Tortured Shark

I had a strange dream of a shark being subject to terrible laboratory tests in which they had electrodes attached to it and were zapping it for some reason. The shark was making crying sound almost like a human. It really horrified me in the dream.

It happens that the day before, I did have an e-mail exchange with someone and we were talking about telomeres. Telomeres are genetic "end-caps" on your genes that tell the replicating machinery stop here. In normal somatic cells, each replication shortens the telomeres and thus normal somatic cells have a finite number of replications before they stop replicating.

This is thought to be a mixed blessing and curse for human beings. It is theorized that the genetic limit on cell generations prevents cells that have a mutation that causes their reproduction to be improperly regulated to replicate only a fixed number of time thus preventing cancers. The argument supporting this is that all cancer cells have a mutation which enables the expression of the gene coding for telomerese, an enzyme which restores the length of telomeres.

Sharks have telomerese active in all of their cells and they rarely get cancer. They are in fact exceptionally genetically stable having changed little in hundreds of millions of years.

Sharks also have special sense organs that are sensitive to tiny electrical currents in the water created by the muscle and nervous system activity of potential prey. This I would think would make electrical stimulation exceptionally troublesome for a shark.

So I can kind of see some things from the previous day that this dream was connected to though the horrible cry the shark made, I don't know where that came from but it was gut wrenching.

Dreams

Haven't posted recently because for many months my dreams, if I've remembered them at all, have been very fractured and incoherent.

Last night I had a couple of unusual dreams, not of the prophetic variety at all, but from an experiential standpoint strange.

I went to sleep around 7AM, and was woken up out of a dream by one of my children at 8:30, which in retrospect I am glad happened because I may not have remembered it otherwise.

The thing that was unusual about this dream is that it lasted seven weeks, even though it had to have taken place within the space of that hour and a half. I've had a few of these before where the dream time is much much longer than the time I was actually asleep but they are very unusual for me.

In this dream, I went on a business trip to Ohio, don't know specifically where in Ohio, just Ohio, for two weeks. While there, I worked out a deal with a company that was very lucrative. Then I took a five week extended vacation to California where I worked on learning to surf and just explored the area around where I was staying. I flew to both destinations.

Most of my dreams don't seem to fit the general description of wish fulfillment but this one definitely did as I am struggling economically at present and I have not had a vacation of more than a weekend in 25 years, and I loath the cold rainy weather here, particularly during this time of year and would just love to be somewhere sunny and warm right now.

When I have these kinds of dreams where the time frame is way longer than the actual time dreaming, I always feel extremely disoriented when I wake up, like the dream life had become more of a reality than waking life and it's like, how did I get here? This morning was no exception.

Then I went back to sleep and had another dream. In this dream, a fictional friend (someone I don't know in real life but was a friend in the dream) had a pet bear and large dog. The bear and got were good buddies and played together; appeared kind of rough but the dog never got injured, and it was a large dog, not as large as the bear but something St. Barnard sized, though it had shaggy fur.

The bear and large dog were both indoor pets; he kept them in the house, and it was in an urban area, a large city, but I don't know specifically where.

At first I was afraid of the bear, it seemed to kind of take swipes at me and I was afraid those huge claws would remove large chunks of skin if it connected, but after a while I came to realize that it just wanted attention and was friendly towards me.

It was a polar bear by the way, and can't help but wonder if it is somehow related to the pseudonym I use on the net, Nanook, which is an Eskimo word meaning polar bear. I can also think of some other things though, Chris, who works phones during weekday evenings, came down last night as power was out at his place; brought two of his dogs with him, they are Siberian Huskies.

One, Angel, I hadn't seen for a while and she had gotten quite large which became evident when she stood up, and I remember thinking how her paws resembled bear paws as they were so large; and she has long hair like the dog in the dream as well.

Anyway, nothing psychic to report; just the mundane; but the 7-week dream is interesting to me. I remember an episode of Star Trek The Next Generation where they take on an Alien Probe and Picard is taken into the aliens world and lives a lifetime there before returning in an hour. Even just watching that episode I had that same sense of disorientation afterwards.

My sense of time is really messed, almost non-existent, under the best of circumstances anyway.