[Bones and Inception references] A dream...

... that was a blend of real and fictional people, complete with a soundtrack of lush strings. I swear I had heard the melody before but I can't place it. So frustrating...

In the dream, I'm an undercover agent trying to catch the perpetrator who kidnaps unsuspecting standardized test takers into an "alternate matrix" and then runs experiments on them. In religious terms, the "alternate matrix" is like... purgatory? Or the bridge between the physical world and the world of the dead, or something like that.

And... I'm working with Brennan and Booth on this case. (I think this is a sign that I watch too much Bones... and Mulder and Scully might have been a better fit for this :-P) They have already rounded up the accomplices outside the luxurious private school building/ castle/ mansion. Now I have to catch the main perp in the act.

However, he can teleport and switch rooms at will, and there is simultaneous testing going on in different rooms... so I remember dashing up and down the spiral stairs that are covered with elegant and ancient-looking carpets and sided with mahogany handles. What a stupid way to catch a teleporter, I know...

All the while I am running around, I keep hearing an ensemble of orchestral strings playing a melody with a overlay of (1) the Happy Birthday song progression Franz Schubert's Symphony No. 8, Mvmt 1 (as I remembered hearing from Minority Report) and (2) Non Je Ne Regrette Rien (from Inception). I recall some students are taking solfege tests on the second floor, but they don't notice me when I poke my head in.

I myself have been taking a strange mix of GREs and SATII... marking an obscene number of Scantron ovals... the horror! I have to ask to leave the testing room to go to the restroom, but I put the proctor in a trance while attempting to catch the perp.

Long story short... I did not catch the perp in my dream because the soundtrack got louder and I felt some strange abdominal cramping and woke up just as I saw Booth frantically signalling me from outside the building...

Seriously... is this like fanfic fodder or what...

Will not quote MacBeth's soliloquy about sleep...

... living out the title of my blog.

And being an ever-expanding vortex of angst spinning out of control for basically all of November so far...

Trying to solve a many-body problem in finite time is fucking sucking right now...

Once-in-a-blue-moon relatively-pleasant dream

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I was wandering around the Stata Center, which looked different from the real one. It was internally circular and the rooms were bigger. There was also one giant general purpose room...

I saw people I know from high school & undergrad whom I don't think know each other. They were engaged in a strange team-building activity inside the general purpose room, building Rube-Goldberg type devices. There were about 5 or 6 competing teams, and I saw them trying to hold down a spring (looked like it had a high spring constant k) hanging from each of the ceiling lights... for perhaps about 30 seconds. The mayhem that ensued was somewhat ridiculous. Screams and cheers and people piling on each other in awkward positions.

Meanwhile, I was circling around the food areas and came across an ice cream dispenser with 5 flavors: green tea, vanilla, strawberry, chocolate, and mint. (Seriously I think I must secretly want all ice cream dispensers to have those flavors...) I had a green tea one, strawberry mixed with vanilla, mint mixed with vanilla.

And then a current labmate was commenting amusedly on my mixing the flavors.

At least I know where the ice cream dispenser came about... I was at a food truck festival the night before and was watching one of my friend's friends eat a tall stack of ice cream balls on a cone. I was already full, but that cone sure looked tasty...

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[Fudgy Science Episode 001] (FSE 001)

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Observational study of how much I talk and how well it comes across vs. how awake I am.

Note that everything is normalized to the value when I'm fully awake, which gives no indication to the absolute quantity.

And there is a "golden zone" when I'm approximately 70% to 90% awake, such that I maintain about the same level of cogency but get more words out. This is when I'm less inhibited than when I'm fully awake. As in my think-it-through vs. just-say-it ratio is tipped toward the latter... in situations where I need to get my points across to a bunch of people, this is often helpful. Which leads me to think that in high-stakes presentations, perhaps one drink ~10 minutes before might just do the trick... or not! I haven't found a consistent algorithm to reach this state yet :-(

My least favorite zone is the ~40% to ~60% awake zone, i.e. the I-don't-feel-like-talking-so-get-the-f***-away zone. I would usually retreat to napping/ sleeping/ pretending to work by typing furiously when this happens.

The "wasted zone" of about 20% to 40% awake usually happens when I average < 5 hours sleep for about a week, after I finish the project in question, when I'm in familiar company. I tend not to recall what I say here. Sometimes I reach this stage in my regular sleep, when I would dream that I'm giving a lecture about some (often technical) topic and proceed to dream-talk, the content of which makes little sense in actuality.

This is what I think an extrovert's graph looks like -

The cogency curve is probably still monotonic, but the verbal flux curve is consistently high even when the person is about 30% awake. And there is a slight tendency for the amount of talking to increase when the person is less awake but not completely comatose.

This in part explains my angst during most of my middle-to- high-school-to- undergrad life, because I was in that Valley of Stupor most of the time. Figures.






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Truncated dreams

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So two nights ago I was dreaming that I was about to go swimming. But the dream itself only included the mundane preparation interspersed with moments when I ran around a pool (in various locations) as a child. So I never actually did the swimming in the dream because I woke up before then.

Last night I dreamed about going to buffets with a large salad and dessert bar. But yes... I didn't get to eat any of the stuff I got in the dream.

Does this indicate unfulfilled, subconscious desires? I do know that lately I've sought out images of scenery with either running rivers or lakes. Probably because I'm not feeling the presence of the ocean or the bay here, and the campus lake is a freaking dried puddle. I mean, the temperature difference throughout the day is like 30 degrees F. That's basically a desert.

And yesterday for the whole day I ate a bowl of pasta with some lettuce and a bit of leftover pork.

So maybe the desires are not so subconscious after all.