Now a major motion picture!
Hey, heâs back.
Does this mean weâll be seeing more Bani Garu, too?
The Stars My Destination - Alfred Bester
great book, short, the style maybe a bit dated in this new age of bleep bloop blorp handyphones (then again thatâs half the charm of the Dying Earth/Jack Vance stories)
The Stars My Destination reminds me in parts of the great (and sadly un-sequeled) Diamond Age.
My âjumpâ dreams are about discovering I can fly, a difficult learning process.
After a few serendipitous accidents, I realized I was unintentionally learning to lucid dream. I learned a few tricks (and also that lucid dreaming is a discipline and a hobby for some people, there are guidebooks), and have gotten better at it. The first solid lucid dream I had, I flew. I cruised around my neighborhood at night, it was fucking awesome but also sort of weirdly anti-climactic. I started feeling guilty because when I was dreaming, I was having a hard time thinking of fun shit to do, and started being hard on myself for being unimaginative. The conclusion that I came too is that dreaming is sort of like 3D gaming. If you want to have incredible, exotic, lush and unpredictable lucid dreams, you need a lot of processing power. Unfortunately when you are asleep, your brain is sort of running at low-speed, so itâs actually really challenging to create the scenarios that would be easy to conjure when awake. I assume thatâs probably where the discipline and practice enters into it. Either way, itâs still fun to fly in a dream, on purpose, even if itâs around your neighborhood. Itâs also useful for taking control of nightmares. I had a dream where I fell off the couch into hell once, and took control of my awareness enough to realize it wasnât real and floated back up to the couch and woke myself up.
P.S. The trick I learned is to check your watch or a clock when you are dreaming. Then wait a sec, and check the time again. Each time you check the time, it should be wildly different if you are dreaming. As in check your watch, itâs 7:20, wait a sec, check it again, itâs 3:45. Your brain doesnât process time well when you are dreaming, and this is the cue you use to âwake upâ in the dream, and realize you are dreaming and take control of it.
I typed all that with my cat sitting squarely in front of the computer monitor, so sorry if typos.
Edit: For cat typing and an additional thought. I wonder if anyone has tried using lucid dreaming therapeautically with veterans for PTSD nightmares, might be some potential there.
The harder you try the less it works. You may end up âswimmingâ or âclimbingâ through the air.
Set intention, do not deviate and the dream will comply.
Iâve found that if you look at pretty much anything with a lot of small details in a lucid dreamâthe branches on a tree, say, or the grain on a wood tableâthen the details will seem stable (and often incredibly realistic) as long as youâre looking at it, but if you look away and then look back, theyâll have shifted around. I guess it makes sense that your brain only bothers to ârenderâ anything in as much detail is as needed for your current immediate perception, but doesnât really store all those details when they are no longer relevant to a subsequent perception of a different part of the scene, so it has to make up a new rendering if you go back to looking at the same object.
I hear flying is just learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.
I get the reference, but, thatâs actually pretty much how my flying dreams work. I usually fly about as well as William Katt. Sometimes, though, I fly just by⌠drifting upward.
Lately, watching multicopter videos like those of Jus70 on Youtube will induce me to dream of flight that night.
In âThe Stars My Destinationâ I think the first guy learned to âjauntâ by accidentally setting himself on fire in the lab and then teleporting to the safety shower.
I just heard about someone using lucid dreaming as a way to deal with PTSD but I canât remember where.
I would recommend the Jumper series of books by Steven Gould. Great books but the movie made out of the first was lame. The good news is that the books still exist and a new one is out this year!
Highly recommended.
The movie âJumperâ was weak but the book it is based on is great. There are a few more of them too to check out. Steven Gould wrote a great series that deals with all the ways that a âJumperâ would be hunted and used by the powers that be. It also deals with physics, ethics and abusive parents.
Really great stories, check them out.
One day I was leafing through a film encyclopedia (the Aurum Horror Encyclopedia to be exact). Itâs a collection of capsule reviews/critiques, ordered by year of release date. Well, as I leafed through at random, I came across one film, Cannibal Girls, which had accidentally been included under two different years with two completely different reviews. So, it seemed to me that the review had suddenly changed, first it said one thing and the next moment another. For a couple minutes, I was convinced that I was dreaming.
Good thing I didnât jump out a window.
Iâve climbed through hard air in a dream before. It wasnât a lucid dream.
I was climbing up a colossal pyramid, the kind at Giza, made out of rough stone blocks you have to hoist yourself up on. When I reached the peak, I looked out over the desert. Then something felt very weird, and I knew something was wrong. I looked down and the whole pyramid beneath me was gone. I had a moment of panic, and started âsinkingâ through the invisible block I was on. As soon as the panic passed, I realized that I could just hop down the pyramid, as long as I remembered where the blocks were. So I hopped on down, and that was the end of the dream.
I liked the subject a whole lot, but I wish the art had been handed by pretty much any of the previous artists 
The Eichhorn stuff is all reprints of stories published a couple of decades or so ago; itâs reprinted here about as often as BB wants to, I guess.
Seconded⌠one of my favorite series just for sheer fun. I just finished Exo, the newest book and I want more again.
Movie was awful (seriously, how do you screw up that big? :P).
But the books are gold. Even the movie tie in book (written by the author of the novels, not a novelization of the movie, but in the movie universe, and telling the backstory of the movieâs other jumper) is fairly decent, nothing ground-breaking, but I enjoyed reading it.
I typed all that with my cat sitting squarely in front of the computer monitor, so sorry if typos.
Look again. The catâs gone, isnât it? And the date has suddenly shifted forward about a day. Youâre still dreaming.
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