Apocolyptic Dream

Nightmare

I've been doing brain exercises for ADD, something known as JB Dual N-Back training. For me it has a side effect of causing extreme dream activity. I'm not sure if the dreaming is actually more extreme or I am just remembering them vividly. Most are not nightmarish although the sheer intensity of them makes them disturbing.

One recent dream I had definitely was of the nightmare genre. It started out with my wife and I going to Top Foods to get some groceries. In the dream, Top Foods had memberships just like Costco except they had this membership where you had the authority of a manager over employees if you bought it. For some reason we did this.

So we're in there and my wife, who works at another grocery store; put her ID card into this cash register computer terminal. I should elaborate; in this dream the cash register was more than that, it also tied into the inventory system and was a kind of electronic time card as well, so when you logged in it started keeping track of your time.

So my wife logs into this terminal and an employee comes up and says she shouldn't do that because it will mess up the statistics. The employee told me he just got done putting up an bullet proof screen behind their windows in the back.

I ask if this was preparation for the food riots. I was making a reference to the George Bush economy we have here, the high oil prices leading to the greater adoption of biofuels, and an increase in food prices.

The employee looks at me very sternly and says, "Do you honestly want to know?"

To which I replied, "Yes, I wouldn't have asked otherwise."

He went on to say that's exactly what they were for. The army came and ordered them to install them just in case of civil unrest.

I commented that that wasn't entirely unlikely if the economy keeps tanking, which it is likely to do if we stay in Iraq and Bush doesn't keep his yap shut with respect to Iran.

I leave the store and I'm approached by an army soldier who points an automatic weapon at me and orders me to lie down on the ground.

The next thing I know I'm being woken up by an ancient Chinese man, I mean the guy looks like he's at least a hundred. He tells me I've been asleep for six years.

I asked what happened? He says he doesn't know, nobody knows. My wife is just waking up as well. She looks visibly aged.

Everything is dark, like a super-heavy overcast day. We end up going into this old house, my wife and I. The wood is all gray and oxidized. I'm looking for something to eat in the house, there is absolutely nothing.

I look outside the window, we're kind of up on a hill, and what I can see, none of the trees have any leaves, there are no visible living plants, no bushes, not a blade of grass.

Oddly enough there is electricity. I ponder how they keep electricity running when there seems to be no food. There is a phone but it's dead. No radio or television, or Internet, no newspaper stands, no way of communicating with anyone except the old Chinese man who also just woke-up.

No way to find out what happened, who is alive. Are my kids alive I wonder? I think of calling my daughter, but I don't know how. I have this vague memory of her divorcing John and marrying someone by the name of Scott White; and for some reason I think he's a reverend, but the memory is very vague.

I am feeling deep despair not knowing if my children or alive, not knowing how to contact them. It occurs to me I don't even know where I am. The terrain isn't familiar around the house. It's not the way I remember it when I went to sleep after being ordered to lie down on the ground.

I wonder to myself if the army was trying to save us by ordering us down, or if they were responsible for our condition and what happened.

I see a few cars moving on a road off in the distance, but I don't see any vehicles anywhere around us, moving or parked, as if they were an extremely rare commodity in this new landscape.

I know if we don't find something to eat soon we are going to die, we've been asleep for six years with no food, I am no longer fat, my wife looks skin and bones and not well. I think maybe it will be better if we do die then live in what's left of the planet.

But then I think I don't know what's left, I don't know how local this phenomena whatever it is, is. I'm scared, do I try to walk and hope to find some food and use up the last little bit of energy reserves trying? I don't know where I am and I don't even know how I am oriented.

The sky is very dark, like a deeply overcast day but it's not ordinary clouds, smoke or soot or something like that. Everything is dry like it hasn't rained in a long time. I can't tell where the sun comes up or where it goes down. It's so dark I'm not even sure the sun is coming up. About the only lights are light from artificial lighting on some buildings, and some still functional street lights.

I have no means of communicating with anybody anywhere. I don't know what happened. I wonder if there was a nuclear war, but all the buildings are still standing, the trees aren't burnt, they are just without leaves, which they probably would be if it's been perpetually dark like this for six years.

What could cause this? I don't know, maybe a massive asteroid strike though I am aware that impact events in the past that were large did result in global firestorms and things don't like burnt just dried up and dead.

At that point I woke up out of the dream. It seemed so vivid and real; and yet it is not the type of dream that is normally precognitive. I can tell those because in those I never jump in time and space, there is a logical connection and I can always think about how I got from there to here, but in this dream, it did jump around like an ordinary dream. I have no memory of how I got from inside to outside the grocery store, no memory of how I got to the house we ended up living in. So vivid though it was, I have no reason to believe it was precognitive.

Afterthoughts

It left me feeling pretty rattled for a while after I woke up. So much so that I was afraid to go to sleep the next day and it took me many hours and I didn't sleep soundly at all.

It's strange because so many elements of the dream I can tie directly to real life events. The newly obtained membership in the grocery store; we just got our renewal notice from Costco. The name of my daughters fictitious second husband, there was a character that used a handle of Reverend White who disrupted our IRC network severely a few years back. My wife really does work at a grocery store.

I think one thing that I find particularly frightening is that I have read numerous versions of a conspiracy theory in which some elite group desires to totally enslave the rest of the human population, and reduce the planets population to between a quarter and half million slaves. The name of the group varies by version, The Illuminati, Bildebergers (I wonder if they come with pickles and onions), sometimes even the trilateral commission gets credit.

One particular version of this theory I was exposed to in the early 80's, by a friend, who had been abducted with another individual from their pickup truck east of Lake Sammamish.

Now I know the usual response is to say yea a couple of nutcases, but I have to tell you, one of the people involved was as solid and down to Earth as it gets, but he died of a heart attack not long thereafter. The other was so paranoid after this event that he was sure the entire world was out to get him. Nobody would have been that emotionally affected by a non-event, and both were in the truck and abducted together. So I am really of the belief it happened or at least something very traumatic happened to them and they believe it happened.

They showed me this video tape and it's got this military guy, and I don't remember his rank but it was middle, not a private not an admiral or general, but captain or lieutenant or something like that.

The military officer gives lecture that is about an hour long describing underground alien bases, tunnels connecting them, how our government is working with them, and lays out this whole conspiracy theory, but with details, how they're going to do it.

Now keep in mind, this is early 80's, before the Berlin wall fell, before anyone believed it would in our lifetime. And he laid it out like this.

First, at that time we were being controlled more or less 1984 style, nations being at constant war to unite the people against a common cause and cause them to be willing to give up their freedom. But he said; that would eventually fail because in time the Soviet Union would no longer be viewed as a credible threat.

Terrorism would replace the Soviet Union as the credible threat, and it would be much more effective because nobody will know who and where they are, requiring constant vigilance even at home, and it would be precipitated by a large event like 9/11.

And what has come to pass? Exactly that, we've basically thrown the Bill of Rights out the window between the Homeland Security Act, the Patriot Acts, and various presidential directives. The courts have allowed it with no real opposition.

Look at the whole wiretap thing, they portray it like it was a necessary post 9-11 phenomena, but if you look at the facts you will know it was in place before 9-11, and here is how.... Right after the 9/11 event, the next 24 hours, the FBI went out and arrested several hundred people based upon congratulatory phone calls, etc. Wiretaps don't get in place that fast, they had to know this event was coming and have them in place well before hand.

But the lecture went on to say that eventually terrorism too would no longer be a credible threat, and at that time we'd be faced with a fake ET invasion. They said they had holographic projection capabilities that could project anything into the sky, ET ships, God, whatever you want, and they'd utilize them to fake this coming invasion. They said run away from military when this happens, they will kill us.

So this dream really shakes up some fears; I do fear our own government far more than terrorists from another nation, or another nation state such as Russia or China, or pretty much anything else. I think they're totally out of control, particularly the military. Eisenhower warned us to beware the military-industrial complex, but nobody headed that warning and today it's running the show.

So the dream awoke real fears that I have and it doesn't seem all that impossible.

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.