Cows In Cars

I haven't posted about dreams much lately because those I've been having have mostly been so strange I can't make sense of them.

One I had lately involved a dairy where cows were brought to where they were milked in cars; they somehow got the cows into the backseat of a car, and then drove the car to where it would be milked, and milked it there, all cramped up in the backseat.

Granted, the conditions in many dairies isn't much better than that but still it's an odd dream.

Sun

This is a close-up of a sunspot. It is really an incredible structure to behold; especially considering it is a structure in a gas, not a solid, or more properly a plasma, in which energetic photons have stripped the electrons off of atoms in the gas.

On the outside you see what are usually thought to be convection cells, although I have my doubts because of their apparent attachment to the filamentary structures which are comprised of charge plasma particles carried along magnetic field lines, or so goes the conventional theory.

The lines appear to twist and turn and bend in ways that appear different than the way iron filings follow a magnetic field line, but then in a plasma there is an important difference, the charged particles themselves, moving, create their own magnetic fields interacting with the existing magnetic field and creating incredibly complex magnetic structures. When I look at these, really stare at them, I can't help but feel the presence of something alive and sentient.

When there is a sunspot group in one hemisphere, there is usually a corresponding feature in the other hemisphere and field lines looping between them. When one of these loops breaks and magnetic field lines reconfigure, then you get a part of the gas ejected into space at tremendous velocity, and if it intercepts the Earth you get intensified Auroras and other space weather phenomena.

Sun / Snow

I posted earlier with respect to the dreams I have of the future having increased snow in this area if we are taking the good path. I am not certain which way we are going to go but I mentioned this year's snow providing some hope that perhaps things will work out without so much pain and suffering.

There are to be sure still evil people planning evil things, a missing nuke that is bound to show up as a mushroom cloud somewhere and used as an excuse to invade Iran, which is really invading Russia by proxy, rather like Viet Nam was really a war with the Chinese by proxy. I think there is not consensus though within that group that it's such a good idea and I hope they decide against proceeding. We really don't need WW III and that's what it is bound to become if it were to happen.

I have posted here and on my Future Sustainable Living blog, regarding the role the sun plays in Earth's climate, and I think it's important to emphasize that because if people do not understand it then they will come to think "global warming" is bogus and just a political or economic ploy. The way the topic of global warming is presented by Al Gore really is bogus. Global warming is real, but it's far more complex than Al Gore and others portray and it's important to understand those complexities and how they affect us.

The first thing to understand is that Global Warming is not all human caused, it's not all caused by carbon dioxide build-up in the atmosphere, and on shorter timescales, carbon dioxide is a minor contributor. By shorter timescales, I mean in terms of a couple of decades or less. In these short intervals, natural variations in the Sun's activity, and in the Earth's magnetosphere, and in cosmic rays all play a larger role.

Our sun, goes through solar cycles lasting approximately 22 years for a full cycle, in which the magnetic field reverses its poles, and then reverses back to the original polarity. During the time the magnetic field is strong, sunspots and coronal mass ejections are frequent. During the time the magnetic field is weak and in the process of reversing, sunspots are minimal.

Higher sunspot activity results in warmer climates on Earth, lower sunspot activity results in cooler climates on Earth. The last three solar cycles have been highly active, each more active than the cycle before it, Earth, as well as every planet in the solar system has been warming. Now, the sun is going through an extraordinary quiet period and we've just had the coolest winter on record in the northern hemisphere.

This isn't to say that global warming is caused by the Sun alone, it is to say that the temperature variations induced by the changes in the suns radiance during the period of a solar cycle is larger than the gradual increase in temperature attributable to global warming. During periods of high solar activity, the Earth's average temperature increases far more rapidly than carbon dioxide accounts for, and during periods of low solar activity, the Earth's average temperature decreases, even in spite of carbon dioxide buildup, but over the coarse of several solar cycles, the Earth's temperature does, on average, increase due to extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Increased carbon dioxide also plays havoc with ocean chemistry and changes in ocean currents that result are far more pressing dangers than global warming when it comes to the effects of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. For these reasons we need to ween ourselves from fossil fuels.

Dreams, ADD, Dual N-Back Brain Training

I suffer from adult onset ADD symptoms, and looking for alternatives to drug solutions because they are not without a plethora of problems, I ran across an article on computerized brain training which related studies that have found a form of brain exercise called Jaeggi-Buschkuehl dual n-back task training to be beneficial as it improves working memory and many of the brain functions implicated in ADD.

Being anxious to find a better alternative to drugs, I searched for an online form of this training and found it (click on the link above to go there) in a flash implementation at a website called Cognitive Fun. There were a number of reasons I was looking for alternatives; the drugs aren't affective over the whole day, they make adjusting to variable sleep schedule extremely difficult, and they stimulants have potential health risks associated with them such as high blood pressure, increased rate of cognitive function loss with aging, etc, and for me another issue is that my brain tends to adjust to anything that attempts to alter it's chemistry rather rapidly and drugs become ineffective. The research indicated that dual N-Back training continued to provide increasing benefits the longer it was practiced.

I found there are side effects to this training. When I first started it was extremely exhausting. After half an hour of training I would become profoundly tired. I found it more manageable to break this up into two fifteen minute sessions and to follow each session with fifteen minutes of meditation that gives my brain some recovery time. Of coarse, real-life, business, kids, company, wife, all demanding attention don't make this always possible.

The second side effect, and the one that is particularly relevant to this blog is that it causes me to dream intensely, more intensely than anything else ever has. The dreams are vivid, long, complex, involved. They have not been, to date, the type of dreams that are predictive, but they do seem to make associations that upon waking, I often find useful, however, I also find them so intense as to at times be emotionally difficult, and that's not to say that they are nightmarish or frightening in the normal sense, but rather that their intensity is just so great that it is overwhelming. I also find these dreams often involve being someone else who is entirely different than myself which is something I haven't experienced in dreams until lately.

In healthy people dual N-back training still produces improvement in what is referred to as fluid intelligence, so even if you're completely healthy you might want to consider this. I am curious if others experience the same dream side effect. If you enjoy hallucinogens you might well enjoy the dream side effect if this also happens to you because the dreams very much have that quality to them.

Snow, Good Path?

On December 30, 2006, I wrote an article about how I see Earth changes occurring and that there are two different potential paths all depending upon how we act, if we can learn to love and forgive, or if we have to keep being indifferent and hateful, and not just to our fellow humans, but all life. We really must begin to sense and feel the connectivity that we have with all things, that we are all one, and think in terms of the greater good.

This year in the Seattle area, we had Snow the latest we've ever had it in the season, into the third week of April, and yesterday, when much of the snow in the mountains is usually melted, yesterday June 11th we had two feet of fresh snow up at Stevens Pass and Snoqualmie also got some snow. For a lot of people this is disconcerting, an unfamiliar pattern, the weather is doing strange things we haven't seen. It does mean things are changing and change has the potential to be negative or positive. But I see it as a positive indication because in the dreams, I only see the increase in snowfall on the positive path.

I have to admit this is incongruent with the way things seem to feel right now. It feels like there is a terrible amount of hostility in the world and that the hostility has stepped up. But the Yin-Yang symbol I put here for a reason. The idea behind this symbol is that the seeds of change are in the present.

If you look at what we've had over the last several decades, it's been driven primarily by greed, power mongering, hatred, we've fought, stolen resources, invaded a sovereign nation and killed it's leader as well as hundreds of thousands of it's citizens.

We've not profited from this, as we've harmed other countries, so too have we harmed ourselves. We now have the largest national debt and deficit in the history of this country. We have most of the world hating us as the direct result of our actions. The US dollar isn't worth squat anymore. We've gone from being third in life expectancy to 49th over just a couple of decades. We've jailed 2% of our population, more than any other nation in the world. We now have oil prices that are more than four times higher than they were before Bush had us invade Iraq.

But there is a positive side; some people are actually starting to realize this was not such a good plan. The high cost of oil has spurred the development of sustainable alternatives. The Chinese are slated to marked a plug-in hybrid that can go 100 miles on a charge next year (while Chevy volt won't be available until 2010 and at a price of $45,000 I'm gonna bet the Chinese outsell them). Obama looks to be an interesting leader; first I've seen that seems to actually recognize that there are two sides to every conflict and first that has shown a willingness to listen to both sides. Time will tell, but maybe there is hope.

In the dreams that take the more positive path; what I see next is intensified Auroras or something that at least looks like that, or sometimes so intense that it looks like a false dusk/dawn after/before sunset/sunrise. If we see these we are on our way.

Air Force Dream

Had a dream last night in which I was an air force test pilot. The thing that makes this particularly odd for me is that I've never been in the military, don't have an interest in being in the military, never learned to fly a plane. I have played with simulators so I have an understanding of basic controls and physics but that's about it.

In this dream the air force had a new jet engine and airplane built around that engine that could accelerate extremely rapidly allowing takeoff to happen in very confined environment, but still reach high speeds.