Dream persistence

I'm flying a magical toboggan swiftly through forests and rocky narrow canyons. Barely missing rooftops and high tension electric wires, I rise up and cruise alongside a Lear jet and see Tom Hanks in the window, I wave. I'm getting cold and I notice that I'm no longer on a toboggan but in a yellow raft and the jet next to me is floating in the Caribbean. I have a small TV plugged into the rubber walls of the raft and I'm watching "I Love Lucy" and Lucy is whining about a deflated soufflé. It start to rain and the TV sparks and dies. The jet plane is now a school bus and we're all in a field of blue green grass, I'm surrounded by kindergarteners picking flowers for their parents. I instruct them that the purple daisies are sacred to the local residents and that we all would have to pay $1.00 for each one we picked. As we get back on the bus I wake up.

Now, if I happen to remember the tail part of this dream, the bus perhaps, or the purple daisies, I might be able to work backwards remembering more and more of this odd dream. But if I immediately get distracted by the morning's rituals I'll instantly forget these synthetic events. And once forgotten, that dream will never be retrievable; it will have been like I'd never dreamed it.

But if I can recall just a portion I might be able to recreate some of it in my now conscious mind. Once there, in my thinking awake mind, I can persist it, I can write it down or I can talk about it or I can simply re-run it over again in my mind, what I remember at least.

So we may dream every night, numerous dreams in fact, and the mind is obviously working to some degree splicing these virtual video segments together in ours brains. But unless we remember them, when we wake, they will be forgotten. Seems like such a waste.

Sometimes I wish my dreams would automatically be persisted in my memory. They're incredible adventures, much more entertaining than real life. To sleep, perchance to dream. I wonder how the brain's functional storage facility can be switched off yet the thought process, the assembly and visualization machinery, can remain operational. And it's like that, like a switch to our PROM, programmable read only memory; once written (the programmable part), a memory cannot be erased (the read only part). But the switch is off while we dream. Nothing is saved in our memories.

But then I think, what if all of our dreams were mixed with all of our waking living thoughts and memories. If I dream, frequently enough, that I can fly, would I begin to believe it? How would I maintain the distinction of what was a dream and what was not? Was I once a ninja assassin? A frog? A stranded sailor? A neurosurgeon? Did I really walk around volcanic sea vents cooking hotdogs in the heated steam? Surreality might take over.

When dreams leak into our memories, when the PROM switch gets turned on sometimes while we're asleep, and our ability to know what is dream and what is not gets murky, maybe then we step over the threshold of sanity and into the realm of psychosis and mental illness.

I guess I'll just leave my dreams as wispy remnants of longings, discoveries and fanciful excursions I had while I slept. But boy I had a doosey last night! I dreamed I was ...

Leximize word of the day, dreamories: the memory of dreams.

We are on the lip of another Maunder Minimum, peering over the edge into the frosty cold future. We'll soon need all the global warming we can get, because global cooling will be far worse that a lot of hot days, freaky storms and rising seas. How about system crop failure around the world? How about the mass migration of people from northern latitudes into the tropics belt? How about the shutting down of the top 1/4th of the planet? Do you know how many people live above the 45 parallel? About a billion. From volcanoes to solar minimums, the next ice age is upon us.

Leximize word of the day, diaspora: the mass movement of a culturally linked group of people.

Global change will necessitate political accord or war down the road. After 2012, when the world's collective breath, being held until then, is released (big sigh), say spring equinox 2013, we'll see true change in national relationships.

Leximized word of the day: memespeak, the catch phrases of the new digerati as spoken by main stream media's talking heads.

Neoleague - March 21 2013

Topic	Misc.	Post Date 05/10/2010
Title	Lexicon experiment
Synopsis	Semantic virus
Post	I would like to request your participation in a linguistics experiment. I propose creating a new word, one which produces a Google hit count, currently, of less than 20. The purpose of this experiment is to create a global awareness of a new word in as little time as possible. We will create a new word, create a definition of this new word, and then release it into the wilds of the infospace, rather like a semantic virus. I would then request that you use this word, at least once, in a blog post or email or comment on an article or blog on the web. The spread of the use of the the term is the intent so a high frequency of usage is suggested. The simple reposting of this posting will suffice. We will then watch how quickly, or not, the word becomes prevalent in the linguistic maze that is the web. Each week I will post a Google search count update on this site. ~~~ * The first word I propose is "leximize" which means "to maximize the lexical exposure of a word." As of this moment (5/10/2010 8:30 AM PST) there are 5 hits on the quoted word "leximize", none of which have legitimate meaning. ~~~ I would also like to attach a future event to this word. The intent of creating this event is to infiltrate the consciousness of the netmind, bleeding out into the memespeak of the mainstream media. The purpose of extending this lexical experiment by establishing a fabricated event is to determine if we have any influence, to any degree possible, on the potential event and date in question; if in nothing more, I suppose, than to escalate of anticipation of the proposed date and event, simply through awareness. * The spring equinox 2013 (March 21, 2013) will mark this event's horizon. * This event will entail the the joining of hands of multiple, long time national rivals and the collapse of physical, political and cultural barriers. * At this point in time not only will these nations build a neoleague but newly constructed terms to describe the event will have been leximized. ~~~ Your participation is welcome in this experiment. I urge you to reformulate the content in this post, to create names to commemorate this event, to create your own neoleague terms and to post this content on to whomever you believe will find this topic entertaining. This experiment has officially begun! Dave Cline May 10th 2010