Date: Mon, 22 Aug 1994 15:36:00 CDT Sender: TECHNOCULTURE discussion list From: stan kulikowski ii Subject: a statistical search for postmodernism in lucid dreaming To: Multiple recipients of list TNC ........................................................................ by nature i am interested in technology at a fine grained level. especially the interface of technical things to some of the stranger areas in human experience interest me. i am delighted that my macintosh generates a horoscope for me every morning. being a programmer, i see nothing wrong in making a windows-equivalent of a tibetian prayer wheel (they are technology after all) for an after-dark screen saver. i am interested in john dee's enochian rituals from the 1520s as a correlate to computer interfaces i once designed for handicapped people. but in none of these endeavors do i find any need to suspend the rules of knowledge in favor of belief. perhaps i am hypersensitive to this. it seems i meet many such uncritical nonthinkers like this in some ufo work i have started. they get offended if i even suggest that there are simpler explanations for such-and-such than aliens from another dimension. it seems politically correct to accept everything at surface level and impolite to doubt anything that is spoken by anyone. so i usually just shut up and keep my thoughts to myself, so as not to trouble the waters. i am interested in the claims that lucid dream techniques are beneficial in developing astral projections. i met a woman once who claimed she projected herself involuntarily while asleep and this was very different from dreaming. a dream protocol i would suggest would be this: (A) before going to sleep, the control person goes into another room and sets up a display of some sort. i am thinking of those cards which were used to test for telepathy (square, circle, cross, wavy lines, etc), but a normal deck of cards would do but would be less memorable and less interesting. somehow i think a collection of crystals or occult objects of some sort might stimulate the effect. memorable and noticeable are key requirements. perhaps laying the display out on a black velvet table cloth used only for that purpose. the intention is to make a display that is (1) immediately noticeable to anyone entering the room, and (2) can be changed in content from night to night. (B) each night the lucid dreamer projects into that other room and looks at the display. (C) the next morning ground control removes the display before the dreamer can go out and see it. both keep records (blind from the other) on the nightly sequence of displays. it probably will help if there are some limited set of objects (like the telepathy cards) to draw from so the dreamer can develop the memory language to deal with recall in the next morning (you are probably familiar with the issue of developing the terms with which to record dreams). however, the control person could place ocassional unique items in the displays, especially if they were very potent attention-getters. i think this protocol would be better coordinated between people who slept together. and i see no reason why they might not alternate roles nightly if desired. if a third party found nonrandom distribution in the control and dream records, then the issue of proximity and other sources of data cross-talk would need to be addressed. maybe the dreamer is reading the other persons mind for the information instead of projecting into the other room. i have thought about designing a computer program which would do the control displays (by video output) at night. randomly selecting the images and keeping the records secret from the dreamer's data entry the next morning. this would allow single people like me to do this without great distances to traverse and the incertainty of some second party elsewhere remembering to make the display. also the stats could be done automatically by the machine. what this lacks is real objects to display (although i might be able to design a robotic device to actually manipulate real things). now, i know that interest in postmodernism does not go in these directions. the protocol above is looking for an information exchange between the 'reality' of control display and the dreamer. some thoughts on pomo seem to suggest that such might be viewed as 'authority' like the freudian analyst who interprets against the models of oedipus attachment or penis envy. i think the pomo theory (if such is not oxymoron) is that there are no meanings in dreams other than what the experiencer places there, usually after the fact. if dreams are little more than random synaptic activity, why look for more? even though i supect pomoians would despise the above technicalities, i think negative results from the above protocol (ie, no statistical correlation between control and dreamer) would support the pomo view. freudians and psychics and indeed anyone wanting there to be meaning in dreams would not accept random data transfers from control to dreamer as popperian falsification of belief. joseph's interp of the pharoh's 14 cow dream (7 fat 7 lean) was valuable because it came true, but it was somehow valued 13.5 years before its truth could be determined. postmodernism seems to value the apriori local determination more than the eventual truth. at least that is how i see it, for whatever that is worth. stan . here's to the captain === here's to the mate stankuli@UWF.bitnet : : here's to the ladies --- who stay up late -- a toast