First of all, this is going to be a very long and very disconnected post, for reasons I will go into later in the post.
“Experiments”
While most college students are known for their “experiments” with various things [I won’t go into my thoughts on this for fear of losing my entire viewership], I have preferred instead to experiment with myself [not in that sense you perverts]: to find my own limits in terms of physical endurances, mental limits, psychological strength, force of will, and various other elements. While I feel that a lot of this is a process which I will continue until much later in life, I have already come to many conclusions about myself [and dare I say about people in general?], many of which are quite surprising.
- Sleep cycles and deprivation - The first set of tests I ran, these were, in many ways, the easiest to run and the most informative. I found during my freshman year that I performed best under a very much delayed sleep cycle, naturally prefering to go to sleep after 3 a.m. and waking up 11 a.m. While often this was due to various activities still going on late at night, more and more I found that even with nothing to do, my body still naturally preferred staying up till past 3. This was surprising to me for a couple of reasons:
- First of all, why should it matter when my body got its sleep, as long as it got the right amount? I had been under the strong impression that only the quantity and quality of sleep mattered, not the specific time it occurred. After all, if I got in the habit of sleeping at midnight everyday and waking up at 8 or 9 in the morning, theoretically that should work. But repeatedly I found that that was not the case. My body specifically liked going to sleep late and waking up late. This held true whether I was in Atlanta, back in Chapel Hill, in England, or in India.
- Secondly, this practice of preferring to sleep late was quite eerie because I have very strong memories of my dad going to sleep very late (by adult standards), 2 a.m. usually, until somewhat recent years when he has shifted his routine earlier (mostly due to other constraints).
As far as sleep deprivation goes, I quickly found out that staying up for an entire night, and for the subsequent day worked quite well. There would be a period of about 1 hour on the 2nd day, usually around the time I normally wake up, where I would be incredibly sleepy, but then suddenly I’d “snap out of it,” and it would be just as if I had woken up–I’d be refreshed, energetic, and ready to go for the entire day. I found several side benefits to this routine–from an analysis of total effectiveness, it seemed to be just as good, if not better, than a normal routine. I would get the first day as normal, the first night at maybe 80% effectiveness, the second day (with the exception of the morning hour) at about 75%, and then I would always sleep really well that second night (no big surprise there), and then I would always have an incredible day at about 110% my normal effectiveness that next day when I woke up (this was a suprise to me). BTW when I saw “effectiveness,” I don’t mean like “efficiency” or “ability to solve complex math problems,” but rather, how much I would qualify my waking time as just like a “normal” day as opposed to that half-awake, half-asleep state (usually caused by exhaustion over the course of several days) where things become quite distant and you basically feel quite shitty. After all, what good was it if I could stay up 3 days, only to have two of those be really shitty, as well as fuck up my schedule after those 3 days?
More alarming, however, was the fact that I found myself aging very noticiably throughout college! This has struck me hard recently as I did not realize how rapidly this process occurs. I have found myself needing more sleep every year, and specifically, not being able to stay up for as long. This has disturbed me in many ways that I don’t feel ready to talk about any further…
As I write this entry, I find myself less willing to go into the details of my other tests, as many of them seem to be too personal for me to feel comfortable to share, while others seem trivial or otherwise still in progress, but my thoughts on sleep deprivation lead naturally to my next topic.
Dreams
Dreams (and nightmares) interest me a great deal (as they do a lot of people), both for their content and for their effectiveness and manner of manifesting themselves. If that makes no sense, I know, hold on. While I could go into some detail here and describe down to the minutest points many of the dreams (mostly nightmares) that I’ve had over the past several years, I won’t (primarily because their content is too frightening, no matter how you interpret them). I’m actually more fascinated by the feel of them. Why is it that certain dreams are so life-like, so real, that the imprint they leave is stronger than many real-life events of my life? Ask me to remember how I felt on a given day and I can give you a very approximate description, at best. Ask me to tell you how I felt during some of these dreams, and I will immediately feel that dream as if I was just having it. I can, in an instant, see, hear, smell, and feel every detail of that dream–an ability which, if applied to facets of “normal” life, would be amazing. Why do some dreams affect us in such a basic level? Are they getting imprinted on a deeper level of our consciousness, a level which rational thought cannot access for some reason. This is the same region I feel that music (Good with a capital G music, rather) can reach, with growing power as I get older.
Also very peculiar is how my dreams are affected by my physical environment. While everyone has experienced the classic “alarm clock in real life is heard as something else in dream,” I’m talking about something much stronger. I have found, through very systematic testing (although at first completely by accident), that my dreams are very sensitive to the ambient tempeerature. In particular, whenever the temperature is above a certain “comfortable” point, my dreams immediately become nightmares, and the strength of the nightmare is directly proportional to the temperature. And actually, it’s not strictly temperature, but rather a combination of temperature and how “stuffy” or “stifled” I feel. This is why I cannot wear a thick comforter at night, unless it’s really really cold, because the intense warmth and stifling weight of a comforter always lead to horrific nightmares. Often when I wake up as a result, I find that even after staying up for a while, doing other things, drinking lots of water, etc., the minute I go back to sleep (assuming I don’t mess with the temperature) the nightmares resume. On the other hand, if I make no change at all except for opening a window, or not wearing my comforter/blanket, the nightmares will immediately subside.
Hypertext and Xanadu
Now onto my third topic. Scroll back over the entry so far. Notice the large number of parenthetical citations, the lists-within-lists, the beginnings of a rambling. I’m finding increasingly that a continuous linear flow is not really the best format for my writing, as my mind always wants to branch off at every possible juncture. Many people have professed to me that they like my writing; that they think it’s good. While I think many of these people are not in touch with genuinely good literature (that’s not meant as an insult–but it’s the truth), I think part of the appeal comes from my tendency to want to explore side issues, or even unrelated topics. I’m trying to think of what format would be best suited for the way in which I think, or at least write, and I have not as yet found an ideal solution (i.e. even a theoretical solution, much less one in real practice). I can tell you what will NOT work, however:
- Normal linear text like this. The main point is often lost due to the large amount of parenthetical material. The continuity is similarly affected, with the net result that the “take-home points” are severely compromised, the narrative does not feel very connected, etc.
- Hyperlinked segments, a la Everything 2. I don’t necessarily have ideas linked to particular phrases; rather, I find that I have multiple points that all emerge naturally from some initial one. Thus you could envision reading one essay with that intial point, paired with one of the multiple following points, and that essay would feel ordered, continuous, and complete. The use of links, especially indefinite links (i.e. that link to a “random” page based on that linking phrase) goes strongly against the idea of a linear progression; even though article A may link to article B, very rarely is it true that you could read from A to B as one continuous, logical progression.
This is one reason why I was very excited when I first read about Xanadu, a lifelong project of Ted Nelson. While his writings and thoughts frequently come across as those of a maniac/showman/true believer, I nevertheless feel that he is on to something, and also feel his constant questioning of the current state of things to be a very necessary thing. He feels that the current internet is too much like conventional paper-and-pencil, and the connection method of hyperlinks is a very rudimentary, at best, implementation of his original ideas of hyperspace (a term originally coined by him). To provide a very rough mathematical analogy, he feels that we are being limited to a 1-, or at most, 2-dimensional space, when in fact we should be able to go to an N-dimensional one, where N is limited only by technological and implementational concerns (both of which are at sufficiently high levels to allow for much larger N). And in its essence, his argument makes sense to me, because I also feel that this is not the best way of doing things. As many an “idea-man,” he has been much less successful with generating any sort of implementation of what he feels is “right,” but even the two projects he has very rough prototypes of (which I have seen/played with) show some promise.
The first is a method of hyperlinked works where connections between different pages are linked from both directions (i.e. the linked page knows about all linking pages, and vice versa), and these links are graphically illustrated by drawing lines between different pages, which are opened not in the same window, but in multiple windows. These links remain visible as further pages are opened up, leading very quickly to a mass of lines criss-crossing the screen: obviously, the idea is still in its infancy, as that is not an acceptable solution. You can try this out for yourself using his free CosmicBook Reader. I also found myself wanting multiple screens to most effectively use this, and in fact, not merely multiple screens, but rather, a 3-dimensional screen.
His other prototype, which he only describes (but has no downloadable version of), is more interesting. It is a method of information display in which there are multiple (N) axes of information. At any juncture, you may choose to start exploring a different axis, “rotating” the entire idea space, if that makes any sense. This seems very likely the kind of format I need for my writings, but unfortunately there is no good implementation of this that I have found (or can even think of, although I’ll concede that I haven’t thought seriously about this for any significant length of time). You can read his own (disjointed) description of this “Zigzag System” here. If I were to summarize his work in one word, it would be “connectedness.” He feels (and I strongly agree), that there exist much stronger (and many more) connections between different pages, and that these need to be highlighted and more precisely related.
Finally, as is the case with most entries I write, I find that the time and energy spent in writing this post have cause me to forget many things I was going to say, entirely miss several avenues of thought I wanted to explore, etc. etc. I think this emphasizes the fact that more so than even a better conception of hyperspace, we need a more efficient manner of communication (other than reading and writing) than can convey thoughts more concisely and accurately between people, because writing, even at its tersest, is still quite long, and in many respects, unnecessarily so. Until such a method is developed, however, I guess we’re stuck with this, and we should try to make the best of it.
Tags: dream, experiments, hypertext, nightmare, sleep, ted nelson, xanadu
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