Coping: With Smokeafornia, a PIREP

[Reader Note:  PIREP= PIlot REPort]

Fire conditions in Northern California continue to deteriorate this morning.

See that line of smoke that goes 3/4th’s of the way up the side of Mount Shasta in California?  It shouldn’t be there.

Our thanks to a couple of readers from Sacramento who sent us some dandy pictures of how bad the smoke is in NorCal due to the large number of forest fires burning up there already.

K. and I have been reading your column for years and, after reading about your Seattle trip, we decided to fly to Seattle from Sacramento in our Turbo Arrow III.   We ran into too much smoke at 11.5 on the way to Seattle, so on the way back, we flew to 14000 feet to get above the smoke—we were both on oxygen cannulas.  I had to constantly nag K. to stop talking so much because you don’t breathe through your nose when you are talking and he had an O2 sensor on his finger that proved it.

Here are some pictures of Mt. Shasta, which was poking out of the smoke and pretty even with us at 14000 feet.

Beautiful pictures and a terrible mess on the ground.

By the way, if ya’ll ever want to trade that Turbo Arrow II straight across for an A23-19, let me know, lol.

On it’s best day the A23-19 is a “Paradox Plane”  If you DON’T carry Oxygen, you MAY be able to get up to 12,500 or above for a while.  But,  if you DO carry the O2 rig, that about assures the added weight will keep you under 11.5…

The Return of Woo-Woo

More properly, around here we call it the WoWW – World of Woo-Woo – because there’s not a single word in the dictionary that really sums it up.

Take Wednesday, for example:  Elaine goes to the store for our weekly “stocking run” and distinctly remembers buying bread.  Not a single loaf…several…because we stock up on everything and like to keep a loaf or two in the freezer.

She gets home and – you got it – no bread.

She remembers seeing it in the front seat of the car, too.

But after tearing the house and car, and all points between apart, there is no sign of the bag with the loaves of bread in it.

And it’s not like we’re alone.  Got this email which deals with the same thing:

Dear George,

I was told that you have some knowledge about items that just disappear, and then reappear later as if they were never gone? I have had this happen several times, & I just don’t get it, but my glasses are the most recent thing that disappeared, and then showed up in plain sight on my passenger seat of my car. Needless to say, I had to turn the house apart looking for them and looked in the car many many different times in every conceivable place and they were not there. Then all at once today, there they are right in plain sight on the seat .

Yep.  This is the kind of stuff that goes on all the time.  Let me run down some of the possibilities for you because maybe one of them will resonate with you when this sort of thing happens.

1. We live in a Computer Simulation

This one may sound weird to be my leading candidate right now, but in the strange world of quantum mechanics, and in particular the Many Worlds Interpretation, every possible future happens.  And as a result, there are billions upon trillions of just slightly different worlds out there.

Most of the time you wouldn’t notice anything is missing, even though microscopic details go missing all the time; not to mention light doesn’t know whether it is a solid particle or a wave down at this level.

But in Elaine’s case, she managed to leave one version of future at the store and arrive home in a different future.  One in which the bread wasn’t purchased,.

If you Google living in a computer simulation (which I’ve done for you here) you will find tons of discussion and lots of content on YouTube that will keep you from working for hours on end.

2.  Transient Global Amnesia (TGA)

This one is another “high prob” answer.  Amnesia happens to us all the time.  I can’t tell you how many times I have driven somewhere and been “off line processing” most of the way because there are so many things in life that are frankly boring.

That’s not the only reason we can go “off line” and fail to put things into short term memory (STM) because we simply don’t attach enough importance to them.

Statins, and lots of other drugs including some heart medicines, have serious mental side effects which is why, given a choice between statins or losing weight and taking a nutritional approach to high cholesterol, I chose the latter.  I’ve had enough correspondence with people who have taken statins, only to find their flying of airplanes, or driving, was no longer “crisp” that I’ve made a personal decision to eliminate that class of medicines from my life.

Not that TGA is a medications-onlyt phenomena.  There can be emotional events, work pressure, or just a lack of what in Eastern religions might be categorized as failing to remain “in the moment.”

3.  Magic Could be Real

Maybe not easily reproducible, but there have been enough accounts over history of people simply “winking out” that we can’t toss this one completely away.

Remember, things like radio would have been considered magic 150-years ago, and a machine that talks to us and can do math problems given verbally, and plays a selection of top news stories and has multiple timers…well, 100-years ago, that would have been called “magic” too.  Nowadays, that’s what the Amazon Echo is, and Siri in iPhones does many of the same tricks.

So could people simply see magic, once in a while, and simply not be able to assign a frame of reference to it?

4. Humans are Delusional

Elaine’s been reading a fair amount lately about “The Field” – which is the “stuff” that makes everything.  This is another one of those concepts quickly gaining ground in particle physics.

Ity seems, she explained to me, an Indian Fakir and his assistance who put on a magic show.  The Fakir thew a rope up into the air, and a young boy climbed the rope.

A moment later, seemingly from nowhere, the boys body parts fell from somewhere over the rope, a really ghastly and gory thing.  The Fakir placed these into a basket, climbed the rope with them, and then came down a minute later along with his assistant.

As you can expect, this was widely reported at the time and it was said to have been a miracle, and so forth.

But here’s where this story gets interesting:  There also happened to be a movie camera running at the time the crowd of people claimed all these miraculous things were taking place.  Played back, they showed the Fakir had thrown the rope into the air, but it had immediately fallen back to the ground.

Moreover, the assistant had not gone anywhere, either.  Both simply stood stock-still until the event was concluded and then they reanimated and people could see them, again.

It was a case of mass delusion, or perhaps mass hypnosis.

Just as the evolution of the German flying disk program during World War II likely set off a race between the US and Soviet Union to develop such flying machines after the war, using Operation Paperclip personnel,  the government had only to underwrite two schools of thought to explain away UFOs as being “alien””.”

And ever since that time, rather than look for the bases of operation among the Super Powers, the public is widely accepting of the idea that spacecraft from other dimensions and worlds are real.  The Occam’s Razor answer – that it’s just long running defense work – is hardly as good when comes to “mind candy” and we’re all somewhat mentally diabetic.

Many Worlds – and Many Answers

The problem with all this work is that we really have nothing more than an amorphous ball of data that has to be explained away.  The number of readers who tear apart rooms only to have familiar objects like glasses, a stapler, or some other such come back into their presence at a later time is not huge; perhaps only a couple of dozen such reports over the years.

But, with companies like Boeing working quietly on projects like teleportation, we have to wonder if maybe that’s not some natural effect and things can periodically bilocate all by themselves,.

The tendency of a thing to be “right here” is, physics assures us, only a convincing tendency.  Elaine’s loaves of bread and our reader’s glasses may have just has “somewhat else to be”’ when their respective owners went looking for them.

But one thing can be stated as “true” around here in the past week:  The number of such reports, which we’d put aside for several months, has just reappeared.

And the reappearance seems to have come temporary adjacent to an interesting development over at Chris McCleary’s National Dream Center, which is an ongoing effort to collect dreams.

They issued a “red alert” yesterday because so many dreamers (and these include people who have a good track record for getting events right at least in many aspects, in the dreams they report) are reporting a coronal mass ejection (CME) that will “take out large n umbers of computers.”

And given my write-up Tuesday about how few computers show up in people’s dreams, both Chris and I are terribly interested in the synchronicity between my (longwinded) discussion of dreams and computers Tuesday and the concurrently flare-up (if you’ll pardon the pun) in mass dreams about a major CME having widespread electromagnetic effects on Earth, shortly.

Computers in Dreams

In Tuesday’s report, you’ll remember, I discussed how I didn’t have any recall of having EVER seeing a computer in any of my dreams.

What’s more, I am not alone because once of our readers (who is also of a certain age) wrote in as follows:

George, I have been in IT for over 50 years and never have had a computer or PC appear in my dreams. But I have had dreams of a BlackBerry that would not work right to my frustration in those dreams.
Is it the technical thinking part of the brain that is not connected to the sleeping dream brain or what?

Good observation on your part. We need to dig deeper….Richard

So dig deeper, we have.

Thanks to Chris at the www.nationaldreamcenter.com project, we are able to scan and tabulate dreams using a specially adapted bite of www.nostracodeus.com code to run against the database looking for word frequencies.

And sure enough, people DO experience computers in dreams, but there’s a possible caveat.

I have asked some young people if they see computers in dreams and the answer is yes.  But when I ask people who are in their 50s and up, they DON’T see computers in dreams.

And so, my friend, we come to a very interesting new Ure Crackpot Theory.  It goes like this:

When people are young, the accumulate the major archetype material that they will construct their dream world from up until some nominal age of x which may correspond to the age of puberty.

Once they have hit this age, the things in their “dream worlds” are locked-in.  After that, things may exists in the objective waking world, but they would only relatively rarely be transferred into the subconscious realms.

Thus, assuming puberty at age 13, or so, whatever the state of the world’s inventions by that time are where your “dream contents” would “lock.”

Not saying this is a hard and fast rule, but it seems to be the case based on a very small sample size.

If I had another 50-years ahead of me (very unlikely) I would be all over this like white on rice because it would explain a lot of things in economics.

How so?

Well, people go through life acting on what goes on in objective reality, but also on how that reality is moderated by what is in their dream states.  And if people do, indeed, lock their dreams down around age 13 and then live until an average age of 70, that could be the source of economic cycle theory down at an almost Jungian kind of level.

Given that the “dream locks” don’t drift around much (age 12-13) and an extension in longevity occurs such that we now live perhaps 87 years, this would imply a lengthening of the economic cycle, but not for any apparent reason.

Could it be that economic cycles have some underlying psychological determinants since dreams are where motivation and other core values around “self” come from?

I’m “afreud” we don’t know the answer.

Write when you break-even,

George  george@ure.net

10 thoughts on “Coping: With Smokeafornia, a PIREP”

  1. I think that your idea about a person’s dream world being ‘set’ around puberty is interesting – however, I do see a flaw. So if the ‘dream world’ is confined to whatever is current at that time, how do people like one’s future husband end up in the dream?

    To restate the question – why would the physical contents of a dream be limited to the world at puberty while the people in a dream evolve?

    (Then there well known examples of inventions ‘thought up’ by people while dreaming – Kekule’s description of a ringed benzene molecule while riding/sleeping on a streetcar, for example.)

    I think that the contents of one’s ‘dream reality’ are at least somewhat based on ‘comfort zones’ – what makes a person feel secure – and that is where the dreams can start . . .

  2. Elaine’s bread,
    easy one GU, dig up the receipt!
    not worth driving back to town so make your own, its way better!
    enjoy your blog, first thing I read AFTER Dilbert.

  3. I remember having a computer in a dream a couple years ago, but it wasn’t like any computer we have currently. It was a scroll; mb 18″ x 18″ thin as regular paper, that was rolled up like a poster or something. It was unrolled and placed on a table, and when layed out flat operated as a touch screen.

    • I remember reading something along those lines a while back – some kind of ‘new product’ . . . I also remember seeing a ‘roll-up’ keyboard (music) which looked neat!

  4. My father used to have things dissapear and reappear on him all of the time. He said it was a ghost named George that did it.

    I remember w while back you talking about alcohol and spirits. Well, he was a major alcoholic, and it hit me that this George character was probably the spirit he always let in when he was drinking. Maybe the spirit didnt like the way my father was, and so punished him in the only way it could, by hiding things from him.

    Or, he could have just been drunk and set stuff in dumb places, only to find them some time later.

  5. IF Octember gets here and we get through it and Ure predictions are accurate – I’ll buy a years subscription. The nice thing – would be IF we get through it and tomorrow is the same as yesterday – you give me a years subscription (worthless to me – as I wouldn’t put a penny into ‘wall street’.

  6. I was trying to explain long wave economic theory (just what you told me) to a friend. He said he just couldn’t believe that economics follow rules like that when there is so much going on in the background.

    I said “don’t you understand, the market isn’t about shares and money, its about the psychology of the people using the market”.

    So given that trite explanation then yes, the dreamworld background would surely have an affect on market movements.

  7. On missing glasses, bread, WOWW … and socks.

    Twice in my life things have disappeared and reappeared. One of those right in front of my very own eyes. I was looking for my glasses, which is difficult when I am not wearing my glasses. All through the house, retracing every step … I could remember. A few minutes later, my dear wife, concerned because of my sudden string of profanity. Whats wrong, she asks. Very perturbed I reply, I can’t find my #@%^ glasses. She busts out laughing … pointing to my red face, there they are you old fool. They were on my face all along. Seems I need another eye exam.

    Another time, in my my much younger life the same thing happened with my socks, well nearly. I knew I had taken them out of the drawer to put on. But I had left the room for a moment. So when I returned there were no socks in the chair to put on. Once again, a retracement, more profanity, and my better half makes the find. I had draped them over my shoulder to keep safe.

    Not woo woo, just comedian me. In my house it pays to laugh at one’s self on occasion.

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