The kids are not all right.

What time is it?

As Scientific American can tell you, Americans are not what they used to be.  We once were a country of people who cared a lot about others.  Now?  Meh.

Humans are unlikely to win the animal kingdom’s prize for fastest, strongest or largest, but we are world champions at understanding one another. This interpersonal prowess is fueled, at least in part, by empathy: our tendency to care about and share other people’s emotional experiences. Empathy is a cornerstone of human behavior and has long been considered innate. A forthcoming study, however, challenges this assumption by demonstrating that empathy levels have been declining over the past 30 years.

The research, led by Sara H. Konrath of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and published online in August in Personality and Social Psychology Review, found that college students’ self-reported empathy has declined since 1980, with an especially steep drop in the past 10 years. To make matters worse, during this same period students’ self-reported narcissism has reached new heights, according to research by Jean M. Twenge, a psychologist at San Diego State University.

I can't read this without connecting it back to the material I have read dealing with outside control of the rock music business.  And when I say outside, I mean WAY outside.. as in cryptoterrestrials or somesuch.  I have a few posts up that deal with that particular issue, but I could do a lot more.  None of that is likely to appear in a Scientific American article.

What about the fact that many people who report having been abducted by cryptoterrestrials recall that the experiences began when they were children?  Also not likely to appear in Scientific American.

Maybe that's because this stuff is bunkum.  But maybe not.  Either way, let's set those issues aside for now.

I have a simple observation for you.  I have kids who watch a fair bit of TV.  I always make it a habit to watch with them.  One thing I have noticed is the amount of random violence that occurs on shows that are ostensibly for kids.

The iCarly cast: Jennette McCurdy as Sam, Miranda Cosgrove as Carly, 

and Nathan Kress as Freddie

In one recent iCarly episode, for instance, the character Sam hits Freddie so hard that he flips over the couch and out of view.  At this point, Carly rolls her eyes and says, as if for the thousandth time, "I'll check for a pulse," or something similar.  This casual attitude toward violence, and treating it as funny, is one of the pillars of the show.

In another episode I watched over Christmas, this attitude is made plain.  Carly wishes that her life were different, and ala A Wonderful Life, she gets her wish.  We see that Sam winds up in "juvie" without Carly's influence.  Yet, there is really no reason that Sam's character should not be in juvie anyway, even with Carly's influence, as anemic and ineffective as it is depicted on the show.  The fact that Sam can get away with being a lawless punk is a large part of the humor of the show, and the Christmas episode makes it plain that there is really no reason she can get away with it.  She just does because that's funny.  Somehow.

Why I oughtta.. we always got our comeuppance when we misbehaved..

This is by no means a feature only evident in iCarly.  There are many other shows made for kids, and they all share some of the same tendencies.  Even when the characters aren't violent, they are often making fun of the foibles of others.  You know, showing the opposite of empathy.

She's not laughing with you.

Now, compare that to the shows we watched when we were kids.  Did Scooby Doo ever break any laws?  Well, not on camera, though perhaps there was an implication that Shaggy was lighting up in the van when the cameras weren't rolling.  Going further back, were Superman, Flash Gordon, or the Lone Ranger ever in a quandary over what was right or wrong?  I didn't watch all the shows, but I'll bet you that even if they were, the point was made that there is a right and a wrong.  Modern entertainment for children actively undermines this principle.

Who are you gonna root for: me, or that whiney blonde kid?

Is this a bug or a feature?

As I mentioned before, I could go very deeply into rock and hip hop music to show how these have gradually changed the perceptions of the young, or at least have helped to do so.

I wonder if I even have to make the point about video games?  Have you played any of these lately?  One of my favorites of recent years also disgusted me when I found that there was an intensely evil campaign woven into it.  I'm speaking of Oblivion and its assassin's quest story line.  This is so horrible, I can't even bring myself to describe it.  Yet other games have gone much further since.

Probably not the worst, but still.. I especially like the "child abuse" 

descriptor the uploader is about to report.

Why is this happening?  It's so widespread in all of our various forms of entertainment, that it really looks as if there has to be an underlying reason.  Either this sort of entertainment sells, which means that kids are demanding it and we are feeding that demand (rather unwisely, I'd say); or, we are actively training our young to be amoral, or at best apathetic concerning issues of right and wrong.

Now why would we do that?

One reason could center on the fact that the military ran up against a wall that caused the draft to be repealed.  Kids just didn't want to fight and kill for a living.  If that's the case, you'd expect early attempts to create this kind of content for children to have met with mixed success.  Were there shows in the 70s and 80s that were a little more violent than the norm, and that maybe weren't very good, perhaps didn't get good ratings, but that kept on showing up on the schedule anyway?

Oh my goodness this show was terrible..

Yeah, that one reeked in terms of story, and did glorify violence.  But it wasn't really a dud in terms of popularity that I can recall.  Also, it revitalized the brand for Hasbro, which continues to sell GI Joe action figures to this day, when it had been off the shelves for several years prior to the cartoon.

This demand for action figures was created by the multimedia monster we know and love -- Star Wars.

That's right, I'm badass.

I don't have the kind of time right now to really properly document my thinking, but I don't think it's a stretch for me to suggest that it was Star Wars, and not some nefarious government conspiracy plot, that created the demand that other cartoons soon rushed to feed.

The really interesting thing for me is how George Lucas, a terrible, awful director who has done his level best (even if unintentionally) to ruin his own creative product, became so wildly successful.  There is a story here.

It's true that he had done a bit of important research into what makes great mythic heroes.  (See Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces, an awesome book.)  And it's also true that he had a template to follow in the science fiction serials of the fifties.  But his adaptation of this material is pretty weak.  The acting in Star Wars is notoriously bad, (with the meagre exception of the only film he did not direct, Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back).

Kids ate it up anyway.  And they wanted the figures, by the millions, especially the bad guys, even to the point of turning one minor character into a major one.

Eat my metal boxers, suckers!

The kids demanded it.  The kids wanted to play with the evil dudes.  And we said, "You do?  Hot DOG!!  We'll make millions, bwa ha ha ha ha ha!"

Oops, make that billions!!

Now, I'm a child of the 60's and early 70's.  Back then, the "anti-hero" was becoming the stock Hollywood lead for a movie, but this had not yet filtered down to the young ones.  We ALWAYS wanted to be the good guys when we played.

My favorite book became J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, which is not a book that is ambivalent about its treatment of good and evil.

Mostly good folk here..

We didn't like Gollum.  He plain creeped us out, as did especially the Nazgul.  That shrieking in the night that they did was much more horrible in my mind than they could ever make it in the movie version.  Shelob was not cool, she was a flat out monster.  Orcs were evil and stupid.

Is it an accident that the hobbits look like children?  Hmm..

Of course the movie version was made in this century and it bears the mark of what we are talking about here.  Frodo gets much closer, much more quickly, to the dark side in the movie than he does in the book.  (The end result is the same -- he still can't throw the ring into the pit and declares it as his own.)

Tolkien had meant to examine the insidious effect of evil on even the smallest, most ordinary of us, through the power of the ring to corrupt.  We saw its effect on Smeagol/Gollum.  There was maybe a small portion of him that was redeemable, but he was mostly gone to the ring.  We saw its effect on Bilbo -- it had corrupted him, but he was proof against it in the end.  Then we saw its effect on Frodo -- nearly turning him into a very short (and short lived) dark lord.

It's mine, bitches!

We also saw the effect of the ring on Saruman, Gandalf, Galadriel and Boromir.  The ring is unambiguously evil -- you must resist it with all of your might, and even then you may not be able to escape its machinations.

I've gone on quite a bit here with TLotR, but the point is that Tolkien knew evil was shiny like gold, that it would interest us.  His advice was to throw it into the pit.

In Star Wars, Lucas advised us to try to redeem the evil.  (Well, Palpatine does go into a pit of sorts, and then blows up with the Death Star..)

And now?  It appears we believe we ought to revel in the evil, to learn what it's like to be evil.

The question is not whether to kill them all, it's how fast 

and how cool it will look.

I hope I can be forgiven if I see a certain trajectory here.  And to my mind the trajectory can be linked back to the era of the Vietnam war, but I don't think we're talking strictly about a military-industrial-complex attempt to create more grist for the war-machine mill.  This also coincides with the rise of alien abduction stories and other weird tales, which exploded on us in the 1950's, 60's and 70's in a big way.

Which is to say, I accept that there is a "control mechanism" at work here, but I don't think you should look to the Pentagon for its source.

It's not our fault this time?  Hooray!!

I think maybe you can look around the Pentagon for some of it.  There's a very weird tale having to do with the rise of psychedelic music and connections to the Pentagon, exemplified by Jim Morrison of the Doors and his father, Rear Admiral George Stephen Morrison, who was in command during the Gulf of Tonkin incident.  There are many, many other bizzarre connections with the military or CIA types and the psychedelic movement in California.  (But I don't think that's an effort by the Pentagon; rather, an effort by whatever the cryptoterrestrials are.  I think they were saying, "Oh so you wanna dance?  Watch what we do with your kids, suckers!" This jibes with the nuclear site flyovers and the livestock mutilations of about the same time, which smack of a throwing down of a gauntlet, something that Jacques Vallee suggested back in 1979.)

But enough of that for now.

What about going at it from the other direction.  Is there evidence that social pressures for good behavior are successful in creating kids that behave better?  Well, funny you should ask..

Because back in 1983, Norway had a serious bullying problem in their schools.  They dealt with it by instituting reforms in education that supported efforts to squash bullying where it started.  And the program worked.

Look at Norway, where the prevention of [bullying] became a major emphasis of the school system after three teenage victims of bullying committed suicide in 1983. There, everyone gets involved — teachers, janitors and bus drivers are all trained to identify instances of bullying, and taught how to intervene. Teachers regularly talk to one another about how their students interact. Children in every grade participate in weekly classroom discussions about friendship and conflict. Parents are involved in the process from the beginning.

Norway’s efforts have been tremendously effective. The incidence of bullying fell by half during the two-year period in which the programs were introduced. Stealing and cheating also declined. And the rate of bullying remains low today. Clearly, when a school and a community adopt values that are rooted in treating others with dignity and respect, children’s behavior can change.

In general, it seems that kids respond to what they see in front of them.  If they see adults and the media showing concern for empathy, as they did and do in Norway, then they become less likely to be abusive.  If you show them images of violence and apathy, as we do here in the US of A, then that's the kind of kid you get.

Imagine that, the kids are easily influenced by what they see.

American children watch an average of three to fours hours of television daily.  Television can be a powerful influence in developing value systems and shaping behavior.  Unfortunately, much of today's television programming is violent.  Hundreds of studies of the effects of TV violence on children and teenagers have found that children may:

• become "immune" or numb to the horror of violence
• gradually accept violence as a way to solve problems
• imitate the violence they observe on television; and
• identify with certain characters, victims and/or victimizers

Extensive viewing of television violence by children causes greater aggressiveness.  Sometimes, watching a single violent program can increase aggressiveness.  Children who view shows in which violence is very realistic, frequently repeated or unpunished, are more likely to imitate what they see.  Children with emotional, behavioral, learning or impulse control problems may be more easily influenced by TV violence. The impact of TV violence may be immediately evident in the child's behavior or may surface years later. Young people can even be affected when the family atmosphere shows no tendency toward violence.

Who knew?

The take away point here is -- the kids are not alright.  The kids are getting strange.  And its everyone's fault if we don't do something about it.

Are we just going to sit back and watch it happen?

Saved by a miracle, or just lucky?

Big wave, little boy.

Here's a story from my childhood I had forgotten for a while, but recently remembered it again.

It was summer, probably July, some time in the late 1960s.  I was maybe four or five years old.  Possibly as young as three.

I had accompanied my family to the Satellite Motel in Ocean City, Maryland, a journey that would become a tradition we would continue through the early 70s.

You can find a picture of anything on the internet. This one brings back memories.

I can remember several things about those days at the beach back then.  First, you would always find small sharks in the trash cans that were on the beach.  Fishermen were pulling them out of the water and throwing them away so that they couldn't eat the fish the anglers were after.  I once reached in to touch one and was surprised when it snapped at my hand.  Not as dead as he looked!

Not exactly like this.

It was a different time back then and I don't think adults were as accustomed to watching kids as they are today.  A nearby adult yelled at me after the fact.  "Don't try to touch the sharks, they'll bite you!"  Yeah, I noticed!

On the occasion that I'm thinking of, I recall that my older brother, always more physically gifted than me, had run right out into the ocean and belly surfed a wave back to shore.  I thought that looked like a lot of fun, so I ran out into the waves.  But I was young enough that I was still only able to concentrate on one thing at a time.  I turned to look back at my family, so proud that I was in the water.  When I turned back, I hadn't noticed any waves at all.  It looked clear and calm to me.  My family waved at me, and then their eyes all got very big.  They started to shout something, but I couldn't hear them.  Trying to hear them only made it so that I couldn't think about what they were doing, which was waving their arms for me to come quickly back.  I remember my brother running past me and looking back in fright.  So I turned around just in time to see the hugest wave I've ever seen.

In reality, it probably wasn't a very large wave as waves go, but I was pretty small at the time.  It was gargantuan to me.  I had no time at all and it was on me, pushing me into the sand, and then dragging me back out to sea, tumbling head over heels.  I hadn't taken a breath before it hit, so it was not long before I was very much out of air.  I knew that I could not breath while I was under water.  I also knew that, scary as the event was, the air was not far away.  The problem was, I couldn't tell which way was up or down anymore.  My lungs were burning, demanding air.  I held my breath as long as I could.  I tried pushing my feet to try to get to the surface, but I didn't hit the bottom.  I was trapped under the water as waves kept coming over, tumbling me again and again.

There comes a time when you are holding your breath that you cannot keep your lungs at bay any longer.  No matter how much you know that you should not take a breath, you are going to.  You can't stop it, you can only observe it happening, against your will.  My mouth opened, and I drew in a long breath.

For all I could tell, I was still under water.  Nothing changed for me, except that my lungs were now full of air, and I had time to reorient myself and find the bottom.  The group of waves that had hit so unexpectedly, drew back, and I was able to stand up and run to the shore.

I checked my breathing -- it was normal.  I was worried because I thought I must have breathed water, but there was no choking, no coughing.  My parents were yelling at me, as parents sometimes do when a disaster is averted.  Why didn't you come back when we waved?  We couldn't find you, where were you?  I couldn't answer their questions and only said, "I don't know," and snuggled into a large towel.

It had all happened too fast for me to be frightened while it was happening, but I was upset now.  Mostly because I thought I had breathed water.  Yet somehow I had not.

I can still remember that moment with a strange clarity, forty or so years later.  The water rushing and tumbling all around me, the sense of complete disorientation.  The feeling that my lungs were about to burst into flames.  They hurt so bad!  My muscles were beginning to feel weak, so that it was hard even to flail my arms.  And then the inability to keep myself from breathing, and the panic that this produced in me.  I thought that I would die.

Then there is a strange blank moment.

And then I am struggling again, still under water, my lungs full of air, and my muscles suddenly full of resurgent energy.

What happened during that blank moment?  It isn't totally blank.  I recall the intake of breath, and the fear that I had just breathed water.  But there was a feeling of some kind of transcendence too.

Perhaps I passed out, or nearly did?

If so I was extremely lucky to have breathed air at that moment.

Or was that some kind of miracle?

Religious Mysteries -- The Shroud of Turin

Detail from the shroud.

It's Christmas Eve, and all thoughts turn to -- that's right -- religious mysteries.

One of the strangest mysteries I've ever come across is that of the Shroud of Turin.  While the shroud was always considered a religious relic, a detailed view from a photographic negative was produced in 1898 that really kicked things off.  For nearly a century, people debated back and forth whether the figure depicted on the shroud was really that of a crucified man, and therefore possibly Jesus himself, or a clever forgery.

The debate seemed to be settled in 1988 when carbon dating returned a date in the 13th or 14th century.  But that figure has been cast into doubt because of further discoveries -- mainly, that the portion of the shroud that was taken came from a part of the cloth that had been repaired in the middle ages.  It does not seem likely that any material will be taken from an area not near the edges of the shroud, so this may be a mystery that remains unsolved, at least scientifically.

There are other avenues of discovery that have cast their doubt on any resolution to the mystery.  Here's an interesting example taken from the Wikipedia article:

First, according to experts, the weaving of the shroud proves it cannot be a first century textile from Jerusalem:

In 2000, fragments of a burial shroud from the 1st century were discovered in a tomb near Jerusalem, believed to have belonged to a Jewish high priest or member of the aristocracy. The shroud was composed of a simple two-way weave, unlike the complex weave of the Turin Shroud. Based on this discovery, the researchers stated that the Turin Shroud did not originate from Jesus-era Jerusalem.

Well, that's it then, right?  Not so fast:

According to textile expert Mechthild Flury-Lemberg of Hamburg, a seam in the cloth corresponds to a fabric found only at the fortress of Masada near the Dead Sea, which dated to the 1st century. The weaving pattern, 3:1 twill, is consistent with first-century Syrian design, according to the appraisal of Gilbert Raes of the Ghent Institute of Textile Technology in Belgium. Flury-Lemberg stated, "The linen cloth of the Shroud of Turin does not display any weaving or sewing techniques which would speak against its origin as a high-quality product of the textile workers of the first century."

I guess nobody can say the shroud that wrapped Jesus in the tomb cannot have come from Syria.

For nearly every point you find in this debate, it seems there is a professionally defended counterpoint.

Here's one of my favorite bits of evidence in favor of the shroud:

The VP8 Image Analyzer was produced by Pete Schumacher of Interpretations Systems Incorporated[102] and was delivered by him to John Jackson and Eric Jumper in Colorado Springs in 1976. It showed the Shroud image has properties that, when processed through this analog computer, yield a 3-dimensional image.[103] Rather than being like a photographic negative, the shroud image unexpectedly has the property of decoding into a 3-dimensional image of the man when the darker parts of the image are interpreted to be those features of the man that were closest to the shroud and the lighter areas of the image those features that were farthest. This is not a property that occurs in photography, and researchers could not replicate the effect when they attempted to transfer similar images using techniques of block print, engravings, a hot statue, and bas-relief.

That's pretty strange right there.

Even if we did find proof that the shroud was a first century artifact, this would not prove the shroud once wrapped Jesus.  There is no test that we can do to prove that.  Even if we are able to recover enough DNA to make a clone, we'll never know who the man was.

But the anomalies apparent in the image, if it was to be thought a forgery, are really puzzling.  It does not appear to be painted.  Nor was it made as a photograph.  The light and shadow effect would have to have been produced locally at every location in the shroud, as if the light were emitting from the body itself as a radiation.

One thing that puzzles me is that the body and the wounds on it correspond exactly to the Jesus we read of in the New Testament.  I find it hard to believe that the oral reports, which turned into familiar stories passed down a generation or two, would have remembered every detail of the condition of the body, so that the shroud and the New Testament fit together like a lock and key.  That's the sort of thing that you would think could only come about through intention, right?

So is the Shroud an intentional artifact?  If it is, and it wasn't forged in the 13th century, but formed by a process we don't understand yet in the 1st century, what does that mean?  Are we talking about a miracle of God here?

Or are we talking about one of those "control mechanisms" that Jacques Vallee speaks of in his writing?

I am pretty sure there will never be evidence enough, one way or another, to prove a case.  It will be left up to our free will to believe how we may.

For myself, I believe in the Shroud.  I can't help it.  The fellow I met during my NDE-ish experience would totally do something like that.  I like these lines from Walt Whitman (though he was talking about the grass, I don't think he'd mind my borrowing):

5 A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropped,. 6 Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose?

It fits my understanding of that fellow that he would leave us encouraging signs, to believe or disbelieve as we may.  Which is not to say by any means that I think everybody has to be a Christian.  I think there are a lot of religious mysteries.  I'd like to look into a few of them over time.

If you celebrate Christmas, have a merry one.  If you don't, have a blessed and safe weekend.

I'll be taking a little time off for family stuff, but expect me back next week, if I am not seized with some unconquerable urge to write sooner.

UPDATE: Thanks to Episcopalian for the kindness of a link to this post over at The Shroud of Turin Blog.  I've returned the favor by adding his blog to my blogroll over on the right.

Nightmares, or, How to interpret your dreams, pt 4

A horrible picture by a guy named Fuseli

Nightmares.  You have them, I have them, we all have them.  Except for that guy who doesn't dream.  He doesn't have them.

Smug bastard!

Regarding nightmares, I have good news and I have bad news.

First the good news.  Nightmares are almost never about what they seem to be about.  You aren't really going to be rent to shreds by some evil moon-mad beast.  Usually.

The bad news is that nightmares mean we have been ignoring something that our unconscious thinks is important enough to scare the sheiza out of us about it.

But let's take a closer look at the unconscious and its urge to scare the bejeebers out of us.  First of all, the unconscious always blows things out of proportion.

You forgot to FLOSS!

The emotions are exaggerated to a high degree because the unconscious doesn't think you are paying any attention and, by gosh, it will not be ignored!  Sometimes what you are ignoring is not really that big a deal in the big picture.

But sometimes nightmares can point to something that really is important.  Something that you really ought to attend to.

Let's look at a classic nightmare for me.  I'll have to dig back into the catalog pretty far for this one -- it's the first dream I can ever remember, and it happened some time in the early 1970s.

Early 1970s

There was a tiny alien caught in a spider web.  A huge spider was crawling slowly toward it, while the tiny alien cried out piteously.  I was frozen with indecision, my strength totally sapped.  I felt like I was supposed to rescue the alien, but if I did, I would be at it’s mercy.  It had huge claws with venom dripping from their tips.  If I didn't rescue it, the spider would kill it.

Brrr!  I still feel shivery thinking about that old dream.  At the time I was about eight or nine years old, and I could not understand it at all.  I had seen some drippy-fingered aliens in a movie on afternoon TV, so that is probably where I got the image.

Anyway, scary, right?

Criminy, someone made a t-shirt out of it!!!!

Years later the image was repeated in a different form, but as you will see, the message is the same.  I noted this one in my dream journal with a single line.

January 22, 1992

A Tigress starving and chained, trapped beneath a tree in it’s root system, inside the roots, which had been hollowed into rooms.

What I don't mention in that line is that, yet again, I felt that I should release a dangerous animal that will no doubt kill me if I do.

It's very useful when you get two dreams on a theme like this.  In fact, often you will recall two dreams in one night.  They are usually about the same thing, and you will be able to use them together to try to figure out the symbols in each of them, sort of like a puzzle.

So in these two dreams, the tigeress is a symbol that is probably easier to figure out, and once we do, we can read that back onto the alien of the first dream.

I figure the reading of the two dreams goes like this.  To put it plainly, but generally -- some feminine personage who had been in my life from at least 1972 to 1992 was a tad bit dangerous..

As it turns out, this is historically accurate.  The feminine personage in question was a member of my family.  She was obviously in trouble and I always had the urge to help her somehow.  The dreams -- overblown? yeah maybe -- were on target.  Had I been able to consciously understand them I might have saved myself some trouble.

The point here isn't to delve into family tragedies, rather to show how dreams will use graphic images with heightened emotional content in order to try to focus us on the issues that plague us in our waking lives, but which we have not fully grasped in our conscious minds.  Even so, it isn't possible to go further without airing some laundry, so you are forewarned.

Now, since we often talk about cryptoterrestrials here, I bet you were sorely tempted to see that little venom-clawed alien as a literal alien.  Maybe you weren't, and if you weren't, you are certainly rational-minded.

Him again!  Grrr.. I hate that guy..

For those of us more prone to grok the irrational, the gravitational pull of that idea was not weak.

But the alien was not a literal alien.  The image of an alien was used to highlight how much I did not know about this person, and could not ever know.  The person was alien to me.  Later, I saw her as a starving tigress.  Let's be candid -- we all know what happens if you release the starving tigress.  She's going to eat your ass without blinking twice.

Wouldn't you know it, there's a restaurant with the name..

Isn't it interesting how the unconscious could know this, while I, a mere eight-year-old, could never have figured this out?  I mean, it took me more than twenty years, and plenty of psychotherapy, to get it.

Partly this is because one thing denial is good at (and even better is its close relative repression), is making you stupid to truths that it might be dangerous for you to understand.

My unconscious understood that I was in a tight spot and warned me of it, even if I was not in much of a position to take advantage of such knowledge.

Now the peril was not physical, at least not often.  It's true that this lady did sometimes break free of the bounds of sanity, and when she did, she might have harmed me or others.  What the dream was telling me was not to trust her.  Not to learn from her.  To try to maintain my own identity without coming to see the world through her eyes.  I was not in the web with the alien, and I did not have to be.  I was not chained in the roots of the tree with the tigress, and I did not have to be.

This much, it seems, I understood, even if I couldn't have put it into words, and even if I was only moderately successful at it until the psychotherapy I mentioned.

I feel like I should add another dream I had, after the therapy and more years had passed.  I'll just retype it here quickly rather than copy it, so names and things don't have to be changed.

I dreamed of the lady again.  I watched as a large poisonous snake sunk its fangs into her leg and thrashed around, digging them deeper, and then biting her again and again.  I yelled at the snake and it turned and tried to bite me.  I was too quick for it and jumped out of the way in time, so that it just grazed my leg, leaving no wound.  After it missed me it fled.

We can't be too down on the alien tigress lady -- that snake bit the absolute hell out of her.

OK, whew, got through that.  Are all nightmares about something really heavy like this?  No way!  But they all have information that you have been resisting or missing.  So you should pay attention to your nightmares and try to learn from them.  They aren't just a scary theater in your brain for your entertainment.

HAVING SAID THAT -- it's also important to UNDERSTAND, but NOT TO DWELL ON the fact that there are possibilities for other influences to enter your dreams.  I don't know what these other influences are, but I find them pretty easy to recognize.  They always want something from you, and outright ask you to do things.

I don't think ordinary dreams ever ask you to do something.  They are about showing you how things stand, not about getting you to do something.

If you've never had dreams like this, then you were probably smart enough not to dabble in the occult when you were a teenager.  You didn't have seances, play ouija, use the tarot, pendulum dowse, or any of that nonsense. Am I right?

If you did do those things when you were young, then it's possible you allowed some nasty types into your dreamspace, where they promptly put their feet on your mental furniture and ate all your mind snacks without asking.

O hai, I'm up in yer unconshuz drinkin' yer beerz and eatin' yer chips.

These are some kind of parasite or something.  I don't exactly know what they are -- dead people with nowhere else to go?  Spirits that were never corporeal so they want to hang around in your unconscious and see what it's like to be peeples?  I'm not sure.  All I know is if you have them, they will be editing your dreams like nobody's business.  You need to get rid of them.  In fact, some of your dreams will be about that.

I know about this sort of thing first hand.  I know how this sounds -- crazy, right?  Well, maybe these aren't literal ghosties or whatevers either.  Maybe they are simply some form of psychological manifestation.  Either way, you want to get rid of them.

I found that I was able to get rid of them by repeating the Lord's Prayer in my own words, and while doing so, asking God to kick them out of my life.  I announced that this was my will, that I did not want them around anymore.  I even made a physical pushing-away motion with my hands and arms.  I then had a series of dreams showing that they were indeed kicked out.  And then the things that I wanted to do changed.

So while I can't prove it or anything, I suspect that these parasitic intruders have a lot of access to your conscious thoughts, introducing urges and ideas that you wouldn't have thought of on your own.

Like I said, don't dwell on this thought, but if you think maybe it applies to you, try my suggestion, adapted for your own religious views.  Intentions matter. You have to mean it.

Otherwise, your scary dreams are all about getting your attention.

How to interpret your dreams, pt 3

Bet you don't need my help figuring out this visual pun..

Let us pause to impose some order on the haphazard chaos that is my usual posting style.  If we're going to talk about dreams and how to interpret them, we should lay out some kind of conceptual map of what we are talking about.

First, as I said in the first post of this series, it's important to point out that everybody dreams.  Newborn infants dream.  Ever seen your dog twitching its paws and whimpering, or maybe softly barking?  It's dreaming.  People with very scientific attitudes may quibble with this, or reject it outright.  And some people insist that they do not dream, ever, at all, no matter what.  OK, then, you don't dream, but everybody else does.  Happy now?

Second, let's make solid the obviously implicit point that I believe dream symbols have meaning and these can be discovered.

Where do dreams come from?  Elsewhere I have mentioned that there can be multiple sources of your dreams.  The main source is the personal unconscious, which is a part of your mind.  In terms of your dreams, this is the primary "filter" of what you experience, providing images and directing content.  Your rational mind is dormant while you sleep, so you cannot expect the unconscious mind, which is irrational, to play by daytime rules.

What I'm saying is, things will be difficult to understand until you learn how your unconscious mind operates.

This would be an impossible task if not for one convenient fact -- the content of your dreams will ALMOST ALWAYS involve things that are happening in your life RIGHT NOW.  Your dreams will very rarely, if ever, have reference to things going on in the wider world.  You will probably not ever have a true "precognitive" dream -- even dreams that seem like predictions are simply an illustration of how your unconscious mind can be quicker on the uptake about some things than your rational mind is. The unconscious mind is all about making associations and recognizing connections.  It also does not have a certain liability that the rational mind does, namely, the power of denial -- an important evolutionary tool, by the way -- so it really does see some things much more clearly than we do in our waking minds.

I totally came up with that sheiza.  In your face, Jung.

Let's talk about that power of denial.  Here's how it's important in an evolutionary sense.  For the problem with having our wonderful rational minds is that we can use them to forecast the probable outcome of future events.  That's an important skill, but it does have a certain downside.

Imagine yourself a simple cave-person, waking up in the morning, alive and unharmed, in your happy and warm cave.

So warm and inviting out there.. until the sabertooth gets you.

The moment you step out of that cave, everything wants to kill you.  Maybe not everything, but it sure seems like it.  Most human beings in this era are dead by the age of thirty, so the odds are really not very good you'll survive today, and with your rational mind, you understand this.  How are you going to go out there and do what must be done to keep the species alive?  How?

Ok, you tell me.

With the power of denial!

Nothing can eat me, I'm Captain Caveman!

This wonderful evolutionary trick allows us to have that rational mind, which animals (apparently) do not have, and still face the world that so obviously wants us dead yesterday.

Yay denial!

Unfortunately, there's a downside to denial, too.  It's rather indiscriminate.  It is very easy for us to abuse it, and not even know that we have, because denial works by knocking conscious thoughts into the unconscious.

This is where your unconscious mind is your friend.  Don't forget, your unconscious mind is YOU, even if you don't really know that part of yourself real well.  It has your best interests in mind (though as an irrational mind, what it considers "best interests" and what you can recognize as such might be in conflict, often enough).

One of the main purposes of your dreams is to puncture through that denial that you have built up but which is not useful for you.

The unconscious mind is also good at making those connections that your waking mind has missed.  So connecting these ideas you can say that your dreams are mainly all about making you conscious of things that you have either missed or denied.

OK.  That's what dreams are mostly all about.  There's nothing spooky about them.  They seem strange because the unconscious mind is irrational and uses a different language to communicate.  This language is symbolic, associative, and, believe it or not, playful.

Puns and other forms of word play are woven into dreams.

Most people miss the wordplay element of dreams, but this is one of the easiest ways to get to the meaning.  If you have read about my dream "Jesus in the peas," you'll remember that it took me years to understand why Jesus would be found among the peas.

Peas --> peace, see?

It's such a common pun, you'd think that I would have figured it out sooner.  But I hadn't realized that dreams use wordplay like that.  But it's not a joke to your unconscious -- this is how it thinks.  Through associations, connotations, and connections.  We need to understand that in order to really get to the meaning of our dreams.

The take away is this -- dreams USUALLY help us to understand what we have either denied, or just plain missed, in our every day life.  It does this through the language of the unconscious, which is not like ordinary waking consciousness.  The language is associative, symbolic, and playful.  We can learn this language by connecting the dream back to circumstances in our waking life.

Bears! Or, How to interpret your dreams, pt 2

"Yes, I'll have the fresh caught yard fowl, a bowl of pet food, 

and a tankard of your best spigot water, m'kay?"

We are speaking of common symbols that we often find in our dreams.  Yesterday, I was working on modes of conveyance, focusing on the jet.  Today I planned to look at some others, like the car.

If your dream car looks like this, you are in trouble..

So let's look at the car briefly, but then I want to move on to another symbol, exemplified by the bear up at the top, because I dreamed of bears in the neighborhood last night.  And that is not good.  Not good at all.

So the car.  Like the jet, it is a symbol that shows you how you get from here to there, but usually, you are in control of the car.  If you aren't driving the car, then whoever is driving it is in some way in control of some aspect of your life.

Where's my sammich?

Pay attention to what the car looks like.  An old car indicates that something about the direction you are going is old fashioned or out of date.  Recently I dreamed I was driving the old blue 1974 Chevy Nova I drove in 1981.

Less cool and more rusty dents, and you've got it.

That's the car I drove in high school.  You really don't want to be driving the car you drove in high school, so if that's what you dream, you need to look at how you are doing something now like you did in the bad old days.

Often enough, dreams of high school relate to how we interact with others.  On the internet it's easy to get into "flame wars" and what have you.  But this mode of interaction is like, you guessed it.. high school.

Ugh, why did you have to remind me of high school?

As it happens, the dream coincided with a bit of unpleasantness I participated in on "the internets."  And I should have known better than to behave like that.

Back to cars.  Are you driving your car too fast?  You are probably being reckless in some part of your life.  Having trouble getting your car going?  Then you are stuck -- somehow your life needs a "jump start."  Are you driving down roads that you barely recognize?  In this kind of dream, you know that you once knew how to get where you need to go, but now you are a bit lost, and anxious about it.  This is a very common dream, and it points toward things that we have forgotten in our lives that we should remember.  The dream asks us to look at our direction and see in what ways we have "lost our way."

Uh.. what now?

But don't just take my word for it.  With any symbol, you can always consult the online dream symbol dictionaries.  But you don't want to look at just one, you want to look at several, because there are multiple ways of seeing many symbols.  You need to look at them all to see which of them, if any, is going to fit into your situation.

Because dreams are almost always about your present situation.

So let's look at some entries about the car.  (NOTE: I'm just pulling these from random spots on the net -- I don't necessarily endorse the sites that contain these dream dictionaries.)

CAR -- The car in your dream may symbolize the physical self or ego development and ego function. In that, it represents the way that you travel through your life's journey. Consider all of the details in the dream, including its emotional content (e.g. difficulty of the road, identity of the driver, direction of the incline). Recurring car dreams usually deal with life's major themes that may include issues of control and sensibility. By carefully examining this dream, you may gain insight into important areas of life, including to how well you are navigating from one stage of your life to another, if you are assertive and take charge or are passive. Dreaming about traveling in a car is a very, very common dream theme that provides valuable information in regard to a specific part of or long-standing theme in your life's journey. See also: Journey, Road

Hmm, ok.  So how about:

CAR -- You, your ego, your personality, your persona, your life and it's direction. Who is driving the car? Where are you sitting in the car? If you are in the driver's seat then you are in control of (or wish to take control) of your life. If someone else is in the driver's seat, they may be controlling your life. Are you riding on all four wheels? If not, something may be missing in your life. Are the tires flat? You may feel your life is going no where. Are there others in the car? These may be unknown (or known but repressed) aspects of your personality. What color is the car? If it is red if may symbolize anger on your part. 

There are plenty others to peruse, also.  You can google "Dream Dictionary" or the like to find your own sources.  You can also purchase dream dictionaries, but to tell you the truth, it's not really worth it anymore.  So much of the same sort of thing is online.

You may be saying to yourself -- how can a dream dictionary know anything about my life?  (Well, the dictionary doesn't, silly!  It's an inanimate object.  For real, why would you say that to yourself?)  As it happens, if my way of thinking is correct anyway, your dreams arise from a source that is common to us all.  So you should not be puzzled to see how your dreams and mine are very similar.  But don't forget to add in what your personal associations are to the image.  Maybe you loved the car you had in high school?

If this was your car in high school, then you are officially awesome.

So now, on to the bears.

My dream last night was strange and frightening.

December 21, 2010

In this dream we were in a house that was in a rural area.  I had walked a trail behind the house to a barn about 200 yards away where I saw bears rooting around.  I saw them eating out of the feed bin and snuffling for other sources of food.  They had just come out of hibernation.  I couldn't see any barn animals.  I knew that my kids and other neighborhood children were outside across the road from this barn.  I whistled and yelled for the children to get inside.  There were many kids in the field across the road.  They saw the bears and started running.  I knew my five year old daughter was out there too, so I was very worried.  I was inside a small picnic area with a screened porch-like structure around it at this time, so I was not exposed to the bears myself, but I started running back to the house and knew they would see me when I did.  When I got there, the family dog was outside.  He started barking as soon as I got into the back yard, which was mostly fenced, but not completely.  A bear had followed me.  This had begun just as the sun started to go down, and it was getting dark now so it was hard to see what was going on.  Oddly, their names were floating in the air like in a video game and I could see those.  Our dog was fighting with the bear as the bear tried to climb some stairs to follow me.  They were making a terrible noise.  Then the dog and the bear both went over the edge and I could no longer hear them.  I thought our dog must have died and I was upset.  I saw the children inside briefly and they were all safe.  Later, my wife told me that she found some bear bones under the house that had been thoroughly gnawed.  We thought maybe our dog had killed the bear and would not come inside until he got to finish eating it, because he knew we'd take it away from him.

 If you are a parent, any dream that shows your children exposed to danger is a nightmare.  It was quite a relief to find that the children had made it safely inside.  But what is this dream about?

Of course, it's complicated.  And we aren't going to decipher the whole thing right now.  Let's just focus an the bear.

Dangerous wild animals, particularly bears, lions, tigers, and sharks, represent pretty much the same thing, but in different contexts and with different nuances.  They often represent the negative aspect of your father or mother, or even that aspect within yourself which you inherited from one of them.  But in my own dreams, bears in particular have another meaning.  As you can see in "The polar bear dream," for me bears can represent something like the burden of physicality in its evil aspect.  And I've had other interesting dreams with a symbol more like the bears that I saw in last night's dream.  Here's one that's pretty old:

June 20, 2002

*Dreamed I was in a department store using a computer catalog.  It was advertising this stuffed bear that came in various sizes – all of them were essentially the same, however.  It was brown with a tan belly and enlarged nipples, as if the bear had just had cubs.  I think there were six teats.  I recognized the computer catalog and realized I had used it many times before.  I wanted to see the life sized version of the bear, because I read, or had heard that it would growl and jump on whoever got in front of it once it was activated.  The computer was very interesting.  There were buttons that were almost like slots, in sets of three.  The slots looked like a place to put in coins.  There was also a three-part set of text boxes.  One of the buttons said “commit” on it.  I wanted to see the bear, so I went to where it was in the store and went over to it.  I wound up behind the display, looking through some empty shelves.  Sure enough, when a tall man walked up to the bear, it turned, growled and pounced on him, knocking him to the floor.  The man was frightened, but also laughed.

Over time, I have come to read this dream to mean that bears are those negative things that happen to you in your life, which you in some way select and agree to.  After all, to "buy" the bear at this strange department store, you have to put in your coins and press "commit."

The man who got jumped laughed like you do after the scary part in a movie has startled you.  Like, "You got me!"  I could see on his expression that he knew the bear was animatronic, or not a real bear, but the act of being jumped on produced fear in him anyway.  And in me too, even though I was only a spectator.

It didn't go down like this..

Seeing a lot of bears coming out of hibernation has to seem like a big problem if it's somehow scheduled, doesn't it?  So what is my dream warning of?  I see them first and am able to warn the kids of the neighborhood, keeping them safe.  But my poor poor doggy!  He's a goldendoodle.  He's a lover, not a fighter.

Bears?  LOL!  Cool!  Did they bring honey?

Yet, in the dream, he was more than adequate to protect me and my family.  I think this suggests that I don't need to go off all aggressive on whatever this outbreak of bears might be.  I can chill out.

But the outbreak of bears -- that's an image that worries me.  They were coming from everywhere.  It was dusk and they had just come out of hibernation, two symbols of a transition to new conditions.  Things that make me go, "Hmmm.."

How to interpret your dreams, pt 1

The Dream by Henri Rousseau

We all have several dreams every night.

You occasionally run across someone who says, "I never dream," but this isn't so.  We all dream.  It's simply a question of remembering the dreams afterward -- some people can't recall them.  But even if you don't remember them, dreams are still doing their job.

Here's my theory of dreams: dreams are the interface between mindspace at large and our own personal dreamspace.  To put it another way, we could say that Jung's "collective unconscious" speaks to our personal unconscious minds through dreams.  The only thing I'd add to that is that I think there's an even larger unconscious that goes beyond the human collective unconscious, and that this also speaks to us in our dreams.

Let's not get too far into the weeds with theory and let it go at that for now.

I will give you a simple way of seeing how this works.  I'm sure you've heard the expression, "let me sleep on it," which we use when we are facing an important decision or a perplexing puzzle.  If you have done this, how many times have you found that, after a night's sleep, even if you don't recall any dreams, the question is suddenly easier to answer, or a decision is easier to make?  This has often happened to me, and I'm willing to bet it has happened to most of us.

So what happened when we "slept on it"?  I'd say that we received information during the night, and in the light of that new information, which often does not even appear to us consciously, we find answering the thorny problem a simpler task.

This is one of the purposes of dreams -- to impart information to us that either we do not presently have, or that we have not seen in the proper light.

Dreams speak to us in symbols, and these symbols are often not clear to us in our conscious minds.  This is because our dreams use the language of the unconscious.  The unconscious is irrational, associative, emotional, often chaotic, and tempestuous, which makes it darn hard to get a good rational grip on it.  Further, we each interpret the impulses of the unconscious through our own personal dreamspace, which means that symbols that appear in my dreams may have a different meaning than the same symbol in your dreams.  So how can we ever have a general system of dream interpretation?

Fortunately, there are some symbols that we all have in common.

How do you get from here to there?

One universal symbol is MODE OF TRANSPORTATION.  We often dream about going someplace.  How we get there has meaning.

Are you walking along a path in the woods?  Are you driving a car down roads that you only half remember?  Or maybe you are flying in a plane -- if so, are you the pilot, or a passenger?

Leavin' on a jet plane..

Let's take that last one first.  I have occasionally dreamed of being a passenger in a jumbo jet.  In these dreams, we are traveling with others to a set destination.  It's public transportation.  This symbol speaks of where we are going as a group, whether that be your family, your neighborhood, your state, your country, or mankind in general.  (A large passenger ship is the same sort of symbol.)  Things to notice -- where are you going?  What are the conditions onboard?  How is the ride?  Unless you are the pilot, you aren't in control of the situation so these dreams often alert us to the kinds of problems we don't control.

Now let's see the symbol at work in a real dream.

April 28, 2010

I was on a jet liner waiting to take off.  I don’t recall where we were going.  It’s possible that I didn’t know.  I recall feeling a little apprehensive or bummed about having to go on a journey.  Now that I think of it, I do remember thinking that I was going to have to fly over the Pacific Ocean for hours to get to Hawaii, then I thought, wait, we aren’t going all that way.  Somewhere in California.  I might have thought I was going to visit my father.  The jet started to take off, but the captain kept having to abort because something would get in the way.  Once it was a transport vehicle that was supposed to wait until he passed to try to cross the runway but appeared to be just barreling through.  He finally got the jet airborne after several delays.  I was working on making some coffee in the steward area just behind the last row of seats, where I had my seat.  I filled a strange coffee making thing and asked someone if I was doing it right.  I think it was a stewardess.  She said I was doing it the right way.  When I went back to get in my seat, I saw that two people were already there.  They were rude kids.  I asked them to get out of my seat, but they refused.  I was ready to fight them, but then thought it might be wrong to hit kids.  I called for the stewardess and she made them leave.

This is a very interesting dream to me, though I did not understand it at the time.  I think the two rude kids in my seat, for instance, represent certain negative elements that I had carried for a long time and only last Spring finally got rid of.  If that's so, then the stewardess would be a spiritual helper of some sort.  This implies that the plane represents a very large group, as in my country, or all of us.  (The coffee, by the way, represents the ideas in my writing.  This dream occurred around the same time I began to believe that bigfoot and other cryptos are not what they appear to be, and started telling folks about it.  Coffee stimulates us and makes us "wake up.")

This dream addresses, at least in part, the anxiety that a desired outcome will be obstructed by the concerns of tedious daily commerce.  The journey is delayed several times, but finally gets aloft.  I'm not sure where we are going, but it's someplace West, maybe California or Hawaii.  Both would be considered desirable destinations by many people, though I'm not so sure about that.

We must understand that the maker of our dreams is wiser and smarter than we are.  The dream maker knows what we ought to know, but have not yet seen clearly, and uses symbols to attempt to draw our attention to these things.  If I'm on a plane headed for California, what does that mean?

Goin' to California with an achin' in my heart..

A first step is to actually investigate the words and names, because hidden in their etymology may be meanings that fit into our concerns like puzzle pieces snapping together.

In fact, the name California was derived from a Spanish adventure writer's fable of a land of the Amazons, whose queen was named Califia.  In older days, California meant gold and the desire for material wealth, as the Wiki article points out, speaking of Cortez' and even Columbus' knowledge of the story of Califia:

The legend was so well known that Hernando Cortez, the explorer, requested resources from the Spanish monarch to go in search of the legendary land of Califia and, in fact, thought he found the land off the west coast of New Spain. This legend, known throughout Europe, also influenced a number of other explorers including Columbus himself, as evidenced in his diary.

"The Indians told him that along that route he would find the island of Matinino, which they said was populated by women without men, to which the admiral replied he wanted very much to bring five or six of them to the king and queen… but they said that it was certain that they [the women] existed and that at a certain time of the year men came to them [women] from the aforementioned island of Carib, which they said was ten or twelve leagues away, and if they gave birth to a son they sent it to the island of the men, and if a girl, they kept her with them."

Thus, the hunger for wealth, riches and gold for personal gain, as well as tribute to their royal sponsors merged with the legend of Mansa Musa's female warriors and took on a life of its own and precipitated the Spanish hunt for gold in North America.

 So a journey to California is not necessarily a journey I'd be pleased to make, if that's what it represents.  And I believe that is at least partly what it represents.

Of course, I lived in California and I have my own personal associations with it.  These merge with and temper the general symbolic associations, and help me to interpret the dream.  Unfortunately, my personal symbols and their associations largely reinforce the idea that this journey is toward materialism and personal glory.  My associations with California are almost all negative.

They're livin' it up at the Hotel California..

So how did that fit into my life at that time?  Interestingly enough, I had at that time begun practicing with a progressive rock band, eventually being named their bass player.  I thought that I wanted to do this, that it was the culmination of a life-long dream.  A dream I had once tried to facilitate by moving to -- you guessed it -- California.

The band doesn't make an appearance in the dream because if it had, I would not have understood the dream the right way.  The dream tells me that I've gotten on a plane headed for California.  Yes, I've kicked the bad kids out of my seat, and yes, I'm making the coffee right, but now I'm on a plane to California.

Even though I did not understand all of this consciously at the time, I did understand that this was a place I did not actually want to go.  Having climbed aboard the plane, I no longer had control over the destination.  As time passed, I came to realize how those symbols and my feelings about them fit into my circumstances.

This is enough for a start.  Next time we'll continue with the theme of conveyance dreams and how to interpret them.

Welcome to the Multiverse

The round marks are "bruises" from other universes colliding into ours.

According to some new research (which I may have pointed to earlier), signals in our cosmic microwave background radiation may show that our universe has been bouncing around in the muliverse like a billiard ball after the break.

Just when the search for exoplanets looked like the undisputed fashionable field of study for 2010, the cosmic microwave background (CMB) is stepping to the forefront of astronomy and cosmology. Last month, it was Oxford’s Roger Penrose claiming that he’d found evidence of a cyclical universe in patterns of concentric circles in the CMB, suggesting our universe is just one of many that have come before it (and will come after it). Now, another group of researchers are claiming the CMB contains evidence of other universes that exist concurrently (and outside of) our own.

The new evidence, put forth by a group of researchers at University College London, is based upon the model of “eternal inflation,” which is predicated on the idea that our universe is part of a larger and ever-expanding multiverse. Our universe is contained in a kind of cosmic bubble that exists alongside other universes contained in their own bubbles, and in these universes the rules of physics could be far different than in our own.

If the eternal inflation theory is correct, it follows that our universe and other universes have likely collided in the past as they violently bounced around the larger multiverse, and those collisions should be evident in the CMB (the cosmic microwave background is a leftover from the Big Bang, and thus is of interest to astronomers and cosmologists for the long historical record it contains – if researchers know what to look for).

Very interesting.

More famous dreams

Pretty dreamer picture comes from here.

Probably by now everyone has heard of Paul McCartney dreaming "Yesterday."  But did you know that there are many examples of famous dreams?

Here's a website that lists twelve of them, including McCartney's.

And here's one that turned up in my wanderings today that I haven't seen before (thanks to Cracked Magazine, via the Daily Grail).

THE M9

Dreamed 1940 by David Parkinson

In 1940, when Nazi armies were victorious everywhere, David B. Parkinson was working at Bell Laboratories, designing a potentiometer for civilian telephones.

One night, he dreamed he was on the Continent close to an Allied artillery piece. The remarkable thing about this gun was that every shell it fired nailed a German plane. Parkinson wrote: "After three or four shots one of the men in the crew smiled at me and beckoned me to come closer to the gun. When I drew near he pointed to the exposed end of the left trunnion. Mounted there was the control potentiometer of my level recorder. There was no mistaking it. It was the identical item."

He proposed the idea at work. Bell Lab engineers quickly saw that Parkinson's potentiometer could indeed be applied to antiaircraft gun control. The M9 gun director was the practical result of Parkinson's dream. The M-9 didn't bring down a German bomber with every shot, but it lowered the number of shells fired per kill from thousands to about a hundred--a phenomenal change. In one week in August of 1944, the M9's were credited with destroying 89 of 91 V-1 rockets launched from the Antwerp area toward England.

In short, Parkinson's dream, and his insistence in telling it--ACTING on his dream--greatly strengthened Britain's defenses against the Luftwaffe and helped defeat Hitler.

Most of this account comes from George Schindler's "Dreaming of Victory" in New Scientist, p. 53, May 31, 1997; info on shells fired came from an IEEE abstract of an article on the M9; see their website.