jameswharris

Beautiful Bassett Hound and Really Big Lobster

In my dream I was outside, in a public place. There were no buildings. I saw a few trees in planters. A man stood talking to a group of people. I was one of them. We sat on rock benches and I felt I was in a class. The man talking was a teacher, a Socrates like character. I see the last page of a book. The teacher asks us about the last scene of a book. I’m only vaguely aware of the title of the book, but throughout the dream I struggle to grasp the title. Eventually my confused mind labels it The Great Gatsby. I turn to the back of the book and read the last scene.

“Hey, I don’t remember this scene, and I’ve read this book three times!” I exclaim without hearing my voice. There are only a handful of students around the teacher and we’re all quiet. The teacher pushes us for an answer again. I make a suggestion that I know is wrong and stupid as soon as I say it and the teacher gives some wise reply that shoots me down. In the dream it almost feels like I’m saying real words, or even reading real words, but really it’s only vague concepts and squiggles that look like words. Communicating in dreams is like telepathy.

I can tell there are two characters in the scene. I reread the scene again. For some reason an image of a giant lobster interrupts the dream and I flash on this idea. “One of the characters in the scene is God.” The teacher agrees and the other students start talking excitedly. I study and study the scene but can’t figure out what’s happening. Has a character died and gone to heaven and is talking to God? Or has God come down into the world to tell him something?

Then I have an image of a beautiful bassett hound running, with its huge floppy ears flying around its head. I don’t connect any meaning and all I feel is the desire to buy a bassett hound – could this be a form of subliminal advertising? Then I return to the outdoor classroom and struggle to make something out of the last scene again. We all make suggestions but the teacher isn’t happy but I feel somewhat pleased that I discovered that the mysterious character was God. The dream fades away and I awake.

It’s fascinating to play amateur scientist and try to discover how dreams work. I think there is a mind that experiences dreams that is different from the mind of the waking me. I call it the narrator. This narrator may be a mechanism that the waking me also uses, but I see “the me” of dreams separate from “the me” who is writing this. When you are in a semi-wakeful state you can observe this narrator in action. Random images will appear and bits of meaning will pop into your mind. Dreams appear to be built on a series of still images or crude moving images that the narrator comments on. The narrator makes up meaning for the images. The dream me acts on those suggested meanings.

Take for instance the dream above. I saw a man standing and with a handful of people sitting around him. The narrator informs me without words, “a teacher and his students.” That image could have been anything. The narrator sees the last page of a book and supplies, “the teacher wants to know the meaning of the last scene in the book.” The sleeping me, that is the mechanism of self-awareness, is very dormant but I relate to one of the students. The “me” in the dream isn’t aware of the narrator – it experiences the series of images and thoughts the narrator provides as a whole story.

On rare ocassions I’ve had vivid dreams where the waking “me” is the dream “me.” However, it’s an illusion. If the waking “me” tries to guide the dream it will destroy the dream. The sleeping “me” is passive and must watch the dream like a movie. If the “waking me” tries to think and override the narrator, the dream will fall apart and I’ll awake.

I think the narrator mechanism works in waking life too. If you are at a restaurant and see a young couple sit down nearby, the narrator might tell you, “See that couple, they are on their first date. See how they act nervous…” The narrator can be very convincing, even to the point where you believe it and think what you are seeing is real. This is why cops say they saw a gun when they didn’t. The narrator can see something and tell the cop it’s a gun. The narrator can be very powerful. The narrator thinks much faster than normal self-aware thinking.

Usually dreams relate to the previous days events, but the above dream doesn’t remind me of anything that happened yesterday. I was an English major in college, so the dream does make sense to me. I’m used to trying to figure out what books mean. I’m used to the anxiety of having a professor put pressure on a class to supply an answer. The Great Gatsby is a book that is taught a lot, and last week I read an article suggesting it was the great American novel. I have no idea why the lobster and bassett hound popped into the dream, but the narrator quickly used the one image and made it fit into the story. Maybe if the bassett hound would have stayed long enough the narrator would have made up a new story for the dreamer, a new dream.

Fiction and story telling seem to be at the heart of our minds. We look out at the world and see trees and mountains. It doesn’t take long before we’re making up stories about fairies living the in the trees and gods living on the mountains. Zen masters try to break their students of this habit – to see the world as it is without the stories, but that’s a very hard habit to break. Think of the war in Iraq. Imagine all the stories created by all sides of the conflict. Just think, the Sunnis and the Shiites are killing each other over stories made up thirteen centuries ago. It’s no wonder that some people believe that even our waking real world is a dream, a nightmare.

And finally, at a meta-level, notice how I can take tiny events in my life and turn them into a narrative structure. Observe the narrator.

Heaven, Hell, and the Other Places

I died in my dreams last night. No biggie, I’ve died in my dreams several times over the years. Dying in dreamland is intense. Yesterday I was having some minor heart trouble and last night I dreamed my heart stopped. I felt myself falling. My last thought was, “Here I go” with a sense of complete acceptance, and I let go. All details around me fell away, and the final thing I was aware of was a dull gray light. Everything stopped. That’s when I woke up. It was quite a relief to wake up and be alive. I love being alive.

Dreamland is such a strange place. I’ve died before, and once came to, floating up towards heaven before waking up. My cousins and I had been riding in the back of a station wagon and we were hit by another car with a tremendous bang. Then blackness. Going to heaven was the scariest dream I ever had. I think it was my first time to die in a dream. I’ve since died a few times from endlessly falling into hell. It’s easier to die the atheist’s death where I collapse into black nothingness. It’s always a trauma to survive death and come to in again, and still be in dreamland. Sometimes the shift is to a pleasant new life but the transition is scary. Other times its overhelming and I wake up in a sweat and panic. Then there are times when I come to and I’m living again on another world or in another life. I don’t believe any of these events have real relationship with reality, but I can see how lots of wild ideas got started in the real world over the centuries.

On these other worlds I’ve been flying creatures, swimming creatures and tree swinging creatures. I’ve always assume my brain created these roles for me because I read a lot of science fiction and fantasy. I remember one time dying and ending up in bed with an attractive matronly woman in her sixties, whom I eventually realized was God. Now that was unnerving. What would Freud have made of that? I was over fifty at the time, but I still wonder if God had any age of consent laws to deal with. She had been jolly, warm and caring and when I woke up, I was reminded of when I was a kid and how I felt about big soft grandmotherly women with ample bosoms.

I wonder how many concepts have come into the world from dreams. Reincarnation feels like an idea generated by dreamland. Did people think of talking animals before they dreamed of them? I remember a beautiful dream of being a part of a troop of monkeys, and being in love with a girl monkey. I never knew if we were Earthly monkeys, or monkey-like creatures living on another world. Did we imagine aliens living on other worlds or did our dreams paint those sense of wonder creatures in our mind. I tend to believe that all mysticism comes from dreams or hallicinations, which to me are dreams that leak out into the waking world. Primative people talk much of dreamtime.

I am reminded of a title of a book about Philip K. Dick – “What If Our World Is Their Heaven.” I’ve been to many heavens and hells, to many alien worlds, in my dreams, and I’ve never visited a world that could top our world no matter how wild my imagination got. If there is a heaven, it is this world.

Super Men and Mighty Mice

During the Ozzie and Harriet years, when I was seven and people called me Jimmy, my sister Becky and our best friends Mikey and Patty, would beg old tattered terrycloth towels from our moms and pretend to be George Reeves. We’d tie those old faded pastel rags around our necks, stretch out our arms, hands flat, fingers pointing forward, tilt our heads down and run like Hanna-Barbera cartoon characters, occasionally jumping with all our might, with the hopes of getting airborne like Superman, or at least Mighty Mouse. And when we were burnt out and our little bodies too tired to try any more, we’d go to sleep at night and have flying dreams.

My sister and I moved around a lot while growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, but wherever we lived it was Kidland, either as part of a mob of kids running up and down the middle of our suburban streets, or in packs roaming the woods, or scattered in hordes over the vast plains of school playgrounds. Kidland was great. It was great because there were no adults. It was beyond fantastic because we were all fueled by our imaginations. Television rocket-fueled our little minds, jazzing our kiddie dramas and kicking those dreams into orbit.

A few years down the timeline, during the black-and-white Beverly Hillbillies era, we could be seen in backyards playing astronauts pretending we were Alan Shepard or John Glenn with cheap white plastic helmets on our heads. After that most of my efforts to fly were in my head and inspired by the philosophy of science fiction, especially the grand master, Robert A. Heinlein. Then the I Dream of Jeannie and Bewitched magic charmed us. We all desperately wanted the skills of being able to twitch our noses and make wishes come true with the flourish of a TV sound effect. Can anyone doubt why in the epic times of The Monkees, Star Trek and The Time Tunnel we turned in our terry cloth capes for grooving with micrograms? Later on into the 1970s, after growing up with Archie Bunker, we became disciples of Carlos Castaneda, studying the ancient wisdom of the New Age, or wishing for rides with little green guys of the third kind. And don’t forget our cousins the Jesus Freaks, Hari Krishnas and Moonies who chanted about the transformation of Earth into Heaven.

Is it too much to say that the Baby Boomers wanted transcendence? Why weren’t boomer guys satisfied with putting on our Brooks Brothers and dancing the nine-to-five? Why weren’t our sisters, the boomer gals, so unsatisfied with wearing stockings and bras and staying at home to be queens for a day every day with Donna Reid?

There is always reality. Meridith Grey cannot fly or make McDreamy disappear with a twitch of her nose, even though she has a nose that reminds me of Samatha. And are the post-boomer generations any different from the boomers? Hiro is our kind of guy. During Christmas I listened to my nephew, an Iraqi vet, talk fondly of the golden age of television cartoons, waxing nostalgic with his brothers over favorite episodes of The Transformers. I kept my mouth shut and just listened, but I was thinking, no way man, The Flintstones and Jetsons were the golden age of cartoons. Yet, it didn’t go unnoticed that the next generation wanted to fly too.

Scientific American Questions Ethanol

Last summer brought many stories about the success of ethanol in Brazil during the times gasoline prices were peaking in the U.S. My hopes for the future were boosted by those reports, but the January, 2007 issue of Scientific American has brought me back down to reality. Matthew L. Wald reports in “Is Ethanol for the Long Haul?” that the numbers don’t add up for E85, the ethanol/gasoline mixture planned for flex fuel cars. Ethanol made from sugar cane and cheap labor may be economically sound in South America, but ethanol made from corn, expensive labor, and fossil fuels, will probably not be a practical choice. Nor is ethanol made from corn more environmental friendly than gasoline.

Ethanol made from various cellulose sources, including corn stalks, have a better chance of being an economic alternative to gasoline, but the technology has not be perfected yet. It’s a complex issue. If you grow corn just to convert it into ethanol, all the production costs have to be considered in its comparison to gasoline. If you grow corn for food, and then consider the stalks a byproduct, they can play with the books and make cellulose ethanol look like a better value. It takes a lot of fossil fuels to make and distribute ethanol, so the gain in freedom from the Middle East might be a desert mirage. If we used all the corn we grow for ethanol it will only replace seven percent of gasoline usage. There are more sources for cellulose, so it has a better chance at helping us get off the gasoline addiction.

What bothers me is the attitude that we want an alternative fuel to allow us to live in the same manner we do now. Car companies are showing flex fuel SUVs. The real reality we have to face is driving cars very different from what we drive now, and I don’t think Americans are ready for that. Just think, making cars more efficient by seven percent, which is easy enough to do, could replace the whole concept of corn based ethanol. Making cars twice as efficient would stretch oil supplies twice as long. The key immediate solution here is conservation and efficiency – not alternative fuels. Given time we should be able to perfect an alternate source of personal transportation energy, but I don’t think that time will be short.

This is the last day of 2006 and I marvel at living in the future. When I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s I thought the 1980s was the future, and the years after 2000 would be amazingly futuristic. And there have been lots of amazing changes, but I’m also surprised how so much has stayed the same. There are more people and cars, more technology and wealth, but people and their basic habits seem the same. Our television shows, if broadcast to 1950s TV antennas, would shock the Ozzie and Harriette watching nation, but they would understand everything and recognize the common basic human motivations and instincts.

Real change to help the economy and environment will have to come from leadership at the White House. I think the President will have to ask America to make sacrifices like they did during World War II. And I think making real changes in how we live with the enviornment will eventually bring about a new kind of prosperity. Looking for energy substitutes that allow us to continue living in our energy wasteful ways that hurt the enviornment are not good solutions.

There are thinkers out there that see other solutions, like Rocky Mountain Institute. I’d like to think that by 2027 many of these ideas would be in place, and it would be the dazzling future I expected the future to be when I was a kid.

Saving digital files forever

Will all your music, audio books, photos, movies, creative writing, diaries, blogs, email, web pages, business records, and other digital files be usuable and available in fifty years? I have a few files that I first created on my Commodore 64 back in the early 1980s converted to text files and saved in My Documents. I have some digital photos that are over ten years old. I haven’t been very careful with my MP3 files, and have thrown many of them out. I’ve even lost or misplaced some iTunes and Rhapsody songs that I’ve bought. Mostly, my My Documents folder grows and grows, becoming a giant trunk of junk that I move forward with every new computer. I’ve even started backing it up to an external USB drive – but if thieves stole both my computer and external drive it would all be gone. My wife’s computer is just as junky, plus she buys a lot of online games and if her machine died we’d be hurting for a lot of missing serial numbers.

Until we started scanning in old photos and slides I didn’t worry much about protecting my files. Some of the photos we are scanning are from the 1920s. We’re now in the business of protecting family memories that are 85 years old. I’m thinking of converting some of my record and CD collection that goes back to the 1950s. I’ve even been collecting old audio book tapes and converting them to digital to listen to on my iPod. All this stuff may not represent a lot of money, but it does represent a lot of time.

The only solution I’ve imagined so far is to copy files to my work computer. I’ve already started bringing work files home as a precaution. But it’s not very convenient at all.

I bought a program called Second Copy that automatically copies my hard disk files to my external USB drive. It has a FTP function in the new version 7.0 that I’ve been meaning to try. I’ve wondered about setting up a FTP server at work as a target for my home files. I haven’t asked my boss what he thinks of that, but I’m willing to offer setting up a FTP server at home to send my work files to. I need to research finding a secure FTP program that would run in background on my two machines.

This isn’t a solution for most people, although many people do work with computers and it could become a fairly common solution. There are probably all kinds of legal issues to deal with. Another possibility is making reciprocal deals with friends and family. The trouble with that solution is most people don’t have static IP addresses or even computers with unchanging domain names from a DHCP pool. I do know people play online games so there is a solution for computer to computer communication. I’ll have to research that.

I just did a Google search and discovered a company Mozy.com that promises unlimited online backups for $54.95 a year, or $4.95 a month. That may be far more convenient than messing with FTP servers – if I could trust Mozy. What I really want is a data bank – a bank for my data files that is as trustworthy as my regular bank is for money. I think I’ll clean up my My Documents folder and sign up with Mozy. I’m not sure how long it will take to transfer 60 gigabytes to them, or if they are really sincere about promising unlimited storage.