anamnesis

I keep a dream journal on my headboard. Last night, I discovered my dreams keep dream journals too. Several, in fact. I caught them writing down stuff that happened during MY day, when I was conscious. I guess my "waking life" is their dream life. Snippets of conversations and things that were said. They were trying to piece it together and figure out what's happening outside of their dream world, or what it means in their own terms. Kind of like dream interpretation, but reversed. I don't blame you if this sounds confusing, I'm confused too. I wonder if me writing that down in my dream journal would be part of what they are writing in their dream journal which I am writing about and whether I might someday find myself in a strange recursive loop with a white coat and lots of shiny buckles trying to squeeze a word in edgewise to prove I'm still sane?

I've seen a fair amount of resumes, but the one from last night's dream made a lasting impression. A friend (dream friend, never met her in "waking" life) was updating her resume. I was amazed to discover it was made out of cheese. Little slabs of cheese, a little smaller than an index card, each slab was about 1/3" thick. They were threaded together with twine in an accordion type fold and on the top of each slab was a concise description of one of her previous jobs. Given the ingenuity of how she got the print on the cheese, and depending on how fresh the resume was, I think she'd probably get an interview for sure. People would just be too curious to see what kind of person would have created this ---and had the nerve to apply for a job with it. Might work better for some types of jobs than others, though.

Wow, time to post an update. Had a great time (as usual!) at the consummate x-mass festivities with M and G. Was great seeing them and the whole clan again! Hit the tribal casino on the way back. Boy, they don't cut any breaks for Indians either. And how the slot machines have changed. Instead of simple little rows where you get three cherries and win or lose, there are all sorts of jaggedly lines and wild cards or affinity matches and you can bet on multiple lines with multiple bets. Gak. I never did figure it all out. Just punched some buttons. Wasn't sure why I won or lost. Spent my $10 dollars. Bah. Bright-eyes won something like $21 though, all on penny slots. We're still not sure why or how. Sonic broke even on blackjack I think. Made it back to the high country and had about a day to unpack when I got slammed with a nasty, 3+ day flu. Guess I'll get that over with early this season. Found myself lecturing in a dream this morning. (OK, afternoon, hey I'm finis...

Woke up with a strange dream fragment rattling around in my head. A group of us had made our way up to Cloudcroft and were sitting around a table at a restaurant trying to decide what to order. I was thinking about the chicken-fried steak, but the menu kept changing. The guy sitting next to me decided he wanted the catfish, but he didn't want it breaded, he wanted it chastised. Now I'm not a gourmet chef, but this was the first I heard of this method of preparation?

Woke this morning in the wake of an odd dream and scribbled down the remnants of what appeared to be the beginning of a story... "That the fabric of the universe was information, was still debated. That David had just experienced the ride of his life, dissembled like some kind of human koolaid and reconstituted from packets across the wires. was undeniable. It had been a clean circuit. But after the tests, he knew the packets would soon be traveling the multipurpose nets; slices of people sandwiched between video, voice and gaming shards amidst virtual goods and currency exchanges. " In the dream I was getting ready to be transported by some guy who didn't seem to sure of what he was doing across a wire with 3 leads that he was stripping the insulation from. More food for thought. And I'm still stuck pondering another idea I tripped across yesterday (or the day before) playing with a little "idea generator" program I'm writing. It suggested a scenario in...

[Warning. Rampant Philosophical Speculation] This article discusses, in part, a curious research finding in psychology that I've puzzled with off and on for several years. In the 70's a physiologist at the University of California named Benjamin Libet conducted one of those experiments that seems to be the norm in quantum physics these days; the kind that directly violates some of our most entrenched beliefs about the nature of reality. In this case however, it was the role our conscious mind plays in our behavior that's brought into question. A quote from the article will give you a flavor of the conundrum: "A bevy of experiments in recent years suggest that the conscious mind is like a monkey riding a tiger of subconscious decisions and actions in progress, frantically making up stories about being in control." One thing you should probably know about me, and the recommendation of this article, is that I'm pretty critical about ways most "experiments...

You may get the impression, from these limited postings in bloggerville, that all I'm up to is dreaming. Let me assure you that I have a bazillion other projects going on, but somehow dream related stuff just bubbles its way here in the margins. The last week or so, one of my projects has been refining a CD that I listen to before going to sleep each night. I'm on revision 13 now. Kept tweaking the frequencies and backgrounds and started to add suggestions to see if I could coax my mind into better recall of dreams. At first I started with a simple suggestion, "I will remember my dreams." Inserted it in a part of the CD where I'd be drifting off (around theta/delta frequences) some 11 minutes in. Then looped it a few times. Had a few issues with volume control in the first versions and it jolted me back awake. After getting that little glitch worked out, I realized there were some problems with the wording. The unconscious seems to be fairly literal. And lazy. And...

Had a strange dream last night. Perhaps it was sparked by a comment on ger-beans blog about the subject line, perhaps it was about certain experiments underway. But it gave me pause. In the dream I learned how to fly by a combination of small hops and rhythmic movements. I've had dreams where I already knew how to fly, but this was the first about learning the process itself. It wasn't a lucid dream, so I wasn't aware that I was dreaming, and things unfolded as they would likely happen in the "real world." First off I wanted to make sure I wasn't just hallucinating (happens from time to time) and showed it to some friends at a public place. Now you may imagine this would all be pretty exciting, and it was, but you may not imagine what came next. In a world, much like our own, where the paparazzi rip apart anyone's life whose story they can market to public interest, where lotto winners become beacons of hope and endless solicitations for those who believe ...

Last night I dreamt I was in psi school. And Bruce Willis was one of the instructors. Entrance Exam A number of us prospects were seated aboard large, wide flatbeds linked together like railroad cars made of very futuristic material. We were being pulled slowly down some track through a big structure like a disney-land ride. The ceiling of the structure was quite high above us and the purpose seemed to be to pass us through a field that was phase shifted 50% out of reality. Whatever that means (I'm still thinking about that this morning.) Being half in and half out of physical reality, some of us started floating a little off our seats. And since this state seemed much like a dream (oddly enough :-) I started experimenting with what else I could do. Pretty soon I was having a blast spinning and doing flips, seeing how high I could go and finding all the ways I could move and play in 3 dimensions. I guess I passed, because the next I remember, I had been in the school for a few we...

Had an odd dream this morning. Out of the blue, haven't been thinking about this topic, so it wasn't the result of anything I recently discussed, or read or saw in a movie of late. I was in a small group watching a research demonstration of a new type of AI that was developed for some security application. A robot , in the form of a toddler , was turned loose to search for something on a stage in front of us. I was impressed how quickly he was moving around obstacles and under a table searching and commented to a gal next to me that if that was a real toddler he would have already whacked his head on that table at least once. Then the toddler got a little confused and wandered off the stage and started interacting in some interesting ways with others and his "extended" environment. Ways that didn't appear to be the result of any programming that I could imagine. So I asked the researcher if he had noted signs of emergent behavior like this before in his experime...

Had a dream last night about something that has careened around my unconscious since childhood. I call it 'the loop'. Robert Heinlein, in Stranger in a Strange Land, describes an alien race that sees humans as long caterpillars; they see time in longer durations than the simple snapshots we perceive. A human being, from birth to death, with all the human's movements in space-time is seen simultaneously and appears strung out like a long worm. Nietzsche believed that consciousness, or awareness, travels down this line and, at death, starts back at the beginning, like on a DVD. Nothing changes, it is merely replayed in our experience. Read Only , after the first recording. Awareness looping forever down the same track. My loop dream is something like this. It tells me I wouldn't know if I had re-entered my life at an earlier, or a later time, and am playing a segment over and over. Each time going back to the situation I was in before as if it were now. The dream alludes...