Dreaming Returns - Counterstrike in a Castle

It had been a long time since I last had a lucid dream, let alone one that I could control. Back in primary school, my days (or nights) were deluged with such remote adventures and fantasies, that sleeping became but a different life beginning. However, yesterday, I had a dream, similar in style, which repeated in two episodes. It wasn't a dream I could control (To do so one would first have to know that one is in a dream), but nevertheless, the amount of details I could capture was overwhelming. It it was thrilling too...

I was on a school trip to a castle. Let us assume Hogwarts Castle. It was not one of those grey and dull stone castles depicted in shows, where knights in rusty armour trudge around. It was one with florid decorations; the floor was extensively carpetted and chandeliers dangled from the ceiling. But it was not an abandoned castle. It was private property, and there were anachronistic security guards and information counter, sort of the type of setting one will expect in a shopping mall.

We followed the leader, in one large group to make our way through the castle, although split into cliques within. As in a typical field trip through a one-way trail at the botanic gardens, some were faster while others were slower. I happened to be with one group, which did not put too much effort into keeping sight of the rest, and we reached a T junction, walls faced with medieval portraits. They took the right turn, and I followed behind. Within sight was a door with striking resemblance to one of those wide and massive auditorium doors at school with the huge longitudinal handle. There was a hint in the way the door was designed that told me it was an emergency exit, not to be used unnecessarily.

I shouted for them not to open the door, but it was too late. They pushed the door open, and in an instant, retreated, for a loud wailing siren echoed through the corridors of the castle. They ran to the left prong of the T junction, not before pulling me along. We were greeted by stairs, followed by a typical wooden door with a rectangular window often associated with staff rooms. We entered a small, yet spacious room made from marble, our every footstep reverberating loudly. Further ahead were similar stairs made from marble and another wooden door that led out of the room.

Just as we were halfway across the room, both doors from either side exploded open, with police officers accompanied by special forces, counterstrike character lookalikes; many of them wore gas masks and held tactical shields. "Don't move!" they shouted. "We noticed someone open the emergency exit."

Thereafter, we were held in detainment in this royal-looking chamber which was as usual, surrounded by portraits. The floor was fully carpetted too, with intricate designs. I was scared, because guns were everywhere. And guns means death. I was worried that the slightest movement might make the policecshoot. Then, while the police were having their break, someone from the group stood up and told us that everyone was too make a run later when the police returned, or he will shoot whoever does not. That sounded ludicrous, but he clarified that it was because he was going to shoot the wooden door ahead, so everyone has to get out of the way.

I was in a dilemma, the police were likely to shoot should they see us running away. When it happened, all of us ran for the back door. What happened next was unclear.

The next thing the entered the scene was me lying on the ground, with the police applying some excruciating ointment on my back, although I do not remember myself getting injured at all. Then, more forces suddenly burst through the door and told us to keep our bodies down and shake our heads and wrists ridiculously if we did not want to be shot.

The adventure more or less ended here.

'Round two' was in a similar setting, but now we got information that there were terrorists roaming about in the castle. We rushed towards the security post to make a police report, but they retorted, "Then why did you come to us? We are not the police." We asked them where we could find the police and they told us that they were sunbathing at the poolside on the first floor. Our next challenge would be to get to the first floor without being shot first. The idea of 'sides' and 'teams' seem to have faded away in this castle. Friendly fire was going to be a likely occurrence, thus we had to be very careful. I can't remember anything beyond the security post.

That's about all of my adventure in the castle. Later I somehow dreamt that a couple of year 5 drama club members joined orchestra, but I never saw their faces because they were away at a camp.

New Classes

I was walking with cmc at bras basah complex when he told me that his friend sent him an sms, asking him what class he was in.

Jokingly, he suggested to me the possibility that he was asking him about his Kingdom of Loathing (online game) class, rather than 2011 new class allocations. I would have preferred that the former was true though.

There is great enthusiasm within me to know who my new classmates are going to be, but provided that I will be liking the answer. Knowing that my interests will hardly be met, enthusiasm takes a 180 degree turn into dread. I would then, rather clutch at straws, cling onto the glimmers of hope that I would get to be in the same class with certain people, than coming face to face with a reality which I do not like (Unless reality miraculously meets my interests of course). Like the saying goes, ignorance is bliss.

My dad used to tell me not to worry about things so much. He said, instead of suffering in constant anxiety for an hour, why not concentrate all those worrying into the final minute? Easier said than done, but if it can be done, the latter would sure be much more preferable. Only now, I know I will be feeling the sadness for the rest of the holidays.

So I went home, and the first thing I did was turning on the computer, and asking people on MSN: “What class are you in?”.  I also got to know about an excel sheet that was circulating around, waiting for people to fill up their own new classes onto class lists. When I saw my class list, my emotions took a downturn. I had not a single friend in my class so far, and there were already quite a few foreigners in my class.

I do not hold any personal grudges against foreigners, but I can’t help feeling that there are wasting class slots. From a stereotypic point of view, they nearly always keep to themselves and are difficult to communicate with. As such, I would rather have these slots be given up for other people whom I might prefer.

And I also feel that there might be quite some personality clashes in my class. This will probably lead to alienation. Reminds me of Year 1/ Year 2 all over again.

There is a lack of balance too. ‘Physics Aura’ is far too strong. I do not have anything against physics, but I love a good balance of everything. I am not very supportive of having sorting of our classes by subject specialization. I love balance in everything, even my worst science subject biology. Come to think of it now, although I had dropped the subject, I will miss it dearly. Thus I will prefer a class having students from all subjects. In addition, it appears that almost my whole class consists of guys. I’m a guy too, but balance is always needed.

But my class list was not fully filled yet, grab and I always on to the faintest hope there is (with dwindling confidence of course).

I messaged: -What class are you in?-

She replied: -I hvn’t checked.-

-Let me noe when you have-

-I will-

After alternating between the morphing class list and facebook for quite a while I got a disappointing reply: –I’m in 06-

*Confidence score drops from 45% to 20%*

And as I miserably watched names being added onto the lists, that score never ceases to continue dropping.

I have heard about trauma, seen it on television, read about it, never experienced it, which is probably an extremely good thing. This experience, of having to face up to my new class, is probably the closest thing to trauma I have ever experienced, and I hope it will continue to be. From a heart full of yearning, believing that nothing is impossible, the unwanted truth collapses upon it in

I watched a little television, then continued sitting in front of facebook. I could not even concentrate on something like watching television properly.

No friends.

No good friends.

No potential good friends.

No potential good friends whom I would really like to befriend.

No balance. (I will probably elaborate sometime later about this)

How do I alleviate my emotional stress over this?

If there’s one thing I learnt about my coping with E.mozilla *, it is not to do anything to surpress it. I found out that it only makes me feel worse. If I’m have the E. mozilla, I should just admit that I’m really suffering from it, and just calm down (calming down doesn’t really necessarily mean to have lifted spirits, it just means not to get agitated) and think about it. No need for any solution. Just think about it. It will make me feel better. Do not restrain the feeling. People says never to coop up one’s emotions to the verge of explosion. It makes one go crazy.

And I had little discussion with someone over msn by the name starting with C and ending with E. We ranked the quality of classes from lowest to highest. Ultimately, I felt only a little better after venting it out via conversation. As we signed off, she told me wished me good dreams, but I replied that I didn’t want any good dreams, because as I have mentioned, trying to go against how I feel will make me feel worse. Just let it be. And hope that I will feel better when I wake up.

Then came up with a few lines, not meant to be taken too seriously:

1) I would drop physics honours just to switch class. Truth is, I don’t like physics that much as mathematics. I’m just naturally curious over natural phenomena. Think I love all those number crunching and calculations? No, I don’t. I like to wonder who something as seemingly complicated as relativity is logically deductive from a few axioms, and how things work. It’s just curiousity, search for knowledge, and I would be just as keen to learn names and stuff of plants and animals. I did not take biology, because I can’t stand it once one goes into too much details. Which explains why I don’t like doing physics calculations. I just love the concepts the way they are.

Majoring physics would have sufficed, but my logic goes that I should either put my best in doing something, or not even doing it because not doing one’s best is a waste of effort. So I should not go for something mediocore like a major. It’s honours or none. I wouldn’t want to take a major and realise that I like the subject and regret not honouring it. Thus I took an honours in physics.

2) I should bring ten books to school everyday next year and they will be my companions. So many people love to tell others to accept the truth and like it; it will make them a lot happier. Unfortunately, unlike the choice of being happy, there is no choice whether to like something or don’t. I can try to like my new class, and hopefully I can, but if I still don’t forcing myself doesn’t do any good, because you can’t force one to like something. If I can’t like socialising in my new class I will probably resort to my ten books.

Being happy is another thing though. That’s the magic of it, only you can decide whether to be or not to be. Stephen Covey’s habit one: Be Proactive

3) Is cycling a good therapy for E. mozilla? I went cycling with cmc, yk, tecklim and joelle the day after, but if I talk about this now I will be jumping ahead of chronology.

Remember what I mentioned about trauma? I have never had dreams for several months running, but that night, I had a dream. I dreamt that a friend of mine and I were spending some time together in 2011. That is probably nothing close to a bad dream. But I have not mentioned that throughout the dream, I was constantly worried about waking up; I was aware that this was unlikely to be the case in real life.

Is one supposed to call such a dream a good one or a nightmare?

Perhaps the reason I did not feel as bad in year 2’s shuffling is that year 3 and 4 are not going to be my final years in this school yet.

After a few days of thinking and contemplation, I feel much better. Just, let it be.

 

I’m in 508.

*E. mozilla is the name of a fictitious virus invented by me which causes one to be emo, named such because of how the name reminds me of E.coli

World of Science - Aerodynamics - Part 4

Lesson 4 was an severely crashed course on fluid flow analysis. So crashed, we practically couldn't apply what we learnt. Fluid mechanics really scared the crap out of me this time.

When I am sick, I always have this dream. I wouldn't say dream exactly, but this mental state, where I am half awake, but I perceive the world so complicated that it tortures my mind. Literally, I feel tortured whenever I have this 'dream'. It's like my brain isn't big enough to comprehend whatever I am thinking of, and it is undergoing system errors.

Imagine it this way. Look at your surroundings, resting on the bed, subconsciously aware of them. Everything looks normal. Then, everything suddenly zooms in, your line of sight remains the same, but suddenly, you start seeing things at the molecular level. And you start trying to make sense of each individual molecule working as a part of your surroundings. Thus, your brain now is filled with information the amount of molecules in your room. You are trying to imagine them as lego bricks, and someone at the back of your mind asks you to re-build your surroundings by stacking these molecules, like lego bricks.

Then, you feel so tortured that you fall asleep completely, but you are not let off. Now you float in space, and I cannot recall the details. As you know this happens when I'm sick and I'm sleeping, so I never manage to remember how exactly to describe this horrible feeling. Anyhow, it is a mental torture.

Trying to make sense of fluid mechanics compared to undergoing this sort of mental state is actually nothing. However, it would be good enough to describe fluid mechanics as its counterpart during my consciousness.

I am currently having enough problems in comprehension in very basic E&M, such as Gauss' Law. How I imagine fluid mechanics would work(I might be wrong) is a blend of vector calculus and chaos theory. After all, the vortices I see in pictures of fluid flow really remind me of strange attractors.

DISCLAIMER: Whatever you are going to see from here to there is most probably wrong

Here
Then one day this lecturer comes along, starts off by introducing the Taylor series, and starts deriving the expressions for divergence, vorticity and deformation by assuming there is already a function for the system of fluid flow. I can accept that, but how do you even model a function for the fluids in the first place?

Another thing that comes to my mind is that fluid behaves really weirdly and it seems that no two times will I exactly see my bowl of soup behaving the same way. This led me to think that fluid (especially at high speeds) can exhibit chaotic nature, and now even my only pillar for security, the function which we assumed we already know, becomes hazy.

And if you haven't noticed, we (or at least I) have no idea what is going on in vector analysis, as you can see on the chart. It is just mind boggling to imagine infinitely many vectors associated to every point in a field.

I have no idea whether what I said was correct, but to sum it all up, I 'learnt' fluid flow analysis in two pages of notes. In other words, I learnt practically nothing.

This are the 4 main nothings that we learnt in the lecture.

Divergence: The supposedly rate of area change
Vorticity: How fast it spins
Deformation: Squash squash squash

THERE

Although my understanding did not increase much, the lecturer then started talking about real life applications, and it FEELED like that I started to understand certain phenomena such as cyclones better on an extremely shallow level after an hour of exposure to fluid dynamic jargon and pictures.

I know I haven't. My feeling then was that this was a topic that I will never understand and learn in my life because it was too bizarre for the mind to contemplate. But again, this was the feeling I had when I was in primary school after being told that with something called Integration, you can find the PRECISE area of a mathematical shape without any error.

Here are some interesting videos my lecturer showed us. Don't ask me how they work.

Dream in a Dream in a Dream (DIADIAD for short) - Senseless logic

I just woke up from a 12 hour sleep.

Need to get ready to leave for NRIC making in school now. To be continued, and hopefully I can remember what I was going to write.

Okay I am back, NRIC making was a rather long wait.

So as I was saying, I woke up at 6 am and fell back to sleep again and starting having this dream. Many things in dreams have long known to be contradictory to the laws of physics in the real world. But that holds true also, for logical reasonings. In some dreams, logic tie events together into an exciting storyline, but this logic does not seem logical in the real world. However, one can only understand the logic when he is inside that dream.

Sensibility is relative:

This dream, as I recall, was a mystery story built up with logic without sense which makes sense to me while I was still asleep. So it is hard to explain why certain things happen and if you are a non-believer in senseless logic, please skip this post. Whatever I am going to post now will not make sense.

Do not ask me why either, because as I said, I will only know when I am asleep. And to be posting this I will be awake, and since 6 hours have passed after the dream, my senseless logic to sensible logic translation skills would have probably diminished to nothing already. The process is fast. It is something like how many people always forget what they have dreamt of the previous night. In this case, I remember to events, but not the logic.

I was going home. I entered the lift. I saw a cow pat in the lift. Something was wrong. I entered the lift, avoiding stepping on the brown sticky pancake. Two builders entered with me. He took this glue-gun-like gun and sprayed it on the other builders hand, then he forced my mouth open and sprayed it on my tongue. I felt a drying sensation in my mouth, like all saliva which comes out of my glands evaporates upon touching the tongue.

Blank Blank Blank

I went to this place where I always had my stupid chinese tuition. Here, there is no distinct line of primary school and secondary school. Everyone was here, and I did not think it weird(as I said this is senseless logic) I asked my primary school friend what that drying glue gun thing was. He said it was a clotting liquid, whatever that was. Then, I realised that the spraying thing onto my tongue thing was a dream. I was conscious, but somehow, I knew that my car was stolen, and I instinctively linked the two events together, that in my dream and my car being stolen(not in the dream) (senseless logic in action once again).

So another friend of mine and I went to my house carpark and searched for my car. We had the key, and decided that they way to find it would be to lock and unlock it with the remote control key and try to pick up the sounds of the car door locking and unlocking. We scanned the carpark to the top floor, where we still could not find the car. Then, five moons glided past us. One was our normal moon, two were replicas, one was a red moon and the other was green. I told him that, and hurried him to take a picture.

However, he said that it was only the DHL balloons flying around, but I pointed out to him that there were no strings attached to it. So we took a picture, as it was not a impossible, but rather uncommen sight in my sleeping world. Sort of like seeing a solar eclipse in the real world. But don't ask me how I know, like I said, the feeling is there, but the logic isn't.

We went to report to the teachers about the stolen car. My primary school math HOD, english HOD, secondary school principal and vice-principal were all there. As I described to them how I had the glue gun dream, and explaining to them how I knew the two events were linked although one of them was in a dream, and the other was not.

Not only logic becomes senseless when I wake up. Even in my dream, senseless logic of my dream in the dream was already taking place.

Then as I was in the midst of struggling to explain why I knew they were linked, and apparently everyone was confused, my mother woke me up, sparing me the effort to continue furthur explanations.

Even minutes after, it felt rather gloomy as I have not realised that I did not have a car and that my parent's car was not stolen. This is the after effect of a deep sleep, commonly resulting from a dream in a dream in a dream.

A dream in a dream in a dream

Original version from
http://dream-collection11.blogspot.com/2008/12/dream-in-dream-in-dream.html

The plane shook violently.

As it descended at a steep angle towards the runway, passengers braced. I covered my head with one head and continued eating chocolate with the other for some weird reason. If I remember it clearly, I wanted to finish it really badly before the plane hit ground. Finally, I was so scared that I tried to force open my eyes and wake up from this dream, but just as my eyelids lifted a little...

Crash.

I woke up with a start...in the plane. Just then the air turned turbulent, the plane shook violently as I chewed on my chocolate. Ahead was a sea of terrace houses with just a small porch which was about to act as the landing strip. The plane is never going to make a good landing with that amount of space, i thought.

And I was right. Surprisingly, only the cockpit caught fire. Even so, the cabin was in a deep wreck. Fortunately. I pulled myself out of it and did one of those reverse chin ups which lowered my bruise covered body down those seperator walls between terrace houses.

I thought it was quite a good job for me to get out of that wreck before the fire spread furthur as I felt quite contented. Now it might seem weird but apparently I wasn't too traumatized.

I walked along the avenue and saw a house with a gigantic 3 storey tall soft toy lion which was just as lively as me, roaring bound by a gate at a house just across the main road. It was really frightening. I walked in the other direction and found a house in which some of my friends were there. The only people I could remember who were there were hk and jk. The people there said that they had to set off for some place but before going, they had to go to the toilet, and there was no toilet in the house. but I didn't really care. So all of us set out for the place we had to go to.

It was then I realised that we had to walk out of the gate onto the main road where the lion was. I was very scared, but realising that everyone was leaving me behind, I gathered my courage and walked past the lion. It went smoothly and I didn't get eaten up by that soft toy.

As our journey continued, I thought I might take some pictures as a memory. I took a picture of that burning inferno of a plane lying in some distance. Black Fumes rose out of the air and i could see the top of the broken plane. So there.

As we continued walking, I felt myself drift into another realm, but the same people were around me, with the same purpose, to get to the 'place'. But my surroundings were different, it was a green meadow with a pavement leading through it. As we walked, I decided to show cmc the picture of the burning plane. I took out my camera.

He asked if I was sure there was a plane crash, because he did not observe one. Perhaps I was dreaming? To confirm this, I checked if the picture was there. It was not. Alas, I found out that both the crashes didn't really happen. All I saw was a collection of jk's photos and weird postures. Cmc was laughing like crap, and I was reassured, the plane crash which seemed so real was all a dream...

And then this whole dream which contained the dream and the dream in the dream ended.

This dream, is one of the most realistic, and vivid ones I had in these few months. Everything was so clear, I could even describe the interior of the terrace house. It had a few religious statues, and it was dusty and dark. No toilets at all too. And the lion on the other side of the road - stood proudly with its paws together with its hind legs. It was yellow and had a brown mane, which made it look even more like a soft toy. Everything in the dream, it just seemed as if it is really happening in real life...