Feb

11

Welcome to your Lucid Dream

Category: Me, Movies, Psychology | 1 Comment

Yesterday I was doing looking for the website to Wikipedia and came across Wikibooks, which happens to be run by the same group, The Wiki Media Foundation. Since I knew what Wikipedia was, I decided to see what Wikibooks was. Well, the same way that Wikipedia attempts to be an encyclopedia which anyone can contribute to, Wikibooks is like a library written by everyone online. I’m not so sure if I will ever use Wikibooks in the near future, but Wikipedia is a pretty good resource to use.

It just so happened that this month’s featured book on Wikibooks was a book called Lucid Dream. This caught my eye for one reason only: in Vanilla Sky, Tom Cruise’s character, David, orders the Lucid Dream package from the cryrogenics company. (DO NOT CONTINUE UNLESS YOU HAVE SEEN THE MOVIE AND/OR DON’T CARE ABOUT SPOILERS!) As you know, the whole point of the movie is that everying occurring in the movie after the club scene is just a movie of sorts playing in David’s head. He thinks it’s real because the mind cannot tell the difference between a dream and reality. But why was it called the Lucid Dream package? When I saw the movie I was so caught up in the revelation that a full quater to (maybe) half of the movie had not even ocurred and was just a computer glitch that I didn’t even think twice about the Lucid Dream. Even the second and third times I saw it, I was busy trying to catch the foreshadowing and really trying to figure out what the movie was about. Like a good piece of art, the movie is up for interpretation. It was purposely made to have a vague ending. When David wakes up, we once again hear “open your eyes” and are unsure of whether he was dreaming the whole thing, had woken up in the lab, or had restarted his dream. It was both frustrating and beautiful at the same time. (END OF SPOILERS)

So what IS a Lucid Dream? I only read the introductory section of the Wikibook, but the practive of Lucid Dreaming is dreaming while knowing that you are dreaming. It’s something you can become awesome at instead of it just happening every once in a while. I don’t know about my readers (and you are free to use the comments feature of the blog to enlighten me) but I have unintentionally had lots of lucid dreams. It used to happen a lot more often when I was a young child in elementary school, but I remember controlling parts of my dream down to the last detail, even “rewinding” my dreams and redoing certain scenes if I felt they could be improved.

It still happens to me, but it’s very rare nowadays since I usually don’t get enough sleep either due to school work or because I stay up with other pursuits, such as writing a blog. However, when I do get to sleep until my body wakes itself up, independent of alarm clocks, fiancees, or other external stimuli, I find that the last half hour to hour before I wake up, I’m usually lucid dreaming. I’m usually in a state somewhere between sleep and wake and am able to control certain aspects of the dream. As I progressively wake up, I’m able to control more of the dream, but I am also less asleep and more awake just daydreaming. Finally, just before I wake up, I’m basically just daydreaming and waiting to get ot a part of the dream where it bores me and I feel like getting out of bed.

I don’t know if it’s being back in academia and having my mind stimulated, the excitement of having this new blog, or what, but I feel like I’ve been blogging on a level that I haven’t done in months. As a quick reminder I’ll probably be saying daily for a week or so, don’t forget that this blog will go inactive when my server goes down, but you can continue to read my blog at blog.ericsbinaryworld.com and once I get my server up at the new site, I will migrate my blog over to this server.

  

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Feb

11

reorganizing and Mo Rocca info

Category: Site | Leave a Comment

I’m not sure how many people have visited this blog site yet or how many are coming here independently through other sites. I know of one person who has confirming coming here and subscriping to the RSS feed. Anyway, you may have noticed I made some cosmetic changes to the site. I’m not 100% sure if it’s going to stay this way. I generally like to leave things the way they are. Since, however, I don’t know how many people are coming here right now and I intend to relaunch the site in a few months anyway, I figure it’s still ok. I put the calender above the links because as the links list grew it would have pushed the calendar way too far down the page. I also moved the categories above the links. I’m not sure if I will emulate the original It’s A Binary World on my tripod page and put the links over on the left side or if I will keep it all as one column here. The center may end up a bit too squished if I go for that, but stay tuned.

Over on my tripod blog, I posted pictures from Mo Rocca’s event this night at Cornell. You should go check those out. I mentioned on that site that I would probably be putting up some video from that night here on this blog. If I do it today, it will end up being much later in the day since I need to get some sleep for class today. Also, I have to do some prep work on the videos to make shrink them down to a manageable size, so that will take some time too. Stay tuned, tonight’s real post to come soon.

  

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