Saturday 8 September 2018

The dream I just had

My brother told me to write down if I dream anything. And I hardly ever dream anymore. So... that was months ago, now. But I dreamed a little dream last night.

I was with a group of Egyptologists, and they'd discovered some ruins... there was a pattern of markings on the floor, moving out of a circle in the middle. In columns like the pattern on a dartboard, I suppose. Each set of markings was a concave etching of some food, with some characters etched deeper into each one. The Egyptologists had figured out the text and had created little trundling machines with arms at the front, sort of like crab claws, but on both sides?

So - we had to let them run over a wide circle, over a pile of rice, but needed to keep picking them up and pulling them back so they wouldn't go to the centre. So that's what we did.

Then something happened and we got called away! I don't remember what for. But we came back and the trundling machines had got to the centre, and had formed a kind of circular pyramid of rice together. Well, a cone shape, but I thought in my mind - round-based rice pyramid, with a smooth gradient. I picked one of the trundle bots up, and accidentally disturbed the pattern, rice spilling out. So I moved the trundle-bot back and put it down to "sweep up" this rice, hoping this would be alright.

And then! Drama! Up / behind us there was a lorry, broken through a barricade on the road above, it came hurtling down, across the sand, and smashed into a warehouse door, breaking through and disappearing. We ran, across the sand, keeping an eye on it. Out from the door of the warehouse, two men came out, carrying guns - one pointing at the other, and the other pointing at the crowd.

Suddenly I noticed I was on a beach with all these people, and I was backing off, trying to get out of the line of sight of this gunman. I noticed other people on the beach were raising their hands, so I joined in, still slowly backing off. Then I noticed one of the people on the beach with his hands raised was my dad, who was smiling and happy to see me. (My dad being on a beach is a very unlikely occurrence, let alone him smiling while being on a beach)

So I stayed by him, but suddenly I remembered the trundling machines, and needed to get back to them... but how to? With these crazy gunmen on the beach?

Then there was some banging, which sounded like someone knocking at the door at my mother's house, so I woke up... before realising I was in my own house, so the sound meant nothing.

Thursday 12 April 2018

Thoughts about senses

Quite often, I wonder about how other people perceive the world, on a really fundamental level. Like, some people are colourblind and some people can see extra colours most people can't. Some people don't seem to have working tastebuds, and other people have the burden of being supertasters. And some people don't care about flavour so much as they enjoy texture. Notably either Ben or Jerry - one of the two ice cream guys, decided to put chunks of things in because texture was far more important to him than flavour. And then there are such things as synaesthesia, which actually seems kind of like a super power if you're a musician. So what if all senses are like that and we just haven't noticed yet or invented language to describe it? And someone could live their whole life sensing things a little differently to everyone around them and they wouldn't know because it didn't come up in conversation, and people tend to assume everyone else is the same and usually have a general fear for not being normal. What if all these differences are actually fairly commonplace? Like, [A] can't distinguish red/green and [B] can't smell the difference between basil and coriander. And [C] can't taste the difference between sugar, aspartame and stevia. I don't know what I'm getting at other than - it's not useful to assume your perception of the world is 100% the same as another person's.