Posts by BenWilson
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That is remarkable. I did not previously realize that thats is a nonexistent word.
These days I figure, so long as it's clear, does it actually matter? It's so common to break all the rules of grammar now, and being pedantic is so damned time wasting. Fair enough if you're writing in a newspaper because they have their own standards, or in a school essay, since they're trying to teach 'good' English. But in a blog? Picking people up on grammar is a pretty lame way to fail to engage the meaning. If it's unclear, just ask for clarification. I'm extremely tolerant of shitty spelling and grammar because I just want the ideas, and I don't think only perfect English speakers/writers have important points to make. OK, it takes longer if they're so poor that the meaning is hard to get. But consider that it also takes longer when you're just pissing people off by being a pedant, and ignoring what they're saying, demanding conformance to standards that are actually pretty arbitrary. People spoke perfectly good comprehensible language well before dictionaries and grammar books were ever invented. Some of the best ideas of all time were expressed completely ungrammatically, and some of the best written art, too. Shakespeare would never have got one play past a proofreader. Language bureaucrats seem to be more about shutting people and ideas down than making things work better, IMHO.
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Most of the time, actually.
That's pretty cool. I once believed I'd solved a particularly difficult maths problem in my sleep, and got up to write it all down. When I woke up in the morning and had a look at it, it was random garbage.
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Have you ever genuinely solved a work problem in your sleep?
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And then I'd go 'well if its only a dream, I can fly!!' And off I'd go.
So far as I could make out, that is exactly what a lucid dream was. I had pretty much the same thing, curious that flying is such a popular choice. If I had to line up 10 fantastic things I most want to do, flying would not actually be in them. I guess it must seem plausible to us, at some level, that it's a fantasy, but not too much of one to blow the whole thing and wake us up. Which was pretty much what happened any time I tried to lead my dreams towards a really hot threesome.
So even now its very rare for me to have a dream where I'm not aware on some level that it is a dream.
Of the ones you remember, that is? It's pretty hard to be sure how many dreams you have in a night - you'd probably need to be kept under observation. Even then, I don't really know how anyone can be sure how long in 'dream time' they were. Some people have credibly reported having very long and elaborate dreams between the chimes of a clock. Credible because the chimes featured in the dream. Others are woken at the end of a quite long REM phase, and report having dreams that seemed to them to have lasted only seconds. But people who believe that they don't dream at all are mostly disabused of this notion if they are deliberately woken during REM.
So even now its very rare for me to have a dream where I'm not aware on some level that it is a dream.
I think this must be close to the ultimate in self-consciousness.
Well the techniques propounded for having lucid dreams mostly involved being constantly self conscious. Like making a habit during the day of questioning yourself "Am I dreaming?". Which supposedly leads to you question it in your sleep, at which point you might notice that you are, and switch to lucid state.
Unfortunately I found that it was a habit that lead to profound insomnia. "Am I dreaming?" "No, for fuck's sake, and you never will be if you never shut up". I did learn a lot about my dreams, but I forgot everything I'd ever known about how to get to sleep, and I'm still trying to rediscover it today.
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It is annoying that every motorbike you can hire is totally weak. I noticed that a lot of American sailors seemed to have found a secret source of Harley Davidsons. Perhaps they brought them on their ship?
But who cares about riding a Harley when you're there for how awesome Thailand is? Great photos, glad I pushed you.
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I'm misty eyed with nostalgia. Except about the getting hassled for 'rides' all the time. I had one guy who couldn't believe I didn't want to go and see a live sex show so much that he pursued me for several kilometers on foot. Finally he said "Boy bar? You want boy bar?", to which I said "Mai aw JING JING" which was the chorus of a popular song at the time, and I had it on authority that it meant "I really don't want it", at which point he instantly gave up.
Could be useful for you.
I had a giggle 5 minutes later when I realized in my attempts to shake the guy off I had been making an almost direct bee-line for the boy-bar district.
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but I did it because you asked.
You da man. But I wasn't asking just for me. At least I hope not.
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Which is a bit of an odd thing to think.
Not really. Wrong guy, right reason is just lamentable. Right guy, wrong reason, is sinister.
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You obviously need a TiVo.
I read a book as a teenager which seriously suggested you could achieve something like this. They called it 'Lucid Dreaming' and the idea was that you could not only become aware that you were sleeping, but also control your dreams.
However, when I tried their suggestions, I found that it did severe damage to my ability to fall asleep. I did have some lucid dreams and they were interesting, but not worth losing sleep over.
These days I don't remember my dreams, so when I actually have a nightmare, I really enjoy it. It's like 'cool, I really do have a subconscious'.
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That is not its purpose.
Hence the hypothetical. But I'm glad to hear it.
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