lucid dream

I had a few lucid dreams recently. The first was more-or-less normal, and the most recent two were very strange and short. One involved a bunch of balloons, and the other involved sortof seeing something different from each eye, and trying to "focus" onto the dream scene, but not succeeding.

I recall that the first time I had a lucid dream was the first time I read about lucid dreaming, and it was very much on my mind. And I failed a bunch after that, but the next time I had a lucid dream was when I read something new about lucid dreaming.. now of course I have had many instances of reading about lucid dreaming and failing to have a lucid dream, but I do think that there's a high correlation with thinking about lucid dreaming itself, as opposed to concentrating on some technique, and definitely as opposed to just hoping I'll have a lucid dream but secretly being tired and just wanting to sleep..

Anyway, I still can't do it on demand, and I still don't have a reliable technique, but I do seem to be having lucid dreams more frequently, so that's great! I'm now marking lucid dreams with a star in my star chart app thing:

I tried the Oculus Rift again, and this time I am really impressed and excited. I had tried it before, and the demo I saw wasn't very immersive, which is understandable, since the person was working on a prototype that wasn't meant to be immersive yet, but I figured the problem had to do with low resolution..

..but the demo I saw this time still had low resolution, but it was really nice. Things seemed 3d, and felt like they were really "there".

anyway

dropbox datastore

I kinda love Dropbox's datestore..

..I was using a regular file for pima, since I wanted it to be encrypted, and also replicated on my disk, and I think the datastores are only in the cloud.. not sure..

..anyway, for my progress helper thing, currently called "progressing with the stars", I used the datastore, and it was awesome. It was just so easy: I draw everything based on what's in the datastore, and when it changes, it automatically redraws everything, whether that change happened locally or remotely.

Unfortunately nobody else can use it yet, because the dropbox "app" is in developer mode, and to make it "public", it needs to be approved.. which I suppose is good, but it would be nice if there was an option for people with a big warning button saying "don't do this unless you're absolutely sure what you're doing!!!", which is what people have to click on anyway to get to the https version of github.io.

anyway, I put this together just so I could get a star for doing 10 minutes of dual spritzing, trying to read two things at once.. I lowered the wpm to 50, and it's wicked hard. I feel my brain straining, which I suppose is good? anyway, we'll see what happens..

dual spritz

source code

Bwahahahaha!!!
You can try to read Alice in Wonderland and Pride and Prejudice AT THE SAME TIME!

Why.. WHY!!! Because maybe learning to read two things simultaneously makes the brain smarter, which is a half-baked idea I got from not fully understanding an experiment I read about.

Anyway, I'm going to try it, and we'll see what happens. So far what happens is that I can pay attention to one or the other, but not both.

spritz

source code

so I'm probably the last to hear of spritz, but I love the idea, and I wanted an interface that let me paste text into it and spritz it, which is what I have above (based on the code for OpenSpritz, though I ended up rewriting it to suit my simplistic needs).

Anyway, the real reason I did this is that I read something in a book about the brain. It said someone ran a study on "brain exercising" games and found that they didn't seem to help people do anything other than play those specific games better, BUT it mentioned some other study where people were given a task of "keeping in mind two different streams of information simultaneously", and that that increased people's IQ. The book didn't say what these streams were, but I want to try reading two spritz streams simultaneously, so now that I've got one set up, I'm going to try and set up another right above it..

I often do this wrong: I want a number to bottom out at 0 — so that zero is the minimum value the number can be — so I do this:

number = Math.min(0, number)

Which is wrong. It should be:

number = Math.max(0, number)

But how to remember this?

sayings about suffering

"Remove desires." — I read Siddhartha in high school, and I recall a character saying that the root of suffering is desire. If we didn't have desires, we wouldn't suffer. Removing desires seemed like a good idea at first, but I tried it, and I found that I couldn't do it, and it seemed like if I did, then I wouldn't do anything at all.. I'd just lie there and die.. which seemed bad.

"Accept everything." — Another character in the book suggested this, and I tried it, and it has actually served me well for a long time. However, more recently, I've been troubled by what it means to "accept" something. For instance, there's that time someone backed into my car and sued me for it and won, and I was angry at them, and also at myself for failing to defend myself against them.. should I have not been angry? Maybe. Maybe "accept" means accept being angry? Not sure.

"Acknowledge everything." — Acknowledge as in look at everything and admit that it's there, as opposed to being unwilling to look at some things. Applied to the car situation above, I take this to mean: be aware of what actually happened, what I did, what they did, how I felt, etc. And that's it. I figure accurate information is good for the brain, giving it the best chance of accomplishing its goals.

"Accept what I cannot change, and change what I can." — Again, I'm not sure what it means to "accept" something, and although the original saying involves asking a higher power to grant me "the wisdom to know the difference", I don't think I've been granted such wisdom, so it doesn't seem good to be too confident about bucketing anything into the "accept" or "change" camps. Also, if something is in the "change" camp, am I meant to be "unaccepting" of it all the time? If it takes a long time to change, this seems like it might be very unpleasant.