Sunday, August 14, 2005
Random notes [Introspection alert!]
Dreams
Over the years my dream mode has changed, presumably reflecting changes in daytime brain usage. Up till age 33, I was doing jobs with low mental requirements and engaging in considerable social activity on the side: traveling, volunteering, hanging with friends. Dreams were quite dull and standard: houses, womb-escape symbols like narrowing stairways, naked in public, falling, all that textbook stuff.
At 33, after encountering a PC with a primitive sound card, I jumped feet first into graphics programming, which absorbed 100% of my mind for the first time. Suddenly dreams became more structured and closer to reality. Before that point, a naked-teaching dream would have used a superficial childlike view of technical matters. Circuit schematics would look vaguely like circuits but would be meaningless. After that point, if I was nakedly drawing a circuit on the blackboard, it would be fully genuine and often helpful to my current project.
A second change happened around 1998, as my work transitioned toward more graphic design and less programming. Some dreams became fully plotted, with original characters and story-lines that I'd never encountered in books, and often with Lucid segments.
One of those this morning. The world was divided into psychics and non-psychics. The psychics were called sorcerers, wore flowing black robes, and had special privileges. (I've never done any of that role-playing stuff, nor read any books of that type, so have no idea where this came from!) I was a lowly non-psychic; toward the end of the dream, I was cleaning a coffeepot, wishing that I could have the privilege of drinking coffee. At that point I thought, Wait a minute, dammit, this is a dream; if I want coffee, all I have to do is wake up and go into the kitchen. So I did.
--
Semi-related:
After about 5 months of building this illustrated blog, I notice that it makes time slow down in a pleasant way. The Theory of Geritol Relativity is well-known: Time accelerates with increasing age. [Also known as the Lorentz-Welk Contraction.] The previous two years, when I was working hard on courseware projects, ran entirely too fast -- as seen in the rear-view mirror, anyway. Since I started this blog, time has regained much of its old mass and substance. Each of these 5 blog-months feels as solid and long as one courseware-year. And, as Martha would say, that's A Good Thing. Not sure why it's different, though. Described objectively, the work involves the same set of skills. Maybe it's a question of 'dailiness': on the previous projects, I had a year or so to complete an entire blob of stuff, so spent that year in a cycle, adding pieces here and there, debugging the result. With a blog, each day's bit of text and image is new. That's one theory anyway.
-----
Just-onces
Just once I'd like to see a news item relating to Marilyn Monroe that does NOT use the Happy Birthday JFK clip.
Just once I'd like to see a President do the State of the Union the way it was supposed to happen: a document sent to Congress. It was not meant to be a circus.
Just once I'd like to hear a Bush speech that doesn't include the word 'strong' in every sentence.
Just once I'd like to hear Bush talk about economics without using that mysterious technical term 'gooderservice'.
Just once I'd like to get a letter from a charitable organization that doesn't use "Changing the world one _______ at a time" for its slogan.
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Busy signals
The Web, for all of its wondrous complexity, still gets along without the clear and predictable signals of the good old landline phone system. On the telephone, a busy signal means busy; a fast busy means a busy trunk line; a continued ringing means the party isn't answering; a 'disconnected' voice message means the phone is disconnected. The Web has dozens of specific-sounding error messages, but none of them predictably signal the condition they nominally describe. Any one of the messages could, and often does, mean 'temporarily busy'.
=====
Later sidenote about dreams: Most dreams feature familiar people, not original characters. But the familiar characters are an oddly restricted set. They are drawn from the people I knew in the 1970s, or more precisely 1966-1979. People I knew only before high school never appear, and people I met after 1978 never appear, even in dreams that are otherwise set in the present. ¶ 8:54 AM
Over the years my dream mode has changed, presumably reflecting changes in daytime brain usage. Up till age 33, I was doing jobs with low mental requirements and engaging in considerable social activity on the side: traveling, volunteering, hanging with friends. Dreams were quite dull and standard: houses, womb-escape symbols like narrowing stairways, naked in public, falling, all that textbook stuff.
At 33, after encountering a PC with a primitive sound card, I jumped feet first into graphics programming, which absorbed 100% of my mind for the first time. Suddenly dreams became more structured and closer to reality. Before that point, a naked-teaching dream would have used a superficial childlike view of technical matters. Circuit schematics would look vaguely like circuits but would be meaningless. After that point, if I was nakedly drawing a circuit on the blackboard, it would be fully genuine and often helpful to my current project.
A second change happened around 1998, as my work transitioned toward more graphic design and less programming. Some dreams became fully plotted, with original characters and story-lines that I'd never encountered in books, and often with Lucid segments.
One of those this morning. The world was divided into psychics and non-psychics. The psychics were called sorcerers, wore flowing black robes, and had special privileges. (I've never done any of that role-playing stuff, nor read any books of that type, so have no idea where this came from!) I was a lowly non-psychic; toward the end of the dream, I was cleaning a coffeepot, wishing that I could have the privilege of drinking coffee. At that point I thought, Wait a minute, dammit, this is a dream; if I want coffee, all I have to do is wake up and go into the kitchen. So I did.
--
Semi-related:
After about 5 months of building this illustrated blog, I notice that it makes time slow down in a pleasant way. The Theory of Geritol Relativity is well-known: Time accelerates with increasing age. [Also known as the Lorentz-Welk Contraction.] The previous two years, when I was working hard on courseware projects, ran entirely too fast -- as seen in the rear-view mirror, anyway. Since I started this blog, time has regained much of its old mass and substance. Each of these 5 blog-months feels as solid and long as one courseware-year. And, as Martha would say, that's A Good Thing. Not sure why it's different, though. Described objectively, the work involves the same set of skills. Maybe it's a question of 'dailiness': on the previous projects, I had a year or so to complete an entire blob of stuff, so spent that year in a cycle, adding pieces here and there, debugging the result. With a blog, each day's bit of text and image is new. That's one theory anyway.
-----
Just-onces
Just once I'd like to see a news item relating to Marilyn Monroe that does NOT use the Happy Birthday JFK clip.
Just once I'd like to see a President do the State of the Union the way it was supposed to happen: a document sent to Congress. It was not meant to be a circus.
Just once I'd like to hear a Bush speech that doesn't include the word 'strong' in every sentence.
Just once I'd like to hear Bush talk about economics without using that mysterious technical term 'gooderservice'.
Just once I'd like to get a letter from a charitable organization that doesn't use "Changing the world one _______ at a time" for its slogan.
-----
Busy signals
The Web, for all of its wondrous complexity, still gets along without the clear and predictable signals of the good old landline phone system. On the telephone, a busy signal means busy; a fast busy means a busy trunk line; a continued ringing means the party isn't answering; a 'disconnected' voice message means the phone is disconnected. The Web has dozens of specific-sounding error messages, but none of them predictably signal the condition they nominally describe. Any one of the messages could, and often does, mean 'temporarily busy'.
=====
Later sidenote about dreams: Most dreams feature familiar people, not original characters. But the familiar characters are an oddly restricted set. They are drawn from the people I knew in the 1970s, or more precisely 1966-1979. People I knew only before high school never appear, and people I met after 1978 never appear, even in dreams that are otherwise set in the present. ¶ 8:54 AM
