Monday, April 11, 2011

ONE THING LEADS TO ANOTHER THING

Recent mention by Marja-Leena and Cassandra Pages and Tasting Rhubarb of La Vie en Rosé   led to a very welcome upsurge in my stats which, like every other blogger in blogdom, I obsessively check now and then - oh allright, very frequently - to see whether I am loved more than I am ignored. Come to think of it, that's a life-long preoccupation.

Anyway, Dorothee Lang who, amongst many other things, is editor of the Blueprint Review noted Jean's mention of the Augustine comic strips and invited me to join mycomics.de   an online community of comics creators. Of course I was happy to do so and, thanks to Dorothee's help, my complete INERTIA strip is now uploaded there.The site is mainly in German but comics from other countries also appear and international participation is encouraged. Gradually I will be posting more strips to this friendly and well-designed site. 

Yesterday was the christening of Lewis - my niece Sarah and her husband Elliott's second baby - and the occasion was blessed by fabulous Spring weather and perfect location: an English village's 13th Century church with great pub across the road where we all gathered for lunch after a cheerful Anglican service during which the round infant, dressed in pinstriped mini-waistcoat, white shirt, green socks and black corduroy trousers, seemed puzzled but smiled graciously. 

When the guests were eating lunch at long wooden tables in the pub garden, I remembered part of a dream I had about a week or so ago in which the same image appeared. I've been thinking about so-called pre-cognitive dreams, which I have fairly often. The pre-cognitive bit is usually quite banal, just ordinary scenes from ordinary life which I see in a dream and then, a variable time later, encounter in waking life. I'm aware of the theories, debates, experiments etc. on this subject but I want to follow my own ruminations about it and see where they lead. 

I'm starting from the premise that some dreams can foresee events/scenes which have not yet taken place in 'real time': how would this process work? My intuition says that there's nothing supernatural about it but that it's an actual process happening constantly although we are rarely aware of it. Here's the gist of notes I was writing while having breakfast this morning:

Suppose the events of our day are like the successive frames in a film - say, 24 frames per second or some other fps - but we don't see separate frames, only one continuous strip. Suppose something different happens when we're asleep and dreaming: the film speeds up and the gaps between frames narrows, they become somewhat compressed. But our perception remains the same as it was when awake so we're actually seeing some of the next frames because they overlap. So maybe what seems like foreseeing a future event is simply looking at the present that we haven't caught up with yet in 'real time' because 'dream-time' goes faster. 

Yes, I know there are all sorts of  problems with this conjecture but it's only a start. I will expand it with some animation/video experiments when I've worked out how to do it. These are the kinds of questions that really excite me and it doesn't bother me that I'm not qualified to explore them - no degrees in physics, neurology, psychology, biology, you-name-it-ology. So? Who's gonna stop me?

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