Vowels and splines
Dream this morning was trying to tell me something useful.... need to write it down before it disappears.

The setting was completely unoriginal. I was working as a technician in an engineering lab, helping a prof set up an experiment. This is what I did for work during the '80s. The experiment had something to do with acoustic properties of various shapes, which was unimportant. (The dream generator explicitly marked these pieces as unimportant.)

Here's the important bit: The prof was telling me that he had worked with grad students from different countries on this type of experiment. He said that the students who came from areas that pronounced certain vowels in certain ways tended to favor linear point-by-point solutions, while students who came from areas that pronounced the vowels in other ways tended to favor solutions by "thirds or fifths", which were closer to nature.

The dream generator was having word-access trouble, which isn't unusual; I can often tell that the story-maker is able to find concepts or pictures but not words. In this case the generator handled the unreachable words in two different ways. It offloaded the missing nationalities onto the prof, who was supposedly being euphemistic; and it used the nearest available terms and blackboard pictures for the missing solution styles.

After waking, I was immediately able to fill in the missing words from the vowels and pictures. Students from Northern European or Teutonic cultures used FIR or LPC solutions, while students from Muslim cultures favored cubic splines, which were more natural. Alternately, "thirds or fifths" could refer to musical intervals, chords, harmony.

I'm pretty sure the message relates to my futile attempts to think about economics in a more or less Islamic style. Not sure yet how a cubic spline (or a chord) will help, but it's clearly an offer of assistance from the dream generator.
  ¶ 2:19 AM