“I can’t hear you. I’m too busy hitting buttons randomly.” – Phineas and Ferb
At dinner sometimes I pretend to gag. My kids know it’s just another dad choke.
There’s a time for odds and ends, and Friday is as good as any since a lot of them are on the health side. These are sort-of random, and are around a central theme of experiments that I do to myself and some of the results. I’m not going repeat the one where I replaced my arms with animal limbs – that idea still makes me mad enough to rip up a car with my bear hands.
First: Humans have been taking drugs for at least 12,000 years. I have written (and stand by the idea) (Beer, Technology, Beer, Tide Pods, Beer, Civilizational Stability, and Beer – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise (wilderwealthywise.com)) that the reason that civilization was formed was so we could have beer. If you look at the artifacts found at Göbekli Tepe you’d find that one of them is a stone trough perfect for making beer, with residue from making beer. People have also been ingesting or smoking various things for millennia from coffee to mushrooms to the Devil’s Lettuce. Humans are drug using – it changes our mood.
I was listening to Scott Adams while flitting about this week and he led off with an interesting comment. “Music is a drug,” because it alters our moods. I was working the other day with earbuds in and found myself really happy. Why? Music. It put me in a great mood and I was amazingly productive.
I hear wind turbines are big metal fans.
Adams is right, music acts like a drug. But there’s more: literature and television and Twitter™ I mean X© all fall into the same category. When I was dating in high school I also (accidently) found that horror movies were an amazing aphrodisiac for the girls I dated. Who knew?
I watched a LOT of horror movies on dates when I was in high school. I guess you could chalk that up to Pavlov’s libido.
I have made this point many times: be careful what you let into your head. It can act like a drug, and the wrong drug at the wrong time can be fatal. Choose wisely, and avoid things that make you feel despair.
Second: YouTube® recommended an 8-hour dreaming track that they promised would allow me to have lucid dreams. For those not aware, lucid dreaming is where you’re dreaming, but you’re fully conscious. It’s an odd state – it’s not like being hypnogogic, where you’re in that twilight zone between being awake and being asleep. Nope, you’re dreaming but you’re fully conscious.
My boss said I was on the Dream Team! He also asked me to stop sleeping at work.
Sounds like something good, right?
The first night I tried it, The Mrs. reacted very negatively. “What on Earth were you playing last night? It gave me awful dreams.” I persisted for a few weeks. Normally, I go to sleep quite easily, and just like Epstein’s prison guards, I can sleep through almost anything. I still found it easy to go to sleep with the “music” but my dream quality really changed over several weeks. My dreams became incredibly dull. Imagine dreaming about being at work. On a normal workday. Doing normal work.
Aaaargh! I love dreaming when I’m a pirate, or hanging out with Tom Cruise having adventures or being asked by ZZ Top® to play bass at a concert because they were desperate. Those are good dreams. But being at work doing normal day-to-day crap?
It was awful. And I was conscious during the work dreams. Sometimes I’d end them, but end up going right back to work. In my dreams.
That was bad enough, but the final straw that ended this experiment for me was that I would wake up at 4am and I couldn’t go back to sleep. I’d be there hours, awake in bed. Or so I thought. In reality, I was dreaming that I was trying to get to sleep, but I was fully conscious. I figured this out one morning when my alarm went off during a dream about trying to get to sleep.
That was weird.
I cannot recommend this sort of “music”, unless you want to relive a boring day at the office without being paid for it.
After I stopped, within a week my old sleep patterns returned.
Third: I was the victim of a plagiarist this week. Oh, sure, I’ve actually seen that someone tried to make .pdfs of my posts and (maybe?) sell them a few years ago, but that isn’t what I’m talking about – I’m talking about someone taking one of my posts and re-writing it, beat for beat, even using the same analogies.
I’m still mad at the guy who did it.
Surprise: It was me.
Sometimes I take notes (I used to use notecards, but don’t have the same set up, so don’t anymore) for posts. Other times? Walking around, or snoozing, and a post idea hits me. I’ll often work it out in my head, and then write it out.
Plagiarist? Their words, not mine.
I did the latter in this case. Then I saw an old post of mine getting traffic with a really similar name after I posted the piece I had just finished. I clicked on it, and it was amazingly similar – the algorithm that suggests posts based on the post I have up suggested it. That post was also four years older, so I guess my main defense was that I’d written somewhere north of 600 posts (nearly 750,000 words) and slept over 1300 times (1260 if you discount the lucid dreaming nights) since then.
Fourth: I’m really enjoying doing the podcast. This isn’t a commercial or anything, since if only one or two people listened I think we’d still be doing it because it’s fun. It’s a livestream now, but I think it’s pretty tightly produced, so we don’t end up with a lot of the awkwardness you’d expect with an amateur like Shawn Hannity. Nope, we’re professionals. Also, I’m thinking this makes us journalists. For legal reasons. You can watch it here (LINK).
I bring it up because a) I can prove The Mrs. actually exists, and b) it’s something we have a lot of fun doing, and it’s creative and we mostly have our clothes on when we do it. As far as you know.
Fifth: I used to hang out with The Mrs. at lunch, but since her schedule changed, I don’t. Instead, I’ve packed off my laptop and tried to be productive wherever I am during lunch, and it saves mileage and I just don’t eat, so that’s a bonus, too. I’m writing this at lunch, and I’ve been pretty pleased with the results so far since I tend to do the first drafts and then when I get home later I do the research and edits and add the (bad) jokes.
Actual German joke: “Why are there so few crimes in Germany? Because it’s illegal.”
It may not sound like a big change, but it shaves hours off of my writing time, and those are hours that I can sleep instead rather than building up a big sleep debt and paying it off on the weekend. Plus, I’m fasting at lunch. In reality, when I went home I’d eat, but I find I don’t miss it at all.
I also think I might get a better overall quality since I’m writing during my most productive time, and editing and cracking jokes at my sillier times. We’ll see.
As always, YMMV.
1. Music: I listen to my JPop station while I write, as I cannot listen to English at the same time I’m listening to my characters. Editing, that’s different. During the day, sometimes a song or album will provoke an idea or plotline I follow later. For example, my first novel, “The Fourth Law,” was influenced by ELO’s “Time” album. The Fat Rat’s song “Euphoria” is a plot point in “Crosses & Doublecrosses.”
2. Dreaming. Hate it. I hate being confused and powerless and that’s my dreams. If I wake up early, I nearly never go back to sleep as I know I’ll dream. I’d rather get up at 0400 than that.
I can’t listen to anything with lyrics when I am writing, it has to be some sort of instrumental music or it throws me off
Nice on the music. I do like dreaming – it’s a huge amount of fun for me.
My other half turns on her “sleep machine” that hums all night. It doesn’t bother me, and she can’t doze without it.
Well, she forgot it in July when we attended an association meeting in FL. So, we went to Walchink™ and bought one. I woke up for a bathroom break around 4ish, and noted it was making strange word combos. She agreed. Subliminal seduction??? Oh, it was “Made In Chinkia”.
Found a app on her iPhone that worked. Think she threw the weird machine in the trash.
‘I woke up for a bathroom break around 4ish, and noted it was making strange word combos. She agreed. Subliminal seduction??? Oh, it was “Made In Chinkia”.’
Par for the course for the red worm. A dragon never really sleeps.
Get rid of it.
My big surprise was that noise could really, really impact my dreams and, thus, my mood.
Because subliminals bypass conscious awareness, they are much more powerful than, say, television commercials. The mind accepts the subs as ‘your own thoughts’.
They’ve been around a long time — a fundament of advertising and propaganda.
Exactly. Imagine the research, imagine the implementation plan.
The more tired I am, the more likely I am to dream of being at work. One of my early jobs was answering calls in a call center for a financial services firm and overtime was unlimited so I would sometimes work 8 AM to 8 PM taking calls, go home and fall asleep and dream I was taking phone calls until the next morning. That was fun.
Yup, 100% this was my experience. And the dreams weren’t about the fun parts, they were about the dreary parts.
Watching the livestream is strongly recommended. You get to vote for “Neil Young’s Braying Jackass of the Week,” every week. You can comment interactively. You can appreciate that Mr. Wilder is married to a creative genius, and wizard of all things audio. And The Mrs. is so kind, she’ll usually indulge my wish to hear that MASSIVE CANNIBALISM sample, just by my asking for it. Join the crowd!
Can confirm
I agree! Good times and pantyhose for everyone!
Barth Bottoms invented the bikini?
Saw a diagram of the actual frequencies released by music that make you have good feelz, and what is so bad about that.
Some people get very far with plagiarism and the Peter Principle of fail until you flail.
Just look at the Brandon sideshow, the best banksters could buy?
Bwahaha! The smartest guys in the room my azz.
The Rudy G mugshot is already a meme and checking to see if Trump is in the rotation yet…nope.
Comrades Kemp and Raffensberger (CCP-Uniparty) of the glorious peoples republic of Georgia will regret the day this can of worms was opened.
I loves me some Huey Lewis and the News!
Oh my God, it even has a watermark.
Saw Top recently and they don’t need a bass player, ain’t Dusty but they sound GOOD
That lucid thing meth does the same thing after 7 day run
Doesn’t surprise me. I had to make Billy stand so I could watch the chord progression so I could follow on my bass.
Didn’t know you played. Me too, guitar. Hey, maybe we can get the band back together? :O)
Nice! My bass was loaned out to a guy back in (seriously!) 1995. I have a crappy Fender six string that I . . . should probably pick up again.
I was listening to Scott Adams while flitting about this week
I tried flitting once. Wasn’t for me. At 6′ 2″ and 220 I was knocking plates off the breakfront and broke a few delicate pieces of furniture, so my in-laws threw me out of the house.
Horror movies are an aphrodisiac? Wish I’d known. It would have saved me the endless tedium of all those goopy romcoms I thought I had to endure to enter the promised land. So, from now on, chainsaws it is.
Re:sleep and dreams. I take ZMA (a common zinc and magnesium supplement that is literally unknown to every medical professional I’ve ever encountered) for bodybuilding, and one of the well-documented side effects is “vivid dreams”. Like, “full technicolor, cast of thousands, Ben Hur-esque epic productions presented in 4k widescreen with 250 watt Dolby Surround Sound” kind of “vivid”. My dreams are typically more expensive to produce than a woke Disney flop, and a whole lot more interesting.
Now if only I could just fall asleep when I’d like, I might spend more time at the show.
TBC
Yeah, surprised 16 year old me, too (horror movie). Glad I found it early.
Vivid is exceptional. I’ll have to look into that.
When I practiced gags, Jill performed Alzheimer’s Maneuver on me and the smartest man I know loved his brother’s wife as his own and in the islands, cats go “Meaui Meaui” … that’s no joke!
Well, I’m not going to discuss Dr. Jill’s gags.
scared me for a moment. I thought you might of caught me stealing one of your memes.
Wendy, take all you want!
RE: Lucid Dreams, and: ” … Imagine dreaming about being at work. On a normal workday. Doing normal work.”
Been there, done that. More times than I care to recall.
The only upside, is that I got pretty good at solving problems that way. That is – if a problem was bugging me long enough, I’d dream about solving it (while at ASLEEP work), and the next day (when I was at AWAKE work) – I’d apply the solution. And it usually worked. 😉
The only problem was occasionally I’d have trouble keeping straight which ‘memories’ were from ‘REAL’ or ‘IMAGINARY’ work.
Although, I guess you could make an argument that just because I was unconscious – doesn’t mean that I wasn’t working. Or that at least my subconscious was.
It’s a shame I couldn’t convince the payroll department of that I could bill for that time. :-/
Brian, I totally don’t mind solving problems, that’s saved my bacon more than once. It was just like paperwork and emails in my dream.
Horrible.
Payroll didn’t care. They told me I was on salary so dreams were company property.