Scala, Java, Unix, MacOS tutorials (page 22)

I don’t know why they don’t work, but last night for about the 100th or 1,000th time I was reminded that light switches don’t work in dreams.

We were hoping to see the northern lights here last night, so I was intentionally sleeping lightly, waking up every half hour or so. In one dream I looked out my bedroom windows, saw the lights, went out of the room to tell others that we could see the northern lights, tried to turn on a light switch, and it didn’t work. So I tried turning on other light switches, they didn’t work, and then I thought, “Gosh darn it, I’m asleep,” and I woke myself up.

This is a bit of an unusual note, even for me :), but if you’re ever laying in bed and feel like someone or some thing has gotten in bed with you — but they’re not really there — you may already be asleep and not know it, or you may be having a hypnagogic hallucination.

For instance, last night in bed, while I was waiting to fall asleep, I was practicing a “witness-ing” meditation technique that I have learned. So I’m doing that as intensely as I can, just witnessing my body breathing, and then someone gets in bed with me. So then I realize that I’m probably in the usual “mind awake, body asleep” situation that I have been in a few thousand times in my life.

When I was younger I used to experience sleep paralysis a lot, but these days I can usually just wake myself up, and that’s what I did last night.

I think of this as being asleep and then waking myself up, but other people might say, “No, you must have been having a hypnagogic hallucination.” Personally, I’m about 99% sure that I am asleep, because I was able to do the same thing during an fMRI many years ago, and also during a sleep study test where the tester thought I was asleep because of my brain waves, but I was actually awake.

I have often thought that the story of The Odyssey is about temptation and maybe even addiction. And just now I saw this story from the Daily Stoic titled, Discipline Now, Freedom Later, and it offers an interesting take on self-discipline that starts like this:

“At a critical moment in The Odyssey, Odysseus tied himself to the mast of his ship because he knew he wouldn’t be able to resist steering the ship toward the beautiful sound of the Sirens. In temporarily giving up his freedom, Odysseus became the first person ever to hear the Sirens without fatally crashing into the rocks surrounding the island where they lived.”

The story goes on with another quote: “The labor will pass, the rewards will last.”

If you’re interested in meditation but “don’t have the time for it,” this quote from Daniel Ingram on intensity in meditation/mindfulness practice was helpful to me:

“It is important to know that really getting into a sense of the breath as a continuous entity for ten seconds will do you more good than being with the breath on and off for an hour.”

One of my favorite songs of late is named Mad As A Hatter, by Larkin Poe. The song is about their grandfather, who has schizophrenia, and their grandmother, who has dementia.

All my life I have known someone who has schizophrenia, and in the last 20 years I’ve also known quite a few people who had dementia and/or Alzheimers, so it’s a touching song in multiple ways. YouTube has this terrific live performance of “Mad as a Hatter”.

Here are some of the lyrics from Mad As a Hatter:

If you must then just please wait and let me have some time
(Let me have some time)
Please don’t come for me
Mind over matter (it don’t matter) when you’re as mad as a hatter

The song ends with these repeated lyrics:

Off with her head, off with her head...
Paint the roses, paint the roses...

I assume the ending lyrics relate to Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.