New Daddy Trick. Uh, better left untried

My Father learned an interesting trick when he was a soldier in World War II.  

I think I can finally say I`ve outdone him

After my Father got drafted into the army during World War II, he was quick to volunteer for a program to learn Japanese.  As of yet, I don't have any Japanese readers on my blog, so I wont offend them, otherwise, it may be impolite for me to say that Japanese is a very difficult language for Americans, even smart Americans, to learn.  Up there with Hungarian.  And I don't know how well the army teachers were at the time, but my Father did learn two things from these classes.  One, his Japanese.  He demonstrated what he knew of the Japanese language in later years to us kids.  He could count to 4.  I only remember half of the count now in my later years and it sounded like "Itchy Knee".  I am not sure if that is the 3, 4 or the 1, 2.  At any rate it beats out my 4 years of Latin I took in High school, as I don't remember any words besides the ones still in the English language and the 6 cases of declining nouns including the Vocative case. (Tangeant note:  for my business I have been thinking of making a T shirt which reads "Punk IS Dead.  Latin is Seriously Dead")

The other thing my Father learned at this time was how to sleep with his eyes open.  This is a very useful talent which can be used on many occasions in all environments.  It can be used at religious services, concerts when you don't want to look rude or uncultured, sporting events when you really don't care who wins not to mention even about the sport, but everyone else around you does care and you have to or you would lose your job or your life, not to say the least of course during education classes of dubious interest.  

I always envied my Father`s talent in this area and practiced it whenever I could. Sadly it never came to me.  I never mastered it.  Until last Sunday morning, in fact I out did my Father.

Don't get me wrong, I love my kids and I love to be a Father.  If I could be Daddy 100 per cent and keep my business intact and safe (easy to do actually as it spirals into bankruptcy) I would do that.  To tell you the truth I am a bit at odds with my new found talent and am not sure that I want to, or that I should cultivate it.  I do not find it in tune with being a good father and do not recommend that others try to accomplish it.  In fact if you shame me with a blistering comment at the end, I will hang my head and say, "Yes yes, I know I am terrible, I deserve your ridicule and even hatred".   But it happened and it leaves me curious about whether it could be re created and it was, well, gratifying.

My yearly sickness which I usually get at the end of November came to me in the second week of September and I hadn't been getting any good sleep as my brain seems intent on driving me to madness with its sick humor dreams it sends me every night.  So by the third week of September I was starting to decompose (in more ways than one) with less than six hours of sleep every night.   Plus my recent inkling that I have some degree of DSPS which puts my sleep/wake rhythm out of sync with the rest of society and my children's` sleep rhythms.

Sunday morning comes and my kids bound into our room at 7.20am.  I had gone to bed at 1am and was heading toward a record 7 hours of sleep.  Not to be.  Unless...

My wife had let me sleep in on Saturday morning and so on Sunday it was my turn, seeing as she was worse off than I as she had been coughing all night.  So it`s 7.20 am and my younger daughter is pushed aside by my wife and so she brings me a book and asks, or rather tells me, "Daddy read a book".  Fair is fair so I got out the Curious George book of their choice and began to read to them.

 

It was the box collection of 6 Curious George books of the new adventures which are shorter (done in the Margret and H. A. Rey style, but not written or drawn by them and not as long as the original Curious George adventures).  I got to the word "quarry" in the adventure "Curious George`s Dinosaur Discovery" and had to repeat the word three times as if I was just learning to read and I couldn`t see the word properly.  Then I realized it was because I had had a micro dream from the word about the Beatles in their early days as the Quarry Men.  I had had the dream in the time it had taken me to read the word three times.  I then further realized that I had in fact been SLEEPING through nearly four and half books of Curious George adventures.  It was only when I came to my R.E.M. sleep and started dreaming about the word "quarry" that I woke up.  

Yes it had been me reading.  And yes not only had I been sleeping with my eyes open, but READING OUT LOUD while I slept too.  Incredible.  While not a breakthrough of Newtonian gravity, I lay there in awe at what I had just done, mind you without the aid of meditation or  hallucinogenic drugs or any drugs for that matter.  My mind had continued to function at a very high level using several senses and yet I had slept.  Wow.    

And so gentle, good reader, you can imagine the conundrum I am in now.  Do I continue to cultivate my new found talent? Realize if exploited properly it could end as a benefit to science and a boon to society, but is rather bad parenting.  Or should I resist any more attempts of this and discard it as a fluke and, well, bad parenting?  I kind of feel like I imagine Peter Parker felt after he realized he had the powers of a spider amplified into human dimensions.  "With great power comes great responsibility."  I am not sure I am ready for this.  And maybe I love my kids too much and would rather be a good Daddy.  Then again.... I could use the sleep.   

    

  

Intermission: Dream #2 support or fatigue of the creative process

Why does "he" do this?  It rattles me so.  It really does.  I end up tired and even exhausted from... a trip FROM the brain, trip from the brain. 

It seems like your brain can be your own worst enemy sometimes.  It insists on dawging you in your sleep with things that never happened that you only worry could have happened or which happened in a lesser version but are blown out of proportion by the brain.  I don't get it.  Why would your best friend want to hurt you so?

My dreams do not follow to the best of my knowledge any ideas about the purpose of dreams.  Sigmund Freud said dreams had to do with wish fulfillment.  I cant think of one dream that I have had in the past.... say, fifteen years that has been concerned with wish fulfillment, oh maybe except that one about climbing to the moon.  Otherwise they mostly have to do with scaring the wits out of me in one way or another whether it deals with someone being on the other side of that door trying to get in and they are not my friend or I am at the pool swimming except there is no water in the pool and I am swimming on the pool tile.  Its not something I ever really wanted to do or to happen to me.  But strangely it happens to me quite often in my dreams, or else the water turns to snow.

Nor can I fathom any latent meaning in any of these dreams that represent wish fulfillment.  Well, of course except for the obvious that I am dreaming of swimming which represents the fact that I really want to wake up and relieve myself at the toilet.  I am not a psychologist or even therapist, so I could not say this from intellectual study, but the only wish fulfillment I see is that I wish I would stop vivid dreaming.

And others say dreaming is a way of either memory consolidation or working through problems from the day.  Uh, for me, ... no.   If anything my dreams just add to and exaggerate my problems.  For instance at this time in my small business I owe a lot of people money.  But what does my brain do?  It makes me dream of owing TWICE as many people TWICE as much money.  So much that I have lost track of the list and I am trying to cross the people off the list of people I owe, but the list seems to grow with each cross out I make.  Maybe that was the same night I had my dream of climbing to the moon?  No, in fact it was just climbing to another tier of people I owed money to.  There were three levels of people I owed and I was climbing up and down.

And memory consolidation?  Why does the brain find it so important to store the memory of a picture of a poster I saw for a split second while walking to work of a clown in a circus?  I couldn't even remember what the poster was about, but for some reason my brain felt it so important that it had to incorporate that poster into my dreams and even make it a vital element of the dream.  That's called memory consolidation?  I call it waste of brain cells.  Sheesh, I might as well have drunk a beer and killed those brain cells if all they were going to do was store the image of a poster of a clown for absolutely no good reason.  And let me tell you, I never used any information from that poster or picture, but I still have the picture stored in my brain. Something like this picture, except in black and white.     

Frustrated after reading reams of studies on dreams and not finding one plausible explanation for my dreams and more so my ability to remember them in detail,  I therefore made up my own.  In fact my brain is pushing me to get to action and write and be creative.  I notice that sometimes my vivid dreaming becomes more intense during a fallow period of little or no writing.  So my brain is pushing me to get started again.

 "And oh by the way, here are some ideas  that you should WRITE ABOUT.  Get the hint dude?  Get creative, get writing.  You can write about swimming in a pool without water."

 "No no brain, you always give me that one."

"Well then  how about not having gone to a class all semester and the exam is tomorrow and you have no idea what the course is about.  Oh and the exam will be taken on the 19th floor of the building and there is no elevator so you have to walk up and in fact on the 19th floor lives... Satan Satan Satan.  Bahahahahahahah."

"Yeah brain, that is an interesting twist on the usual idea you send me about failing a class, but, you know what brain?  I think its better if I just write the story and you... you let me sleep please.  I have some ideas in my head for some stories which I think are a bit more... um... creative than yours, although don't get me wrong brain, I appreciate your sending me the pictures and ideas, but could you just let me work on them now and you let me sleep?  Let me get some peaceful sleep?  You haven't sent me a good idea since that dream about living right next to that electric power company which spewed out such soot that it shut the town down for hours during the day.  That was a good one, rather disturbing, as are most of your ideas, but I did use that one.  But since then.... nothing really good."

"No sirree Bob, I have to push you and send you more ideas and basically kick your arse or you just wont get to it.  So sorry, but more vivid dreams coming up for you.  You should write them down.  Why haven't you been writing them down again?"

"Oh bugger it."

Trip from the Brain, A-gain.   

My Father wrote very deep, intellectual books, the last one he wrote was about Hegel.  He used to take three hour walks along the Bruce Trail in Niagara Falls and St. Catherine's, Canada or the Mission Peninsula in Michigan to work on his ideas and consolidate and write and rewrite things in his head.  He was a very smart man.  Me, I just go to sleep.

 

     

 Above the first picture is the Mission Peninsula down the center between the bodies of water.  This lower picture is on the Mission Peninsula I am sure my Father saw it many times.