dreams

I dream a lot; blame it on the overactive imagination or an overexcited subconscious. I had two really big dreams yesterday, the latter the most important one, but I'll tell you both.

In the first dream I had stolen the technicolor dreamcoat from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and was parading around residential with it. I befriended a newspaper clipping of an M.C. Escher homage done by Bizarro, which would become animated when I pointed at it and thought really hard. (Anyone close to me know I absolutely adore Escher's work, so this is fantastic - I cried out loud when I saw it in the comics)



Anyways, when I pointed at it and thought really hard, it would turn into a real life coat made of newspaper to accompany my technicolor dreamcoat, and we would go around scaring crows and chasing children and stuff. We came by this bully's house and the three kids came out and so to ruffle their feathers I animated the coat and had it chase these kids who were scared stiff. They ran into their garage and the coat was in there with them, but then they closed the garage and then my pointing didn't work because I couldn't point at the newspaper through the garage door. I ran inside and the kids had shredded the newspaper, and then they proceeded to beat the shit out of me.

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My second dream is a little strange because I have never talked to God before. They always say you know when God appears before you but I have never had it happen before so I wouldn't know. Of course it's in a dream, but I still think God comes to you any time he wishes, whether you're awake staring at the Sun or asleep staring at the Sun in your sleep. So I'm sitting on the porch with Blacky wandering around in front of me and God comes out of the house and takes a seat next to me on the swing. He didn't look like anything to be honest, but in the way you know in dreams, I knew this was God. He was looking at Blacky all funny and then proceeded to tell me everything that was wrong with Blacky and how Blacky was going to die soon because he was old and he was getting really sick. He told me exactly the day Blacky was going to die and I was crying so hard because I love Blacky and I won't want him to die.

I turned towards God and through the tears I pointedly exclaimed, "Fuck you!"

God then turned away and said,
"You'll learn to love everything I do."

I then woke up to the sound of an annoying crow cawing and I wished I had my amazing technicolor dreamcoat and my newspaper clipping coat to go scare it away.

words

Language is fascinating. I love the idea of words as symbols, as if they are grenades carrying the ammunition of meaning, and when used in the right spot, will explode into understanding. I find it so interesting that the way you use words can influence how a person thinks about what you say. Any first year psychology textbook has the story where participants watched a video of a car accident, then rated on a form how fast they thought the car was going. The only thing that changed between two conditions was the wording of the question:

"How fast was the car going when it bumped into the other car?"
"How fast was the car going when it smashed into the other car?"

Of course, people who read the first had lower estimated speeds, while those who read the second had higher.

Words are so influential, that during the war they didn't refer to Jews as humans, they referred to them as objects: "Figuren" or "stücke", dolls, wood, merchandise, rags. There were no people in 'Nam that were the enemy, because the enemy were gooks, the same as how coloured people were niggers or coons, chinks or coolies, spics, nips, pakis. You oppress them, you kill them, who cares because there's no human rights violations on objects - they ain't human.

Words can turn something that is into something that isn't.

You can omit words too and pretend like the thing it symbolizes doesn't even exist. Some neurophilosophers have proposed eliminating words like "mind", "conciousness", "imagination" thinking that if they don't talk about it in ways that can't be explained by biology, then maybe there will never be a materialist/non-materalist split. As if you can just throw a rug over God and pretend He isn't there, and say that just because we don't have the word God and that we don't talk about Him no more, He musn't exist, and that God must just be something your proteins and electrical impulses make. "Words that have truly lost meaning become obsolete by common consent, not banishment".

We speak, but rarely do we realize that the words we utter have so much power. Think about what you say.

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Beauregard, M., & O'Leary, D. (2007). The spiritual brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul. Toronto, ON: HarperCollins Publishers.

Michaels, A. (1996). Fugitive pieces. Toronto, ON: McClelland & Stewart Ltd.