving this kind of representation the name "Castle Representation" (probably because the setting for this dream was in a castle-turned-tourist-attraction that was nowhere near as accessible as it promised to be at first.

(And the lucid part of my mind said: "ooh! it has a name, now! That's Clever! Remember that!)*

And then the dream turned fragmentary, as people started to get up from the table, and going into other rooms, and coming back with dessert, or not, and the scenes jumped around to different POVs in seemingly random ways that can't be narrated coherently. So I'll stop here. At least I got down the bit I told myself to remember.

*Though, in the waking world, I think maybe "Set Dressing Representation" would be more fitting? What do you think?

Edited to add: Although, after going away, and having a second cup of coffee, I think I’ll keep calling “Castle Representation.” Honor the Dream! Also: A) it’s one word --simple. and B) a “Castle” is a thing that is built specifically for the monarch -- it’s a closed off space that’s a world apart from where the rest of the society lives -- just like how the fictional world for a disabled protagonist is purposely built for that character and that story, and is completely cut off from how real disabled people live in the real world.

So okay. Yes. “Castle Representation” it is, then.