Quantum Weirdness 106: Are dreams real?

Fascinating stuff, what!

The Millennium Conjectures™

 “Reality is wrong.  Dreams are for real.”–Tupac Shakur

It has been advocated–I can’t recall by whom–that our sleep dreams may actually be real events in an alternate universe.   I doubt it;  that’s too far over the top for my taste.  But the following unusual dream–one I’ve actually had–will serve for now as my final installment of the Quantum Weirdness Primer.   It’s a fitting intro to my next two conjectures, both of which deal with the possible nature of consciousness in relationship to quantum physics.  The dream was short and unexciting, but opened up a Pandora’s box of questions.

The Infinite Office Building

I am working in an art-deco era office building in the Flatiron District of Manhattan.  It is a beautiful, clear spring day and the New York skyline fills my panoramic view.  I get up to go to the water cooler when a realization hits me.  This is…

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The chicken in his mouth

Is there any sense in talking about acts of nature, floods, fires, the movement of celestial bodies as being good or evil? Is a fox evil and the chicken in his mouth good? If mankind destroyed itself, would there still be evil in the world? Does evil depend upon the existence of sentient beings with free will?

The present age

If there was Judgment Day during the time of slavery in the United States, how  many people of European background would have graduated… up? Or in Germany during World War Two? Would everyone who supported the Nazi party go to hell? And in the present age with the West’s great riches and the third world so poor? Would there be 2 lines at the gates of heaven, one line for those who fed the hungry, and another line for those who did not.

Every age has its sins. Some times more than others. How would people be judged?

They don’t look scared enough.

Original Sin. It was a hot topic in the early years. Of my schooling. How could we have sinned if we hadn’t actually sinned. Even to a nine year old that seemed odd. Later the word sin was blurred to mean nature. Human beings were flawed. It seemed then that priests/teachers jumped through hoops to explain its meaning.

Sin is always associated with guilt. And Catholics always feel guilt. Guilt is that big hammer in the sky.

Its always amused me how many people who profess to be Christians, aren’t. They don’t look scared enough.

I’ve always needed a gimmick

I’ve always needed a gimmick to write non-fiction. So to write something vaguely autobiographical I created this idea of a calendar. A girlie calendar. Which you used to see hanging in almost every service station, most work places, etc. The calendar then became an ebook. It is called appropriately Calendar Girls. And you can download it for free. A bargain at twice the price. (old joke)

 

February

I can’t remember what she looked like. Her image has completely dissolved into the past. But not the strange irony of our meeting. I was hanging out in Yorkville during the early 1970s. Yorkville was a kind of Greenwich Village in Toronto. There were a lot of hippies, wannabees, and suburban longhairs. I was one of the latter. There were traffic jams every Saturday night from the people in cars who wanted to look at us. I was in a particularly depressed mood that Saturday. This pretty girl, a red head, sat down next to me and we talked. I was hoping to jump her bones so I told her that no one remembered anyone else. That we were all anonymous nobodies. (What a pick-up line.) I told her that she would forget me in a week. We went our separate ways. Several years later I was at a party in a town hundreds of miles from Toronto. Full of wine and myself. I started to put the moves on one particular young woman. She told me a story. She had just returned from Vancouver. While there she had been at a party when a young woman, a red head, had tried to pick her up. Her name was February. They went back to the woman’s hotel room and had sex. Afterwards February told her a story about a young man. A young man she had met in Yorkville years earlier. Who had told her that she would forget all about him within a week. It had been years and she hadn’t been able to get that young man out of her head. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I was that young man. And now years later I can’t get that incident out of my memories.  I don’t know what it means. I don’t know if it means anything. But the story has this sense of being… odd.

Sex is awful

 

Sex is awful when you’re too young. Its power over you is tyrannical. It can be devastating. This combined with one’s naivity and innocence make for a dangerous brew. This is a story from my book The Bicycle Thieves.

The Crush

Judy, Marcus’s younger sister by a year, sometimes sat watching television with them in the O’Reilly basement. David didn’t know if she was pretty but she had an unsettling affect on him. Anytime she was around David felt butterflies in his stomach, and his mouth going dry, and a certain weakness in his knees. As much as Judy’s presence made David feel uncomfortable, he missed her when she wasn’t there. Sometimes when Marcus wasn’t looking she would rub her leg against David’s. When she was doing this, David would pretend that her attentions were having no effect on him while at the same time praying that they would never end. David did not know what to make of all of this. He couldn’t talk to Marcus about his sister and certainly couldn’t talk to his own sister. In truth, he didn’t know what to do. But in his heart he knew that sooner or later something would happen. And he was afraid of what that might be.

David loved to listen to Judy laugh at his jokes, loved to watch her shake the long black hair that ran over her shoulders. He wondered what it would be like if they could be alone. Maybe they would talk, just between themselves and not in the crowd that always existed at the O’Reilly household. Maybe they could be friends. But David didn’t like to think about maybes. It made him feel queasy.

On afternoons when the boys were playing horseshoes, Judy would watch, cheering David on. Marcus would tell his sister to shut up but when his back was turned she would smile at David, running her tongue along her braces.

“You shouldn’t talk to your sister like that,” David said when the two boys had taken off for Apache Burger. Marcus had a yen for a strawberry milkshake. Marcus was always hungry.

“Why not, she’s my sister,” Marcus said shrugging David’s remark off as inconsequential.

On one occasion Terry was playing horseshoes with the two boys. He pointed out to Marcus the attention that his sister was paying to David. Marcus complained to Mrs. O’Reilly that Judy was bothering them. Judy stomped off, banging the back door as she entered the house.

David was no longer in the mood to play horseshoes.

“He’s got a crush on your sister.” Terry pointed at David.

“Do not!” David protested.

Terry laughed and taunted David. David turned and flew at Terry knocking him to the ground, and kneeling on his arms.

“Take it back,” he cried, raising his fist above Terry’s face.

“Okay,” Terry cried. “Just get off me! My mother’ll kill me if I get this shirt dirty.”

On hot days the O’Reilly kids would wade in the huge outdoor pool that Mr. Marcus had constructed in the backyard. One day as Marcus and David sat watching television, Judy came down the stairs soaking wet with a towel wrapped around her. She retreated to the back of the basement in a location where only David could see her, and changed. Did she know that David could see her? David tried not to look but he couldn’t keep his eyes off her long and slender boy like body as she slipped out of her bathing suit. Her nakedness tied David’s stomach in a knot and made him feel sick.

“Let’s go to Apache Burger,” Marcus suggested. “I’m hungry.”

Another day watching the Loretta Young Show in the Marcus basement, Judy sat with her leg slung over the arm of a chair. Marcus had gone to the corner to buy his mother some ginger ale. David was delighted to finally be alone with Judy but he didn’t know what to say.

“She’s beautiful, don’t you think?” Judy said referring to Loretta Young.

“Ya,” David replied. “I guess.”

“I wish I was that beautiful,” Judy sighed.

David’s mouth went dry. He wanted to tell Judy that she was beautiful, that she was much more beautiful than Loretta Young but the words wouldn’t come out. Upstairs Mrs. O’Reilly dragged herself across the kitchen floor and called down to Judy. Judy’s face was wrenched into an ugly glare.

“Why did she have to get pregnant! Don’t I have enough to do?”

Judy stomped up the stairs.

One morning David sat in the living room waiting for Marcus to come out of his room. Marcus stumbled from the kitchen, a bowl of corn flakes in his hand, and still in his pajamas. Mrs. O’Reilly called him from the basement where she was doing a load of laundry.

“Jesus!” he cried. Marcus put the bowl of cereal on the floor, slid it under the couch, and stomped out of the room.

David sat alone in the room for several minutes. Except for the roar of the washing machine in the basement, he couldn’t remember the house being so quiet. When Marcus returned he turned on the television and fell onto the couch, forgetting all about the cereal.

“Go wake up, Judy,” Marcus commanded. “My mother needs her.”

“Send one of the kids,” David muttered. David resented Marcus’s tone.

Marcus smiled.

“They ain’t around. She’s upstairs sleeping. Sneak in and tickle her feet. She hates that.”

Reluctantly David climbed the stairs to the bedrooms. He felt like a thief moving down the hallway. Never having been upstairs before he was not sure which room was Judy’s. He checked one room after room but each was empty. What if he walked into her room and she was naked? What would he do? Ever since that day he’d seen her remove her bathing suit, David couldn’t get Judy out of his mind. I should go back downstairs, he said to himself. This is all wrong. He entered the last bedroom.

Judy was lying in bed. A naked leg hung out from under a bed sheet, dangling over the side of the bed. David’s mouth turned dry.

“I should get out of here,” he muttered to himself but his legs would not move.

Judy began to wake up. David took a step toward her. She rubbed her eyes, sat up in bed, looked at David, and screamed. David ran. He ran out of the bedroom, down the hall, down the stairs, out the front door, up the street, up his driveway, into the backyard, and hid behind the hedge at the back of the lot. And waited.

“What have I done?” he kept repeating over and over, tears running down his face. “I shouldn’t have been there. I shouldn’t have looked. I’m going to hell! I’m going to prison! God, let me disappear!”

David waited and prayed.

“Oh, God, I’ll never go near a girl again! I promise! I promise I’ll never do nothing again.”

Hours passed. As the sun began to set and the shadows stretched out along the lawn before retiring, David slipped into his house and up to his room. And waited, laying on his bed, staring at the ceiling. Each minute seemed to drag on for an eternity. He heard Chico barking out in the street. Maybe he should go talk to Terry. But wasn’t it Terry who had taunted him about Judy having a crush on him? He couldn’t bear to be taunted again. David saw images of himself being dragged from the house and thrown in a police cruiser. He saw Judy on the sidewalk with her father, pointing at him. He heard the jeers and laughter from all the neighbours and then the weeping from his mother, and the look of sad resignation and disappointment in his father’s eyes. And then he fell asleep. When he woke the next morning and heard his mother vacuuming downstairs he knew that his prayers had been answered.

the echo of your breathing

Is blogging becoming… passe. Twitter and texting appear to be becoming the new avenue of info. I’ve always looked at this blog as an alternative to mumbling to myself in the street. I am from a generation that feels more comfortable when ideas etc are written down. That is disappearing as we get older. What’s next.

The twit and the text will not last long either. Change is moving so fast that one feels the only alternative sometimes is to stop, step outside, and listen to the echo of your breathing.

Dust wakes up

I wonder. Actually I’d like to stop at the “I”. Not my personal “I” although that is of interest. I mean, why are we awake? And by we, I mean everything that is aware. Where does consciousness come from? And why does it exist if there is a why? All of Hegel’s work is propelled on this one inquiry.

I think back. And at some time after the universe’s stew has been brewing there were objects, chemicals, processes, etc. But no life. And then life appears. Perhaps it is inevitable. And after that at some point dust wakes up. Us appears.

 

some wheezed. some used cigarettes

 

murder. the iconic word for an act so heinous. Always it is Shakespearean. When I wrote the book I included the poems called elements. This one is about air. They are whimsical.

…………………………………………………………………………….

elements (1)

someone sucked

the air in held it

and then pushed it out.

each spectator took his turn.

some pinched his nostrils

some honked

some wheezed

some used cigarettes

to fill the air.

everyone was moderately pleased

that they’d been given the chance to breathe

until a pungent sound

a rose

from the corner

of the courtroom

where a little old man

had let his diet play a tune.

 

 

Canada – a miserable lot

Canada ranks 17th. The United States 26th. In a child well-being index. The Netherlands ranks number one. Belgium ranks 9th. I mention Belgium because I lived there for four years. My son was born there.

Belgium has gone through some very tough times in this recession. Last time I visited we could see stores closed. Unemployment is high. Canada on the other hand escaped most of the worst aspects of the recession. And still Belgian children see a brighter future for themselves than Canadian kids do.

Our government is a miserable lot. Taking the example out of America they think it is more important that the rich get richer. Even if the rest of the country goes to hell. And it is not as if the recent government’s policies have led to better times. Things continue to go down hill.