Rax Oha Tal: The Reality Engineering Handbook

Granular Students in the Motherf*in Record Room

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 21:12:51 GMT

I was on some kind of hovering platform, looking down at people. There were fights breaking out among them, and as I went to the edge to look I came close to falling off. It tilted more and more, and we started heading for the ground. The people below were screaming.

me: (jokingly) "Hey, if we're going to crash... aim for Paris Hilton!"

Somehow that lightened everyone's mood and we sort of bounced and no one ended up being hurt. Getting off the platform and looking around I saw a large number of books. For some reason, I had a worry that they were spam books... generated by an automated process and not making any sense. But I picked a couple up and they seemed okay from the covers.

me: "Can anyone suggest to me an example of a great and groundbreaking book?"
woman: (picking up one close by) "This is very good."

The title of the book she had picked was something like Manifesting Intent in the Creative Process.

me: "What makes it good? What's the idea?"
woman: "I generally think the point is that you read it to find out."
me: "I don't have the time for that."

I flipped to the back cover and tried to skim the summary, it was an oddly shaped book... tall and narrow. While trying to make out the words, I was accosted by an elderly librarian woman.

librarian: (snarkily) "We generally prefer it if students do not use the record room if it is not for a specific purpose."
me: "Record room? Huh?"
librarian: "And we also restrict access to full students only, and rarely allow granular students in here."
me: "Student of what? Am I a student? What am I studying?"
librarian: (angry) "Are you a student AT ALL?"
me: "Look, don't get angry. Let's just say I have... uh. Well I guess it's a medical condition. Sometimes I know who I am and sometimes I don't, it's very confusing."
librarian: "Oh amnesia is it? Well, I'm not sympathetic, you want to see a *real* medical condition!?'

She sat down and started doing something odd unbuttoning her shirt and showing a gaping gross something or another going on in her abdominal area. I didn't see the details because I looked away.

me: "Okay, no, please. You misunderstand, I wasn't trying to get sympathy. This is research. I'm in an unknown place gathering information about how I got here, about what kind of place this is--what kind of records these are--and what kind of students you are talking about."
librarian: "Hmm. I wonder if you're onto something that Nash fellow was onto. Nice enough kid, always here in the record room on some kind of business."

I became a bit agitated about how long I'd have before I woke up. There was a guy who looked a bit like a zombie who walked in, but ignored me and started typing on a computer terminal. I suddenly noticed that there were a lot of younger people converging in on us who looked very intent and looked a bit like a cross between a military troop and a documentary film crew.

me: "Well, here comes the cavalry, maybe this is why I'm here."

I walked toward their approaching numbers, and sang a little song as a joke where I recited my name and how I was there in the "motherf*in" house. Somehow they all decided to repeat me, and stood at attention.

me: "Hey thanks. But you don't have to sing. I was just singing a little goofy song for the recording devices, try and defuse tension. Humor."

A black guy holding a small metal device that looked like some sort of all-stainless-steel swiss army knife stepped up to me, surveyed the scene, and shook his head and gestured it at me.

guy: "When you take this all back to the money thing...and I know you're going to do that one day...I'm coming after you."
me: "Hmmm... I guess that was the whole point of Star Wars? Anakin using talents for good and then later, when he's older and circumstances change, becomes Darth Vader?"

I woke up while finishing the thought.

The Embassy Paperwork Scam

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 01:35:14 GMT

I was going somewhere for a job interview. I'd gotten into a garage and parked, and I had a sense of puzzlement and felt lost. It was like I had wanted to get into the building but wasn't supposed to, and now my car was locked inside and I would have trouble getting out.

Walking towards the stairwell, I not to look suspicious. I opened a door for a woman carrying a box, and went up the stairs to the building's interior. Poking around a bit, I thought back to the instructions I had received. There had been a previous interview, which had gone well. Not entirely sure why I'd need any second interview after my first appointment.

I reflected on the address of this place in my head, it was something like 168th and La Jolla. As I remembered what I'd been told, my view changed to a wall of spinning cassette decks... and I was listening to a voice:

voice: "So that's how they're doing it. They say 'Okay very good interview, but take this paperwork down to 168th and La Jolla.' The candidate signs and does whatever, saying 'Oh, sure I'll take the paperwork, I really need this job.' The people at the building take the papers, no one gets in, and the reason no one gets in... it's an *embassy*!!! The people have no idea what the paperwork means, or the power of the messages they have given their names to."

I continued hearing a voice, though it may have been different.

voice: "Bastards, bastards bastards, WE STOP THEM NOW! What's the point of waiting instead of acting? This is a pathetic display of immuscle. In fact, if you do not take action, I'm going file a motion to have you and everyone else responsible executed."

(Note: immuscle was a strange word that stood out. I thought it would be interesting if it were a real word, because it's not one I'd heard. Doesn't seem to be.)

voice: "That is not your decision. Project managers should stick to project management. Though if you want to get hands-on and do something about it, I'll give you a transfer. You can sit in with the guys in the trenches for a while."

The voice turned away from its argument partner (which may have been itself, I almost got the feeling it was reflecting on both sides of a conversation) and seemed to acknowledge that I was able to listen in on the conversation:

voice: (to me) "I'm not using you. You're incredibly talented, but you also believe as I believe."
me: "That's nice, but wait. Who are you?"

I felt like I could make out an image of something. Almost botanical...like a flower, but alive and with moving bits on its face that were motioning as it talked.

me: "No, but I mean more... WHAT are you?"
voice: "I could write down a name. Funny you mention it, I'm actually getting one worked up. But it wouldn't be worth the effort to transmit."
me: "Let me try simpler questions. Would you consider yourself an 'alien being'? Do you now, or have you ever resided in my physical universe in a way that might visit our planet?"

There was a jolt of electricity on the face of the flower being. I heard what seemed like a yelp and I snapped out of the hypnagogic state.

Life in the Cuddly Zone

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 20:59:50 GMT

I was laying on a couch and was somehow communicating with someone who was looking for me in a dark room.

me: "Yeah, well if you want to know which one I am...I'm the one with the laser eyes!"

At that point I could see a youngish and somewhat fashionable black woman with short curly hair, standing next to a tall bar table. When our eyes connected there was some kind of flash or special effect, and I deemed this was the person I was looking for.

We did not speak, but she held up a spoon upside down—holding it by the bowl. The understood goal I felt was for me to make it bend. Without moving from the couch, I focused my will and bent the handle from afar; I wanted it to twist more but it just sorta folded over one way and then I managed to fold it over all the way the other direction.

She took the spoon and threw it up into the air, and seemed to try to catch it...but instead of catching it, she fumbled it, but in such a way that it came over closer to me. Then she approached and spun it on the ground where it momentarily seemed to spin on its own, but the effect was very brief. My own attempt to cause a perpetual motion with my mind was so taxing the room went all dark for a moment.

When I got up to navigate there was just a long hallway, as if it were the interior of an apartment. I came upon some people I knew who appeared to be playing board games at a large round table they'd put at the end of the hall, which seemed to be some kind of recreation area with couches. Everything was fairly stable, yet when I went back down the hall and came back the table had vanished, though a couple people were still on the couch.

me: "Do you guys see a table here that I can no longer see? Big and round?"
someone: "No, no table."
me: "And one didn't move? You weren't just sitting here moments ago, at a big table, playing games?"
someone: "Sorry, no."
me: "All right, I'm sort of afraid that you guys all have your wits about you and I'm wandering around like some kind of loony who can't see straight."
someone: "What you go through must be pretty scary."
me: "Yeah, well. I'm not very good at being scared by things anymore. Though I would like to see the performance of most people from my world in such situations, they'd flip out. Not at this maybe, just the other stuff I go through."

There was a pretty girl with long blond hair sitting on the floor next to the couch. I approached and sat down next to her.

me: "Hi there. Can you tell me anything about where we are?"
blonde: "This is the cuddly zone."
me: "Well that doesn't sound bad at all! Does that mean you're cuddly? That would be good, because you're unusually cute."

I tentatively started to stroke her hair.

blonde: (a little embarrassed) "Yes, I was going to say...that I liked your nose. I liked smelling it."
me: "Huh? Well, I'll just say it's a stressful to feel responsible for treating people in your dreams as if their wills should be respected, and aren't just figments of your imagination you can use as you wish."
blonde: "Oh. Yes."
me: "Well I don't mean we need to get naked or anything, at least not now, it's just nice to be able to do touch you while we talk. Also it's grounding. Ok, so, how did you get here?"
blonde: "You know how hard it was for me... growing up all my life, being teased!"
me: "Why were you teased?"

Her accent shifted rather suddenly into something that sounded South American, and she spoke about attending some very specific college whose name I can't remember. I asked a few more questions that didn't lead to any interesting responses.

blonde: "I can't take myself back that far, I might fall!"
me: "Fall from where? To where?"
blonde: "You know who to wake up and who to not wake up! Don't abuse your power."
me: "I'm sorry, I really don't know anything. That's why I ask all these questions, I'm trying to build a model."

She grabbed me and started to weep. I decided to move her onto the now empty couch and put a blanket over her, and leave. By this point in the conversation she had morphed into something that looked like a dog's head on a frail human body. Another small but ordinary-looking terrier jumped up on the couch to be with her, and an elderly but robust-seeming woman walked in the room.

elderly woman: (shaking head) "Sometimes I wonder if he gets in the way more than anything."

(Note: Though I took her to mean me, she could have also meant the dog that jumped on the couch. As she seemed to be some kind of authority, I wanted to go speak to her...but I was waking up.)

As I awoke I was reading some kind of classified ads. One talked about a guy who was ready to sell his 8,500 sq ft. hotel near the 405 "to the New Economy". He said that he thought one of the big advantages his hotel had was that he had a big enough parking lot that he could offer free parking.

Use and Abuse of Science in the New Thought Movement

Sat, 12 Jul 2008 06:30:30 GMT

(Note: This is a draft, and I'm not sure I said quite what I wanted to say, but it is late. I will revisit it another time.)

Frequently, science and technology will start demonstrating an amazing effect through the careful manufacture of new processes. That leads a certain type of person to capitalize on this, under questionable premises. We're all aware of the kind of quackery that banks on the credibility of scientific achievement, such as "magnetic Chi balancing rings":

Manfred Porkert was quoted in Wikipedia as saying:

...the term qi comes as close as possible to constituting a generic designation equivalent to our word "energy". When Chinese thinkers are unwilling or unable to fix the quality of an energetic phenomenon, the character qi inevitably flows from their brushes.

In this product, we see the unholy union of the undefined (or very loosely defined) with the narrowly-and-well-defined. Yet at some level, it is easy to see how some might view electro-magnetism as "verifying what the ancient cultures knew all along"...that power and energy flow through the universe in ways that the eye cannot see. Bolstering that argument is the sad fact that many materialists who would have dismissed the vague Chinese notions were equally slow to accept science's more empirically-testable field of electromagnetism, until it gained popular acceptance.

So it's not that the victims of these products are lacking in intuition. If anything, their intuition is strong—they know that it is possible for interactions invisible to the naked eye to affect our material situation. Without that belief, and the willingness to look for and model things we cannot see—could scientists have ever made the mental leap to even look for electromagnetism and radiation?

Clearly, for science to gain credibility with holistic thinkers (and be accurate) they must phrase their work as a refinement of certain ancient traditions. Otherwise they seem to have an attitude that seems to sound like Jack Handey's joke:

"We tend to scoff at the beliefs of the ancients. But we can't scoff at them personally, to their faces, and this is what annoys me."

The current situation is that when people are not happy with how well science extrapolates its findings in line with their intuition, they look elsewhere. Eventually they find someone who will sell them an interpretation that mutates a modest discovery into a cosmic notion of "what they always knew was true". A great example of a perplexingly weird movie that distorts a lot of buzzwords and scientific research to such speculative ends is What the Bleep Do We Know.

(Note: Despite the movie's rather grand distortion of Quantum Mechanics, some of it was done pretty well, including this basic explanation of particle wave/duality in a cartoon...

...yet doing a good job on such basics does not excuse the greater overstatements in the film.)

One thing that has come to my attention is that of the theory of The Holographic Universe. This suggests that each small part of the universe contains the information needed to recreate the whole. It's a pretty wild theory. But it's a new way of thinking, and some odd phenomena in science can indeed be explained by looking at them in a new way. I think the new way might be summarized somehow like this:

Imagine you are watching two people in a room. You know they are not communicating with each other—they have no cell phones or secret signaling method. Yet when one of them holds up their right hand, the other one INSTANTLY raises their left hand. In fact they seemed to make the decision at the exact same time—how could the second have known what the first was going to do?

The answer is not always obvious—but you probably weren't looking at two people in the first place. This strange instant communication can be explained as just one person and a mirror! Science has a lot of situations which might be re-imagined in an analogous way...to simplify what looked like a weird or complicated problem.

If you keep doing this over and over you can reduce a cosmos of things to study down into just one thing...e.g. The Holographic Universe. But I think of people getting too hyped about such things are getting ahead of themselves. It would be like someone who is so happy to have explained the person who instantly raises and lowers his hands, who gets confused thinking there's only a single thing to study—one person. But you really now have two things again—"people" and now "mirrors"!

It might be tempting to keep applying the method and investigate a way of saying there isn't really a person and a mirror but just a "personmirror". This single object can be explained as having properties that sometimes makes it look like a person, and sometimes look like a mirror. This would be analogous to finding an equation for the universe that could predict all past, present and future. I'm not going to say that isn't possible, but where's the chalkboard to write it down or the computer that's going to crunch the numbers?

(Note: This reminds me of the old Steven Wright joke: "I have a map of the United States...actual size. It says, 'Scale: 1 mile = 1 mile' I spent last summer folding it. I also have a full-size map of the world. I hardly ever unroll it.")

What does it mean to take a small finding and turn it into something too large? The classic tale of over-reaching from a single observation is the story of the Blind Men and The Elephant. Everyone knows that each blind man grabbing a different part of the elephant was making a valid observation but not ready to accept the complexity of the whole, which didn't fit into a neat shape.

Discoveries of science are our observations. But it will take even harder thinking to assemble the pieces to the next level—not a glib armchair assessment from a non-scientist. I'd prefer it if the average New Age writer stuck closer to first-hand testimony and stuck to their guns about what they perceived, rather than overblowing the relevance of scientific discoveries to support their philosophy.

Sufis Sweating Flatworms

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 15:58:50 GMT

I was sitting in the front right row of an auditorium, wearing a bathrobe. But somehow it kept slipping off, and this preoccupied me. A girl behind me was leaning over my shoulder onto my row, and I had the feeling that we knew each other well but had just picked different rows to sit in. Also, I sensed from an earlier context that I had sort of unwittingly gone to a meeting for Christians, just because there was a sign that said "meeting downstairs" and I thought "oh, ok" and went.

speaker: "I want to thank you all for coming, you made the right choice."
girl: (whispered, to me) "Well, at least we got to skip math class."
speaker: "We met our fundraising goal and we'll certainly be winning the $50. But we're not content to stop there. We'll do whatever we can, we'll sell cookies. Heck...we'll even write on the cookies 'the Christian Club sucks' if it will get more people to buy them!"

Still trying to manage the robe that was slipping off, I slouched in the seat so I touched the ground. While I was down there, a small yellowish dog came up to me. He/she was very interested in something that was in my hand, and started licking at it. I realized it was the tip of a pencil that the dog was interested in. A girl came and pulled him away.

dog girl: "Oh, we need to get more litter for the litterbox. But we don't know where to find any."

I decided to leave and find some proper clothes, or a bed in any case so I could lay down. Somehow I was outdoors on a very large and pretty-seeming farm, with lots of greenery...although I was walking on a path built from towering piles of small boxes that were collapsing underneath me as I went. The path seemed to lead to a small house which I entered. It was a single room, and inside was a girl with dark hair in a bed. She looked like someone I once dated briefly.

me: "Hi there! Long time no see!"
dark hair girl: (nervously) "You shouldn't touch me."
me: "Why not? What's wrong? Do you have a boyfriend now?"
dark hair girl: "No it's not that. It's because I have liquid coming off of me...and...uh, it has eyes."

I didn't feel any liquid, but I looked and saw a dark spot by the oven. She pointed me away from that, which apparently wasn't what she was talking about...and I saw a few large flatworm-type creatures zig-zagging across the floor. They were luminescent, and changing colors at a rapid pace.

me: "Oh. Sorry to hear about that. Well, I've seen worse. Oh...I just realized...that Christian guy from before, I knew him from my waking life. I should have said something, to prove to him what's going on! Not that he's ever doubted my dream accounts, he just sees it all as tying in with God."

Then there was a second bed with two people under covers I couldn't see at first...but two more girls with dark hair who looked different threw off the sheets and got up. After greeting them with hugs and sort of inspecting them to see who they were (no one I recognized), I began following them through a series of spacious hallways. The one girl who I was following now looked like a very small Middle-Eastern woman.

me: "Anyway... I need to know some information. Do you guys live here, on this farm or whatever it is?"
small woman: "No, I am not... not a full Sufi."
me: "A Sufi? You're not one? If you were one, would you live here all the time?"

Her speech became incredibly thick and in a foreign language, with only a few words coming out that I recognized. Since we were walking through some kind of large ballroom or banquet hall with many other people, I decided to try talking to someone else. A man dressed in priestly robes and holding a book was sitting alone and looking at me.

robe guy: "Oh *you're* here! How deserving of you!"
me: "Sorry...I don't know if that was sarcasm or...uh...do I know you?"
robe guy: (surprised) "You don't remember? I am Ed's friend Brian."
me: "Okay, now I remember when you came for dinner once, but didn't you have much darker skin?"
robe guy: "Yes, when I was younger my skin was dark, but this is what it has become. Here, you should have some food."

(Note: Though I had a vague sense I knew who he was from that information at the time, I don't know any "Ed's friend Brian"...so no clue what I was talking about.)

He indicated a glass plate which had fancy looking sliced citrus of some kind, the rinds had been removed and it looked very perfect. Not entirely intentionally I ate something that tasted like a piece of pepperoni and resumed questioning.

me: "Thank you but, I continue to want to know. Who are the people here, and do they live here regularly...or, what? Why is it that I blip in and out of existence, is that happening to everyone else here too? Does it happen to *anyone* else?"
robe guy: "This happens to people when others are dependent on them. We are connected and those connections pull on us."
me: "Wait, so something happens to call me back? All the time? But I wake up and don't notice any particular event that would have triggered it. It's more like I'm being pushed out of here than being pulled back."

He guided me toward an informational sign that was posted on a podium to our right. It had small diagrams of different types of food on it. The top had a disclaimer—something about how their powers were limited, although patents were pending to grant them more.

(Note: I got a slight sense that this may have been a joke. Kind of like someone saying "Until my patent for a time machine comes through, my status as ruler of the space-time continuum is only informally recognized by Bob, Susie, and myself.")

Trying to read more of the sign, I could only make out a part that said "Unfortunately, The Koreans are in a condition of no wheat sandwich." The two letter "U"s in "unfortunately" were white while the rest of the letters were black.

There was some sort of warning that was set off, and a red alarm light began to strobe. Either instinctually or due to some audible message, I got the sense that I was about to be attacked by something very big and scary, like a Tyrannosaurus Rex. I looked at the robe guy, who didn't really seem too concerned.

robe guy: (smiling weakly) "Good luck."
me: "Oh, well. Whatever comes I'll just stare it down."

(Note: Though appearances made it seem like the facility we were in was under a large-scale attack, I wasn't sure if his lack of concern was due to the attack only applying to me...or if he and others were just less vulnerable to what was about to happen...or if they'd all made peace with the destruction that was about to ensue.)

I waited and watched the wall where the warning light was coming from. The wall cracked and I was bracing for some huge beast to come out of it. But instead, an unusual boxy car which seemed to be covered in plastic wrap came barreling out, like it was fleeing from something. I thought it was fleeing from a Tyrannosaurus, and that I'd be having to deal with that soon...but I didn't because the car came careening in my direction and woke me up.

Bambos and Bambots

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 01:08:45 GMT

I was watching some kind of strange remake of the Iron Man movie, in which there was a gruesome car accident in a convertible on a typical city Highway. People were flung from cars and literally pulverized into paste, and somehow I was transitioned into an ER or operating room where things were shuffling around on a table...with eyeballs and other parts. Knowing I was dreaming, I decided I needed to buck up and be brave and look closely.

The table seemed more like claymation of worms and other odd shaped things. I saw a skull staring at me and rattling its jaw, but instead of being scared I put it on a pile of clay and tried to get it to animate the clay and dance around with me. Which went all right, but I went hunting for some normal people and found a couple of girls in a room.

me: (suavely) "Hello there ladies..."
girl one: "You're very attractive!"

The girl grabbed me and started kissing me, but this led us to start floating backwards until we landed in a room which seemed clean but institutional. We separated and suddenly I was speaking to a guy who was praising my abilities in dreams.

man: "I've run into people from my graduating class, and I've never seen anyone anywhere close to as good at this as me...not until you. But somehow you put all the memories together."
me: "I'm not quite sure why that is. I've had no training, myself. But I've started to wonder if there's some kind of symbiotic partnership between me and something that has had training, y'know, like Jonathan Livingston Seagull type stuff. Can't really tell...no evidence to back that up...it just feels that way."
man: (laughing) "I like this guy."

I turned around and started taking a little more stock of the room. There were two sets of doors toward a long hallway. A woman was leaning up against a phone and had kind of an amused look, and started to talk to me.

woman: "This is so weird. I had to pee...but when I went in the bathroom, and something came out of me as a brownie. And I didn't think I was going to be able to make it back in here, but then there was this grilled cheese sandwich...and when I took a bite of that I stabilized and seemed to take care of it." (laughs awkwardly) "Okay, weird again, but it actually was pretty good. So maybe it will help you."
me: "If it comes to that. But I can take it from the way you're talking about the nonsense going on in the bathroom that perhaps we're on the same page here, about things not making sense."

I started challenging the people in the room there if they were alive, and if they had bodies on Earth of any kind. One man appeared concerned about the woman.

concerned man: "No, she...she died, had cancer. She was my mom."

A brightly and officially dressed courier bolted into the room and handed me a thin cardboard envelope which contained medical records. It was sealed. I didn't know what to do with it, but someone in a doctor outfit took it from me and filtered through. Then handed a paper to her. We all looked over her shoulder as she struggled with it.

woman: "My name is...my name is...Bonnie. Bonnie West."
concerned man: (whispered, to me, about the doctor) "Ask her about the kids!"

(Note: I didn't know what he meant, I thought he meant to ask the doctor about *having* kids, which as I wasn't interested I didn't bother with. She answered anyway, as if she either heard the question or knew I was thinking about it.)

"doctor": "The kids are out of control here. Plain and simple as that. If one of them runs into you here or attacks, just give them a good knock, as hard as you can."
me: "Yes, yes. I need to learn how to fight, more generally speaking. I'm getting tougher but still lose a lot of fights in dreams."
"doctor": "You can't be fighting all the time. You'd never get any sleep. You might as well just do crossword puzzles instead of sleeping."
me: "Well, while we are on the subject, what's with the injections? Why am I so often being attacked with needles? I can take a few of them, but now it's like I'm being turned into a pincushion every time."
"doctor": "The blowdarts and needles—those would be the bambos."

Her saying this term drove one guy in the room into a frenzy of ranting.

ranting guy: "Argh, the Bambos and Bambots! Dammit, they're everywhere...you can tell if they're around by looking for the symbols. I can't stand them."

The God Criteria Collection

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 23:48:33 GMT

Coming on the heels of a dream in which a plush shark told me it thought of God as a "preservative" [1], someone asked what *my* notion of God was. It's not a word or concept I've given a lot of thought to...which might seem strange for me not to think about. After all, I sure seem preoccupied with trying to catch the attention of helpful/wise/guiding superintelligences—under most definitions, God would qualify!

Yet I think the reason I've avoided focusing on "God" is that I'm not very hung up on whether I meet the being that created The Universe. By the same token, had I been an orphan I don't think I would have spent much of my life searching for information about my parents. The odds of those particular adults being the only ones I needed to talk to would be unlikely.

This notion I have of "The Creator" not laying ultimate claim upon "The Created" features pretty heavily in my philosophy overall. If I were to write a song, I think it would be wrong to not allow others to sing or perform it if they wanted. Yet it would also be wrong for those people to pretend they had written it, if asked. Thus I'm more impressed by showings of ethics than showings of power—although I am all for using power when it can bring a serious change in making the world more fair.

(Note: I saw some of Gandhi The Movie last night, and it was interesting to see his perspective: "Where there's injustice, I always believed in fighting. The question is, do you fight to change things or do you fight to punish? I have found that we are all such sinners that we should leave punishment to God. And if we really want to change things... there are better ways of doing it than derailing trains or slashing someone with a sword.")

Despite my bias of "Existence of God: Not As Interesting a Question as You Might Think", I do have a meaning ascribed to the word. These are a few requirements I came up with off the cuff that would be qualify a being for the title "God" in my book (which, don't forget, is The Reality Engineering Handbook and not The Bible):

Must have a vision of right and wrong. Something can't be amoral and have me consider it God. It has to be aware of suffering and pain (and able to empathize with our model of it, even if ours isn't the only model out there He has to take into account). He must want to improve the situation wherever He is able. He must consider the creative liberation of all consciousness and spreading of awareness to be a worthy goal. Some people might be fine with a less value-driven notion of God, as a kind of cosmic life force that feels no sadness at suffering. Their God doesn't care when a plant dies of lack of rain, or when a cat eats a mouse, or the human dies from murder. But I'm on board with "dividing the light from the darkness", else it's not God...it's just Math. I might diverge in opinion of justice from God at the moment, but as time reaches infinity I should come to agree with Him when I see the bigger picture, as per this classic Sinfest comic:

Must be an active force. God wouldn't have to have created our Universe with the production of human species as a focus of His initial attention. In fact, He may even not know we're here yet. Omniscience is not a rule—since my God operates through The Law of Mechanism, he may take time to find us just as we might take time to locating subatomic particles after studying a collision. But He must have existed before humanity, must have been involved in whatever event sparked our current existence, and now that it's happened He must have the agenda of getting directly involved in the uplifting of species. Creating us and walking away wouldn't be enough to be God in my eyes:

Must not uniquely identify with humanity. My God must be ready to embrace animals, alien races, and AI (when it arises, if it has not already). He is not the "created mankind in his own image because He's an old white guy and thinks it's okay to eat cows" God. He'd step in with animatronic soy cows that taste like the real thing, because he thinks you can have your cow and eat it too—all with no suffering. (Sidenote: If it's what you really want to believe, God might let you believe the soy cow is real and suffering at your hands, but he'd be busy liberating animal rights activists and cow souls out of the soy-cow-murder theater he left behind.)

Must be self aware. God must know he exists and what He is doing, and He must have started His work completely alone. I don't think He has to know why, or where He came from. He merely needs to know where everything since him has come from and be able to explain it as a first-order or second-order by-product of His own doing.

My definition of God means He would have to be a real thing that interacts with other real things. Though it may seem to limit Him, practically speaking "being real" is not much of a constraint. After all, even with our tiny brains we can shape atoms and light...so for all practical purposes, a super-being could do quite a bit.

The best metaphor I can think of for how God can be real and yet reach up to us might be to say He is like an Operating System on a personal computer, while Earth and Ourselves are programs. An Operating System is a program too, just a special one that runs before the rest and that keeps all the programs in motion. For God OS to meet the rules above, He must be the primordial operating system that wrote us (or the things that wrote us). And unlike Windows, God would be a self-healing OS that is constantly reaching upward and refining things, with diligence and attention, subject only to the limits of The Law of Mechanism.

I'm okay with God having been created, but just have the rule that those creators have not ever (and will not ever) be able to interact with Him. It would be like He was set off in this Universe alone, to build and explore. Understanding God's haze on where He came from can be explained by something analogous to a bootstrap process—which if you've studied that in computers, can be fairly profound.

So now that the groundwork and definitions for AmIGodOrNot have been laid down, where do I stand on the likelihood of God's existence? I'm skeptical and increasingly on the side of the fence believing "the universe is a careening out of control with no one at the wheel". Thus it may be down to us, alone, to bring order to a universe with no active God. Dave Gahan's song for Kingdom says:

Can you feel me coming? Open the door, it's only me I have that desperate feeling And trouble is were I'm going to be I know you hear me knocking So open the door and set me free If there's a kingdom behind it all... Is there a God who loves us all? Do we believe in love at all? I'm still pretending I'm not a fool So in your infinite wisdom You show me how this life should be All your love and glory Doesn't mean that much to me

Like Dave, I'm puzzled by my life experiences, and a bit worn out. I'm to the point where I'm not quite sure how happy I'm going to be about all the love and glory which might come in the future, even if it did. Sometimes we can be so burnt out that when we get to the end goal with the supposed prize we were seeking, we don't really want it that much any more and we're just depressed...so, c'mon God. Let's see some action here, I am ready to believe.

The Law of Mechanism vs. The Law of Attraction

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 21:41:32 GMT

If you wander into the New Age and Spiritual sphere which , you will frequently find references to "The Law of Attraction". Wikipedia has analyzed it thusly:

The general consensus among New Thought thinkers is that the Law of Attraction takes the principle "Like Attracts Like" and applies it to conscious desire. That is, a person's thoughts (conscious and unconscious), emotions, and beliefs cause a change in the physical world that attracts positive or negative experiences that correspond to the aforementioned thoughts, with or without the person taking action to attain such experiences. This process has been described as "harmonious vibrations of the law of attraction", or "you get what you think about; your thoughts determine your experience".

Books and films like The Secret put forth this argument. They are widely criticized for their lack of credibility, and I agree: don't believe a yet-to-be-understood scientific law is responsible for any success their methods offer. Successful results from small-scale visualization exercises may seem like magic when people haven't understood how powerful that and a small amount of planning can be, but even common sense tells us that luck favors the prepared mind.

I've seen the "Like Attracts Like" law invoked in other contexts. This included the idea that on a spiritual course we are being constantly pulled closer toward our soulmates, or toward the experiences that we have dreamed for ourselves. Channelers say that if you are in telepathic communication with some being, it is because the two of you share something very similar and can resonate with each other. (This is much like if you pluck a guitar string very loudly and have another guitar in the room, that same string on the second guitar will start to vibrate.)

But if The Law of Attraction is THE prime directive of the cosmos, then it's a tough policy to live under in my case. It seems the other residents of my planet have very little in common with the way I think, so how did I get here with them! And I sure hope the spirit realm isn't a like-attracts-like situation in dreams, because there's frequently unpleasantness that gravitates my way. :(

(Note: I'm usually pretty nice in waking life—I even catch spiders in cups and put them outside instead of squishing them. If I were meeting beings "like me" in my dreams, they would not attack!!)

So what I've devoted my study to is The Law of Mechanism. That is to say: every system has rules, and if you don't understand them you can't really control what happens to you. The Law of Attraction is *sometimes* compatible with the Law of Mechanism—for instance masses coming together in space by gravity. But there are tons of exceptions—identical charged particles do not attract, they repel and need another model.

If you find a case where Law of Attraction is holding better than Law of Mechanism, it just means you were probably focusing on a smaller part of the mechanistic system than you should have. You must expand your theory of the system's working to account for whatever was making the Law of Attraction work in the places that it does. After doing this work, you have a model that can explain both the cases where like-attracted-like and the cases where it didn't.

For instance, Google is clearly a place where like attracts like. It was built that way! But you need more operating principles to understand it than that—it is a system, and they ban pages sometimes. Two banned pages may have a lot in common but find no attraction in the Google sphere. If your internet connection goes down, you will need careful application of The Law of Mechanism to get it working again!

Evolution: Embrace your chance

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 15:17:59 GMT

A music video was playing by recording artist Poe on the iTunes of my computer. I expressed surprise about it to a girl who was in my room.

me: "I don't understand how this is playing in iTunes, because I don't have the video and have never seen it before...I only have the song. Was the video somehow encoded onto the CD?"

(Note: The video was black and white, and had left in a lot of visual elements that would generally be only for editing and recording—viewfinder, timecode, etc. There were white numbers flickering all over the page, and the video was choppy. It reminded me closely of a bizarre video released on iTunes recently by Radiohead for "High and Dry":

It's strange to see a "new" video release in 2008 for a song released in 1995, so that alone caught my attention in terms of questionable chronology. But the oddity of the video—and the oddity of the 1995 video—give me pause as well.)

The girl pointed angrily at various web browser windows I had open, with the jealous insinuation that I'd been having an affair with someone.

girl: "Who have you been talking to?"
me: (angrily) "No one. And if I was, it's not any of your business anyway. Want to see what this all is, I'll show you!"

I went through the web browser windows one by one. They were mundane things--a page of people trying to do a remake of the video game Adventure Construction Set, and a couple of heavily animated Flash games. After the windows were closed, I noticed I had an instant message from the user name "encephalon". When I tried to open it, the OS/X dock came off in my hands and I was holding it.

me: "Okay, now I very clearly am dreaming."

I did my best to manipulate the dock in my hand...pressing the icons wouldn't launch any applications. All the windows were too tiny to read, and I had to make gestures indicating what I wanted to have happen. I pinched my fingers like on an iPhone and that managed to get the point across, and eventually I zoomed in on the inbox for e-mail from encephalon (not a chat message). It said something about hoping a company was smart enough to install some kind of cybersecurity product.

Filtering through a few other messages I tried to read them, they were about technical developments in what sounded like a new transistor technology. The screen made my eyes hurt and then I was walking with the girl from the previous argument.

me: "The signs are everywhere, and you're just not paying attention. Instead your mind is in a petty place. You should have given me a bit of credit when the toolbar on the screen fell off in my hands--this stuff needs to be studied!"
girl: "Yeah, well, not everyone's life gets to be an epic. Some of us are just a module."
me: "What? You aren't making sense."

We ended up walking into a house. There was a black man seated inside the door.

black man: "Yeah, she's too quiet."
me: "Oh... I wouldn't say she's quiet. Just not curious enough."

I thought she and I were returning to my bedroom where we had been previously, but when we entered the room there were other people there. I started roaming and saw that the house was filled with people. Some of them resembled celebrities (including Chris Elliot) and others just resembled people I knew.

I encountered a man with a cane standing next to another man wearing a homemade sticker that said "Evolution: embrace your chance"

me: "Ah yes, evolution. Well that's good too, but I thought it said 'revolution'."
sticker guy: "What?"
me: "You know, revolution. Like... a war for a cause."

The sticker guy had some awkward misunderstanding of it and feigned like I'd insulted him, and the cane guy held it up mockingly as if he were going to attack. But they were joking and gave me another chance to explain.

me: "Try thinking of related terms...civil war, for instance."
cane guy: "Yes yes, like the REVOLUTIONARY WAR. You remember. From school?"
sticker guy: "No, hm, no."
me: "Wait, how well are you people here functioning? I mean, do you have solid memories of who you are or were, and what you're doing here? Is this some kind of recovery room, or purgatory, or what?"

A man who seemed to be an authority figure walked by and pointed out to me some art a person was doing. He was working on a bunch of drawings and animations of abstract fish. The stylized art was moving in a frame with no obvious screen.

man: "That fellow used to have some raw artistic talent. But here he has a chance to really refine it. We teach him to start small, with something simple in black and white, and then he goes through iterations until it makes something very impressive. Take this."

He handed me a white piece of paper with the sketch of a landscape on it, it looked a bit like a mimeograph. As the man walked away I followed him.

me: "I love the idea of your exercise. Refinement is essential. "
man: "Absolutely! I'm glad you understand it's important."
me: "And it's very exciting for me to think that, uh, the afterlife or whatever is a place where we further develop what we have previously learned. I've studied graphic design, though usually I use computers to do it."
man: "I'm a graphic designer myself."
me: "Great. Ok, so I'm sure we'd have a lot to talk about on that, but I have some other questions to ask right now. Can we talk?"
man: "Sure, we can talk anytime."

me: "I need you to help by verifying the place I live most of the time. I don't even know where here is, but it's clear you have a reality of some kind. Here's my address."

I started writing my address down on a piece of paper. It became a little bit of a patchwork, it seemed I was working together with a girl who was marking it up with me like a symbolic game. We'd do things like turn 1s into capital i's in order to indicate Roman Numerals.

man: (amused) "There are a lot of people who have imaginary lives in their head."
me: "Well if you're saying the life I have tied to that address is potentially a dissociative reality that exists only in my own head, it's one heck of a doozy. I can't believe it's not threaded in with other universes in any way."

The girl on the floor couldn't find my street, but suggested she'd found a similar location listed as a place where Virginia Woolf had lived. I tried giving a landmark of a local cafe, but at this point I felt an attack. I sort of had to peer around to see where it was coming from. It was a small black child in a green shirt.

me: "Okay kid in green shirt, attacking me. You guys see this? Help!"
crowd: "Yes."
me: "Are you going to do anything to stop him?"
crowd: "We're trying!"

I attacked back as hard as I could, and noticed the people in a big swarm around me. A second small black child--this one in a red shirt, came at me with the same attack.

me: "TWO attacks now. Red shirt this time. Green STILL attacking me."

Kiosks at Cat Claw Construction

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 18:37:01 GMT

I was on a bed with a girl who seemed my age and we were flipping through papers.

girl: "I think I'm 51. How old do you think you are?"
me: "There's a biological component of me that's 33. You can trace it back to a hospital and a birth certificate and a stream of physical evidence which has led up to the current time. But I think I am guided and informed by some forces that are way older than that."
girl: "What you've done so far is phenomenal. Way too much for 33."
me: "Thanks but...wait a minute, who are you? What are we talking about?"

My attention turned to the papers. They looked a little like test booklets—printed blue ink on white paper with writing on them in pencil. These were character sheets for something called "The Reality Game" (or similar).

Many books were blank. But I found one with my name on the front, which I opened and started to read. The sections mostly contained a series of tick marks counting things—number of positive points scored, number of negative points scored. There wasn't much textual writing, but one of the areas in the booklet was for "performance in the Sprite Painting scene", which had a little essay scrawled in the space.

(Note: I had moments prior been in a dream in which a Sprite logo was painted.)

Under a section it listed "Player Skills For Commerce" and said "Growing and selling Tomatoes". I am not sure why, but this caused me a very intense anger.

(Note: Obviously growing tomatoes has no relevance to my life. But I felt that somehow, someone else had been exploited and what had been the attribute that was to sustain them had been deprived...it would be like if you were playing World of Warcraft and there was an exploit which stole your gold every time you killed a monster. I had this vague sense that the tomato skill had been stolen from a character. The evidence doesn't support that conclusion, I'm merely suggesting what I thought I knew at the time.)

Reaching the end of the book full of hash marks, I dug in the box for more paper. There was a flier that had been more professionally printed, so I went for that. It had a page full of businesses which in this "Reality Game" had kiosks where players could go to check status, ask for help, etc.

me: "Okay, this is what I'm looking for. I'm going to have to remember some of these."

The girl offered me a phone.

girl: "Why don't you just call them? There are numbers."
me: "Because it's not important to establish their relevance here. Here I have the flier--it doesn't do me any good when I wake up. I'll try and memorize the names of the ones I'm most likely to remember."

The paper was very visually stable, though my memory was really weak. I just kept cycling around the page, focusing on the names of the businesses that were the least outlandish and did not change as I looked away and looked back. They were "Cat Claw Construction", "Wormfarm", and something approximating "Museum Find" or "Museum Hunt".

(Note: Other businesses were proper names combined with Shoe stores or fashion, and as they were unusual names I felt little chance of remembering them.)

Though I'd had a long time without being attacked, my attention was drawn to an open door in the room, which a guy ran into. He seemed to flit between being a prototypical gamer with a ponytail, to a small wiry guy with white hair and glasses—like a biology teacher or a stage magician. Obviously hostile, he came in and started throwing glassware at me—there seemed to be a rack of it in the room for this purpose.

me: "A ha, you again! Well, I already know about this bit. And I already know about the next bit. The only thing is, you have no idea how outgunned you are here. This is a serious audit, with severe consequences."
him: "Yeah well the last time you were here, she helped smash your skull with these glasses."

(Note: He was indicating the girl on the bed who I'd been talking to, who seemed to find our confrontation more amusing than a source for concern.)

me: "You think I don't have memory, and that you're safe. But there are records of this—oh believe me, there are. Ever see the movie 'Memento'? It's all about recognizing your own handwriting, which 'I' can."

(Note: I of course was referring to the idea that he felt he was killing this tomato-growing character who can walk down the street to Cat Claw Construction, but that I who shop at Whole Foods am watching. Whether Mr. Glassthrow knows about this journal and my life or not...I still think the somewhat random method by which this information is exchanged points at the idea that you might be watched. From A Scanner Darkly:

I'm supposed to act like they aren't here. Assuming there's a "they" at all. It may just be my imagination. Whatever it is that's watching, it's not human, unlike little dark eyed Donna. It doesn't ever blink. What does a scanner see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does it see into me, into us? Clearly or darkly? I hope it sees clearly, because I can't any longer see into myself. I see only murk. I hope for everyone's sake the scanners do better. Because if the scanner sees only darkly, the way I do, then I'm cursed and cursed again. I'll only wind up dead this way, knowing very little, and getting that little fragment wrong too.

...which is very much how I feel.)

Lava Won't Cure Your Stink

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 17:27:12 GMT

I was with a girl on a bed, watching some movie that was about a guy named Madu. He was an inspirational guy who was trying to help a little league team. The coach of the team was the father of one of the players, and looked a lot like Drew Carey. It had grotesque special effects on their faces, for instance a black man whose nose had been removed and given a chin that looked like a butt.

It seemed to be a musical, and thematic in the film were scenes of these overweight people stripping and showering. During the songs they'd do more grotesque facial manipulations, and sing about how much you (the viewer?) stink such that even if you put your feet in lava they'd still smell.

me: "Wow. They sure sing a lot about lava not being able to cure the problem of smelling bad. Methinks they exaggerate."

We got up and were doing some interior decorating, and other people came in to offer suggestions.

guy: "Why don't you paint that Sprite can?"
girl: "Okay..."

The girl placed a giant canvas on the wall and began painting, quickly and accurately. It was not a sprite can but just the logo.

(Note: I have personally never liked the "lymon" but now that I look closer it's not that terrible:

...part lemon, part lime, part letter "S". Still wouldn't want it on a giant canvas on the wall of my room.)

me: "It's amazing you can do that and have it look so precise without doing a pencil sketch first."
guy: "Yeah, wow."

Internally, I chastised myself for not checking the color coordination beforehand. But I looked around the room and noticed the walls were already yellow, green, and white.

(Note: I wondered if the guy who suggested drawing the Sprite can had already taken stock of that. Or perhaps the can was being used as a color reference in the first place to pick the colors of paint.)

When I turned back to look at the painting, it had little wavy black marks on it.

me: "Oh no, the paint got messed up."
girl: "That's intentional, step back and look."

I stepped back and looked, and saw she had somehow kept it as the sprite logo (sort of) but was doing an impressionistic layer so that it was a meadow and a mountain. I watched as the painting began to evolve and wander rapidly through several pieces—flooding me with transitions and images of cartoonish faces of women with wild hair.

(Note: It was really good art, actually. I'd enjoy seeing it in a gallery. It no longer had elements of the original Sprite logo, but was on the same wall on the same size canvas.)

me: "Am I to believe that I jumped forward past the passage of time, like fast-forward on a VCR?"
guy: "Yes. You skipped ahead in time."
me: "Okay, this is what I'm talking about. That's not possible and why do I keep ending up in situations where this happens but no one can explain it?"

Another short bald guy, who had light brown skin, came forward and threatened me. Not with any weapons, but he pushed me to the ground.

bald guy: "I'm gonna beat you up."
me: "Why would you WANT to do that? Don't you want to talk to me? Why can't you like me? You could *love* me!"

I grabbed him and started kissing him, and then tried to use dream-telekinesis to morph him into an attractive girl. The combat vanished and turned into the sensation of making out with no visual feedback. Seemed to go well until I felt a very hairy underarm, and decided to give up on the effort and awaken.

(Note: This is not something I usually try, as I believe it negates any reality the dream signal might contain and turns it into little more than one's own imagination and memory. I gave it a shot because this was a rare situation of being able to face off against a hostile force in a seemingly stable scenario.)

Kinda Like Helen Keller

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 22:28:09 GMT

I was watching (or perhaps participating in) a session where a woman who had disabilities was being questioned in front of an audience. She was connected to machines and a man was asking her questions, which were being interpreted and then answered back by a young girl. Someone was massaging the body of the woman being questioned.

(Note: At first I assumed the massage was some kind of signal or communication, but it was later established not to be.)

man: "If you have no way of seeing, hearing or telling the difference between people...then everything that comes at you is symbolic. Do you have any way of sensing others? I'm going to start doing something to you now, can you tell?"

The man went up and began pinching her at random places, while the massage continued.

(Note: Somehow, I 'felt' the pinches as they happened. However, I was watching the scene, and did not feel I was answering these questions...I really attributed them to the woman in the chair.)

The answer was relayed back through a young girl.

girl: "She says yes, she feels two presences. One that has been massaging her the whole time to reduce the pain. Another feels like her uncle who was once trying to encourage her to play with a Commodore 64 computer."

(Note: My uncle had a Commodore 64. But again, I really didn't feel I was answering—if anything, I identified with the questioner. Perhaps I was a piece in the interpretation process they were mentioning?)

man: (to audience) "I'm sorry about some of the limitations of the kinds and numbers of questions we can be taking today. Though our interpreters are very fast and good at getting information to the subject, the young girl who is carrying one piece of the process across hasn't quite gotten the knack of doing it as fast as we'd like."

(Note: He was more specific about the thing the young girl had trouble doing, I just didn't understand.)

A couple of miscellaneous notes

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 22:21:33 GMT

I'm writing down several dream accounts today because I'm back from vacation, and able to sleep in all day. Which is nice after a week of not getting enough sleep. Too lazy to write them all down, if they seem like more of the same...no interesting names, no good information. But things that caught my interest I will write down.

I'd like to welcome anyone from lucid_dreaming now monitoring this journal, but warn you that I do not worry about 'flooding'. This journal is here for my documentation purposes, and I will post in it as often as necessary to do that. I used to try and keep the rates down for readers and use sections like lj-cut, but I now am pretty specific about one-dream-per-entry. I'll try and keep them as readable as possible.

Role Playing on Mars

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 17:28:29 GMT

I was using some kind of password cracking tool. My account's name was something like halo3, and when I typed in the account name there was a two phase process, the first gave me a CAPTCHA-like graphic that had the wavery text "dead"...reading it, I typed in the account name and the password again.

The machines I was using seemed very old, and I was located on top of some kind of building. An alarm of some kind started going off, and a security guard of some kind came over to me.

me: "Oh sorry, this machine just does that. I'm totally authorized to use this equipment."
guard: "I need to call someone to check this out."
me: (innocently) "It would be much easier for me to find a way to turn off the sound if you'd help me get down from here."

The guard helped me down, and I pulled the machine I'd been using plus some additional laptops into a formation on the ground. I was using one aging and static-y laptop to browse for terms that I'd found inside the virtual game, called something like "e-Berg". I escaped into the operating system and saw it was running a variant of Ubuntu unix underneath. A man who identified himself as "Max" came over and started looking at one of the consoles to see what was going on.

"Max": "Who are you? How did you get in here?"
me: "Oh, I think you know why I'm here."

I produced a piece of fabric that is sort of my calling card, and "Max" got angry and started to attack me.

me: "Hey, hold up. I was just looking. I know how it is, not everything that's a secret is a secret for bad reasons. But lies can compound on each other, and anyone starts lying to protect their little role playing club, then people can get hurt on the outside. Even if everyone on the inside agreed to be there."
"Max": "I'm sorry about attacking you just now, I'm very...basic. If I'm angry, it just comes out, words aren't always easy...it's how my emotions manifest. But I'm insulted. You should have known everything was on the level here, didn't you recognize my passwords?"
me: "No, sorry. I'm really having to go deep here, nearly full memory loss. Something really bad is going on, this is the only way to find it. The perpetrators aren't gamers, they have no sense of fun."
"Max": "Well, let's get you out of here then. For once, won't it be nice to have some security guards protecting you, instead of getting your ass kicked?"

(Note: I'm embellishing the conversation a bit as it was communicated abstractly, but this was the gist. Obviously I have no idea why I'm saying what I'm saying, though it is consistent with some theories. Whether I'm just babbling in character from the preconceived theories or actually am the character in the theories is unknown.)

A group of people joined us and we started piling into cars. There was a girl who started talking to me.

girl: "So there's a rumor going around on the forums that you've got a crush on one of your fellow alumni. She says you pinch her on the butt every time you see her."
me: "I don't know who spreads these rumors, and I don't know who you're talking about. Moreover...please people—let's stop having important conversations in secret—that is the whole reason I'm here."
girl: "Well I'm glad you're getting to see Mars, it's a beautiful day."

The outside did not look red and rocky, it looked like ordinary green grass and plants. I felt I was at some kind of family fun-fair. My gums were somehow swelling up with a brown goo, which I would pull out and throw on the ground.

me: (showing the girl) "All right, what is with all this gunk in my mouth?"
girl: "Yes, that's a common reaction. There's a spray you can use, though really it's better if you spray on a Q-tip and apply it. There's some at Mom 'n' Pop's, I made a selection for you."

One nearby building started to glow, and I went to it. Inside were lots of small children, and I got the feeling it was like a first-aid tent. As I headed for the Q-tips I sort of tripped forward and fell into a little cluster of children, not too hard but injuring one of them. An adult woman came over to help.

woman: "Oh, did you trip?"
me: "Yes, sorry."

She helped the kids and I wasn't able to get up, so I awoke.

The Easiest to Remember Name

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 12:45:52 GMT

I was walking into my apartment building, and noticed some mail sitting on the steps. One thing was a small delivery sealed in white plastic, and I understood it to be some kind of connector that I needed to give my roommate. Walking in the door with the connector, I was accosted by a girl I did not know.

girl: "I'm going to need things to be quiet for a while. I'm taking a nap."
me: "I'm sorry, but...*who* are you?"

(Note: I know the people who live in my building in waking life, thus I would be likely to ask such a question if someone unknown approached me asking for quiet.)

girl: (angrily) "I'm the girl who takes naps on Mondays, and I need it quiet. I live next door."
me: "Sorry, but I don't believe we've met."
girl: "Yes we have!"
me: "Oh. Right. You're Angela."
girl: "It took you eleven seconds to remember!"

(Note: No idea why I thought her name with Angela, it didn't come from any waking life recognition of her looking like someone I knew.)

me: "I'm sorry, but if we've met before, it must have been to only exchange names...because I don't remember ever spending any time talking to you."
girl: "Well, they did a study of what the easiest to remember name was. And do you know what topped the list?"
me: "No. Maybe...Scott?"

(Note: Also no idea why I said that.)

girl: "It was *Angela*. Well, no, not really. The study was inconclusive, but my name was one of the easier ones to remember."

There was someone I vaguely recognized present, who seemed to have injuries like black eyes.

me: (to black eye guy) "Did someone attack you?"
black eye guy: "Yes, just a little bit ago, on the corner. He was just beating me."

We began riding to a store somehow while I asked him further about the attack.

me: "Were they just attacking you for fun, or were you mugged?"
black eye guy: "Oh, he took my wallet. Yeah. If he'd just stopped a minute and asked I'd have just given it to him."
me: "He probably thought it was a better way to not get caught. But don't worry, there's a bigger mission going on. Maybe he won't get caught here, but at a higher level."
black eye guy: "I doubt it. This sucks, what's the point."

As we got out and walked toward a grocery store, I noticed a man with lots of strange creatures. Though the grocery store seemed fairly normal, the color and music coming from inside his store seemed other-worldly. He made a small purple elephant-like creature run around—I held my hand out to it, and it sniffed me.

me: (to black eye guy) "See, this is the part where you're supposed to clue in and go 'oh, hey, this isn't POSSIBLE...I must be DREAMING...maybe I'm being shown something."
black eye guy: "Hmmm. Uh..."
me: (to vendor) "Where do you get these animals from?"
vendor: "There's only one place to get them, and that's from me. I make them."

There was a detour in the dream at this point that wasn't terribly interesting, as I started walking around through stores and cafes. They seemed rather nice, but at one point I tried to use a bathroom. Somehow as I reached out to close the door, water splashed everywhere out of a trash can. This distracted me and I got up to find paper towels, but a woman came and closed the door to that bathroom and opened another one, which looked rather messy...and it had an open wall, so people could look in as you used the toilet.

woman: "Every time I leave that other bathroom open, someone messes it up."
me: "There was a trash can full of water. Didn't mean to knock it over, but it was just water. Anyway, I'm not using this one if people are watching."

She walked away, and I decided to go find the more magical store again before I woke up. I had some help getting through the crowded mall-like area, but when I thought I was reaching the colorful store I instead landed at a several-story building full of books with glass walls.

Seeing a gray-haired old man who looked like Dustin Hoffman inside, I beat on the glass to get his attention. I think the store was called "Allo Massi". Our dialogue was somewhat disjointed.

"Dustin": "There is a lesson in everything. For some beings, they have never had the experience of walking in a room and being noticed, they have never stood out in a crowd. If you are black and you are the only black person in a room of one hundred white people, it is fundamentally different."
me: "Sure. Great. But can we arrange a meeting? I'd actually like to learn something substantial for once."
"Dustin": "Education is God's ultimate work."
me: "I couldn't agree more. So will you help me with some means of staying longer, where I won't wake up and I can experiment with this place better, and you can explain its relation to my world?"
"Dustin": "That doesn't sound like education. That just sounds like 'hanging out'."
me: (furious) "Look, do I have to sit down and write out a sample script to show you examples of conversations or studies that DO produce value?"

He looked at me somewhat fearfully.

me: (still angry) "If you think the only way to educate people is to put them through some kind of random wheel-of-karmic-suffering so they experience every unpleasant thing possible, you're wrong. Maybe you'd learn something by talking to me, because I can get the gist of many different things just based on first principles, and solve problems before they happen."
"Dustin": "You need to work on your own problems."
me: "Give me a break. You're not the only one who gets to decide what's a problem and what isn't. Maybe I know more about God's real way of education than you do, and I'm here as a messenger to tell you your problem. Which is you're so selfish about your time that all you'll do is give out random platitudes and don't actually caring about helping disoriented people who are seeking information about the things they see and why they see them."

At this point I noticed some other people had gathered around. One of them made a mock gesture of grabbing "Dustin"'s neck as if he were snapping it, though he seemed fine. I glared at him.

(Note: I had an interpretation that perhaps the person doing the neck-snapping was under the impression that I was too disoriented to tell the difference between a mock attack and a real one, and was trying to antagonize me and/or free "Dustin" from having to talk to me anymore.)

me: "Since I'm still here, I'll try some very specific questions. What is a hull?"
someone: "Oh yes, I got trapped in one of those once."
me: "I don't mean like 'the hull of a boat' or the 'hull of a nut'. I'm asking about something specific, which would apply to 'bathroom layer normal' and 'bathroom layer depraved'. Moments ago I was dealing with some crazy bathroom stuff, so I'm investigating these specific terms."

As soon as I said "Bathroom layer depraved", a sharp attack started from behind at around my waist. But a guy in a suit started making an attempt to answer, so I tried to hold out.

suit guy: "Oh yes... bathroom layer depraved, isn't that... a desert device, between two computers...?"

The guy made an unusual rolling motion with his fingers as I woke up.

Maisse's Anthropormorphic Mushrooms

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 16:20:41 GMT

Stepping out of a house into a deck area, I saw a man seated in a chair. He was reading a paper and having some coffee. He reminded me of Mario, the video game character.

me: "It's-a-you, Mario!"
man: (getting up) "Hey there."
me: "I'm sorry if it's strange that I'm picking you out to talk to. Do you think it's strange?"
him: "Oh, I don't know. I don't think I'm any less noteworthy than Mario, or a mushroom."

At this point I noticed that there was a giant plastic statue of Mario on the deck, and also a little smiling picture of an anthropomorphic mushroom.

(Note: The mushroom looked a bit like this:

...though since the man I ended up speaking to didn't seem to look like Mario at all at this point, these objects may have appeared because of my initial impression.)

me: "Do you have a name?"
him: "Well, I don't go so much for names. But how about 'mace'?"
me: "Ok, mace it is."
him: "Well, see, I'd spell it M-A-I-S-S-E."
me: "I can remember that."

(Note: Maisse is a town in France and a relatively common last name, but not so common as a first name.)

me: "This place reminds me of my grandmother's house. Are you somehow related to me or anyone in my family?
"Maisse": "Yes, actually."
me: "Um, okay so how do you fit into...the hierarchy? Or not hierarchy, but just what is your relationship to me and my world?"

A small kind of dirty child came barreling into us. I stepped away, fearing an attack. But he just looked at me with big eyes and a dumb look. He kind of smelled bad.

"Maisse": "Oh nothing to be afraid of, [name] will take care of him. Hmm. But he is kind of a mess."
me: "All right back on the topic, I mean, to give an example...are you a person who is...dead?"
"Maisse": "No, no. But I was trying for that this cycle, wanted to see what it was like. I didn't get picked."
me: "How can you be picked to be...dead?"
"Maisse": "Well, it's just a thing you can do, it takes about 50 years. Unless you do the roller-coaster and then it's over in two."

(Note: I don't know if he meant a literal roller-coaster, or if he was suggesting that there was some sort of process for expediting one's process by rushing it some other more metaphorical way.)

me: "So...okay, in this position of dead or not dead and descriptive terminology for what people are, what am *I*? And why is it that I'm here mapping out territories of the cosmos that no one from my world seems to know about?"
"Maisse": "You're a programming person."
me: "That's something I do, but...I mean, am I somehow different biologically from people with other skills or jobs? Like...someone who repairs telephones, they'd be technical maybe but would they not be a 'programming person'?"
him: "Right."

Another guy was in the room sitting in a chair, who disagreed with this position. And I woke up.

Blowdarts at the Pool

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 20:08:30 GMT

I was walking into a restaurant with a date, and we were waiting for a seat. My date called after the greeter...

my date: "Hey, lady! What time did you say we'd get a seat?"

This was embarrassing for me, and even more so when she drunkenly leaned her arm over the greeter as they talked.

me: "Since when do we call people 'lady' and put our arms around people without their permission?"
greeter: (laughing and putting her arm on me) "Oh, I'll let it go this time."

This brought my attention to notice all the people milling about. One was a black woman who stepped forward with a large glass jar of what looked like very small round dark spheres. She pulled one out and offered it to me.

me: "Thanks, but...what is it?"
woman: "These are berries."

By the time she had handed it to me, it had inflated to something the size of my hand. It seemed like a fleshy fruit with raisins in it instead of seeds. Not sure if this was poison or not I looked at it warily, but decided I didn't really care since I'd wake up eventually anyway. It didn't taste particularly good, so as I took bites I mentally tried to make it taste more like plums that I remember eating from childhood.

Walking out onto a balcony, I saw a pool below. The world began to morph into cartoon art, and I decided to take a high dive off the balcony into the pool. I splashed into the cool water, and tried to surface, but could not. Holding back the panic, I just willed myself out of the water.

me: (sing-song voice) "Oh...it's the awesome power of a god...how did this happen...how does it work...I don't know, and I don't know what's going to happen next..."

Looking at a row of houses in the distance, I made a flattening gesture with my hands. There were screams as they all were demolished. The houses sprang back up moments later, like a pop-up book. A man and a woman standing next to me looked at the houses, and then looked at me.

woman: "It's surprising they haven't started vercating us yet."
me: "Vercating? What is vercating?"
woman: "No, I said grenading. Usually they'd be trying to blow us to bits by now."
me: "Well why don't we blow THEM to bits."
woman: (smiling) "Don't you worry, that's coming along fine. We've gotten three of their top people. And if they execute on the information we planted about China...they're as good as gone."
man: "There's a guy at the door. Oh, this is going to be interesting."

We began walking along the pool toward a door.

me: "With all this talk about 'us' and 'them' it seems you think we're in a group together. What would you call this group?"
woman: (a little surprised) "You don't know? Well...what have you been told?"
me: "I've heard some things, but I don't want to bias your answer. I'd rather hear what you'd say."

The woman's attention was drawn toward the door. She began a fiery-sounding sermon that I couldn't quite understand, about "this...the eleventh month of the year of the moon" (or something). I was distracted because I was being attacked by a skinny guy with glasses, who had a syringe.

The man I had been walking with leaped to my defense and tried to stop him before I was hit...but it didn't do much good. I could pull the syringe out. But every time I did, the guy with glasses kept throwing them at me, like they were blowdarts. Though they were painful, I was able to stand and continue talking.

me: "Wow, these needles again. You guys sure rely heavily on whatever chemical you're injecting me with. And as evidenced by the fact that I keep showing up, they're not really working are they? In fact, I think I'm building up quite the tolerance. I'll go back to the lab and study myself in more detail to see if I can't make some kind of immunization shot."

In the time between pulling the darts out of my body, I gestured with my finger to try and crush his head. He did seem to duck and express some kind of pain response, but the attacks kept coming. He didn't speak at all, and I decided a little more taunting would be more effective until I woke up.

me: "Now that I get a close look, you sure are ugly. I bet that's why you're doing this, you're jealous! Well, we shall see, won't we?"

Dimitri and the Amazons

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 19:39:51 GMT

It was raining, and I boarded an empty bus with a friend from High School. There was no driver, the doors opened automatically for us.

me: "Hmmm, it's like...I don't know how to spend my time anymore in dreams, situations like this. Let's see..."

A colorful circular symbol was painted in the center of the floor of the bus.

me: "Well let me see if I can make that symbol move from the floor to the ceiling."

I focused fairly hard and visualized it happening, telekinetically. The symbol began to peel as if it were a sticker and fluttered up onto the roof of the bus, but it didn't look like it would stick. I had to walk over and use my hands to flatten it.

me: "That wasn't bad at all."

Somehow this transitioned to where I was in a living room with attached bedrooms, naked. I could hear someone about to open one of the bedroom doors, so I grabbed a giant orange towel and wrapped it around me. A thin man who identified himself as "Dimitri" walked in.

me: "Ah, you almost walked in on me with no clothes."
"Dimitri": "Yes, well everyone has to get dressed sometime. The next time maybe the tables will be turned, and it will be me who is the deaf one."

(Note: His remark about deafness was something I just ignored at the time, but it could be that he was aware of my dreaming state and knew I didn't have all my senses operating.)

me: "How do you like living here?"
"Dimitri": "It is okay, it has a great view. But that doesn't mean too much to have a nice place without a girl around to show it off to. Do not get me wrong, I had one two years ago. But you need too much money these days...and I don't feel the need to..."

He gestured in mid-sentence at a magazine on the table. It had a title like Start your own Amazon-style successful business.

"Dimitri": (annoyed) "...start my own Amazon-style successful business."

The Old Fraggle Likes to Hoggle

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 16:10:57 GMT

I was at my grandmother's house speaking with Morton Harket, lead singer of the band A-Ha.

me: "Well, how do you like it here in America?"
"Morton": "Everything is incredibly empty. Not just people not showing up for the concerts, but for instance, in here...the walls are all white and no pictures."
me: "Well I agree, but there's better interior design in lots of places."

We wandered into the kitchen, and my Mom was at a table.

me: "I'd say my apartment has been decorated pretty well considering the budget, wouldn't you?"
Mom: "Yes, now that's been done it's time we socialized."
me: "Sorry, can't stay long. I'm asleep and dreaming right now, going to be gone in a second."
Mom: "No you're not. Why would you say that?"
me: "Because I'm able to tell. Sorry, bye."

With that I sorta passed out and woke up to start writing on a laptop. As I turned it on, I noticed I had a new email, titled 'The Old Fraggle Likes to Hoggle'. Before I could open it, there was a disruption and the machine logged out.

Tinkering with the computer and trying to get logged back in, I found another mail titled "Getting on the same page." Replying to it, I began to type frantically (and with numerous errors) a completely unreadable message about my name and who I was. I was awoken by sirens, which turned out to actually be outside the apartment.

Kanye's Golden Collapsible Cane

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 16:10:55 GMT

At first I had the feeling that I was entering some kind of exclusive music club. In my hands was a golden collapsible cane, and somehow I knew that I needed to return this object to someone there who had high status.

(Note: Another collapsible cane—though not a golden one—appeared in this dream when my car turned into a cane.)

A man with a clipboard was making sure that everyone was on the list, and I felt out of place overwhelmed. However, I was allowed through without being checked...and guided into a meeting where everyone seemed to accept my being there.

There was some technical presentation and I was taking notes. After the presentation, people formed a line on either side of me. I went to walk down the line and out of the room, but was stopped by someone.

man: "You need to introduce yourself to everyone. All the people here are directors."

(Note: At the time I thought this meant "movie director", but perhaps "division manager" would make more sense.)

I walked down the line, casually shaking hands. People would tell me their names and what they were responsible for, all of it had to do with software development projects. At one point, I met a man with several boxes of software on a table in front of him. He said he'd been working on many projects for a long time, and introduced himself as a 'logger'.

(Note: 'Loggers' first appeared in a dream in which I perceived them as a 'bad thing'.)

Recognizing the term as one of interest from my dreams, I stopped and inquired further, though I did not become completely lucid.

me: "I'm curious...what does a logger do? Is this related to tracking bugs and correlating them with causative factors?"
logger: "Ummm, no, not really. Let me show you some of the things I do."

He showed me pages of line graphs and tried to explain what they meant. I didn't really understand it, and couldn't read the labels on the axes. So I persisted in believing that it had something to do with bug tracking, and decided to make haste and leave the room.

Still holding the golden cane in my hand, and I went to a bouncer who was at a door. There were lists being checked and things of that nature, but I didn't want to deal with worrying about whether I was on the list or not in order to see the boss in person. So I just handed the cane over.

me: "This is for Kanye."

(Note: For some reason, when I said this, I thought I was bringing the object to rapper Kanye West...none of whose music I've heard. But I know of no one else named Kanye. Also, it was a cane that I was returning, so this could be a crossed mental wire of some sort.)

The bouncer looked menacingly at me, and took the cane and thrashed it up against the wall. I was baffled and stepped back.

me: "That was a bad idea. It wasn't a random gift from an admirer that you can just destroy. The meaning you should have taken was, 'I am returning this, it belongs to Kanye'."

There was a look of fear in the bouncer's eyes. A woman who looked a bit like Whoopi Goldberg stepped out of the room being guarded. She looked at the battered cane on the ground, looked at me, and looked at the bouncer.

me: "I'm sorry, I just told him to give it to you. It was late and I didn't want trouble with procedures for granting an audience."
"Kanye": (to bouncer) "You were hired to keep people from getting in and messing with me or my stuff...not to break my stuff. You're fired!"
bouncer: (whining) "Come on! You'd think that donut I got for you would count for something."
"Kanye": "What? No! Get out of here now."

The bouncer left, and "Kanye" shook her head and faced me. I was really stressed out by this point.

"Kanye": "Unbelievable. I'm not saying it wasn't a good donut. It was from that new place downtown...really fresh, I've liked everything I've had from them so far. Have you been there yet?"
me: (nervous) "Uhh...no."
"Kanye": "Well anyway, you don't have to worry about that guy anymore, he's history. Now why don't you come in and tell me about the meeting?"

Despite feeling it was too late, I followed along into the office. "Kanye" had a piece of paper representing a seating chart of the room I had been in. She presented to me so I could point to which person had said what.

"Kanye": "How was everyone's hair? Probably awful, were they wearing hats?"
me: "I'm afraid that if you're going to want details on what specific people said, I'm going to have to go get my notes. I really hadn't planned on meeting you about this right now."
"Kanye": "That's fine, go get them. I'll wait."

I went to get my notes, that I sensed I had left in the meeting room. But somehow I ended up fumbling around in the trunks of cars and woke up.

Seeing With My Eyes Closed

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 23:29:18 GMT

I was noticing that with my eyes closed I could still read in a dream. There were some people in a kitchen, one of whom was a girl I believed I knew. She was helping me run some vision tests.

me: "Check this out! I can read with my eyes closed!"
test girl: "Oh really? What does this say?"

She put a book in front of me, and I started reading it.

me: "If you believe I'm cheating, then here...I'll pull this black hat over my eyes."

At first having the knit hat over my head made it harder, but I started being able to read again. I asked for more samples. Some of the things I was being given to read seemed to be in a foreign language, so I just read the letters.

me: "This line is just symbols, there are no letters."
test girl: (laughing) "Yes there are! You're not looking close enough."

When I looked closer I saw these symbols were things like the copyright symbol or the GE logo, and did have letters inside.

me: "Oh. Well, inside the symbols there are letters. I wasn't looking at those because they were so mall, but this one says 'dH'."
test girl: "How could you not recognize that when you designed it?"
me: "Don't remember doing that. Ok, I'm still unsure if this is good enough proof. This hat has holes in the weave, I want something more...can you hold your hand over my eyes?"

She did and suddenly everything went black.

me: "Okay, that wasn't good...let me see again for a second. Now put your hand back again."

My sight still seemed to function, and I read off some more things she held in front of me.

me: "Tell people what you saw and that I proved it. And now give me something to take back when I wake up...a fact I couldn't know about you otherwise."

(Note: Because I believed I knew this girl in waking life, I thought this dream character might have access to the memory of the actual person. I now can't think of her as looking similar to anyone who I actually know.)

test girl: "I know you're all excited about this, and want to make a point. But none of it's surprising in the 'magic world'. I'm not going to help you impersonate a psychic."

I became quite angry and was going to attack, but instead started pulling a nearby curtain. The curtain ripped and pulled off the hooks it was on. It had been used to zone off an area where it seemed people were living, though none of them were home at that moment.

me: "Okay...calm down self, just calm down. We don't have to take this, we can leave."

Storming off I decided to go to a clothing bin and start packing my things. A small girl got up from a bed where she was laying with an older man and followed me along.

small girl: "Are you really leaving? Out into the rain?"
me: "Yes I'm leaving, I'm too good for this."
small girl: "Me too! I want to leave too!"
me: "Well, maybe this isn't the right moment. But yes, definitely the time is upon us."

Knowing I'd be waking up any second, and not knowing what the stakes were in whatever lifetime I was living, I decided to try not to cause further damage. I walked back to the kitchen-like area where I had been reading books.

test girl: (to people at table) "We had 16 packs of Guinness, and now they're all gone. How did that happen?"

They debated for a bit why they'd run out so quickly, and the girl got up to address me.

test girl: "What has gotten into you?"
me: (angry) "Why doesn't anyone understand how important verification is to me? It hurts to be treated like a crazy person, and worse it hurts to FEEL like you're crazy. Maybe other humans have their memory wiped when they wake up, but my guy remembers everything. He's getting gruesomely killed three times a night and has to live with that by himself."

A man stepped into intervene.

man: "Whoa, whoa! FULL memory, of everything?"
me: "Admittedly I'm exaggerating for effect. No, not everything, but a sizable amount."
man: "What do you think is bringing the average up to 3?"
me: "Huh?"