Monday, 13 February 2023

Hello. It is Monday, February 13, 2023.

This morning I awoke with a memory of a dream.

That’s unusual for me. I am told that my dream-amnesia means that I’m repressed or something like that – that it is healthy to remember dreams! And, in fact, I can if I try. Or I used to be able to.

Back in college, circa 1974, I took a course in parapsychology. It ran the gamut from (then) scientifically plausible things like telepathy and precognition to tarot cards; and, although it was extracurricular, someone I met in the course, sold me some mushrooms. That was by the far the greatest impact the course had on me. I came back to campus – or perhaps that year I didn’t go home for Christmas – and was alone in the dorm and seemingly on campus on New Years eve, and ate the mushrooms. I spend the night wandering around the campus, in a pellucid haze. Everything seemed new and fresh and perfect. I felt I could see every individual blade of grass. It was a lovely experience, beyond the ability of words to capture.

But I digress. One of the units of the parapsychology course was on Carl Jung, and the unconscious (not to be confused with Freud’s subconscious), and one of our assignments was to keep a dream notebook. (Come to think of it, perhaps we were studying Freud’s “On the Interpretation of Dreams” – but I think not; Jung was much cooler than Freud at that point in time, although personally I had been quite impressed with his writing on dreams, and also his essay “Civilization and its Discontents,” one of the best titles ever, and a topic guaranteed to engage the interests of an adolescent seeking to differentiate himself from… well, everything. )

Back to the dream notebook. The assignment was to keep a notebook beside our bed, and just before going to bed we were to think about remembering our dreams, and upon waking the first thing we were to do was seize the notebook and record whatever fragments of dreams we remembered. Whether it was the nightly priming, or the recording immediately upon awakening, I was quite surprised to find that I had plenty of dreams – or at least fragments – to record. I wish I had access to those notes, but I am pretty sure they are long lost. I wonder if they differed from the dreams I usually recall.

The thing I tell people, and I speak truthfully, is that I rarely remember dreams. And when I do dream, the dream is more spatial than visual. I have a sense of space, and objects within the space, and the ability to move through the space, but it is difficult to discern much. Either I don’t have much visual imagery, or I do, but it is almost always twilight nigh unto darkness in my dreams. I can touch things and feel their textures. I can see shadowed objects looming before me and I seem to know what they are. I can hear voices and drift along on a stream of dialog in which I may participate, but I do not see other speakers. Because it is so dark there are no colors. I only experience colors in my dreams when I am sick running a fever, or when I am taking some kind of medical-grade pain medication, something I try to avoid. Were my dreams different, more akin to what others report, when I was taking pains to record them? I don’t recall.

Last night’s dream was typical for me. I was in some sort of auditorium, likely in a university campus. The auditorium had steeply sloped seats, and I was sitting in a seat, or perhaps a table at the front row. I was drawing something – a crude sketch of… perhaps an animal or a person… I can’t recall. I’d finished with that sheet of paper, and discovered I had no more people, even though I had something I wanted to draw. Katie got a sheet of paper for me from someone sitting behind us, and I took it to draw upon, but discovered that the back side of it was covered with an intricate mandala-like (but rectangular) pattern in differing shades of blue ink. It seemed sort of like a circuit diagram. The diagram bleed through the paper, to the extent that although I wrote or sketched a few things on it, it was hard to make them out because the diagram, bleeding through from the other side, made it so hard to read them. As I continued to try to draw or write, I realized that the circuitry would take what I was writing, and re-cast it or respond to it, sort of in the same manner as ChatGPT, which I’d been playing with last week. I don’t recall thinking that the geometric circuit-like sketching on the back had anything to do with it, though in hindsight that seems like an obvious conclusion. And that’s it. That’s the end of the dream.

The daily routine

After rising — I’d discussed my dream with K on awakening — I did my usual morning things. I went down to the kitchen, heated oatmeal and made tea for K, and made espresso and toast for myself, and read the paper. I have recently canceled the paper subscriptions and moved to reading entirely digital copies. And I have to say that I like it. I like that I don’t have to go out into the wintery dawn to retrieve the papers, which typically involves going all the way out to the sidewalk — where I may discover the paper has not actually arrived yet — and maybe, once a month or so, involves wading into the snow to grab an especially inadroitly lobbed paper.

I have brought my large iPad down to the kitchen where it now lives and serves primarily as a reading device. It is big enough that I can view the e-edition replicas of papers, and scan through the paper in the same way — except more easily — as I did with the actual paper paper. I can also view articles from the economist, and, for that matter, I can read a variety of other articles — from the MIT Technical Review, from Nature, from Reasons to be Cheerful, from Medium, and so on — that arrive in my (e-)mailbox. I recently discovered that I could alter the mailbox to which my reading is directed by a set of rules, so that said mailbox resides on iCloud, and thus is accessible to any of my ecosystem of devices. This means I always have more to read than I am able, a situation which I appreciate.

After I have read for a bit, while consuming my espresso and toast and something on the toast — olive oil and either cheese or smoked salmon — I will tidy up the kitchen, if I did not do that the night before. Next, I will typically practice the piano a bit. I’ll start with technical exercises from the Hannon book I am working through, and then move to a few of the songs I am working on. After that I will move to the attic, and provided I don’t have a Pleasant Chat scheduled — these usually occur on Tuesday and Friday and sometimes Wednesday morning, will do one thing or another in my office. One thing is to go through my exercise routine, which I originally designed to take 20 minutes, but which has ballooned to 30-40 minutes; the other is to read and./or make reading notes, in preparation for one of book discussion sessions with one of the three friends with whom I am currently reading books. These are, to be explicit:

Contemporary American Essays (ed. Phillip Lopate, with CT
The Tangled Tree, by ?David? Quammen, with CS
and essays or other short readings (the current one is “The Tyranny of Structurelessness” by Jo Anne Friedman

Anyway, my practice with reading is to keep notes on a chapter by chapter basis. These include, at a minimum, a brief summary of the chapter or essay, and, if I am enjoying the peice, a more extensive summary, often with extracted quotations. Some of these are maintained in word documents, on my computer, but more and more I am trying to post summaries in my “Notes” blog.

Next, again depending on the structure of the day, I will normally go out for a run, or take Katie to the U (though today I took K&C to the airport and then went to the Audi dealership to pick up my car which was in for repair). If I run it is almost always either at Minihaha Creek, if I have other things to do, or at West River Road along the Mississippi, if I have no plans for later in the day. Sometimes a run is followed by, or preempted by, a significant activity like piano, a study period, , or an appointment of one sort or another (today it was taking the car in to the dealer).

Normally a run or other activity is followed by a stop at the store — usually Linden Hill’s CoOp — to pick up groceries for dinner, and sometimes food from the hot bar for lunch. I favor savory foods, often with tomatoes and or chili’s, that we do not typcially cook at home.

Then I’ll return home, and do a few tasks — computer, email, reading, writing — before starting on dinner. After dinner I sit by the fire with a drink, and typically read or write.

And that’s my day. Seems boring when I write it all out, but I find my days quite pleasant.

Current Status

I am well into the year. Things are going largely as I planned. I am doing well on my exercise — both aerobic and strength training — and my various reading activities, solo, pairwise, and group. I am not writing as much as I’d wished — though I hope to join a workshop which will help remedy that — and my aim of taking self-paced courses online has foundered a bit, although I hope that is temporary — the current lapse is due to working to get K and I set up with new computers, and to repair various facets of our computational ecology. I hope that this week I will get back into my courses.

That’s it for now. Time to retire from beside the fire, and go to bed.