I'm with Giulietta Masina in a restaurant and realize I'm dreaming. The dream becomes unstable for a second as I try to control it. Masina looks frightened, as if I am not supposed to have figured out that the dream is a farce. She says, “I am not prepared for this.” She didn’t expect me to “wake up.” Remarkably,  I remember my earlier pledges to ( Read more... )

I'm stuck in a dream within a dream. I keep trying to end the dream according to its rules, but I do not succeed because I don't know it's a dream-within-a-dream. The dream goes on and on, the longest I can remember. Eventually a courier on motorcycle delivers a hand-written letter to me. In bold handwriting - all but exclaiming "you idiot!" - the ( Read more... )

I don't think I can agree with the poststructuralist argument that everything is derived from languages. No. I think that there are other modalities that are non-linguistic. I am thinking of emotional and mathematical modalities, the two modalities that seem to go into creating the infinitely meaningful but non-linguistic art of music. Who could ( Read more... )

Social interactions are difficult. I am likely to have lifelong social anxiety. This is not for any fearfulness of others on my part, but my hypersensitivity to the presence of others and myself. And this sensitivity is not something I wish to part with, necessary, as it is, for sustaining my understanding of human emotions as well as preserving ( Read more... )

The idea is that the body and brain function on a 24-hour circadian schedule, requiring roughly 16 hours of waking-time followed by 8 hours of sleep, and rest periods interspersed. This is supposed to be founded on biological constants, evolutionary cycles that have been in effect for thousands of years - although even this is extremely suspect. ( Read more... )

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There is this curious and wonderful point you may reach in the between-state. I do not know if it is lucid hypnagogia or lucid dreaming or what, but it feels suddenly that you can see even though you know your eyes are closed. It is so strong that you feel like you can read text laid out in front of you though your eyes are closed. A feeling of ( Read more... )

I finally face my freak wave recurring nightmare. I’m swimming and looking at 30-foot surf threatening me. I swim toward dry land. I swim up and over a terrace only to discover that water is there too, and waves are coming from that direction as well. I’m caught between two wave breaks and have no escape. I become lucid, remembering that I have ( Read more... )

It begins as a bad dream. I’m at a college. I don’t recognize it. I have some whorish woman hanging around my room, trying to seduce me. I want nothing to do with it and have to rather forcibly eject her. A few minutes later a student she sends in comes to hurt me or torture me for rejecting the woman. He’s drawing little red X’s on me: torture ( Read more... )

An insight came to me about masculine anger. Just from watching surfer-gang tough guys surfing angrily and pushing people around with their localism, as compared to the Dharma-surfer's feminine embrace and love of the wave, I somehow made the connection to a deep kind of Freudianism. What are they so angry about, these thugs, I thought. It doesn't ( Read more... )