Catmachine

Firstly the disclaimer: yes, I know what dreams are likely to be in reality. No need for any "well actually" here as this is not a psychological treatise, it's a flight of fancy. A stream of consciousness. So please indulge me. There's nothing quite as frustrating as having an involving and fascinating dream only for the details to evaporate rapidly on awakening. The emotions linger around the head affecting the mood like the perfume of someone fascinating who's just left the room before you got to properly talk to them at a party. Your only chance if if they return - you can't follow them because you might get lost. Besides, what if they're busy? They're bound to be talking to someone else. And you don't want to bother them. Although to be honest I can't remember the last time I went to a party. When this happens with dreams you simply have to comfort yourself with the effect they've had on your mental state. If you're lucky it...

I’ve talked before – both here and in other blogging arenas – about how locations and landscapes in dreams seem to be consistent from dream to dream, almost as if there is a place we go when we sleep, or if the brain retains the architecture of dreams like a computer storing the map of an imaginary place on its hard drive ready for when we next play that game. I don’t think we’re computers though, and even though people describe the latter as “electronic brains” I suspect they way they work is very different, just as different as eyes and cameras. A lot of what we see and the resolution is down to the brain interpreting visual (and I suspect other) signals to give us a picture that makes sense. This is probably why I see cats both when there are cats there and when there are not. It makes sense for there to be cats. But I digress. There are a multitude of dream buildings and cities that are often there when I fall asleep – the twisted versions of childhood houses and the large oceanic ...

Everyone has experienced The Confusion. We all know what it's like. We're on our way home from work after a long day. It's later than it should be. We're sitting on the top deck of an overlit bus. Outside it's dark and it's pissing with rain, the hateful hiss of tyres on wet tarmac a cosmic background radiation to our fatigue. Red traffic lights shout their noiseless commands into the chaotic evening, fragmented into violent splatters by the rain drops on the window. Sleep drags at the back of our eyeballs and we close our eyes, leaning our head against the glass. But the vibration of the engine makes dropping off impossible, our skull reverberating from hundreds of tiny impacts. The traffic is moving so slowly it would probably be quicker to get off and walk, but there's the rain to contend with so we stay on board until the last possible moment.  It's only a short walk from the bus stop to our flat but even that's more than enough time to g...

Recurring dreams don't have to be recurring nightmares. Most of the time they are though. You know the ones, where the creatures are coming to get you . They never quite succeed but as you wake in the dead of night the fear that they might do next time is very real. But I used to have a recurring dream that wasn't a nightmare. In fact it was quite the opposite. If you've been reading this blog for a while you may recall that one of my favourite bands of all time are Lush. An account of following their Split tour around in 1994 appeared on this very blog back in 2011 ( part 1 , part 2 , part 3 , part 4 ). Due to the tragic death of their drummer Chris there were no more Lush gigs after 1996. I don't think anyone expected there to be. Except, for some reason, my subconscious. From the first few years of the twenty-first century onwards I started having dreams that I was going to a Lush gig. It was always a gig by the reformed band (as opposed to a dream set in ...

Ah, I'll do it when I get home , I think excitedly. And I visualise it in my head, sitting at the computer and doing the thing which has just excited my mind whether it is writing, coding or photoshopping. Except in my head I am still sitting at my computer in my old flat even though I moved out of there a couple of months ago. The human brain maintains a model of the world around it and when things change in reality it takes far longer for these changes to percolate into the mindscape of the head. The older you are the longer it takes for these changes to kick in. In dreams of course it takes even longer. When asleep I still seem to be living in the house I lived in as a teenager (although oddly am the age I am now). These mind quirks dragging me back into the past have of late caused me to become increasingly worried about dropping dead although I suspect that turning fifty also has a lot to do with these concerns. When I was a kid the idea of being fifty was the same as ...

Do you ever have dreams in which there are two versions of the same person? The strangest thing is that in the dream you don't really notice. It's really quite odd - there's Jack and of course there's Jack as well. Often one of them is a lesser instantiation - they have less talent or inspire less fear. You say I thought Jack was frightening but they're nothing compared to Jack! Sometimes it's something less negative - Jill will show you something and you think That's interesting - I bet Jill would like that, I'll have to remember to tell her about it! This last one sometimes occurs in real life - when Jill shows you something just for a second you think that Jill would be interested and resolve to tell her before remembering that the notion is ridiculous. It must be caused by an error in brain processing. A person is probably represented in the memory space by a complex object with myriad properties and associations. Perhaps sometimes two ver...

It has been of mild annoyance to me recently that I seem to have been having quite interesting dreams and yet before I can get to a keyboard to record them, they evaporate leaving only a sense of their ambience - if I'm lucky a pleasant and exciting one. I have already discussed on this blog why dreams might have to evaporate , but of course that isn't to say that they always do. Sometimes they stick . And sometimes the ones that stick are the nightmares. This is probably advantageous. Vividly remembering frightening things means we avoid repeating them and consequently may live to pass on the genes for vividly remembering frightening things.  The problem comes when dreams are so frightening that they pass this threshold - there's nothing you can do to avoid them and if you're unlucky they will recur  again and again and again... I have already covered the recurring dreams I used to have about the creatures called Dobods . But one foe appeared ...

There's nothing quite as interesting as one's own dreams but the downside of this is that there's nothing potentially as boring as other people's. However one interesting thing about anyone's dreams is that if they write them up before falling asleep they may find that this captures details which they then completely forget. The next time they awake from consciousness they  won't remember them. At all. This may be to do with the way consciousness divides up time between the long and short term memory. I suspect that the short-term memory consists of "today" or in other words the amount of time since the last sleeping. This is how we distinguish today from yesterday. Today is now , we are conscious and living on our wits; memory of things that happened earlier that day feel very different from the memories of things that happened the day before, even though the difference in time between them is negligible. The important thing is that they happene...

As I've discussed before, there's a very good reason we don't remember our dreams for long. Feedback. Howlaround. To reiterate; there are two kinds of memory, long and short term. The long term is our hard disk, the storage of time past, whereas the short term is our working memory space, the RAM in which our consciousness occurs and in which reality seems to take place.  Sometimes a backfiring brain will temporarily mistake the latter for the former and misidentify what's happening right now as a memory of the past, hence deja vu .  Sometimes this feels more like the memory of a dream, a clue to its origins. We sleep to allow the short term memories of the day to be processed and filed in long-term storage; dreams are a side effect of this process.  If we remembered them as well they'd have to be processed and filed along with the rest of the day's memories producing their own side-effect dreams which in turn would have to be processed and so on ad infin...

When I was a child I had an enduring fantasy that I was not in fact of this world but was an alien, sent to observe these strange ape-like beings and send reports back to my superiors on Antares.  The details weren't always the same of course and the science fictional colour and background grew ever more complex as I reached my teens. However, when this notion first started I am sure it was a lot simpler. I don't recall its beginning, it felt like something that was always part of me. However, my earliest clear memory of "being an alien" is from 1973 when I arrived at my new school in Muswell Hill.  This was the first time I had to play football and I loathed it. It wasn't just the game itself, it was the football teacher Mr Gibbins who was also my class teacher; a moron and a bully.  He was also obsessed with football.  I didn't like football so he instantly took against me. It was his exhortations to " Face me! " or " Face the goal! "...

Kernel Panic Tomorrow morning is when I go into hospital to have a general anaesthetic for the very first time. It's an interesting concept. Looking at the operation of the brain as analogous to that of a computer it's more like a hard reboot, actually being switched off and on again as opposed to mere sleep which is more comparable to being in stand-by or, well, sleep mode. Will I feel any different afterwards? I'm hoping that such a restart will clear out any unwanted program loops, neuroses that have been running unchecked ever since a random combination of circumstances and input set them off. Mentally I should feel better, that is once I've stopped feeling nausea. And, most interestingly, what will happen to my consciousness? I have heard that by all accounts it's as if no time has passed; as the inhabitants of the Dollhouse say " Did I fall asleep? " This makes sense from a materialistic point of view. No new data is entered or data sorting takes...

One day I hope to be asked " Where do you get your ideas from? " as it will mean that I have written a work of fiction that has impressed someone and is original enough for them to wonder how I managed to think it up. At the moment the only person likely to ask me that is myself and unfortunately I don't yet have an answer. Any regular readers may recall that I previously wrote about different types of writers, the architects and archaelogists , and identified myself as a member of the latter camp. I discover the story as I go along; in many ways I don't "get" the ideas from anywhere, the ideas come to me. As I mentioned before it can be difficult to write short stories as an archaeologist; it can be even more difficult to write a synopsis. This is a problem, because I need to write a synopsis, a summary for a piece of short fiction I am planning to write. At the moment it's not important what this actually is, suffice to say there's a deadline an...

"If work were so pleasant, the rich would keep it for themselves." Mark Twain Somehow I find myself already sitting here by the window at home with the daylight fading on the final twenty four hours of my precious time off. It doesn't seem fair somehow. It's almost as if I've hardly had any time off at all and yet simultaneously it manages to seem quite a while since I was last at work. It's always the same at this time of year. One of my main problems is that the maximum time I can take off in one chunk is around two weeks which, what with the weekends, amounts to sixteen days in total. This might sound like a lot but in reality it's only just about enough time for my mind and body to recover and for me to start feeling even remotely human again. But then of course I only get to experience this refreshed feeling for one day at most before having to restart the whole cycle of running myself into the ground again. That's the trouble with having a so-c...

It's that strange time of year again, when, due to the odd way I visualise numbers and dates , I start to get (santa) claustrophobia. There is something about the period between Christmas and New Year that feels the wrong size. The whole of the final quarter of the year seems to be a build up to the festive season, which whatever your belief system and curmudgeonity-level is at least a break from the day to day grind of everyday life and a chance to relax and recharge the batteries. What's more, if you're fortunate, you get over a week off work gratis without having to use up any valuable leave days. Then after the blowout of 25th December you crawl up through the trapdoor into 26th and realise there's nowhere to go. It's not so much another storey like the rest of the weeks have been, but the attic of the year, and not one that's been given a swanky loft makeover either - this is the old fashioned kind with bare beams, darkness, spiders, old cardboard boxes, ...

I've spent the last few blog entries if not explaining it away then at least arguing that an afterlife is unlikely and that this is all we've got. This isn't as cheerless a claim as it might first sound. Many materialists gloomily cry " This is all there is! ", their faces contorted in melancholia (and, not to put too fine a point on it, no small measure of glee at spreading the bad news). I don't subscribe to this point of view; I'm trying to explore and expand my knowledge of our existence. I'm not starting from a traditional position of Heaven and Earth and then scribbling out great swathes of the firmament; I'm starting from a single cell and marveling at how far we've come and what it means to be conscious in the four dimensions of spacetime, and many worlds of the quantum multiverse. However, my subconscious obviously isn't entirely happy with my recent activities as several times over the last few days I've dreamed about the af...

Boundaries can be the most fascinating places in the universe. They come in many kinds. Some are physical borders such as the change from desert to jungle, a river, the boundary between the heliopause and interstellar space. Sometimes they’re territorial or imaginary in origin such as the border between England and Scotland or the Greenwich Meridian. Occasionally the latter try and make themselves the former, as happened with the Berlin Wall , the Maginot Line or the Gaza Strip Barrier . Generally though in the grand scheme of things these political borders are invisible; even the Great Wall of China , originally a territorial border and allegedly visible from space, no longer marks the boundary between the People’s Republic and its next-door neighbours and in the twenty-first century is merely the fossil of Qin Shi Huang ’s ambition. Some borders are a state of mind, sometimes literally. They bisect the fourth dimension of your lifestream, lines drawn between knowledge and ign...

For some reason I seemed to spend the last couple of hours of the night awake, wondering what I was going to write here. At the last minute I fell asleep and started dreaming. Once again I was in Pendaleon House, the place my paternal grandparents lived throughout the seventies and eighties. I suppose it's not surprising that it's stuck in my head so much; from the ages of five to at least twenty when I went there it was a treat. A holiday, a few days off from the nightmare of school. Plus I suppose it could be said that my grandparents spoiled all three of us (when you're a kid that's a good thing). And more even than that. The house had a surprisingly large garden with an unexpected number of sheds. My sister and I discovered a way into the extensive shrubbery which became our own version of Narnia, "Tufty", a land ruled by a king with a keen interest in photography. On our second expedition into Tufty we discovered it was several hundred years later and th...

As a child I discovered that the only ways to beat the Evil V were either to fiddle with the curtains until they were entirely shut or to simply open them. Sometimes this was more difficult than it sounds. I well remember one occasion - I was still in a bunk bed so must have been pre-eight - when I awoke early in the morning and opened my eyes to see the Evil V hanging there looking at me. I had to get out of bed, go over to the window and open the curtains. I scrambled down to the foot of the bed and reached for the curtains only to awake to find myself still lying motionless back in the bed, eyes barely open; but open enough to still see the Evil V hovering, smirking. This went on for a while. I would seemingly get up and reach for the curtain only to discover that I hadn't moved; furthermore that I couldn't move. Once I actually managed to open the curtains, although the fact that I did so by playing a fanfare on a trumpet was a bit of a giveaway that it was merely anot...