I came across an interesting blog by someone who believes herself to be under pervasive government surveillance, to the point where they're hiring people to get to know more about her and pretending to be her friend and that her hairdresser is a government spy. Given all the wacky things I give some level of credibility to, I don't think that's impossible...just unlikely.

But I have a strong interest in accountability, investigation, and making "secret knowledge" open. And my heart goes out to anyone who is having challenging thoughts and receiving nothing but isolation-inducing responses and lack of communication. So I find things like the letters she gets back from the NSA in response to her queries quite typical of what a world of false authority we live in. It's unfortunate that the only people who get so riled up about it are those who are disoriented and looking for answers, who get marginalized because of their disorientation.

Though I left a comment on the NSA letter entry, another later comment has been approved while mine was not. I don't want it lost, though there's sort of a psychologically predictive element that she might reject its content because it questions the validity of her interpretation of her experience. But as is my usual pattern when I don't get response from a letter, I'll just open it up and publish—as the theme of the post is transparency in any case. Here's what I had to say:

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Dear Kyeann,

Well...I don't think it's a good idea to be 100% sure that you are actually being followed or systematically spied on by the US government!! Though it's *theoretically* possible that new friends you meet are covert agents, there are much more mundane explanations for—say—why your hairdresser mentioned a detail of your life that don't remember telling her. Even if you were to find out she goes through your garbage, it doesn't mean she works for the U.S. government. She might just be a stalker. :)

But this letter you got back from the NSA is a good thing for everyone to take a long, serious look at. Regardless of whether your surveillance is real or imagined, you're unearthing very real "black holes" in government accountability. Those should not be quietly accepted just because people are too busy with other issues to worry about it.

Something else is really wrong here and it's entirely tangential to surveillance. What I'm most mad about parallels the quote in your entry about Martin Luther King about how we must shift from being a society focused on "things" and start to focus on "people". I ask this: would a people-focused government allow the NSA to write back an obviously distressed girl with a nonsense Catch-22 form letter that's only going to make her more distressed??!

The kind of bureaucrats who lean on things like that letter to address a voice reaching out to them are basically what I have come to term "spam humans". Like a message in your inbox with a seemingly meaningful headline that turns out to be for pills, the person who sent you that letter may look like a real person but they might be inauthentic. I don't recognize the "humanity" of something just because it stands upright and blinks. Ever see "They Live"?

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

The folks who sent you that letter are the sort who'll smugly smile and laugh if you ended up being arrested in a protest outside a government building, and were then diagnosed by a court psychiatrist as paranoid schizophrenic (thus incompetent to stand trial, so they can keep you locked up indefinitely under the guise that you are in a "hospital"). Then they'd go out and buy dinner with money they made from investing in the pharmaceutical companies that interlock with this whole system.

For these and many reasons, I do not recognize the U.S. government as legitimate. Guess it's kind of a religious issue at this point, because I don't give any Man-made organization authority. Truth is the only real power we should pledge our service to, and I do strongly identify with V's speech from V for Vendetta:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=8TLD3Z6sJWA

Until the revolution comes--be it Man's revolution or God's--take care of yourself! Don't let the distracting ideas work you into a frenzy. For instance, it's probably not true that you are being singled out for following by the government. Though if you didn't have a file at the NSA you now almost certainly do, even if it's just containing your letter...(quite interesting how some of these things become self-fulfilling prophecies!)

What is most certainly true is that there is terrible corruption and a very insidious mentality in most of the population. By extension this applies to the type of people they choose to put in power. But try not to panic! And it's good to remember what Jonathan Livingston Seagull said:

"Do you want to fly so much that you will forgive the Flock, and learn, and go back to them one day and work to help them know?"

Keeping one's sense of humor about it all helps too:

http://www.theonion.com/content/video/in_the_know_is_the_government

:)

Kind regards,
æ

Someone on the newsgroup alt.dreams.lucid wrote:

Before I throw myself into LD I want to know if anyone has actually succeeded with LD to the point where they can reliably control their dreams and experience LD regularly.

I decided to come up with an answer to that. Here it is.

---

I lucid dream pretty much each and every night. Someone asked me today how I achieved this. Beyond getting a lot of sleep, I think that a pattern of lifelong critical thinking and analysis helps. If your mind is "turned on" to the degree that you regularly notice anything out of place while you are awake, you are probably going to have the same thought process while you are asleep. The dreaming cues become so obvious that you can instantly kick into exploration mode (instead of wasting all your dreamtime on a fool's errand to deliver pies made out of shoes to your dead grandmother).

Your question about "mastery" leads me to something that I'd like to address with those getting interested in lucid dreaming: Is the goal to be able to control the dream scenario freely as a 3-D playpen, with the assumption that you are "alone in your head"? Or rather, to treat the dreaming world as a potential source of information and a gateway to perceiving a bigger external reality than the one you see now?

Since I can already imagine things all by my lonesome while I'm awake (on pencil and paper)... I pursue the communication angle. If you want to read some of the stories, my journal is online:

http://realityhandbook.livejournal.com/profile

As you see I haven't sought to master dream "control", in the sense of turning it into a puppet show. In fact, I'm working on the opposite! I choose specific tactics to screen against cases where a question is answered by my own preconceptions about what the answer will be. It takes work in the waking world to do this too--certainly you know people who hear what they want to hear, despite what you said! Becoming a good listener requires clearing your mind a bit and really focusing on the words coming at you.

Am I wasting my time by not seeking dream control as an avenue for fantasy fulfillment? I dunno, my fantasy fulfillment rarely involves me controlling everything. I remind people that we still don't know what the internal breakthrough was that enabled Helen Keller to comprehend the sign for Water, and that opened a channel for her to express her desires to an entire outside world. That world could *sense for her* and better react to her needs...though it might have been a bummer to find out a whole planet had senses she had gone without for so long.

Flatland, which is a cool little book, has inspired a lot of people to think about gaining new perceptual abilities. It's about the shift that a 2D creature might have understanding 3D. Several videos have been made in that vein:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=BWyTxCsIXE4

I'm sure there are many other shifts to study, and perhaps a whole cascade of possibilities... so many that one can never master them all.

Good luck on your dream pursuits...
RH

There is a part on the website for Skeptical Analysis for the Paranormal Society where they ask for your opinions. I happened across this site and liked the tone, so I thought I'd write my 2 cents.

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Hello Alison/SAPS...

I found your website through StumbleUpon. Specifically, the part I saw was a page critiquing the effectiveness of dye-packets advertised as chromatherapy to put in the bath. Following that to see the rest of the site, I noticed there was a section where you solicited comments from people on why they either do (or do not) believe in the paranormal.

Here is my submission which you may print, if you so choose. I'd also like to talk with you or your staff if you would like. Among your listed categories, I would consider myself to be a "paranormal investigator", though it's not my day job!

-----

I'm a very strong critical thinker, who grew up as an atheist and was deemed by society to be exceptionally intelligent...well, at least back then. The only reason I ever ended up confronting the paranormal was due to an emerging pattern of lucid dreaming that arose in my early 20s. After not remembering my dreams for most of my life, I was suddenly able to walk around and interrogate dream environments... ask questions, and examine objects. It was shocking at first, and I could only hold it for a few seconds before I would wake up or lose clarity. Yet the stability rose to the point where it became a whole second existence for me.

It became obvious that the information I was processing could not be reasonably explained as a product of my own mind--well, at least not any more than the solipsistic view that my waking life is "just me"! It is undeniable that my own mental infrastructure "colors" any objective signal that might be reaching me in dreams. Yet we know this to be the case with being awake, it might just be a question of degree. Despite my well-reasoned arguments and analogies, most of the intelligent people I knew denied that I was experiencing anything of value--they believed it was random neural discharge and I should forget about it and take sleeping pills.

My own proving strategy was at somewhat of a dead-end, since I was waking up most mornings with keywords and names that returned nothing on Google. So I independently began to read up on New Age topics... anyone who felt they were in contact with things that were somehow "other-dimensional" (the astral projectors, out of body experiencers, trance channelers, psychics, etc.) I was very ready to believe, and searched with high hopes for someone who had both ability and the critical thinking to help me make a breakthrough in "proof".

Haven't found any of that yet, or at least not what one might call a "breakthrough". What I did find in my search into the New Age community were a lot of open-minded and nice people who do not dismiss the experiences of other people, merely because they do not experience that thing themselves. I find it a very telling failure of science that lucid dreaming itself was doubted until repeatable experiments by Stephen LaBerge showed that yes-- a person whose brain is in sleep state can communicate with researchers in a lab through eye movements:

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

Great experiment, and it makes my life a few percentage points easier in terms of explaining what I go through. But why didn't the centuries of consistent first hand testimony mean anything to "scientists"? Is a "brain" "scan" that much more valid than what an otherwise intelligent person has to say? Validation shouldn't be about "okay, you're not crazy like we said...sorry" but rather "hey, now we understand that thing you've been telling us about better...cool!" I wrote about a disturbing recent example of that exact thing with out of body experiences, whose verification was spun as a way of mocking those who'd had the experience:

http://realityhandbook.livejournal.com/46376.html

The absence of benevolence has created a true polarization between the paranormal and the scientific communities. Instead of working together harmoniously, they see each other as adversaries. One need not look long at the language of the people in the JREF to see it as a kind of holier-than-thou mockery, that seems to be more about feeling superior than actually educating anyone. In the meantime, the absence of an appreciation for critical thinking has made the paranormal community a hodgepodge of folks who'll welcome any ol' crazy idea that wanders in the door. This gap needs to be closed--and one thing that will close it is good, open, kind, patient communication.

Please feel free to read or critique my journal, which I have tried my best not to "enhance":

http://realityhandbook.livejournal.com/profile

I met with a group of local people this past week who are involved in channeling, and explained my ideas about wanting to speak with someone whose focus was on exchanging technical information (rather than just going on the "self-help" angle or abstract work with feelings/energies). They pointed me to Lee Carroll, who is known for his channelings of an entity known as Kryon. He presents some ideas about DNA, and you can read the expected critical reaction on the James Randi forum:

http://forums.randi.org/archive/index.php/t-8794.html

My letter suspends disbelief; I decided to explain my own ideas/hopes about channeling and how it might be more robust to criticism (as well as arguing that it's worth it to make the effort). I also address the challenges in mental modes of communication that are bypassing alphabetic or verbal layers. I think this will be my new general introduction to my attitudes on channeling and goals with it.

---

Greetings Kryon, Lee, and/or Staff,

While trying to locate channelers with more science education than the average person, a local group referred me to your site. Specifically, they mentioned some of your publications that describe yet-unknown aspects of DNA. It raised some questions for me, but to really explain those questions I have to first explain myself. If you have the time to review this letter I would greatly appreciate it.

I seek scientific channels because I myself have an engineering background, and am credentialed and considered competent in that area. Yet I am a chronic lucid dreamer and firmly believe that I am in contact with consciousnesses outside of my own during these dreams. It bothers me that this belief is dismissed by most of the educated people I meet (who I otherwise enjoy for reasons entirely tangential to our impasse on metaphysical beliefs). Thus, I have made it a personal quest to do what I can to gather proof of the phenomena that will satisfy the category of critical thinkers who I'd like to outreach to... as it seems I have a unique crossover of skills to do so.

My foremost tool is curiosity. Once I realize I am dreaming, I will remain as calm as I can (however amazing or horrific the circumstances) and I will question beings about their nature and try to establish a frame of reference. I ask them about their awareness of Earth, and I ask them if to describe or demonstrate the mechanism of how we are communicating. I'll pick up objects and ask what they are, disassemble them, or improvise experiments with the physics that are in play. To the extent I can, I offer keywords and information which would assist in locating me in the context of geography and the world-wide-web.

Thus I think of myself as an inter-dimensional explorer and map-maker, and I write many of my dreams down in my journal-- which you are welcome to read:

http://realityhandbook.livejournal.com/profile

Yet clearly, my dream techniques are not as fruitful as being able to have an open connection to alien intelligences while fully awake. Channeling seems like a more ideal and less cloudy way of exchanging information with these entities, if I could develop that skill. Or of course, if someone already had the skill I'd be satisfied to ask them questions, if they thought like I do. This made me wonder if you share my aspirations to build these maps and bridges... as opposed to shifting attention away from that pursuit.

I personally find it suspicious when a channeler avoids the subject of verification... which even if I thought it wasn't terribly *important* I'd at least think it was *interesting*. Though I can fully accept that it is difficult to relay words across a channel that will make sense to the audience without context. It calls to mind this joke:

A farming family had been working for generations, without any of them attending college. But finally they'd saved enough money that they could send young Bobby to the university in the next town. When Bobby came back home after his first semester, all the kin folk eagerly came to visit and gather around the dinner table to see how their most educated relative was doing.

"Bobby," said Pa, "why don't you tell us all something smart they learned you?"

The relatives looked on eagerly. Bobby scratched his head for a minute and then said, "Oh, here's one. Pi r square!"

Everyone bowed their heads sadly. Pa shook his head, and said: "Doggone it boy, I don't know what they're teaching you at that school. But even us country folk know that pi r round!!"

I've gathered that dream communication is done through symbolic exchange between interfacing minds. To give words letter-by-letter is arduous and error-prone in my mental sphere, and requires averaging and repetition. (Not to mention the necessity that the receiving and transmitting parties share knowledge of a certain awareness of each other's written language, or have access to automated translation technology.) If channeling is at all similar, then I imagine the average person trying to describe a computer to someone 1000 years ago might sound like this:

2000: "...so you see, every K-O-M-P-O-O-T-R-E has a lightning rope."
1000: "A what?"
2000: "A lightning rope. It gives flame to the C-M-P-U-T-T-E-R."
1000: "Wait a minute, but you were talking earlier about the rope to the inkwell and pen. They also carry lightning?"
2000: "Yes, those... uh, U-B-S... I mean, U-S-B ropes, they do carry a small amount of lightning. But the lightning ropes carry more."
1000: "How much more?"
2000: "Uh... I don't know. It can make a rat light up, but you still have to plug in inkwells with a lightning rope... so..."
1000: "What do vermin have to do with any of this?"
2000: "No, not a rat, forget I said that. I meant to say a pen which draws to the page you are reading and changes it, connected by U-S-S-B rope."

It requires a persistence to communicate in this fashion with so many barriers, but I do think it's possible. In fact, if I wanted to send the idea for a good experiment for producing readily usable electricity for someone in year 1000 I could do so even if the channel were "noisier" than this... assuming there was a real connection and neither side was going to give up. I find it unfortunate that I do not see most channel/entity/interviewer groups using methodologies that could lead to such breakthroughs.

Yet even if it is somehow meddling to deliver powerful technology into the hands of channelers, I don't think it has to be that extreme. When thinking about the nature of communication with interdimensional entities, I ponder all the non-technical things a human being--even a simple one--would have to offer an alien. For instance: they could explain Tetris, which is fun no matter what dimension you play it in. They could draw and explain a Rubik's Cube, even if they had no idea how to build one. If you asked a human to sing a few songs from the past few decades, they'd give you some out-of-tune renditions of favorites by Madonna and Prince.

The channeling community, in my experience, does not generally sparkle with these kinds of alien gifts. Yet as the Ghostbusters say, "We're Ready To Believe You". I'd like to have discussions with a channeler at my level of communication and technical skill who actively encourages the line of questioning that I speak of. If you or your representatives do not have interest, I'd certainly appreciate you forwarding this on to anyone (well known or unknown) who shares the agenda.

Regards, and thank you for reading...!

Last night I watched an interesting BBC video about four famous contributors to mathematics, all of whom died of suicide or in sanitoriums. It's called "Dangerous Knowledge":

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3503877302082311448&q=dangerous+knowledge&total=342&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0

It opens talking about Georg Cantor, who was given particularly harsh treatment for his theories (now accepted as foundational in mathematics, thus more or less 100% correct as far as we know in 2007). Many of his famous colleagues at the time said his approaches were "a grave disease"... "laughable and wrong"... or called him a "scientific charlatan". The video puts emphasis on how much these attacks from these particular people hurt him, and led him into isolation and self-destruction.

When the problem you study is only of interest to a small community who can understand it, it is hard on visionaries who find themselves under attack by that group. In my case, I don't know that I have a "group"... but certainly my group is not the New Age movement. They tend to lack education, and they often have extremely bad taste. Even their websites are horrible amalgamations of the worst wallpaper colors, animated GIFs, and grievous application of the Papyrus font. Though I might find agreement with some of their unique experiences, these are not people I want to spend time getting to know.

Who do I want to be accepted by? Educated, curious, artistic, scientific people. But as I've mentioned before in terms of my conflict with perspectives like those held by Dawkins and Dennett, there is a tendency for intellectuals to take on an attitude that becomes headstrong and dismissive. What I consider to be my obvious intelligence does not spare me—it is impossible to be respected and have a dissenting viewpoint, when dealing with a conformist group.

A recent study published by some researchers managed to give people a sensation that matches empirical descriptions of "Out of Body Experiences". A lot of bloggers have chosen to write about it, and depending on their biases, they either think it validates the accounts of OBE-havers or invalidates them. I tripped across a journal in which a converted Atheist quoted a portion of the account including this sentence:

"the studies suggest a scientific explanation for a phenomenon often thought to be a figment of the imagination"

And added his own two cents:

"(...) No doubt believers and meditators will come up with some other concocted reason to think science is wrong about this. When will the supernaturalist madness end?"

I responded with this:

I'm sure many atheists denied that anyone ever experienced an out-of-body experience. Now they might concede "ok, it happened, you weren't making it up... BUT it didn't mean what you thought it meant!" I think many scientists tend to marginalize the significance of that shift. There is a big difference between being right all along, and merely being willing to change your opinion if new evidence comes to light! It’s no justification for cruelty or dismissal in the meantime.

So I think you should be more cautious of statements like "when will the supernaturalist madness end?" Some of those you are labeling were the ones who stuck to their guns: they bravely reported the facts of what they saw and experienced in OBEs, and didn’t recant merely for fear of being labeled "mad". They gave the data to help motivate the experimentation, and this is a step toward bridging those experiences with existing peer-reviewed research.

Long live the scientific method: cornerstone of intellectual growth and best-known compass of reality. But death to fundamentalism... on both sides of this kind of debate... we have tons still to learn! Who knows what other findings will surprise science and bolster the accounts of some aspects of "supernaturalist" experience?

In truth, I kinda despise religion, and I'm tempted to launch into a Edward Norton 25th Hour rant about the various kinds of people I dislike. But I think I see all things as religions; if someone spends all their life in World of Warcraft vs. studying the Torah, I'm not going to say one is obviously better.

I play Devil's advocate because there's a tiny fraction of people I care about being overlooked and mistreated, myself included. From the outside I don't see how one would tell the difference based on anything other than careful conversation with the individuals in question. So I push for more open-mindedness. But like the four from the video, the fight takes a toll.

I've joined a few internet bulletin boards and forums, and not found a lot of kindred spirits, but... some. Yet to date, this has not provided any additional readers or comments to the journal.

The experience I felt was the best was a conversation held on the forum for the International Association for the Study of Dreams:

http://dreamtalk.hypermart.net/bb2005/viewtopic.php?t=1975&highlight=&sid=5a99d7e9fcdc11de5ac389136eda6205

Thoughtful responses, though it kind of fell off. And there's no evidence that anyone actually clicked through to the journal entries I posted, as all the responses merely address the content of the forum message. I actually did click through to Al's dream blog, which is unique in that it is Illustrated...I've thought of doing this, where warranted. But on Al's blog it's not easy to see which dreams are lucid and which are not, and it generally seems to be missing the details I'm looking for. (Bravo however for remembering them and keeping so many notes.)

My luck with the Steve Pavlina forum wasn't particularly great in terms of the Pavlinites, who seem to be a bit doofy by and large. Though Steve himself is a well-spoken guy:

http://www.stevepavlina.com/forums/search.php?searchid=361636

Tribe.Net was a wasteland, and I deleted my account:

http://footintwoworlds.tribe.net/thread/c6ff5de6-d27c-45ee-9bd1-85390bcbf639
http://lucid-dreamers.tribe.net/thread/c3ba367c-aa0f-4651-92c6-9388b709620c
http://footintwoworlds.tribe.net/thread/4236bf34-32db-4ad9-b8ff-ea9bf6274fda

Orkut was a lot of dead air and one-sentence posts, but my understanding is that the only people using it are in Brazil, so maybe English isn't their main language:

http://www.orkut.com/CommMsgs.aspx?cmm=12393&tid=5303800

I feel that the UseNet news hierarchy is, by and large, pretty pathetic... spammers and trolls, which is too bad, because it's based on a good distributed standard. I'd rather send someone an email than write their myspace account, and by the same token I'd rather post to a usenet group rather than someone's web forum.

As hopeless as UseNet is overall, the response to my initial post to alt.dreams.lucid was civil and friendly, but it didn't bring any readership or new insight:

http://groups.google.com/group/alt.dreams.lucid/browse_thread/thread/9e9540eaf953f602/1e35ece5f6646f18?lnk=st&q=realityhandbook&rnum=4#1e35ece5f6646f18

Also, once a chemist did a good identification of a crystallography spam, and seemed like a cool and open-minded dude...entertaining spam conspiracy theories even when we were on a mainstream science group:

http://groups.google.com/group/sci.chem/browse_thread/thread/1f279b8639fad770/32aad920539ef93b?lnk=st&q=realityhandbook&rnum=7#32aad920539ef93b

I was happy to get some zero pole magnet feedback, after the dream about those:

http://groups.google.com/group/sci.physics.electromag/browse_thread/thread/775043800f39f76/350f8963233e7a9f?lnk=st&q=realityhandbook&rnum=6#350f8963233e7a9f

Other dialogue hasn't gotten results:

http://groups.google.com/group/alt.movies.the-matrix/browse_thread/thread/cf25d7646096a2b8/635c5a7e50f80f39?lnk=st&q=realityhandbook+matrix&rnum=1#635c5a7e50f80f39

http://groups.google.com/group/alt.dreams.lucid/browse_thread/thread/3b7facc83fb16a7e/3dfaa710f71c03ad?lnk=st&q=realityhandbook&rnum=1#3dfaa710f71c03ad

I haven't tried that hard to talk to dream bloggers, because many of them seem to get very little done in a lucid state...and when they do, they have only the most superficial of paraphrases to offer of what they did. But "Ben" at DreamingLife seems to be making his first steps into the kind of territory I study. So I made an introduction, with no response:

http://dreaminglife.org/2007/07/31/how-i-got-into-lucid-dreaming-back-in-1999/

I don't understand why someone like that wouldn't be interested in the findings of someone who is (frankly) a lot further along in the process, and willing to talk.

Update: recent outreach I'm going to put down so I can track them:

http://johncox88.com/?p=321
http://godchildren.livejournal.com/31975.html?thread=149479#t149479

I'm not sure what direction to take outreach at this point, how important it is to me, and how to improve if it is. I refined my profile info a bit so that at least people know what this journal is about. I've been mostly timid about contacting prominent people like Steven LaBerge or Richard Linklater (director of Waking Life) because of these lackluster experiences. But perhaps if I arranged my notes and concepts better, and just disregarded the internet response, I could start some conversations worth having.

CAPTCHAs are getting out of control, and when I saw this style pop up on Myspace days later I was pretty much thrown back to a dream I had:



Amazingly unreadable. Looking on Google for anyone else who agreed that MySpace CAPTCHAs were insane, I found this rather interesting article (warning, turn down the sound!) which shows how much worse it might get.

I wrote the blog author the following letter.

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I found your entry about future CAPTCHAs, amusing and prescient. But I couldn't find the comment button, perhaps I have to crack your new CAPTCHA to be able to? :)

I'm very concerned about the evolution of spam and web scraping, especially the reverse problem: what do we do when the computers are the smart ones and *we're* dumb. Imagine the music not being there to distract, but actually being part of the puzzle...like you have to synergize something about the music and the words. The sense-impaired have a tough enough time already. Have you ever actually tried one of the audio CAPTCHAs? They're tough, try the audio on this one:

http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html

I am a chronic lucid dreamer and recently journaled on the topic of a related experience:

http://realityhandbook.livejournal.com/40960.html

Then coming across the Myspace CAPTCHAs today--required for every message sent to a new person--it really had a close feeling. I don't know if it's because the site doesn't trust me yet or if that's how it is for all accounts. But it made the fact that I've been getting Myspace spam seem a bit more amazing...like, who's cracking these regularly in order to send me fake profiles trying to advertise phony dating services? Does anyone take that bait? How can it be worth the work?

Food for thought. Anyway, great post, and I also really enjoyed checking out your scenemusic...it's good! I used to be very much into Purple Motion. If your blog has a comment mechanism I'm missing, let me know where it is!

This is unusual, but was the mood I was in today.  Bear with me.

I've long been unnerved and intrigued by a few surface parallels between some of my more "experimental" writing techiques, and the infamously parodied internet site for Time Cube . Not to say that all incomprehensible things are equal—but I have to acknowledge that there's probably a certain universality of experience among individuals who've gone for periods of time indulging whatever stream-of-consciousness impulse urges them to write any babbling that happens to pass through their head. The choice to use wild formatting and encodings could just be random, or a deliberate attempt to encode or hide information.

In any case, contemplation of this led me to write Gene Ray a letter. Of course I don't I expect him to comprehend it and respond in a kindred "sanely insane" fashion. It's really just for me, my internet readers, and posterity.  But I chose him as a target audience, to serve as a dialectical device for exploring the subject of why someone might write weird stuff. Without further ado, here's what I wrote:

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Subject: A Question* for Gene Ray about "Word Viruses"**

Dear Gene Ray,

Viagra!** (That means "hello"...in my half-humorously-invented language. I chose it because I'm quite unnerved by the idea that simple words or patterns trigger the silent deletion of communications. It's amazing that by using that one word I have radically jeopardized the delivery of this message! Yet I feel it's important to push back against systems that hide or delete e-mail without any warning to the sender. After all: if you think it's hard to teach Time Cube now...the irregularity of human censorship is nothing compared to the cold precision of automated filtering!)

That risky opening aside, I'm writing you today because I have been reading timecube.com. While I may not understand your ideas, I do deeply relate to being passionate about something that other people don't seem to think is comprehensible or sane! It is frustrating, and I hope you are not too much the worse for wear.

One question came to my mind that I would like to ask about your writing, namely:


I'm asking because I often use unconventional formatting for very specific (and unusual) purposes. To demonstrate, above I gave each letter in the word "color" a different color. It's odd, but notice that someone who doesn't know that particular English word might deduce the definition just by looking at it. Also, I might be able to catch the attention of physicists who'd notice that rather than picking a random sequencing of color for the letters as a child might, I correctly ordered the visible spectrum as ROY-G-BIV.

Breaking convention in other ways might also teach a communication technique, or serve to grab attention of a particular self-selected audience. For example: if I am concerned about whether the recipient of my message is seeing what I wrote as I intended, I often send along a screen capture from my computer. This also provides an opportunity to position other information in the graphic which I think might be of interest. (It might help to send along cryptic or surprising things, which I'll occasionally do to make a point or start a conversation!)

Such choices come with the consequence of looking a bit childish or crazy by disobeying conventions. I'm sure most would argue that making a message look like a rainbow for the sake of some pedantic sanity check is not sane! But I live every day with a sneaking suspicion that glossing over oddities in our daily lives is depriving us of crucial knowledge. I remind people that we still don't know what the internal breakthrough was that enabled Helen Keller to comprehend the sign for Water!*...and whatever that was, it opened a gateway for her to speak to an entire outside world. Perhaps we as a civilization are on the brink of another such breakthrough, if we are just more persistent with communications and not so prone to instant rejection of "nonsense"...

But I don't want to put words in your mouth for why you've picked such unconventional formatting for your website! Most likely it's just for emphasis, akin to when people TYPE IN ALL CAPS TO GET YOUR ATTENTION. Yet I thought expressing myself through a letter to you would be a good way to get my own ideas written down, while simultaneously sending an empathetic outreach to a fellow heretic (however different our theories may be).

Best Wishes,
The Reality Engineering Handbook

---

Yes, I know: by all accounts Gene is a rather confused old man...who will only be more confused by this. After all, it contains a screen shot attachment claiming to be from 3 years in the future, where timecube.com has somehow been replaced by an ad for a Penis Enlargement Product. Of course I'm referring to a realistic scenario...the consequences of domain name systems which are defective by design, because they give the ownership of words to organizations that don't manage them in a democratic or accountable way...and in an international community that redirects or blocks sites. 

It's really very challenging for me to take the time to present something like this in such a dry manner. There are so many layers to what goes on in my mind when I start thinking along these lines, and I hate having to spell out why this kind of thinking is useful. Especially because it's not this in particular, necessarily, but the pattern of pervasive blindness and bad design that we have instituted in our systems.  I don't want the information we need to solve the mysteries of the universe to be blocked by petty human insecurities...and those who would exploit the dark corners created by automated machines set up by those insecure humans. I'm pretty sure that if we're going to figure out exactly how far this has gone we just might have to start every message with Viagra...

It should be obvious to spammers that they shouldn't spam... obvious to people making spam filtering software that they can't throw away messages without bouncing them. It should be obvious to the naming organizations that if there is contention for a domain name then it should have a disambiguation page. We should be solving the universe's problems, sharing information, and the last thing we need are automated systems scanning image attachments to email for the word penis and deleting them.

Incidentally, some of my weird ideas on pushing communication envelopes have originated from the bizarre art(?) of xpaerimtlslaekv   ... whose enigmatic desktop screenshot (named yellow..265---55511832.--------.jpg) suggests communication with an extraterrestrial of some sort, because no human works with a desktop like that.  Should we be concerned?

I was in a dream where I was speaking to a girl behind the counter at a coffee shop. I was trying to order a large mocha, and she was saying something about my order...but I couldn't understand what she was saying. She was pretty.

me: "Sorry, I can't understand you! Why not just pick anything that cost less than $4. I'll drink it."

Somehow I ended up outside, but decided I needed to go back in and talk to her. There was someone else behind the counter.

me: "Is the girl who was here before still around?"

They got excited and went in the back to fetch her, and she came out and jumped into my arms. I think I already knew I was dreaming, but the abnormality of this brought that issue to the forefront of my mind.

me: "Do you remember waking up this morning?"
her: "No."
me: "Well, I'm asleep right now. So from my perspective, this is a dream."
her: "I know that about this."
me: "Are you dreaming as well? I mean, can I contact you in the real world?"
her: "Yes. I have email."
me: "Can you tell me the address?"
her: "longbeach2000 [mutter mutter]"
me: "Can you repeat that?"
her: "longbeach2000 [mutter mutter]"

(Note: Very few hits on the internet for longbeach2000, most relating to some car race. Some guy named Darin has the Yahoo! email, which makes me wonder how long before every email address you could possibly randomly think of is taken. Reminds me of this saturday night live sketch.

This Japanese blog with a single entry certainly fits the pattern of "longbeach2000 mumble mumble" because the only words I can read on it are longbeach2000, and it's a user account name.

If dreams are a communication channel, it's certainly noisy and polluted by one's internal vocabulary of senses. It's bad enough trying to translate between common human languages where you'd think we knew enough about them to do better than this Altavista-translated garble:

Romantic love it does not should talk. If you discuss, it is understood, you will graduate such romantic love. If the ear it can tilt in voice of heart, perhaps many things know. The beginning first step of today and desire it did. It is contribution to new. Just a little it becomes tense.

The comment is equally confusing:

It increases from in this pleasure of comment to this article. After the meeting it leaves.

As an exercise in translation, I left a comment pointing back here. I tried writing short, simple sentences...having them translated into Japanese, and then translating the Japanese back and seeing how close I got to what I'd originally typed. What I ended up with was:

I do not speak Japanese. I used the computer in order to translate this. I would like to share this dream. Regrettable that is written on English. You can read that?

...we can hope it's a little more grammatical in Japanese.)

(I sent this letter last month and haven't received a reply—nor did it bounce. So I am posting it publicly in case the intended recipient did not receive it.)

Hello Marco,

I found your name in the Wikipedia article on Madonna's "Sorry" while researching to find out who made that video. Let me first say that your work and your website are excellent...and the parody of "Cog" for 118 is absolutely hilarious. I wish I'd had the opportunity to work with people on projects as creative and cool as these.

(Tech note: you seem to have a broken link for the Sorry video on the showreel page. It does not seem to play, though all the other videos seem to be functioning.)

My questions about Sorry were particularly regarding the unusual boom box prop, and the somewhat atypical use of color. As production designer for the video it seems to me that some of these decisions were most likely yours. But I assume there was a guiding vision for the plot which was laid down in pre-production; and I'm wondering where a few of the ideas came from.

For instance, shots to the van's exterior show it driving by first a green light...then traffic cones, and then a seeming vertical 3-light-signal which has two yellow lights on top (as opposed to the usual red, yellow, green). Was this a custom prop, or were the signals constructed digitally? (or do these exist in some other country for a purpose I am not aware of?) Did anyone on set suggest that the sequence of colors was important, or that they be connected or correlated to the changes of outfits inside the van?

The lyrics to Sorry say "Don't explain yourself 'cause talk is cheap". But I must explain myself, because I love conversation about ideas. So I will tell you why I am asking...it is because the video eerily reflects aspects of a script that I have been working on since last year. In my story, a security expert stumbles upon a color-based protocol being used to stop the proliferation of technology into societies that wouldn't be informed enough to deal with it. They use all kinds of objects as pawns, including clothing, stoplights, *firetrucks*, and other very large objects.

It was startling when I saw how closely "Sorry" fit my vision, at least in terms of the visuals...but I think plot-wise as well. Something most people who watch the video don't even mention is when Madonna's character tests a man who is using some kind of 3-D impersonation to have the appearance of being someone completely different. It's the only "supernatural" event in the video so it stands out to me, but most people I show the video to do not even notice it.

There's sort of milieu right now about impersonation--perhaps because people are waking up to just how easy it is to deceive people these days. I've seen more than a few fan videos on youtube which people have tried to pass off as having been created by the artist. It's a trend that any technologist would assume is only going to get more difficult to track!

The Pet Shop Boys remixed Sorry, and "I'm with Stupid" video there's a similar appearance of the four-colored lights...with a theme of the artists being impersonated and not being able to do anything about it. (If you haven't seen that one, I'd be interested in your opinion of the production.) Seems you've worked with Robbie Williams, and he's a bit preoccupied with the concept in "Radio" and "Something Beautiful".

I really appreciate you reading this far. It's difficult for me, being as curious as I am! I'm saddened that some of the most popular artists--Madonna and George Michael, for instance--don't have a single link from their website to a free resource to communicate with fans! Children, especially, do not have $39.99 to join a fan club...and I bet they have some of the most interesting questions...

Thank you very much.

( attempt to comment on a thread about the video, didn't work )

Many dreams I have had have involved Strong Bad of homestarrunner.com. I've also had a lot of synchronicities with my life—which I won't go into here, but suffice to say it has intrigued me. I have a little bit of skepticism of the site's "alien" character...the cartoons are fantastic and detailed, and free. I've enjoyed it tremendously but also wondered why it's so weird. As these stand out among flash animations in a remarkable way, I've pay unusually close attention to it for themes that might carry information.

As a relevant example, in lunch special, a writer signs a message to Strong Bad "sincerly". He pronounces it "censorly" and then goes through an ordeal, ultimately getting a message with an MS Paint attachment that reads:

"Deur Strond bad,
I hava a emau] n ow. Cheet helps.

Stlong Mad

attachment"

I've thought a lot about how to get past censorship, and to communicate through invisible filters. And the weird thing here is that this cartoon looks like a prescription for how to work around someone who is charging for a resource that should be free, and bypassing interference which is blocking awareness of that resource.

Certainly I may be over-interpreting, but no one else has an answer besides "this is randomness, and if you're seeing more than that it's all in your head". I decided the best thing to do is to write a letter to the creators which I reprint here. It's fairly overt but contains a little bit of my own nonsense which is—actually—not nonsense. I've added links to the cartoons I'm referencing which weren't in the original textual mail if you're not familiar with the H*R universe.

---

Subject: a jumbo/LARGE question for Homestar Runner dot Com

Hi there Brothers Chaps and/or Strong Bad,

I enjoy your cartoons very much. A lot of people think they don't make any sense at all, but I see lessons and patterns in them. Some of your work has eerie synchronicities with ideas that I have about education. Maybe your writing is sufficiently random that my interpretation is comparable to seeing shapes in the clouds. But the outlandish and almost suspiciously alien quality of your animation makes me feel it can't be dismissed so easily. So I ask: Is there something "intentional" behind what you are doing?

With a few exceptions, every SBemail strikes me as more than meets the eye. Even the one you just released entitled "road trip" seems fairly pointless to people I show it to, but I see something going on. Strong Bad and the Cheat are trapped in a Gremlin whose doors can only be opened from the outside...a situation ripe with metaphors a la The Matrix. He makes a specific point of having an "inside joke" that only the people on the road trip will get. They are trapped until Homestar Runner shows up and says the inside joke, which seems to magically release them from the car.

I do not think most people would draw a connection here--that the inside joke had anything to do with Strong Bad's ability to be released. But was his decision to come up with jumbo/LARGE before the road trip tied to his emergency plan for escape? It reminds me of the "shared secret is capital" idea, as when Kevin Spacey's character in L.A. Confidential cleverly invoked the name Rollo Tomasi to catch Captain Dudley Smith and keep him from getting away with a crime. You might not have seen the movie but it's explained here:

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

Speaking of being stuck in a box, filters and spammers are hitting people with some nasty divide-and-conquer problems where they can't communicate due to censorship of some invisible kind. You don't have to live in China to be snookered! Case in point: many sites are now duplicating content off of Wikipedia and then remove or corrupt the name of the source and replace it with something else in order to fool you (and search engines) into staying in their false version of the site. If you haven't seen this list of such abuses in mirrors and forks, you might find it depressing...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Mirrors_and_forks

Just after I got availed to this you released "No Hands on Deck" in which Homestar Runner--rather than saying the full name of the site says "Kapedia". Was that random as well? It's tough for me to really know why he wouldn't say the whole word, as he doesn't tend to abbreviate anything else in that way. The synchronicity of this one, coming on the heels of my realization about the abuse in mirrors and forks, was unusual.

It's because of the brilliance of your site and the seeming ease with which you are able to create massive amounts of hi-fi content that I am drawn to look for greater purpose. One might say that other internet cartoons are more like time boxes with gross old wigs in them, but yours looks like an actual capsule and goes "Frooooosh"...thus warranting increased scrutiny in my view. But I'm in the minority, as most people say that you (and other artists who have moved toward projects for kids, like They Might Be Giants) do not have a subversive agenda but are just peddlers of kinda amusing nonsense.

Maybe kinda amusing nonsense is intrinsically subversive by its very nature? I don't know, it does raise questions. Yet as you set out to write a Children's Book which warns about those who perform exceptionally but are actually cheating, I speculate that it may be the case that you have continued a broader educational mission. That very question of what it means to be the victim of "a cheat" has preoccupied me, as I feel that trade secrecy and high prices on technology have unfairly skewed the landscape of artists trying to compete.

I've not seen you speak on this in any interviews, and it seems your DVD commentary isn't very transparent. So seeing as you have an email address it is probably best to just *ask*. I'm certain you are busy but I would appreciate at least a very short answer. I'll take one from The Brothers Chaps or an appointed 3D representative at face value, though an answer from Strong Bad will almost certainly be too oblique. But since it would be very enjoyable in any case, here's a question phrased especially for him:

Mr. Strong Bad,

I have been investigating you. Are you trying to educate or send some kind of message when you answer emails, or are they just experiments in absurdism? I'll give you 1000 #8 pencils if you tell me the secret.

Mr. Ogden North

As added incentive, I've attached a picture of a hot lady I know on myspace. (It is absolutely not a trojan horse written by a virus researcher and I promise it won't download an atomic clock onto your machine.) She's maybe not as hot as a Brontosaurus having breakfast, but I think it makes as good an inside joke as any.

Sincerely,
Brian Deckeman
Tue Sep 5 11:45:36 PDT 2006

---

Y'know there's even a cartoon in which someone named Brian writes Strong Bad and asks if he wants to go out. SB doesn't ask any anatomical questions, he just jumps to conclusions based on the name and acts as if the name itself is a problem. I found it a little odd that my own name would appear in an email title...but again--are you hoping to inspire a challenge to assumptions with that, or am I just thinking too hard?

I posted to alt.dreams.lucid today, trying to do a "shout out" to the experienced lucid dreamers who can't really live a normal life without finding others of their ilk. Or at least, that's what I was trying to say—maybe it didn't come across? This represents my acknowledged failure to have anything result from my various psychic attempts to hand out and collect contact information in the dreamworld. It failed, so...new plan needed.

(I've known about alt.dreams.lucid for a while, but have historically shied away from Usenet. Namely because posting required some weird nntp server address that I never had, and I didn't want to put my email address out there. But with a gmail account these two things are hopefully going to work all right!)

In any case, if you're a visitor to my "blog" due to seeing that post, welcome! It's not updated all that often; I have interesting dreams (almost) every night but only write them up occasionally, especially since I don't feel particularly responsible to an "audience". (That might change if I get one!) For the moment, I usually document a dream if I think there is some danger of me forgetting an aspect that I will want to look up later.

---

Newsgroups: alt.dreams.lucid
Subject: any "chronic" lucid dreamers who deeply questioning reality?
Date: Thu, 15 Dec 2005 14:29:44 -0000

Hello readers of usenet alt.dreams.lucid,

It seems many in this group are looking for techniques to have more
lucid dreams, out of a desire for novelty.  That's cool!  But I'm
afraid that my own experiences have gone far past entertainment, and
have raised serious questions and issues that I'm not able to put
aside.

(Indeed: When I started six years ago, I spent a lot of time wondering
about how to stay in dreams longer.  Now I am usually more concerned
with how to wake up!)

It's tough to explain to the average person how much one's worldview
can change after clocking dozens of hours interrogating the dream
environment directly.  Those who do not have lucid dreams--or who have
them infrequently--can easily dismiss them as a subconscious flight of
fancy.  Yet I've become convinced that there is something fundamental
involving communication with worlds and beings which are "as real as"
the people one meets on the street.

I'm livid at psychiatry's narrow attitudes about lucid dreaming and
"astral projection", but I also haven't been pleased with religious
movements or conspiracy theorists.  When things started getting intense
for me, I looked into previously-taboo ideas like chakras and Jesus and
alien mind control.  I was willing to suspend my disbelief in the words
and look for patterns suggesting they were attempts to describe things
that related to me.  My eagerness to explore created vague situations
with "teachers" who seemed more interested in controlling knowledge
than in coming clean about their own uncertainties.

Now I am thick-skinned and skeptical, but the very detailed lucid dream
experiences have not stopped.  For the past year my strongest hope has
been to contact people who are in my situation.  I've tried handing out
my contact information to beings of all sorts while in dreams and
telling them to write me when they wake up, but nothing has arrived.
So I am trying this the "old-fashioned" way.

(Usenet is fairly old fashioned, isn't it?  I tend to like the features
of LiveJournal better ... look me up as LiveJournal user
"realityhandbook" ... some dream documentation and weird theories!)

Hope this spoke to at least someone out there.  Best wishes and I will
try to keep up with posts here.  Maybe I'll even figure out how to
reply to some!