Category Archives: dreams

On insomnia

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Couldn’t get to sleep at all last night–to coin a phrase. The creepy part of jet-lag is not that you can’t wake up or stay awake, it’s that you can’t get to sleep at night. I tossed and turned last night and nothing was comfortable, not the pillow, not the mattress, nothing. The hours ticked off–one, two, three, four, and I still couldn’t conjure up sweet dreams. The sandman would not visit my house. The worst part is that everyone else in the whole place was sound asleep. Insomnia is a solitary past-time in which the dark hours of the early morning pass slowly and painfully. Oh, one might find something to eat, read a book, or watch an old movie, but you are really missing out on all that rejuvenating sleep which totally eludes you. Sleep is the antidote for the stress and work of the day. To close your eyes and drift into unconsciousness is the only way to deal with being bone-tired, stress out, and sleepy. Yet, when sleep eludes you as if it were tiny fish in big pond, one suffers from a strange sadness, excluded from a world of dreams in which every other human being has taken refuge. Insomnia is a mean, hard, unfriendly sort that makes friends with no one. To sleep the sleep of the just plain tired is one of the priceless luxuries that no one can keep from you, but insomnia can. You can feel tired, you can feel like you should be be asleep, and you can still be wide awake. Every bone and every muscle in your body will ache, but sleep is a foreign country where you don’t have a visa and you’ve lost your map.

On insomnia

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Couldn’t get to sleep at all last night–to coin a phrase. The creepy part of jet-lag is not that you can’t wake up or stay awake, it’s that you can’t get to sleep at night. I tossed and turned last night and nothing was comfortable, not the pillow, not the mattress, nothing. The hours ticked off–one, two, three, four, and I still couldn’t conjure up sweet dreams. The sandman would not visit my house. The worst part is that everyone else in the whole place was sound asleep. Insomnia is a solitary past-time in which the dark hours of the early morning pass slowly and painfully. Oh, one might find something to eat, read a book, or watch an old movie, but you are really missing out on all that rejuvenating sleep which totally eludes you. Sleep is the antidote for the stress and work of the day. To close your eyes and drift into unconsciousness is the only way to deal with being bone-tired, stress out, and sleepy. Yet, when sleep eludes you as if it were tiny fish in big pond, one suffers from a strange sadness, excluded from a world of dreams in which every other human being has taken refuge. Insomnia is a mean, hard, unfriendly sort that makes friends with no one. To sleep the sleep of the just plain tired is one of the priceless luxuries that no one can keep from you, but insomnia can. You can feel tired, you can feel like you should be be asleep, and you can still be wide awake. Every bone and every muscle in your body will ache, but sleep is a foreign country where you don’t have a visa and you’ve lost your map.

On invisible

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The very idea of “invisible” is a little hard to grasp. I’m not just talking about something that is really, really tiny such as an atom or an individual molecule of water, which are pretty much invisible to the human eye. What I want to talk about is something you should be able to see, but for some reason you don’t, and no, I’m not talking about stealth technology, or am I? I am not entirely sure what “invisible” means at all. The Predator can make himself “invisible” by turning on his high-tec camouflage, but that is stealthy technology that makes him hard to see, but he’s not really invisible. I think one needs to ask the hard question, can anything really be invisible that has mass? We know that a magnetic field is invisible, but it also has no mass. Light is visible and invisible according to its wavelength and the ability of the human eye to detect certain wavelengths. Again, for the Predator, other wavelengths are also visible, not invisible. Smells are invisible because the detectable parts per million are so small, we can’t see them with naked eye. If ghosts were real, they would be both visible and invisible at the same time. Certain bombers are invisible in the dark and even radar cannot seem them, but they aren’t really invisible either. Sound is invisible, and the wind is invisible, sort of. I think that it is both frightening and ironic that there are series of horror movies about men who have made themselves invisible, that the invisibility causes insanity and false grandeur. Even the tiniest bugs, amoeba, diatoms, and the like are only invisible because they are tiny and the human eye cannot distinguish anything at the atomic level. Love, or hate, are invisible, but then again, wild emotional abstractions don’t exist in the physical world other than as ideas, not as concrete realities. The closest thing to invisible in our world is the fictional cloaking device that exists in the world of Star Trek, which alters something at the sub-atomic level, changing the time phase of the object, rendering it invisible within its current physical frame and/or context. So I not only don’t know what invisible is, I also have no way of really describing it either. The actual physics of light reflecting off of an object so that said object appears invisible has yet to be truly defeated, except for the world of science fiction. None of this means, however, that we still aren’t working on it, albeit, clandestinely.

On invisible

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The very idea of “invisible” is a little hard to grasp. I’m not just talking about something that is really, really tiny such as an atom or an individual molecule of water, which are pretty much invisible to the human eye. What I want to talk about is something you should be able to see, but for some reason you don’t, and no, I’m not talking about stealth technology, or am I? I am not entirely sure what “invisible” means at all. The Predator can make himself “invisible” by turning on his high-tec camouflage, but that is stealthy technology that makes him hard to see, but he’s not really invisible. I think one needs to ask the hard question, can anything really be invisible that has mass? We know that a magnetic field is invisible, but it also has no mass. Light is visible and invisible according to its wavelength and the ability of the human eye to detect certain wavelengths. Again, for the Predator, other wavelengths are also visible, not invisible. Smells are invisible because the detectable parts per million are so small, we can’t see them with naked eye. If ghosts were real, they would be both visible and invisible at the same time. Certain bombers are invisible in the dark and even radar cannot seem them, but they aren’t really invisible either. Sound is invisible, and the wind is invisible, sort of. I think that it is both frightening and ironic that there are series of horror movies about men who have made themselves invisible, that the invisibility causes insanity and false grandeur. Even the tiniest bugs, amoeba, diatoms, and the like are only invisible because they are tiny and the human eye cannot distinguish anything at the atomic level. Love, or hate, are invisible, but then again, wild emotional abstractions don’t exist in the physical world other than as ideas, not as concrete realities. The closest thing to invisible in our world is the fictional cloaking device that exists in the world of Star Trek, which alters something at the sub-atomic level, changing the time phase of the object, rendering it invisible within its current physical frame and/or context. So I not only don’t know what invisible is, I also have no way of really describing it either. The actual physics of light reflecting off of an object so that said object appears invisible has yet to be truly defeated, except for the world of science fiction. None of this means, however, that we still aren’t working on it, albeit, clandestinely.

On a hypothetical snow day

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It is the eternal dream of all children, old and young, to get a day off from work and school because of bad winter weather. No, I don’t expect a foot of snow tomorrow, but it could ice up really good overnight which would make driving prohibitive, or at least very dangerous. Driving in snow isn’t easy, and you can slide around a bit, but driving on ice, well, just isn’t possible. If you have no friction between wheel and road, you don’t have any driving either–you just have lots of sliding, and sliding is bad in a two ton vehicle. The dream of a day off from the regular grind is more tantalizing than finding free money because even if you find free money, you still have to do something to enjoy it. A snow day is enjoyed by doing nothing more than staying home. You don’t have to get dressed, you can drink a second cup of coffee, you might take a nap or even read a book–watch an old movie, maybe. The hustle and bustle of December is stressful, but a snow day is a de-stressor, if such a thing exists. You can be completely passive to enjoy a snow day. No meetings, no classes, no problems, nothing to turn in, and since tomorrow is Friday, we would get a long weekend. This is way too good to be true. The freezing rain just hangs off to the west, shutting everything down in its path, but the truth is, nothing is falling in Waco. Oh, there’s a fine mist out there, but the ground is warm and the roads are still passable, so I suspect that my dream will not come true. Yet, wouldn’t it be lovely to get an extra day of vacation right when you most need it?

On a hypothetical snow day

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It is the eternal dream of all children, old and young, to get a day off from work and school because of bad winter weather. No, I don’t expect a foot of snow tomorrow, but it could ice up really good overnight which would make driving prohibitive, or at least very dangerous. Driving in snow isn’t easy, and you can slide around a bit, but driving on ice, well, just isn’t possible. If you have no friction between wheel and road, you don’t have any driving either–you just have lots of sliding, and sliding is bad in a two ton vehicle. The dream of a day off from the regular grind is more tantalizing than finding free money because even if you find free money, you still have to do something to enjoy it. A snow day is enjoyed by doing nothing more than staying home. You don’t have to get dressed, you can drink a second cup of coffee, you might take a nap or even read a book–watch an old movie, maybe. The hustle and bustle of December is stressful, but a snow day is a de-stressor, if such a thing exists. You can be completely passive to enjoy a snow day. No meetings, no classes, no problems, nothing to turn in, and since tomorrow is Friday, we would get a long weekend. This is way too good to be true. The freezing rain just hangs off to the west, shutting everything down in its path, but the truth is, nothing is falling in Waco. Oh, there’s a fine mist out there, but the ground is warm and the roads are still passable, so I suspect that my dream will not come true. Yet, wouldn’t it be lovely to get an extra day of vacation right when you most need it?

On shadows

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Are they positive or negative? A very good question, I answered, but I imagine the answer is “neither.” We tend to ignore the self-same shadow that we cast of ourselves, since it is always there. Shadows are, technically, nothing more or less than the absence of light because someone is blocking the light. A shadow is the description of a negative quantity of light. Yet, shadows seem to be so much more, and they often have a sinister edge to them. The word shadow is sometimes used as a synonym for the word ghost, and it is the root-word for “foreshadowing” which seems to have something to do with telling the future. When things stay in the shadows, we might suspect that something is wrong. In all the horror movies I ever watched, the monsters always stayed in the shadows until the last minute when throwing light on the situation seemed like a good idea but wasn’t. Staying in the dark, avoiding the light, lurking in the shadows, are all negative or suspicious types of behavior. If you are a shadowy character, your ethics and morals are in question or doubtful. Cooling off in the shade is probably a different matter where a person seeks the protection of the trees or a building or a wall in order to avoid the heat and light of midday–returning us to that lack of light, that negative quality of shadows. My favorite shadows are those long shadows that we all cast either early in the morning or late in the day. Our shadows stretch out behind us or go on before us, faithful companions that will only leave us as the sun goes down at the end of the day.

On shadows

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Are they positive or negative? A very good question, I answered, but I imagine the answer is “neither.” We tend to ignore the self-same shadow that we cast of ourselves, since it is always there. Shadows are, technically, nothing more or less than the absence of light because someone is blocking the light. A shadow is the description of a negative quantity of light. Yet, shadows seem to be so much more, and they often have a sinister edge to them. The word shadow is sometimes used as a synonym for the word ghost, and it is the root-word for “foreshadowing” which seems to have something to do with telling the future. When things stay in the shadows, we might suspect that something is wrong. In all the horror movies I ever watched, the monsters always stayed in the shadows until the last minute when throwing light on the situation seemed like a good idea but wasn’t. Staying in the dark, avoiding the light, lurking in the shadows, are all negative or suspicious types of behavior. If you are a shadowy character, your ethics and morals are in question or doubtful. Cooling off in the shade is probably a different matter where a person seeks the protection of the trees or a building or a wall in order to avoid the heat and light of midday–returning us to that lack of light, that negative quality of shadows. My favorite shadows are those long shadows that we all cast either early in the morning or late in the day. Our shadows stretch out behind us or go on before us, faithful companions that will only leave us as the sun goes down at the end of the day.

On Deckard, the Blade Runner

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Deckard is one of my favorite characters in one of my favorite movies–Blade Runner. Deckard, a paid police assassin kills replicants when they are out of control or anywhere where they aren’t supposed to be. The movie is an existential examination of what it means to be human–to have self-awareness, to be unique, to have memories, to have purpose, to live your own life. Replicants are artificial human beings, or at least that is the starting hypothesis of the movie. They are used for distasteful, repetitious, or dangerous jobs that human beings do not want to do. Apparently, ethical considerations of treatment are off the boards because replicants are not really people, don’t have parents, are the result of complex DNA experiments. When replicants go wild, however, Deckard is called in by the police to identify and eliminate rogue replicants. So Deckard “retires” replicants who are no longer doing their jobs and are more an annoyance than a solution. By using a euphemism to describe the murder of a replicant, human authorities sidestep the issue of just how human the replicants are or if replicants are really just a name for slaves. The fact is, though, that replicants are such perfect reproductions of human beings that the humans need complex tests in order to identify the replicants. So if replicants are such perfect copies of human beings, why aren’t they human beings? Ridley Scott wanted to cloud the issue further by suggesting that Deckard was, ironically, a replicant as well in his movie version of the book, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” by Phillip K. Dick (in which Deckard is not a replicant). Though Scott’s idea is intriguing, I believe it eliminates part of the ethical question concerning the retirement of replicants, but Deckard’s job certainly fits the bill for a replicant job–distasteful and dangerous. If Roy Batty, the dangerous battle replicant that Deckard must retire, has so much super-human strength, why is Deckard so fallible and weak? Of course, if Deckard were a replicant designed to retire replicants, he would have to be programmed to believe that he was human in order to do his job. He would have to have an unlimited, or undetermined life span, he would have to believe that replicants were a threat to both himself, particularly, and humanity, generally, and he could not suspect for a moment that he himself is a replicant. Ergo he would have normal human strength, suggesting that Deckard is both human and replicant at once, blurring the line between human and replicant to the point where there is no difference between the two. The question of what constitutes a human being is in play as is the right of the government to determine life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the case of the replicants, or do the replicants have rights? All of these questions double back on the society which has created artificial humans, but obviously considers them to be less than human in spite of the fact that hardly anyone can tell the difference. Deckard can “pass” as human, though a suspect one. Deckard as a human understands that the matched euphemisms of “retiring replicants” does not mask the problem of killing humans, and he struggles mightily with doing his job precisely because his profession puts into question the slavery of the replicants, which pushes the existential question to the forefront–what are we all doing working for big government, big business, or big bureaucracy? In the end, I think the story works a little better if Deckard is human, but making him a replicant with an indeterminate termination date certainly is suggestive.

On Deckard, the Blade Runner

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Deckard is one of my favorite characters in one of my favorite movies–Blade Runner. Deckard, a paid police assassin kills replicants when they are out of control or anywhere where they aren’t supposed to be. The movie is an existential examination of what it means to be human–to have self-awareness, to be unique, to have memories, to have purpose, to live your own life. Replicants are artificial human beings, or at least that is the starting hypothesis of the movie. They are used for distasteful, repetitious, or dangerous jobs that human beings do not want to do. Apparently, ethical considerations of treatment are off the boards because replicants are not really people, don’t have parents, are the result of complex DNA experiments. When replicants go wild, however, Deckard is called in by the police to identify and eliminate rogue replicants. So Deckard “retires” replicants who are no longer doing their jobs and are more an annoyance than a solution. By using a euphemism to describe the murder of a replicant, human authorities sidestep the issue of just how human the replicants are or if replicants are really just a name for slaves. The fact is, though, that replicants are such perfect reproductions of human beings that the humans need complex tests in order to identify the replicants. So if replicants are such perfect copies of human beings, why aren’t they human beings? Ridley Scott wanted to cloud the issue further by suggesting that Deckard was, ironically, a replicant as well in his movie version of the book, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” by Phillip K. Dick (in which Deckard is not a replicant). Though Scott’s idea is intriguing, I believe it eliminates part of the ethical question concerning the retirement of replicants, but Deckard’s job certainly fits the bill for a replicant job–distasteful and dangerous. If Roy Batty, the dangerous battle replicant that Deckard must retire, has so much super-human strength, why is Deckard so fallible and weak? Of course, if Deckard were a replicant designed to retire replicants, he would have to be programmed to believe that he was human in order to do his job. He would have to have an unlimited, or undetermined life span, he would have to believe that replicants were a threat to both himself, particularly, and humanity, generally, and he could not suspect for a moment that he himself is a replicant. Ergo he would have normal human strength, suggesting that Deckard is both human and replicant at once, blurring the line between human and replicant to the point where there is no difference between the two. The question of what constitutes a human being is in play as is the right of the government to determine life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the case of the replicants, or do the replicants have rights? All of these questions double back on the society which has created artificial humans, but obviously considers them to be less than human in spite of the fact that hardly anyone can tell the difference. Deckard can “pass” as human, though a suspect one. Deckard as a human understands that the matched euphemisms of “retiring replicants” does not mask the problem of killing humans, and he struggles mightily with doing his job precisely because his profession puts into question the slavery of the replicants, which pushes the existential question to the forefront–what are we all doing working for big government, big business, or big bureaucracy? In the end, I think the story works a little better if Deckard is human, but making him a replicant with an indeterminate termination date certainly is suggestive.