Only in dreams does beer not spill

In a dream I knocked over a full glass or bottle of beer. Not a drop came out.

The above is from a note in May 2014.

How do we dream something physically impossible but in the dream believe its reality.

For years I haven’t had any flying dreams or dreams of levitating over a floor and skating forward.  Could this mean I’ve settled down and no longer think I can do everything?

Sometime in the last two months I’ve had a recurrence of dreaming of a glowing fire in something that should not be burning.  In the dream nothing is consumed.

I heard on a recent “To the Best of Our Knowledge” that thoughts can be captured from one animal and replayed in the brain of another animal, inducing false memory.  Will sometime we be able to capture our dreams and replay them when we are conscience.

What are the legal implications of this?  Could the authorities read our minds?  Could the authorities put a false memory in our heads and get us to confess to something we never did?

Exodus Decoded: separating myth and reality

I watched "The Exodus Decoded" the other night, produced and narrated by Simcha Jacobovici.  It had lots of fascinating facts and conjectures, but it was overproduced with complicated sets and some overreach.  It is fascinating to consider how some unusual natural phenomena are attributed to divine intervention.

In this case, it was the explosion of the mega-volcano Santorini or Thera in 1628 or according to some as late as 1500.

"Santorini" from Wikipedia gives some interesting information and further references on both the Exodus and Atlantis connections.

"The Exodus Decoded" has been disputed by many but others corroborate his general outline.  One is Barbara J. Siversen's "The Parting of the Sea: How Volcanoes, Earthquakes, and Plagues Shaped the Exodus Story.  Another is "Thera and the Exodus" by Riian Booysen.

One of my own conjectures is that the Thera eruption may also be the basis of the Biblical flood story.

So many books and so little time!!

A couple of interesting quotes

The first is from the panel, appointed by and funded by Toyota to look into its safety problems.  The Star Tribune, 2011-05-24, Business quoted the panel that Toyota noted its success in saving over $100 million by negotiating a limited recall of all-weather floor mats".  The Strib wrote this as "an example of what the independent panel called the automaker's view of regulation as an 'adversarial process' that considers blocked regulations to be 'wins.'"

Gosh, too bad more complainers of government overregulation aren't caught with their hands in the cookie jar.

The second is some words of wisdom in Sheri S. Tepper's "The Visitor", a post apocalypse science-fantasy: "You asked for wisdom?  Hear these words.  Nothing limits intelligence more than ignorance; nothing fosters ignorance than one's own opinions; nothing strengthens opinions more than refusing to look at reality."

The problem is what is reality: we are spending too much or we are not investing enough?

Newspeak in action!

Apropos the manipulation of reality, check out this video that Al Jazeera English gave a link to:

http://www.collegehumor.com/video/6465342/twin-baby-talk-translated

The kids are very animated and engrossed in their "dialog".  Does their dialog make any more sense than the captions that have beed added about Libya?

It was a story supposedly about the media manipulation in the Ivory Coast, see http://english.aljazeera.net/programmes/listeningpost/2011/04/201149855326742.html

I was disappointed in the text of the page.  It seemed to barely touch the Ivory Coast, but listed stories in many other areas.

But then I discovered that I was only being teased to listen to and watch a 25 minute program - Listening Post.

BTW, Radio des Nations Unies has been covering Côte d'Ivoire extensively on its 15-minute daily podcast.  Unfortunately, my French is not good enough to get more than a general sense of what is being said.

Has this prediction become true?

"In a way, the world-view of the [Manipulators] imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it.  They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening.  By lack of understanding, they remained sane.  They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird."

Who are the manipulators?  In George Orwell's "1984" it is the Party.  Who would it be in our world: corporations, the military-industrial complex, the national security establishment, the Tea Party, …?

Could the attack on public education be an attempt to ensure that people are incapable of understanding the manipulations?  Could the attack on true health care be an obfuscation to cloud understanding.  Could the use (or misuse) of words like patriotism, free market, tax burden, job creation, and on and on be used as "flagrant violations of reality"?

Could all this manipulation be a means to confuse people so that they became "not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening" and therefore not even show up to vote?

Reality in dreams, dreams in reality

Last night I had a dream about wrapping presents. One of the presents was food and we had to hide it from the dog. I suddenly woke up with the thought that we had no dog. We haven't for about nineteen years.

I went back to sleep, probably had some other dreams, and then one in which a salesman was trying to get me to sign for a car. I was reluctant and woke up with the realization we didn't need a car; we had recently bought a car.

I find it interesting how often we have dreams that we think are the real world.

But then in the real world we have dreams about what we will do. Some will come true; some won't.

I long had a dream of visiting Europe again and visiting friends I have living there. Now I've given that up because I don't want to fly again. The last trip to Japan was too much sitting still for too long. And all the security hassle at either end makes the sitting still even more burdensome.

I have all kinds of dreams about what we will do with our Brimson property. We long ago gave up on building a house there. Now it's a lot to fix the floor insulation of the cabin; something I keep putting off every year as we have more squirrels with silicosis. I have a dream of opening up all the trails I once had cut. Will I spend enough time there? Even with the new chipper, it takes about four hours to sixty feet, what with the gathering of the brush and branches to stuff into the chipper. Four hours is about all the time I spend on this activity each two-day stint; there are other tasks to be done, including walking and loafing. I probably had at least two miles of trails.

I have all kinds of small dreams of becoming a better singer. I can't do that if I keep writing these blogs:)

So which is reality? The dreams when I'm sleeping or the dreams when I'm awake?