Ten Years Apocalypse-Free
Happy ten years since Judgement Day! Remember, living as a nukaholic means taking it one day at a time - every day that you wake up and don't accidentally start World War III is a success.
Oh, and also happy tenth birthday this week to Sluggy Freelance, grand champion of webcomics.
Dreamlog: China and Lavender
I am taking part in an extremely high-budget live-action roleplaying game which is running over the course of a weekend or longer. The group organising the game has obtained the exclusive use of several city streets in what I think may be Wellington, including an entire Victorian-era shopping arcade. The game's story is a Victorian fantasy and involves a group of children who are supernatural beings being chased by shadowy forces. There is much hiding and running involved - there is a sort of live-action arcade as well as puzzle element. I hide in an upstairs room and watch as the game master's team, playing my top-hatted adversaries, scour the streets looking for my companions. I give them the slip for now and duck back through the arcade. I think some form of magical travel or gateway (possibly simulated by a bus) to a second 'set' a few blocks away has been involved, but I have safely returned. We are about halfway through the story, I think. A team of decorators is clearing out one of the antique shops and is replacing it with a new one which will be used later in the story. Every one of the storefronts in this arcade has multiple uses in the game and we are constantly running around stealing, buying or trading chintzy artifacts like china cups and clocks and the like. I marvel at the expense which this game is taking, which must rack into the millions.
I am in an upstairs room with my father, mother and a few friends. My father is extremely excited, as the opportunity for a business venture he has been thinking about for years is opened. He is going to cash out his life insurance, travel to America and start up a firm. Somehow he is not concerned about the risks should be fail. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. He is buoyantly optimistic and seems sometime in his 40s and as I think about it on waking, not even my own father at all but someone else's.
I am listening to him and reading a coffee table book in the same room about architecture and ecology. There is a beautifully photographed story about a famous American skyscraper, in New York or possibly Chicago, and how a problem involving an infestation of wild lavender on its roof was solved. The roof was sloping at an almost 45 degree angle; on the right side of the roof and going all the way up was an Art Deco 'water feature', a staircase down which transparent fluid fell, but it was actually an oil fountain. (The building possibly belonging to Standard Oil or similar; 1939 World's Fair kind of feel to it). Somehow the architect 'trained' the lavender to grow up this oil fountain staircase, which it found appealing, and not across the rest of the roof (which was damaging the structure). The article described how this was a 'secret' bit of history about the building, as everyone thought the plant/oil combination had been designed from the start, and also how this revealed a lot of science about plants. The photographs were full-page and stunningly crisp, the slanting roof of the building white against an almost Greek blue sky, the translucent sheets of oil, the purple mossy lavender.
Influences: the life insurance bit seems to be inspired by a TV life insurance ad. Something about the 'lavender' makes me think 'water hyacinth' but I haven't read anything about that for years. 'Children who are supernatural beings' makes me think of my reading of reviews for John C Williams' 'Orphans of Chaos' series.
Dreamlog: Frozen Food
I am with my parents in a cafe, eating an ice-cream bar. It is one of the best ice-cream bars I have ever tasted.
I am managing the frozen foods department of a supermarket. There seems to be a restructure looming. A customer wants a refund because their child tripped on the high step entering the freezer section. I search for boxes on the shelves, but we seem to be running out of product. I discuss with the other managers how long the store can hold out before we get bought out by our competitor.
Intertwined with this are diagrams and schematics of my software project, where functions appear as ice cream bars.
Project Love
The reason why I am interested in nonviolence is because it appears to be intertwined, at a deep sub-molecular level, with spirituality, and particularly the pragmatic, results-oriented kind of spirituality which manifests itself in literal miracles. It's annoying and awkward but there you are. Here's Agnes Sanford in 1947 in 'The Healing Light':
He had seen, for the first time, the working of that force that will eventually take the place of bombs and shells upon this earth. For as soon as enough people are able to use the power of love in such a way as to create thereby a perfect self-defense, wars will be outmoded. When one can obtain justice and right and friendly cooperation without money and without price, without bloodshed and without pain, it will no longer be sensible to fight for them.
"If an armed burglar broke into your house with intent to kill," the old question goes, "What would you do? Fight him, or lie still and let him kill your wife or child?"
Silly old question. One would do neither. One would project into the burglar's mind the love of God, by seeing him as a child of God and asking God to bless him. And if one were strong enough in faith and love, the burglar's mind would change. He would leave the family unharmed and go away.
"But hardly anyone can do that!" the answer comes.
Obviously. For if we could, we would not need to resort to war in order to defend ourselves. And we had best learn to do it, for until we do, we must suffer. Until we know the method of love and brotherhood, our choice of weak non-resistance or self-defense is only a choice of evils.
Project love. How do we go about doing that? How do you even begin to start training? What's the equivalent of basic martial arts? Are there dojos you can learn this stuff? Courses where one can practice? And what kind of politics - or metapolitics perhaps - does something like this translate into? It doesn't really map onto either Marxism, religious conservatism, libertarianism, or even law-abiding liberalism. I feel naked and alone pretty much everywhere on the political spectrum - about the only party anywhere that has nonviolence as a principle are the Greens, and some varieties of anarchist.
(This is in the context, mind you, of a practical how-to manual for literal physical healing using the power of your mind, not an abstract philosophical text. The existence of anomalous powers for healing is taken as a given.)
Dreamlog: Saucer redux
Hmm. Just now was watching an episode of Numb3rs and they briefly showed a Lifter. Which reminds me to go check JLN's website and I end up watching this video of his Coanda Effect UAV. Which I've probably seen before, but still it's a cool video and I wasn't consciously thinking about it until the TV reference prompted me.
The interesting thing is that it's very much reminiscent of the UAV image from my last dream. Not identical with the shape, but certainly the flight handling pattern. Close enough to count as a precog hit? Or a delayed unconscious motivation to visit the site? No obvious hits on any other elements of recent dreams.
Dreamlog: Saucers and Pod Hotels
Fragments from this morning. It's an 'airport dream' again.
I am on holiday, visiting my parents. Apparently I will be travelling on shortly to some kind of meeting or conference. I see images of something like a salt flats or desert, covered in roads or runways, reminiscent of Nazca lines or Burning Man. The alarm clock (in-dream) rings insistently. My father has modified it somehow. I wake up briefly.
I am in an aeroplane on the runway, waiting to depart. There are four or five older women in my line of seats. I am telling them my story, whatever it is. They are sympathetic. We have some kind of party, standing, as the plane lifts off. I feel comforted and among friends. A small saucer-like device, looking very much like a modern US military ducted-fan drone, hovers near the runway, tilting and circling to get a look at us as we leave the ground. I explain the principles of operation of Viktor Schauberger's Repulsine to my seat-mate.
I am on the road outside a small bed-and-breakfast guest house in an unknown country. I think my parents are with me again. On the lawn outside the guest house is new addition, a kind of automated self-service one-person 'pod hotel', like a giant vending machine. The front is transparent and inside is a made-up bed, barely enough room to lie down in, and a set of packaged foods. One can insert coins or card, get in and stay the night without ever seeing a human. It's significantly cheaper than the normal full-service stay. Presumably it was added recently by popular demand for budget tourists. The machine is new and shiny and has novelty value, but it is cramped. I debate the cost savings of this against going into the house and getting a real bed.
Stranger
I'm sorry baby
Your dreams never come true
But your nightmares maybe
Minuit
I find this disturbing.
I remember growing up in the late 70s/early 80s at school, hearing the 'Stranger Danger' mantra at school and vague warnings about adults trying to lure children into cars with lollies. Never, ever, ever get in a car with someone you don't know. Run! It was never really explained exactly what Very Bad Things would happen to us if we got abducted, so of course we tended to imagine the worst. At least, I know I did. It was a scary time in my life for other reasons - religion, family, and nuclear war all lining up for a piece of my sanity.
I suppose as an adult I've got fairly blase about this stuff, since child abuse by family and trusted caregivers rather than in-broad-daylight abduction by outright strangers has saturated most of the headlines since the 1990s. There's been a sort of assumption - at least in my conscious mind - that it really doesn't happen here, or not anymore, and maybe that the Stranger Danger scare in my childhood years was just an urban myth, a few big cases blown out of all proportion, and then a fiction publishing sub-industry of grim 'serial killer' police procedurals solidifying the Twisted Lone Psycho myth into a sort of 1990s/2000s morality play.
But I don't think my subconscious ever really forgot. I mean, I know it didn't. The idea of just getting snatched out of the blue haunted me for years, and is still there, pretty much. And I guess I never did grow up that much, since I still can't really parse out in my head just what kind of dynamics are going on in a situation like that.
And now, three times. In my city. My safe, ordinary, boring city. Three times a child at or near school (the same school, even) has been accosted, in a situation right out of the Stranger Danger 'duck and cover' scenario that seemed so laughable. In each case, it seems the kid was smart enough to run and get help.
I don't know why this creeps me out as much as it does. Why it bothers me more than the horrific cases of domestic violence to children that have happened in NZ recently. The whole betrayal of trust from family thing is one of the most basic fears there is - why doesn't it reach me like this does?
Maybe it's because I grew up feeling unsafe in my own head, and my gut's take on it is that danger from family is bad, but it's something you can get to understand, predict, live with. It's not good, but you can cope, for some factor of coping. You build structures of emotional walls, segregate the weirdness, keep it under control. You go into combat mode, lock down hard, go quiet and cold and precise inside, and do what needs to be done. The true realisation of the damage, the aftermath, comes later in life, when you look back at what you should have had and what you got instead. What you are.
But violence out of nowhere is just weird and leaves you shocked, gasping, no place to turn and no-one to come and save you. You don't even have that inner smirking voice saying you silly silly person, you knew that was coming didn't you. You should have been smarter, harder, older.
No, I think more likely it's because I used to think the world was a scarier place than it turned out to be, so flashes of seeing that some of those old fears weren't entirely wrong leave me sweating. What if all the others turn out to have been true too? And after all the emotional work I've gone through to try to get away from them?
It's like finding out that the bogeyman was real, after all.
Stranger.
You know who he is. Your parents talk in hushed voices about him when you're around. But never quite hushed enough that you can't make out the words, here and there, no matter how much you wish you couldn't. The words are how he finds you. He's that dark figure beside your window. You see him crouch in the bushes. He loves bushes. He's wearing dark clothes, loose fitting. There's a hood over his head. You can't quite make out the face - and you never will. He has a van. Maybe it's an unmarked van. They don't have unmarked vans in this country, but the Stranger lives in the country of dreams, and there he is the police. Kids who see him - who get seen by him - who meet those black holes he has for eyes - they just vanish, and don't come back. Ever.
And no matter how you try not to think about it, each night as you fall toward sleep, you feel him out there. Waiting.
He doesn't ever have to move. He just stays there, night after night, in that dark shadow in the bushes beside the window beside your bed. You know he's not really there but it doesn't help. You know you don't want to, but you won't have a choice. Because he's like gravity. Sooner or later, you're going to come to him.
Everyone does, in the end.
Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave
Woohoo! A serious article about the history and influence of the first-ever Adventure Game, Colossal Cave!
And discussion on the venerable rec.arts.int-fiction .
I did some web-digging a year or so back about the real Mammoth/Colossal/Bedquilt cave system. It's Pretty Darn Interesting.
Settling back to enjoy a good read.
Dreamlog: Five Years To The Day
I dreamed about both of my parents last night.
I am walking at night in the city with my father. We step into a shabby cafe. It is smoky and crowded with surly drunks. They make rude comments as we approach the bar. The scene fades.
My mother has died, suddenly, and not from illness. It is five years to the day since some important event. We all wonder at this. It seems very important. I have a curious sense of dream-deja-vu - I am aware that I am dreaming, that this is not in fact how my mother died in real life, but I am certain that I have dreamed this scene before, or that it is part of a recurring dreamscape, in exactly the same way that I recognise certain locations like the brick building or the port city. I seem to have a five-point list of dream features that I want to remember, but as I make the final transistion to waking mind all but the 'five years' evaporate.
Extraordinary Knowing
I've finally finished Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer's Extraordinary Knowing: Science, Skepticism, and the Inexplicable Powers of the Human Mind.
If I were putting together a short introductory reading list about the state of scientific ESP / psi / anomalous cognition research in the 21st century (leaving the deeper spiritual implications for the moment in the too-socially-awkward basket), I would include at least Irreducible Mind, Entangled Minds, Mind-Reach, and this book. But if I only had one book with which to capture the attention of an interested layperson, it would be this one. Mayer writes lucidly, engagingly and in the first person, but she also writes from the viewpoint of a staunch scientist who has had to come to terms with the reality of anomalous human knowledge and is willing to confront wherever this strange journey takes her.
This includes a journalist-like roundup of the current leading researchers (Puthoff, Radin, Jahn et al) and methodologies (Zener cards, Remote Viewing, DMILS, SPECT, ganzfeld and the PEAR/Noetic Science autonomic entrainment setups), plus an outline of the major skeptics and historical controversies. Most of these I've encountered previously, such as in Radin's work, but Mayer brings a few new angles and a new perception, as a psychologist and a human being with a passionate interest in both the reality of psi and why the subject still remains so taboo in mainstream science.
Of all the books on the subject of psi or spirituality I've read so far, Mayer's comes across as one of the freshest and most exciting. Her comments about psi-knowing being like gestalt visual perception ('daytime eyes and nighttime eyes') are intriguing and something I had not heard previously, and the four-quadrant matrix comparing psychology to physics (conscious vs unconscious / tangible vs intangible) looks like an interesting way of approaching the similarities and differences between the two worlds. Her remarks about Freud's personal belief in telepathy sit nicely alongside the Irreducible Mind focus on Myers' broader treatment of the 'subliminal' as opposed to the 'unconscious'. I especially like her interest on 'what does psi feel like' (and her conclusion that it's a very similar state to 'flow experiences') - as it's a long-neglected but vital element of the puzzle. But it's her stories about the suppression (self-suppression, often) of discussion of anomalous cognition in the scientific and medical world that seem the most human and compassionate, and give me the greatest hope for the future.
It is a sad footnote to this wonderful book that Mayer died (of complications from a long-term illness) shortly after the manuscript was completed. I would have loved to have read what else she might have written on the subject.
A Youtube video of Mayer talking about the book before her death.
