After a long hiatus from publishing, I've just collated together a bunch of notes I've taken, and formulated them into entries. The result is 77 new posts--covering an extremely tiny drop of my dreamlife over the past 4 years. (Last entry published before the update was 29-Oct-2015.)
I figured I should accompany the update with answers to a few questions that someone might have--if anyone reads these!
Why So Long Without Updating?
Several reasons.
The first is technical--I've chosen a pretty rough path of developing my own site generator...running on a programming language that I also code and maintain. Maybe not so crazy: remember that Da Vinci made up his own coded language for keeping his notebooks! But it isn't pushbutton publication, and certainly means that I can feel demotivated to dig into it and keep it working.
I've also been traveling a lot these past years. From Florida headquarters, to Denver, to Salt Lake City, to Tucson, to Savannah, to Philadelphia, to Akron...and shorter periods everywhere in-between. And I've kind of kept the alien-dreamlife on the down-low as part of my social messaging. (Back in the day I did outreach to channeling and spiritual communities, e.g. when I lived in LA, but they weren't scientific enough so I don't really do that any more.)
But also: I don't know how much good publishing this does. For all my efforts to make the site accessible and searchable--and with as many improbable keywords as it has--you'd think someone would write me about it. At least a schizophrenic or two! But I don't even get any spam, which is doubly suspicious. So I can conclude either everyone is being filtered out, or I myself have been "ghosted" to make me invisible.
Note
"Ghosting" (or "Shadow Banning") is the term for an internet practice by which someone on a system posts and believes it to have been published for all to see. But the only person who actually sees it, is them. It's the kind of nasty-yet-taken-for-granted practice that makes me very angry.
Why Did I Update Now?
I've actually been keeping notes periodically all along these past years--when things align to make me feel like doing it.
So I keep my laptop(s) in bed with me. When I find the motivation to write something down when I wake up, I tap notes as drafts in Gmail. (This has the advantage that the drafts automatically record the dates, so I can annotate the entries correctly to the day the experience happened.) Then I have to go over them and put them into the format my dream journal takes.
I split my computers up into "work" (Lenovo Yoga: entirely programming) and "play" (Surface Book: Photoshop, Music, Writing). Dream journal is on the "play" computer, which I really hadn't touched too much for a couple of years. But the last time I'd touched it was the beginnings of formatting a batch of entries--and got worn out before I finished. So they were sitting in a suspended state, only on that machine.
Digging out the "play" computer for another reason, I found those old entries. I decided it was time to slog through for a couple more days and get things cleared up--adding in new experiences since. And yes--we are talking about days of formatting work.
What Made You Write Down The Dreams You Did?
The rate of dream recall has kept a steady ramp up (both lucid and non-lucid), to where it's getting fair to say I never actually "sleep". But my documentation has gone down significantly. A lot of it is repetitive and frustrating...and if I've already wasted time going through the experience, I don't want to double or triple it by wasting the time to document it!
Yet I'm always hoping to find some validating information. So if I can clearly remember a brand or logo, and describe intersecting details that assemble a correlation...that would be a nice direct hit if it were ever lined up with something from a universe we can't reach yet. Not in my lifetime, I don't think--it would be pieced together from historical records after-the-fact.
Sometimes I'm too tired to reach for the laptop. It's like the Mitch Hedberg joke:
I write jokes for a living, I sit at my hotel at night, I think of something that's funny, then I go get a pen and I write it down. Or if the pen is too far away, I have to convince myself that what I thought of ain't funny.
There's definitely some selection bias in what I document. Disturbing things that don't have any details seem pointless to relive. I will also be less likely to talk about situations where I act badly (I kind of brutally stabbed someone in the foot for no reason once, and woke up upset at why I did that). Though my faith in myself as a reliable witness is pretty high, I am writing about things I'm doing in a half-aware state...so I feel I deserve a bit of slack for leaving a little out here and there.
If something is quotable, I try to capture that. I'm not sure if there were any truly great ones in this batch of 77, though the remarks about Jesus not being busy kind of stuck with me as being a bit profound. When picking out clothes to wear or contextualize myself socially, I was amused by the suggestion in "Thinking Africamatically". Hey, it could be true. :-)
I like compliments. But I get attacked vs. having nice things said about me at a ratio of about 1000 to 1. So any positive remarks I can get I'll take, as in "The Trendsetter" or "Born on a Monday". It's not particularly encouraging that out of 4 years of accounts, that's a big chunk of what nice has been said!
And while this is going to make me sound crazy to some (most?), I'm rather convinced I'm an interdimensional undercover agent. So when I'm running into situations like "Impure at the Undone Bar", I feel something was going on...and my reports could be important. Same with the bandages in "Beetron and Relief".
Note
Interestingly, I was at the South By Southwest movie festival in Austin when the movie "Source Code" was premiered (I didn't wait in line for that at the time, but saw it later). It's about a guy who is repeatedly spliced into someone's consciousnesses in the moments before their death to try and piece together who bombed a train.
It was a curious movie to be headlining at the moment I happened to be there. Perhaps I am attacked and die so often because I'm doing the same thing--having my brain borrowed to piece together a situation, while occupying a victim's body?
But given how many of these I don't write down, I really hope that writing them down isn't a prerequisite to my observations being helpful. My experiences would ideally be logged some other way.
Any New Thoughts?
No. Not much new to say, really.
Some people (like Elon Musk) are 99.99% sure we live in a simulation, and not "base reality". I don't know if he has a body of firsthand supporting evidence like I do--he may just speaking from a point of view of common sense. He frames it pretty well in an interview with Seth Rogen, as the paraphrase says:
If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then games will be indistinguishable from reality, or civilization will end. One of those two things will occur. Therefore, we are most likely in a simulation, because we exist.I think most likely--this is just about probability--there are many, many simulations. You might as well call them reality, or you could call them multiverse.The 'substrate' on which these simulations are running, whatever it may be, is probably quite boring, at least compared to the simulations themselves. Why would you make a simulation that's boring? You'd make a simulation that's way more interesting than base reality. Think about the video games and movies that humanity makes, which are distillations of what's interesting about life.
I do believe that I am jumping around in these parallel simulations. I'm not sure how, and no one I talk to seems to know how...even if they have mechanisms for it, they don't see me using those mechanisms.
It's understandable that I could be seen as a threat: if body-snatching beings exist and you found a way to inject your friends so they recovered from takeover...you probably would put syringes for killing the aliens in every house. Plus, if you believe some property of the "infection" gets worse the longer you let it go, then you might not delay to answer the alien's questions.
(Further, if you believed you weren't hurting anyone in the process--e.g. I'll just wake up and be "fine" and the trouble will stop--you may not prioritize whether I have a bad experience, even if you liked me. (See Also: "Too Young to Leave the Crib")
The inevitable question if the alien-inhabitation-theory holds water is whether I'm the original human for the body I live in, or if I have been overtaken by a virus. I might just live on a planet that hasn't recognized its existence yet. If they did, I could be injected and return to "normal"--whatever that is. Oh, I don't know. :-/
On that note: My mom's favorite dream reading is "Frameworks, Frameworks, Frameworks". Perhaps being a "programmer" and a "scientist" is leading me down a line of interpretation where I make connections and accept a kind of "Matrix" framework as if that is "obvious" or "common sense"?
I'm not sure, and I'm fairly resigned that I won't be able to find out. Anyway, whether this is my last batch of dream entries or not--I can't say. Good night and good luck.
-- 2019 MetÆduc8tion Nov