mind

I've been feeling odd lately. Too odd to complete a blog post on time? maybe, maybe not, but I at least tricked myself into thinking that I could not do it when I should have. (in regards to last weeks blog, which I did not complete) In all honestly I've been feeling pretty damn sick over the past week. Odd symptoms mixed with nerves and panic over those symptoms. I'm not trying to make excuses for a missing blog here, I have a point. Over the past week I've been having some interesting experiences over the the minds power to create, or alternatively control or reduce symptoms. If you get some chest pain and start to think for even a second that you're having a heart attack, it's likely that your arm will all of a sudden start to hurt. A rather unfortunate confounding-effect, or maybe you actually are having a heart attack. Sometimes I feel like my heart could stop beating entirely, and as long as no body told me my heart had stopped, I would be fine. I just finished reading "I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon" which is basically all about the human mind. this also brings me back to TTTE in which a scenario in described in which a person is immersed in water that is the same temperature as the human body and then left in total darkness and silence. This apparently leads to the feeling of separation of mind from body. The passage also states that most people cannot stand it and ask to be let out quite quickly. I want to try it. I can see some problems, I myself am very familiar with water, all one would really have to do would be to kick around and splash up some water. In his short story, Dick basically creates a flawless version of what TTTE describes. Another thing I wonder is what brain activity would be like from the inside if all body activity was removed. It's said that when one sense is lost, others become stronger to compensate for that loss. spend one hour outside on a dark night and that statement proves itself. So I try to imagine what it would be like if all the senses were lost. would all that extra computing power be put to the remaining brain functions, which basically boil down to imagination and self meditation, or is the type of computing power that can only be put into sensations? Would it be lost without its intended use? is imagination a sense in itself? I tend to think it is and that all that brain power could lead to some interesting results. The closest I suppose I've ever been to this is a dream. I've even had a few experiences of somewhat lucid dreams in which in I have a supernatural control of my surroundings. The dreams are not as long as I would like them to be and often my control is flawed of fails all together. I've also always wanted to have a dream lasting a long time take place in one night. Time is very subjective in dreams, but mine have never seen to last more than a few hours (it seems) that I can remember.

Now, onward to something completely different, this is sort of related to Postsingular, but only in the way black is related to white.

I got a strange idea up in the woods on Saturday night, here's what happened. Me and a few of my friends walked up to the tower in the arboretum at about midnight with no flashlights or cellphones. we just walked and relied on our night vision and in few cases, I followed Seth purely by the sound of his footsteps, though he was about fifty feet in front of us, which is not something I believe I am capable of normally. Anyway we made it to the tower and there were a few other people up there enjoying the night. I couldn't see their faces, not tell their race. It was like they were shadows with voices. So the idea I got from it was a way to meet new people. Two people enter a pitch black room, not too big, but not claustrophobic. These people find each other, and my idea is that they hold hands in the middle, like a hand shake sort of, but frozen. Then these people just talk and get to know each other, no physical judgment would be possible, and those things are much easier to get past once you know someone by their character and personality. If you were feeling really bold, you could even get your friends to set you up on a "blind date" (har har). I ran the idea past my room mates and they brought up potential issues of trust, which is legitimate, so naturally you would want this to be a somewhat controlled environment. Any way, I had been thinking of that along side Postsingular where the orphidnet lets people see everything about each other. Black vs. White. Obviously it wouldn't be for everyone, but I would be willing to give it a try.

I guess that's it for the class-mandated section blog. It hasn't been easy for me, and I'm not real proud of most of my entries. I'll probably still post, but infrequently.