Ian & Stuart's Australian Mac: Not for Sale/Another.not.for.sale (Australia).iso/no need to argue/Statistical Search for PoMo

Internet Message Format | 1994-08-23 | 6KB

Date:    Mon, 22 Aug 1994 15:36:00 CDT
Sender:  TECHNOCULTURE discussion list <[e-mail]>
From:    stan kulikowski ii <[e-mail]>
Subject: a statistical search for postmodernism in lucid dreaming
To:      Multiple recipients of list TNC <[e-mail]>
........................................................................

  by nature i am interested in technology at a fine grained level.
especially the interface of technical things to some of the stranger areas
in human experience interest me.  i am delighted that my macintosh
generates a horoscope for me every morning.  being a programmer, i see
nothing wrong in making a windows-equivalent of a tibetian prayer wheel
(they are technology after all) for an after-dark screen saver.  i am
interested in john dee's enochian rituals from the 1520s as a correlate to
computer interfaces i once designed for handicapped people.  but in none of
these endeavors do i find any need to suspend the rules of knowledge in
favor of belief.

  perhaps i am hypersensitive to this.  it seems i meet many such uncritical
nonthinkers like this in some ufo work i have started.  they get offended
if i even suggest that there are simpler explanations for such-and-such
than aliens from another dimension. it seems politically correct to accept
everything at surface level and impolite to doubt anything that is spoken
by anyone.  so i usually just shut up and keep my thoughts to myself, so
as not to trouble the waters.

  i am interested in the claims that lucid dream techniques are beneficial
in developing astral projections.  i met a woman once who claimed she
projected herself involuntarily while asleep and this was very different
from dreaming.

  a dream protocol i would suggest would be this:

  (A)  before going to sleep, the control person goes into another room
and sets up a display of some sort.  i am thinking of those cards which
were used to test for telepathy (square, circle, cross, wavy lines, etc),
but a normal deck of cards would do but would be less memorable and less
interesting.  somehow i think a collection of crystals or occult objects
of some sort might stimulate the effect.  memorable and noticeable are key
requirements.   perhaps laying the display out on a black velvet table
cloth used only for that purpose.  the intention is to make a display that
is (1) immediately noticeable to anyone entering the room, and (2) can be
changed in content from night to night.

  (B) each night the lucid dreamer projects into that other room and looks
at the display.

  (C) the next morning ground control removes the display before the
dreamer can go out and see it.  both keep records (blind from the other)
on the nightly sequence of displays.  it probably will help if there are
some limited set of objects (like the telepathy cards) to draw from so the
dreamer can develop the memory language to deal with recall in the next
morning (you are probably familiar with the issue of developing the terms
with which to record dreams).  however, the control person could place
ocassional unique items in the displays, especially if they were very
potent attention-getters.

  i think this protocol would be better coordinated between people who
slept together.  and i see no reason why they might not alternate roles
nightly if desired.   if a third party found nonrandom distribution in the
control and dream records, then the issue of proximity and other sources
of data cross-talk would need to be addressed.  maybe the dreamer is
reading the other persons mind for the information instead of projecting
into the other room.   i have thought about designing a computer program
which would do the control displays (by video output) at night.  randomly
selecting the images and keeping the records secret from the dreamer's
data entry the next morning.  this would allow single people like me to do
this without great distances to traverse and the incertainty of some
second party elsewhere remembering to make the display.  also the stats
could be done automatically by the machine.  what this lacks is real
objects to display (although i might be able to design a robotic device to
actually manipulate real things).

   now, i know that interest in postmodernism does not go in these
directions.  the protocol above is looking for an information exchange
between the 'reality' of control display and the dreamer.  some thoughts
on pomo seem to suggest that such might be viewed as 'authority' like the
freudian analyst who interprets against the models of oedipus attachment
or penis envy.  i think the pomo theory (if such is not oxymoron) is that
there are no meanings in dreams other than what the experiencer places
there, usually after the fact. if dreams are little more than random
synaptic activity, why look for more?   even though i supect pomoians
would despise the above technicalities, i think negative results from the
above protocol (ie, no statistical correlation between control and
dreamer) would support the pomo view.   freudians and psychics and indeed
anyone wanting there to be meaning in dreams would not accept random data
transfers from control to dreamer as popperian falsification of belief.

  joseph's interp of the pharoh's 14 cow dream (7 fat 7 lean) was valuable
because it came true,  but it was somehow valued 13.5 years before its
truth could be determined.  postmodernism seems to value the apriori local
determination more than the eventual truth.   at least that is how i see
it, for whatever that is worth.
                               stan

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