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?
