dreams

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

Part 2 of draft-clearing: another CORDYCEPS-related draft. This one is dated September 15th, 2016.

—

Did you know there’s a Greek alphabet song? {{this was marked as “insert a link here”, but the Youtube URL of the particular version past!me was thinking of was not included}}

I didn’t know for *sure* there was until today, but last night it occurred to me that it was *plausible* that one might exist, and if so it would be pretty helpful in making sure I knew the names of all the Greek letters and learning what order they go in.

Why did I want to learn the Greek letters, you might ask? Well.

So, I read CORDYCEPS [link], yeah? And my brain was like “Hey look, a new skin for our recurring amnesia nightmares [link]!”

And the thing is, my subconscious has been fairly insistent† that my INO is the Greek alphabet. This is weird because I *don’t have the ordering of the Greek alphabet memorised*. I mean, I know the order of the first five letters because of Brave New World, but after that, ???

So now I’m actually learning the order of the Greek alphabet *just so that this will stop bugging me*.

(…thank you @itsbenedict? I guess? For…inspiring me to learn?)

†If by “fairly insistent” you mean “both of the two times it’s come up”.

Tags:

#I never did *completely* memorise the ordering #but I’m much further along than five now #might finish it at some point #oh look an original post #cordyceps tcftog #amnesia cw

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

(I feel like @itsblehnedict might find this interesting)

[under the cut for non-fourth-wall-breaking infohazards, and also cordyceps spoilers if anyone still cares]

So in my dream this morning I was playing a video game (it might have been a VR game, but the way my dreams work all media is VR media, so I’m not sure if it was *meant* to be VR), and part of the plot was an elephant-induced apocalypse†. I thought it was neat how the game handled that.

(Note: in this game, the elephant is foodborne as well as airborne, and was deliberately developed and put into place by some evil conspiracy. Never reached the part where they explain what the conspiracy was trying to accomplish.)

As you would expect, the game tracks physical infection and memetic infection separately. You can actually survive for quite a while after eating a poisoned cookie, if you play in exactly the right way to keep your character oblivious to the apocalypse going on around them.

But it’s really hard to do that and people normally only stumble into it by accident, because the game performs (limited, one-way) fourth-wall breaking.

If this is not your first playthrough to reach the elephant plotline, the game *knows that you know* (because you’ve played before), and will flag you as memetically contaminated even if your character has no idea.

But it goes farther than that. The plot flag that triggers the apocalypse is finishing your dinner that night. (You then–if you don’t have other plans for the night–go to eat poisoned cookies and watch a poisoned movie with your family, and many other people in other places are doing the same. If you do have other plans, your family does it without you.) There is no in-game indication that an apocalypse will start then (in the main branch of the plotline, you actually *die* that night, and are resurrected by plot stuff later). If the game notices you building a bunker, buying gas masks, avoiding finishing your dinner to buy yourself more time to prepare††, the game *realises you must have read a walkthrough* and *flags you as memetically contaminated* (because why would you be doing this stuff if you didn’t know what was coming?).

—

†For anyone who has not read Cordyceps but still wants to read this post, the short version is that “the elephant” is a disease that is fatal when symptomatic but can only become symptomatic *if you know the disease exists*. If you’re infected without ever learning about the disease, it lies dormant for a few months and then dies out, unless you learn about it during that timeframe. (They call it “the elephant” because it’s pink and you mustn’t think about it.)

††If you say you aren’t hungry and put your dinner in the fridge, the “finished dinner” flag is not set and the apocalypse is postponed. You can eat other stuff later, and as long as it isn’t *that* particular meal the flag is not set. Letting the food rot sets the flag, but you can still buy yourself about three days this way.

Tags:

#cordyceps tcftog #illness tw #apocalypse cw #infohazards #oh look an original post #dreams

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

kaylapocalypse:

wunkolo:

I had a dream I was able to time travel and I went like 10, 20, 100, 1000, 2000 years into the future but the instant I went to 4,000 I got stuck in a time dilation jail set up by the American government in the year 3,877 in which anyone that tried to time travel back or forth across May 23, 3877 while on Earth would end up stuck in this time dilation chamber trap to stop time travelers but like it was so crazy and mismanaged because it was legit capturing like every single time traveler ever and the place had only been open for 12 minutes and was already getting overpopulated with nonstop multiple recursive instances of this one other guy trying to break previous versions of himself out of this god damn time traveler jail

that is fucking hysterical and absolutely sounds like something the American Government would set up. 

Tags:

#I didn’t actually laugh aloud but it still amused me enough to reblog #story ideas I will never write #time travel #home of the brave

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

shitifindon:

shedoesnotcomprehend:

shitifindon:

shedoesnotcomprehend:

(i)

A side effect of my sleep disorder is that I have lots of really vivid strange dreams, which I remember well when I wake up.

Last night I dreamt that something inexplicable/apparently paranormal (details not important) happened, and that I posted to tumblr saying “hey, so this really weird thing happened, and I can’t come up with a mundane explanation for it, does anyone have any ideas?”

In the dream, I got several replies to the post, offering potential explanations. I posted again thanking people for their input and saying that, as it happened, none of those could apply in this case.

“Obviously,” I added, “from your point of view, the most plausible explanation at this point is ‘some random person on the internet is lying.’ But I’m curious what the most reasonable explanation is from my point of view, given that I know it really did happen.”

At which point I woke up, making the answer immediately clear: the most reasonable explanation was that it did not, in fact, happen, because I was dreaming – even if I was quite sure it had happened.

(ii)

A while ago I had another dream along the same lines.

In that dream, something had happened that could happen in real life, but happens much more frequently in dreams – I don’t remember what it was, but something like “leaving the house and then realizing you’re not wearing pants,” or “finding out you’re signed up for a class you haven’t gone to all semester.”

Within the dream, I noticed this, and turned to the person next to me. “You know,” I observed, “if I were being strictly logical, I should now conclude that this is all a dream and none of it is really happening. Just goes to show how silly and impractical that kind of thinking is.”

Whereupon, of course, I woke up, and subsequently felt very silly indeed.

(iii)

I’m pretty sure my subconscious is trying to tell me something.

I’m a little concerned that what it’s trying to tell me seems to be “you’re living out Inception; wake up.”

But then, that would just be ridiculous.

huh!

This is fascinating to me because, while I do (very rarely) sometimes consider in a dream whether or not I’m dreaming and come up with a “no”, when I do that while awake there is an experiential/intuitive factor present that makes the answer *super obvious* and that is consistently missing in dreams. (It’s just that in dreams I don’t always retain the information “hey, if you can’t feel The Thing That Means You’re Obviously Awake Right Now, you probably aren’t”.)

And like, MOST of the time, if I’m dreaming and it occurs to me to wonder whether I’m dreaming I can notice the absence of The Thing That Means I’m Obviously Awake. Or if not that I can pick up on another blatant sign, such as having a super hard time visually focusing on objects, or the stubborn refusal of bathrooms to continue having walls when I’m in them, or my mother being alive.

Do you not have a thing like that, or what?

I definitely don’t have a Thing That Means I’m Obviously Awake. (A fairly common experience for me is picking up on environmental/mood cues that correlate with being-in-a-dream, and going “oh shoot I am totally dreaming right now aren’t I? great, the jump scare is coming any second,” and then it turning out that I am in fact awake.)

I do have a good reliable check I can perform, though (like you) I often forget it exists in dreams: I don’t feel pain in dreams, so I’ll bite the side of my hand, and if it hurts a little I’m awake and if my teeth go straight through painlessly I’m asleep. (As a kid I assumed everyone had this and that was what the “pinch yourself to see if you’re dreaming” thing was about.)

Unfortunately, though, this really only works while I’m doing it, because (I don’t know if other people experience this?) dreams don’t just give me invented current-experiences, they often come with fictional memories. This can range from “ah yes I have been searching for this mystical artifact for years” to “I can remember clearly the day I learned to fly” to “oh yeah I’m definitely awake because I checked just a little while ago.” (I first consciously noticed this phenomenon after Inception came out; I tried the remember-how-you-got-here thing, and discovered that my brain was cheerfully willing to spin out vivid memories of how I got there.)

(“Try reading a book” used to also be a good check for me; in a dream, I was never able to. Then one time I tried to use it and my brain cheerfully generated pages of made-sense-at-the-time text, and I concluded I was awake, and was quite startled when I woke up. These days, my second-best check for dreaming is that I can never type in dreams, especially not dialing phone numbers; I constantly hit the wrong keys, and then backspace too far, and then hit the wrong keys again…)

Weeeeeeird. Brains, man!

(If I had to describe The Thing That Means I’m Obviously Awake, I’d say it’s something like… a solidity and concreteness and embodiedness of experience? Dream experiences hit all or most of the right highlights, but fall down on the really minor stuff like ‘this table is at the exact same height every time I touch it’, and the framing stuff like ‘I have functioning vision, hearing, taste, smell, and proprioception all of the time, but cannot ever see the events of my life from a third-person perspective’.)

I think I’m in between the two of you. One of my big differences in dream-vs-real experience is that my sense of touch (and related senses, like proprioception and nociception) keeps running in the background when I’m awake, but when I’m dreaming I only feel touch/pain/position-in-space if I’m paying attention to it.

This is similar to your experiential/intuitive factor of Obvious Awakeness, yet is almost completely useless for dream testing because of pink-elephant problems. If you try to actively determine whether your sense of touch keeps working when you’re not paying attention to it, well, now you’re paying attention to it.

(I suspect it might be the reason why I pretty much never get false *positives* on dream tests, though (with only one exception I can think of). If I’m seriously wondering whether I’m dreaming, I almost certainly am. But dream!me generally doesn’t find that line of reasoning convincing *enough* to bet on it (do things that will go badly if I turn out not to be dreaming), and I can’t say I blame her.)

I don’t currently have any tests that consistently or even near-consistently work, just some that work sometimes.

—

Somewhat tangential, but kind of related: after watching the Doctor Who episode “Extremis”, I found myself occasionally performing shadow tests in dreams and failing them. I thought it was weird while watching that episode that everyone leaps from “we’re part of a simulated reality” to “we must be a training ground for aliens preparing to conquer the alpha-reality Earth”, without considering other reasons you might be part of a simulated reality, and it seems my subconscious agrees.

Tags:

#is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #reply via reblog #unreality cw #embarrassment squick #dreams #Extremis

{{next post in sequence}}

Anonymous asked: I actually just had a sex dream for the first time. But I was a guy in it, which was weird (cuse im not), and it was more like I was reading something than actually experiencing it. Very weird, and not unpleasant, just confusing.

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{previous post in sequence}}

{{OP by asexualactivities}}

brin-bellway:

(something something be the change you want to see in the world, hold on)

(okay, let’s see if this works)

Wait, do other people have a distinction in dreams between reading a story and experiencing it? “I’m reading this thing” is sometimes used as a framing device, but I still experience it as I would if it were “actually” happening within the dream.

(The thing about Erotic Dream Week is you see some of the non-sexual variety in people’s dreams too. Although I already knew non-prosopagnosics tend to see faces in dreams, so that part didn’t confuse me.)

Tags:

#reply via reblog #dreams #prosopagnosia #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

baroksleg:

baroksleg:

i had a dream last night where the hot new trend was making “monksona”s which was basically just like … urself. but as a medieval monk

in the dream i went way into the details of mine but i forgot it all? I think I was a Cistercian brother in west Germany. and i did a lot of calligraphy but my latin was bad so i mainly copied things.

this meme was so serious in my head i got so into it man

#mine would be like gregor mendel but he can also do parkour (x)

i knew telling this website about this dream was a good idea

#mine is an offensive OCD stereotype who solves crimes (itsbenedict)

Tags:

#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #thank you for that tag Benedict #Monk

Regaining Normalcy: Flame Girl Saga

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

sinesalvatorem:

dragonsmagiccircle:

sinesalvatorem:

The day after I escaped from The Freaky Kidnapping Facility, I had a calm, civilised talk with the college admin about security. I impressed upon them the importance of having security procedures that don’t let sock-wielding kidnappers drive into the campus, pick people up, and roll out like nothing ever happened.

I only screamed a little bit. I only kicked a potted plant once. I’ll admit that half the screaming I did was a direct consequence of having kicked a potted plant, but I never claimed I made the best decisions. What matters is that after my terrifying-yet-unbearably-cute rantings, they increased security. Which is to say, they implemented security. Being scaredorable works! Never again would travel-sized students have to worry about involuntary shipping and handling!

After half a day spent watching over my shoulder, eyeing the knives in the cafeteria warily, and giggling senselessly at the mere mention of mitochondria, a representative from student affairs told me to take the rest of the day off. I was disappointed yet resigned. Just because I could heal (and get off on) a stab wound didn’t mean I wasn’t traumatised.

After I was safely ensconced in my dorm-room, I pulled out my phone. I’d never been the most social person, so my contacts broke down neatly into four categories: Important authority figures – from college admin to the police – that I’d already screamed at as much as I cared to; my parents, who would learn of my kidnapping over my dead body

(they really would: I had set up a system to notify them should I become unresponsive); my study group, who would either be in class or, y’know, studying; and pants-less fire goddesses I’d promised to call. It wasn’t that hard to figure out who I could commiserate with at the moment.

“Hi!” I said, trying not to sound traumatised. “This is that girl from last night.”

“Hi!” A warm and familiar voice replied. “If it were any other ‘girl from last night’ calling and sounding this traumatised, I’d probably feel like a terrible person. As it stands, your response is pretty normal.”

“Uh, OK, I think.” I replied, eloquently. “Thanks, um, I actually don’t think I got your name -”

“Emma.”

“Thanks. I’m Clare. You sound… Really normal. Like, given the whole… Everything. The whole everything. Shit. I’m bad at words. But I’m sure you noticed that. I didn’t need to say it. Shit again.”

There was soft laughter on the other end. However, it didn’t sound like someone laughing softly, but someone holding the phone away to laugh loudly.

“Sorry,” Emma said when the laughter had died down. “I’m really sorry. I’m just kind of giddy. Like, I’ve been in bad situations before, but I kind of expected to die. I’ve never had to deal with people with that much resources. Usually a couple muggers or burglars – rarely organised crime, and never this.”

I was really sorry to here that Emma lived in such a bad neighbourhood that they were constantly dealing with criminals. It made me feel lucky to live in a place so safe that, until today, there was no campus security. Although, seriously: what was up with the whole no security thing? That didn’t feel right.

Wait a second. Emma was waiting for a response. I’d zoned out mid-conversation. Crap. What was I supposed to do at this point? Make sympathy noises? Which ones? Why didn’t human interaction come with a manual? Or even just a regular text book. I could probably do a better job cheering up some Gram-negative bacteria than anything this macro. I just said the first thing that came to mind.

“I’m sorry to hear that. You must live in a pretty rotten neighbourhood.” Yes, I insulted her home. Smoooooth, Clare. You must be a real hit with the flame-ladies.

“Oh, no.” Emma assured me. “It’s pretty nice here. Workload’s pretty low. In fact, if I want to do the most good, I should probably move downtown. That’s where the real bad guys are.”

Do the most good? What? Was she a social worker? That might explain why she could stay so positive-sounding in the face of all this craziness. I’d never imagined Gram-positive bacteria trying to cheer me up.

“I’m sure the people you work with really appreciate how altruistic you are,” I told her. Honesty probably works as an OK sympathy-signal. Or not. I’d know if anyone had been so kind as to give me a manual. I couldn’t even tell if this was an appropriate time to ask her out. Despite my best efforts, I’d been unable to locate a copy of The Gay Agenda, either.

“I actually work alone.” She informed me. “It’s not like there are enough criminals to justify two idiots in tights chasing after them.”

…Was this a euphemism? I could sort of see the stuff about tights and chasing, but where do the criminals come in? I’d only learned the meaning of “booty-pirate” last week, and I didn’t think it was relevant here. But what did I know, really? I probably missed an entire lexicon by avoiding all humans during high school. This could be the most transparent thing in the world to everyone else.

Sigh. I guess I would have to suck it up and admit that I was confused.

“Um, I’m sorry, Emma, but I don’t really know what you’re talking about.”

“I mean I’m a solo crime-fighter, of course. I’m not a part of any superhero teams. I’m a lone wolf. I know; shocking, right? I guess that means you roll with a pack, right?”

…………

“You’re a superhero!?”

“You’re not!?”

“No! Definitely not! I only learned I had powers yesterday! I learned them as a result of getting stabbed by a torturer! This is a thing!?”

“Oh my God, I totally need to get you up to speed. There’s so much to teach you! Let’s meet for coffee tomorrow afternoon. Know anywhere good near you?”

“There’s a coffee shop on campus, and I can be there at 5:30.”

“Great! Don’t worry about directions – I’ll just use my ~super powers~. See you then!”

Wow. So…. Wow. The third most surprising thing to happen in my life: superheros exist.

The second, of course, was the whole torture/kidnapping debacle. I still needed to sort out my shit after that.

However, they both failed to compare to the Most Astonishing Thing Ever:

Holy shit I’m going on a date tomorrow!!!

(Major thanks to ilzolende for editing and good suggestions.)

Wait wait wait… I need to find part 1.

Part 1 is ‘Didn’t Want To Move Because Wet Chocolate Mousse’. You can find it by following the tag ‘flame girl deserves a phone call’, which I’m using to organise the story.

(Part one was initially just some random dream so, while part one is definitely cannon for all subsequent parts, the reverse is not necessarily true.)

Tags:

#storytime #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #reblogging the version with context included

Prosopagnosia Dream

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

dhalim:

The dream itself was kinda ridiculous. I was among a group of magicians who was having to battle an invading magician army from taking over this labyrinth-like town, and battle was supposed to happen outside the city gates which were at least 30 feet tall. However, the gates were set up on an incomplete grid just outside the town, and in my dream, it made complete sense that if someone was having trouble defending one side, we just moved it further back and defended it there (??? I don’t get it either). Anyway, we took our positions on top of the gate, balancing on what was ultimately this fence only a couple inches across, and somehow expecting to throw magic down at the invaders? Except the invaders wound up coming up to us, and I was forced down to ground-level where the invading force was closing in.

I ran off to the side, to this little shack and on my way, I nearly ran into a woman who had bleach blond dread locks, who I didn’t recognise. Looking at her, I couldn’t decide if she was friend or foe, but when I didn’t attack, she kept running. The battle was hardly fierce, mostly just people running around, and I can’t be sure if I actually saw a face, or just dread locks and told myself a face was somewhere in there because it was supposed to be. Either way, in the dream itself, I suddenly felt overwhelmed because I literally couldn’t tell if anyone running around me as I went into the shack to hide was on my side or the invading side, and I didn’t want to attack anyone in case I guessed wrong. What if someone attacked me and they just couldn’t tell if we were on the same side or not, and I defended myself and killed them?

Worst of all, when I entered the shack, the man inside told me to get back out there and defend the town, but I couldn’t because I no longer knew who I was defending, and had to try to explain my perceived cowardice. I wound up waking up half way through my crap explanation, but I tried for several minutes to go back to sleep so I could finish telling him why. Sometimes dreams really suck.

And that is why we invented military uniforms.

Tags:

#after a while of population growth battles get to be large enough that even non-prosos can’t keep track of who’s on their side #prosopagnosia #tales from the prosopagnosia tag #reply via reblog #embarrassment squick