Kirk’s Blog

I couple of friends of mine, Merre and Nick, and I were trying to find some place, but we were lost and wandering through a hotel. We passed through a room full of poker tables with huge cards propped up facing us, as to beckon us to play. Before we exited the room, we all seemed really intrigued by one of the tables, so I suggested that we play.

Merre went first, and she quickly lost $5. Then it was my turn. I got up on the stool, which somehow seemed a lot higher now that I was sitting on it, and waited to give the lady my $5. She cleared the stuff off the table finally and accepted my $5 bill. Then she gave me a $50 bill in change. I looked at it for a moment, deciding whether or not I should take it really quickly so that wouldn’t notice or give it back and inform the woman of her mistake. As I stuck the bill in my wallet, Merre was sitting behind me trying not to laugh at the situation. I could barely get the bill in there because the wallet so fat, and I stuffed it back in my pocket.

I waited for what seemed like an eternity rehashing the event in my mind. I thought about how she clearly looked at the $5 bill before giving me change, and it seemed suspicious. I also felt bad about taking the money because I knew it was wrong. Finally, I pulled my wallet out again, looked in (pretending to double-check the amount that she had given me), and gave her the five back. As I tried to get her attention by saying “Miss,” the bill fell out of my hand and trickled to the floor. Before it disappeared, I noticed that it was fake. The entire thing was white except for a piece of $50 bill glued to the top corner of the paper. My speech froze as I stared at the last visible location of the fake bill. I was unable to move or change the position of my mouth as I realized that she intentionally gave me the fake bill as a test of moral character, and I failed.

Dream Interpretation

This dream is related to the time when I took more than my share of lunch money. Yesterday the company received an email stating that people were still allocating funds that were not rightfully theirs, but I had nothing to do with it this time. The dream reflects my failure of the moral test the first time, but I passed the second time.

I walk into a special cafe that people go into when they want to commit suicide, and in this culture, suicide is a normal and an accepted part of everyday life. People are sitting around at tables sipping their death drink, and I go up to the counter to order one. I looked at the menu above the cashier’s head and ordered the “Power Green” drink. I did not want to die, I just wanted to examine the drink.

I left the cafe with my drink in hand on my way home so that I could analyze the substance, and I took a couple sips without thinking. I thought to myself, “Well, maybe just a couple sips won’t do anything.” Then my throat started to close up and my vision went blurry, and I started freaking out. I started running home so that I could reverse the process before it was too late. Before I got there, I croaked and collapsed to the floor.

As far as I can tell, the dream is about my raw diet because of the “Power Green” drink. Dreams are often a rehashing of the day’s events with a stronger emphasis on the emotional content. Yesterday I was talking to my sister about the raw diet among other things. Death in a dream in often symbolic of change. The raw diet has brought a change in my life that I unwittingly brought upon myself, just as I unwittingly drank from the cup of death.

I’m gonna have to go with “yes” - I felt like a zombie today. It snuck up on me like a phantom. Not only was I spaced out, but due to being so sleepy, I was incapable of of doing anything of significance. All this reversal of alertness is driving me crazy. Now it’s the day time that I’m sleepy and the nighttime that I’m so awake. For the first couple days, my alert times were extremely regular and predictable. Now it seems like any little thing is shifting them from place to place. Sometimes this very time slot that I’m typing this entry during is a groggy one, sometimes it’s an awake one. Somehow though I think these changes are a necessary part of the transformation process (as I like to call it).

I remember back in high school or middle school when they taught us drug education/awareness. We learned things like the first few buzzes one gets off of cocaine are awesome highs. Then, as one becomes addicted and develops a tolerance, it is necessary to consume higher doses to get the same effect until eventually the person is doing the drug all the time just to maintain equilibrium. That’s how I feel with Warcraft, ha! Before, it was get a nervous energy rush after playing. Now I need it just to stay awake, and it’s getting to the point where I need to play it every time after I wake up. It’s such an easy way to stay awake; I don’t know what I’d do without it. The blood-shot eyes are paying the price, but the eye drops are also helping that.

Another thing that’s been happening is that I’ve been having more memorable dreams during my naps. Like earier today I had this one dream that I was walking around without any shoes on with a bunch of Jews. Sometimes I’ll wake up for a brief moment during my naps with the weirdest sensations. Like one time I woke up and I thought I was floating… for real! Also, it seems that my appetite has gone down somewhat since I started getting groggy, which is good because raw food ain’t cheap!

It is very common, if not universal, for people to report that their naps feel like hours when it’s only been 20 minutes after fully adapting to polyphasic sleep. Well, I just had that experience, and I haven’t even begun the transition yet. I have been napping consistently though. My nap was full of half-lucid dreams. It was so weird!

I was in strange apartment complex, but for some reason I thought it was my old home in Washington Heights.

In normal dream conditions, I probably would have just kept going thinking it was my old apartment even though it looked completely different, and I wouldn’t have discovered the truth until after I woke up. But this time I was aware of the contradiction, and I thought it was strange within the dream.

I was talking to a guy outside on the street, and he was communicating to me that he wanted to come upstairs to my apartment with me, but he didn’t say it in words. I’m not sure if his lips were moving or not, but there was definitely no sound coming out. The message was more telepathic.

In normal dream conditions, I would have continued along with the dream regardless of whether or not someone was communicating with me verbally or telepathically. People always communicate telepathically in dreams, and I never think it’s abnormal. But this time, I thought it was strange that I wasn’t registering his messages through verbal communications.

I thought to myself, “Oh crap. I must be in one of my spaced out moods.” So I went into the strange building and got into the elevator. As the elevator went up, the gravity disappeared, and I started floating. I tried to move my arms, but I couldn’t. It was as if I was suspended in some sort of liquid that made me immobile.

At that moment, I realized that my arms were in my napping position, and I was still napping, and that’s why I couldn’t move them! Then I realized that a lot of time had passed since I went to sleep for my nap - far far more than 20 minutes; it felt more like a couple of hours or so. I started to think about what I would write in my blog as the results of the second round of wakenotizing. I would say that I didn’t wake up from my alarm in the morning or during my nap in the day, and that there’s something in the process that’s not working. I also thought, “Oh no. I missed lunch. My coworkers must be wondering where I am. I’ve been in the closet for hours.”

Then… to my utter surprise… my alarm that I set for 23 minutes went off! I decided to nap at 11:30 am since I was tired today (I actually started at 11:20 am) because I know from experience that that’s approximately the best time for a nap earlier than 3:30 pm and since it’s when I would be doing my nap on a polyphasic schedule anyway.

I just had my first vividly lucid dream. And I woke up feeling well rested.

I had this dream with scenes reminiscent from Simcity 4.  The dream is appropriate since I spent the entire Labor Day weekend playing it.

I was waiting at the subway station for someone when I struck up a conversation with a person standing next to me.  We began talking about directions, and I explained something to him using a body of water as reference.  He corrected me and indicated that my sense of direction was exactly reversed.  Then I saw the body of water behind me and turned around and realized that he was correct.

Now, I’m clicking some area of the landscape to bring up a window with a “Mystery” slider.  There just wasn’t enough mystery, so I dragged the slider to the right to increase it.

The meaning of the first part of the dream is a little fuzzy, but it likely has something to do with my sense of direction in life, more specifically with school.  I have turned my back on my feelings (the water), and I’m finally recognizing them.  There is not enough “mystery” in what I’m studying right now to easily keep me focused.

My weekend of full immersion in Simcity 4 is actually a lot more meaningful than I originally thought.  I thought it was just me procrastinating again, which is true, but that doesn’t paint a complete picture.  It was a major setback in my progress towards completing my school work, so I decided that I just have to stop working on it for now.  With two significant eclipses and Rosh Hashanah on the horizon, I don’t want to start my new year off so behind in my school work.  As to why the weekend was significant, it was the station of Pluto.  A bit of context is in order here.

This entire transit I am going through, Pluto square natal sun, is largely responsible for my interest in polyphasic sleep to begin with.  It has to do with going to extremes (Pluto) in order to get more done (sun).  During the first exact hit of the transit in January, I accepted additional projects and obligations, loading my plate fuller than I should have.  Then in March, during the first station of Pluto, I decided to attempt polyphasic sleep - an extreme measure targeted at increasing my waking time.  After my initial failure at achieving full uberman, I went on a reduced sleep schedule and worked on increasing my self-discipline, which helped to a point.  I relaxed a good bit and stopped pressuring myself to get more done than I was capable of.  Now Pluto has stationed for the second time, and I made the decision to postpone my overdue school work so that I can engage in another round of polyphasic sleep, which I’m still very excited about.

Betty Lundsten cautions against attempting super-human feats while having the Pluto square sun transit.  Her experience with it is nearly identical to mine in terms of what lessons she learned throughout the process.  I respect Betty’s words of wisdom, but I’m going to have to go with my feeling on this one.  Polyphasic here I come!

I dreamt that I was washing dishes and my mom told me to wait because she wasn’t available to dry them at the moment.  Yesterday I had a dream that a fat man kept reheating 3 items of food in the microwave.  I’m not sure what either dream means at this point.

I find it hard to believe that so little time has passed and that we still have so much time in front of us yet to come.  It seems like it’s been much longer than a few days and the past couple of days have been magical.

On day 3 we went down to the Dead Sea, the lowest point on earth, and we floated to the top of the water as expected because of the high salt content.  I also grabbed a whole bunch of salt crystals from the bottom.  It was really interesting how the salt coagulated into balls that littered the sea floor, so it was perfect for picking them up and putting them into a bag to take with me.  We split up to get food at different places in the area and then tried to meet in one place to eat together, but when my sister came over to the pizza table with shwarma (turkey), the woman who worked at the pizza place told her to leave because it is not kosher to mix meat with cheese in the same meal, and apparently even to sit together.  I had a falafel sandwich, but I think she suspected everyone with a pita in their hands of having meat.

While we ate, we were given another piece of paper with a question to ponder and discuss in groups (the meaning of the question became clear on day 4):

The Rabbi of Kotzk said: One should always have in his pockets two pieces of paper.  On one should be written “I am only dust and ashes”.  On the other should be written “The world was created just for me”.
1 - What does this mean to you personally?
2 - Which piece of paper do you regularly need to look at?
3 - What things in your life do you use as these pieces of paper?

I interpreted it as the ancient fate versus free will debate, which I’ve had some experience with considering my experience with astrology, and Kabbalah addresses the issue even more definitively.

After the Dead Sea, we stayed in the En Gedi kabutz, which was really nice.  As far as I can tell, the industry of the En Gedi kabutz is tourism and dates, so tourists made up a large percentage of the inhabitants.  For some reason, I had been aching to listen to some live guitar music, perhaps because someone had asked one of my roommates to hold a guitar, and it ended up sitting in our room for days, and we weren’t quite sure who it belonged to.  My thirst was quenched at the kabutz, where we all sat around in a circle on the grass in camp fire style singing various songs in Hebrew and English.  During that experience, I got a second wind and I ended up doing Capoeira with some others.  The level of humidity at the kabutz was much higher than in Jerusalem because of its proximity to the Dead Sea, so I was quite sweaty.

After that, I decided not to sleep in my room that night.  A couple of guys from a previous Livnot trip wandered into ours for a couple of days to join in our festivities, and there was not room for them to sleep in, so they slept outdoors on the land of the kabutz.  I decided to join them so I could get a look at the stars.  The view was much more impressive than in light-polluted Jerusalem, and after my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I was able to see more stars than I can remember seeing in a long time.  I saw Jupiter before it set and some other vaguely familiar constellations that I wasn’t able to identify.

After my 3 hours of sleep, we woke up well before the sun was due to rise, and we took a 5 minute bus trip to the base of Mount Yishay (Jesse).  I woke up feeling alert and refreshed, which I have been feeling for most of my naps at this point.  I get a lot of my sleep on the short bus trips via power naps, which help a lot.

As we began our hike up the mountain, I was able to identify Venus in the morning sky before the orange fiery globe of the sun peaked over the horizon.  I originally thought it was Mercury, but then I remembered that it passed below the horizon on the 18th of the month, and at that point it became an evening star (Mercury is stationing right now btw).  Most of our hike was in shade, so that was nice.  The view from the mountain was really spectacular.  We could see the Dead Sea and the kabutz and other mountains.  The desert looks like a giant was playing with sand and poured a pile of sand in various spots, them bam! we have mountains.  When we reached the summit at about 7:00 am, we ate breakfast.  Amazingly, despite having a maximum of 4 hours of sleep per night since arriving, I felt fully awake and elated.

On our way down the mountain, we stopped at an oasis and lounged in the Dodim Cave.  The transformation from lifeless desert to lush tropical garden was sudden, and we found ourselves splashing around in the pools after a hot, sweaty, and intense morning hike.  When we reached the bottom, we had lunch, and of course I fell asleep instantly on the bus.  After waking from the little nap (probably the usual 10 minutes or so) I put in my ear plugs in to block out the obnoxious laughter for the remainder of the 1 hour trip.  I must have woken up in the middle of a sleep cycle because I was groggy after waking.  After checking back in to the youth hostel for the last time, I set my alarm for 25 minutes for a power nap.  When the alarm sounded, I turned it off and went back to sleep.  Two hours later, my roommate was shaking at my feet to wake me up, and I was really groggy that time. |-)

The last planned activity for the day is what brought light to the previous day’s question about fate versus free will.  We were taught about shabbat and what would be necessary for preparation the following day.  The explanation for the meaning of shabbat made me realize that there is a greater degree of spirituality in daily Judiasm than I thought, even though there are still some fuzzy areas and contradictions that I have yet to understand.  The concept echoes the same sort of things discussed in the Power of Now by Ekhart Tolle.  Remaining present in the now and appreciating existence is in contradiction with planning for the future and creating in the material world.  Therefore, we spend 6 days of the week moving and creating and working.  The 7th day is reserved for rest.  However, the term rest is oversimplifying the matter.  The central concept is that we cannot create in the material world.  In more understandable terms, we do not want to think about anything beyond the day of shabbat or work for something in the long term.  The object is to be in the present moment and realign with the spiritual self and internal sense of direction.  An analogy was made with a swimmer.  Every now and then, the swimmer has to come up for air and realign his sense of direction, otherwise he’d swim right into the wall.

Today I recovered a bit more from jetlag, although everyone seems to have woken up at around 4:00 am, including everyone in my room and those not in my room.  I had a dream that I needed a new couch for my apartment, and I found a bright orange/red one.  I’m not quite sure what that means.  We just hung around reading until we fell asleep again at nearly 6:00 am and then slept until they woke us up at 6:50 am to start our day.

For a few hours, we wandered around the desert, which was very beautiful, and after that we went inside a limestone cave that was created by the Jews to escape oppression by the Romans.  Our guide explained to us how the various chambers were designed to both fool the Romans in case they ever found their way into the hidden chambers and to hide the Jews while they conducted forbidden religious ceremonies.  From certain hill tops, we could see quaint little villages and farms.  I don’t often see such mountainous landscapes full of trees and buildings.

After that we had a picnic and cooperated in a little activity.  We were given a piece of paper that said something like:

Who is wise?
Answer: Someone who learns from every person
Do you agree? Why?
Who is the wisest person you know?

It seems like a modest first step to opening our minds for indoctrination into the Jewish faith, LOL.  After we finished our light hike, we came back to the hotel/hostel/dorm or whatever it is and ate some dinner.  Then we got a bit more into Judaism than we have thus far.  The planned activity was to break us up into groups and discuss our Jewish identity, background, etc.  Most people were equally distant from any sort of religious experience as I had been growing up and presently.  We talked about the oddity of secular religion and the general lack of faith in the population.  I’m not sure that any form of external identification is valid, much less identification as Jewish.  I guess that’s part of the point of the trip.

Anyway, tomorrow we’re going to stay in a kibbutz (a touristy one), and we’re going to sleep in the desert.  Hopefully there will be less light pollution!  I have been dissapointed with the view of the sky here in this city, and I thought that the decrease in humidity would produce more visible stars.  I hope to get a better view of the stars in the desert.  Anyhoo, my time is about to end…

Louis said that he was really “sweating” (weighing heavily on his mind and provoking stressful emotional responses) the whole New Orleans situation (Katrina) and that he had thoughts of adandoning his life and moving back down there.  I believe his words were, “I’m really sweating New Orleans.”  He and his boyfriend wanted to have a baby together, and Louis said that he wanted to move out to the country. He didn’t want to know what a sonogram was or any of that technology, and he wanted to live completely away from computers. I said excitedly that I wanted to live a similar life, except that I wouldn’t want to be completely alienated from computers.

Then the dream flashed to a scene in the wilderness - what it would be like if we adopted the lifestyle. The three of us were riding around in the desert on horseback wearing long poles on our heads so that we looked like unicorns. We trotted around in a circle dipping our heads and then raising them up again.