So I’ve been sharing my Weird Dreams with the fediverse lately. Because I’m a bit of a nut, I figured: why not share my normal dreams as well? I’ll be doing that with the #fedidreams hashtag every morning. If you, too, find dreams interesting, feel free to join in! Some ground rules and background: as a teenager, I was extremely interested in #lucid dreaming. I practiced #dream recall and put a lot of work into it, as the first step to lucid dreaming. While I never achieved it, to this day I can generally remember 1 or 2 dreams a night. I don’t believe dreams are supernatural, or have any deeper meaning.I just believe they’re fun, and sometimes an interesting way to get a glimpse of your own subconscious. Also, thanks to some medication I take, my dreams have become even more vivid over the last couple years. If I’m lucky enough to have any explicit dreams, I’ll be keeping those to myself! Will sharing my dreams with the world every morning get me any closer to my long abandoned goal of lucid dreaming? Will my subconscious get performance anxiety and stop dreaming entirely? Will the focus on writing up my dreams in something more than point-form for my dream diary make them even weirder? It’s a social experiment, bro! And you get to follow along on this journey of entirely unscientific and meaningless science! Yay! Yeah…feel free to filter out the #fedidreams hashtag entirely.
@fastfinge Years ago when I started regularly taking melatonin, I found that if I stayed off it for a few weeks then took one, that night I would have a very strange dream. Most of these dreams tended to eventually wind up in a situation where many people were saying the same thing at the same time, but in a certain way so they were slightly out of synch. At that point I would wake up, sort of scared. I remember one such dream wound up with me sitting in a car, watching a performance of some kind that was going on inside and outside the car. The often repeated line of this skit was that someone would ask, "Would you throw a cat?" and someone else would answer, "No, sir." At the end of the dream, the whole crowd said loudly, "Would you throw a cat? No, sir!" Then I woke up.
@fastfinge@jaybird110127 I took Zolpidem briefly. I don't remember any weird dreams as such, what I do remember, however, is waking up in a full bath. I am not likely to forget that any time soon. I had been noticing that things were being moved around and things just didn't seem quite right for the previous few days, but I didn't think for a moment that I was sleepwalking until this happened. Nope. Not again, I don't think.
@fastfinge@jaybird110127 Particularly since this was at school, where I had my own bathroom atached to my bedroom. Nobody would've heard the tap running or anything. Not cool at all.
@fastfinge@jaybird110127 Heh, we have proper evil blind asylums here in the UK. Actualy I didn't always have nice rooms like that one, but some years I got lucky.
@fastfinge@jaybird110127 Yup. Not a dorm, either, my own room. Technically all of the en suite rooms were doubles, but I almost always got them to myself anyway because everybody hated me and I hated everybody, and somehow their system for allication was mad enough to allow me to get away with that time and time again.
@arqeria@jaybird110127 It sounds like Harry potter has lied to me! Aren’t British boarding schools wonderful places where you make best friends, have adventures, and fight evil?
@fastfinge@jaybird110127 I guess sort of, if geting repeatedly buggered counts as fighting evil. Also the only letter I got was a letter from the local government telling me how lucky I was that they weren't going to force us to go to court for funding.
@fastfinge@jaybird110127 Oh hey by the way, I think you Canadians have the Stephen Fry audiobooks, right? If so, go get Moab Is My Washpot. That's Fry's autobiogriphy. He went to much nastier boarding schools than mine.
@fastfinge@jaybird110127 Apparently he couldn't say pocketed it, so he asked Rowling to change it, and instead she made sure every subsequent book included it.
@arqeria@fastfinge@jaybird110127 Moab is the first of his life writings, he's done 2 more I think. Moab is by far the best, though. I mean to understand him as a man. The latter ones go on to give detail about the life of an actor and celebrety, which held far less interest to me. But I can certainly relate to being a young and confused person, so Moab worked really well on that front. Fabulous book.
@cachondo@fastfinge@jaybird110127 I did end up listening to all three of them, partly because Stephen fry is just endlessly interesting to read about, and he somehow always manages to make whatever he writes about seem interesting, partly because I sort of wanted to find out how it all ended, but mostly because I needed bedtime listening for a while and I got a little bit sick of the Harry potter books. I'm still incredibly annoyed that he only did the first hitchhiker's book, that is very very sad and the guy who did the others in no way compares.
@arqeria@cachondo@fastfinge@jaybird110127 Stephen fry rules! I mean, I can only say that to the Harry Potter series as it's all I have. But I never get sick of listening to those.
@TomGrant91@arqeria@fastfinge@jaybird110127 everything he reads just has that certain pleasing rhythm. He just has one of those voices, doesn't he? I remember listening to Goblet of Fire on audio tape in bed. I mean I was 14, not a real kid. But having to get out and replace the tape whilst Harry was in the graveyard and it was all blowy and windy and spooky outside at 02:00AM? nooo way! So even though to listen to him was and is always a pleasure, he sucks you in well, too.
It's very sad to see him struggle with mental health so frequently, too. i've often wished there was a way to transfer how I feel about people to them sometimes. Some of the brightest have so little self worth during a bad spell.
@cachondo@arqeria@fastfinge@jaybird110127 The wierdest bet for me at least, Goblet of Fire side 7B. "Yeah, you can have a word, good bye! End of side 7 B. We had no idea there were 2 separate boxes of tapes you had to get.
@TomGrant91@arqeria@fastfinge@jaybird110127 I've often wondered why with every RNIB talking book you have to sit through how many tapes or CDs it's on, what levels the chapters are at now we have DAISY, whether or not the reader has had tea yet...
I guess at least you never start a book that way not knowing there was a second disk.
@cachondo@arqeria@jaybird110127@TomGrant91 Do you also get the copyright notice that the book is only for blind people and if anyone else ever hears it you'll be tracked down and killed?
@arqeria@fastfinge@jaybird110127 I have a podcast coming out later today precisely on school memories, mine are rather opposite of these. My time at school was generally very good.
@Onj@fastfinge@jaybird110127 mine was definitely a weird mix. Made some amazing friends, and plenty of good memories, but it definitely had its downsides, and I think I could have quite possibly gotten more from it if I'd started at 6th form. BTW, did you start at 6th form or not? I don't remember, but the responses I've heard from people so far would seem to indicate that most people do generally have more positive memories of it if they started later, but there are exceptions to that too. I'll be interested to hear that podcast as well, I think you finished about a decade before I started, so it'll be interesting to hear how things changed.
@arqeria@fastfinge@jaybird110127 Well it's just this second come out, so now you can. I started in year 5 aged 9, so as far from sixth-form as it's possible to be.
@Onj Hey, sorry for the delay, I just managed to listen to it. The stuff about Russia was absolutely fascinating, and I can't believe you had to carry around those brailers, I can only imagine there was some horrible accident at some point. How on earth did you manage to ride a bike? I did ride a bike with stabilisers when I was little, and I managed to get around mainly by following my family's voices and listening to my mother's ocasional shouted directions, I was a lot braver back then, but I can't imagine doing that even on the school campus because I always needed to keep track of the shorelines, I could do this with my feet when not using a kane, but a bike would definitely be something else altogether. I never even got the hang of using one without stabilisers, tandem bikes excepted. Did you actually start school when you were 9 or were you just talking about the asessment? I started at 11, I think that was definitely the youngest you could move up to secondary school then. I did have to use the payphones a lot because my phone was often confiscated, and although I never knew about the trick you mentioned, I did learn that if you called someone and there was no money in the machine, the call would still connect for a little while, you just couldn't transmit, so I was able to tel my then girlfriend to call the number back whenever she received a silent call from me. That was particularly useful those first few years, most of my school friends were either much older or, later, a year or 2 younger than me, and that first year in particular was very isolating. BTW, your wife kind of reminds me of a school friend, who in turn reminded me a lot of Emma Watson, I was not the only one to make this comparison BTW, it was quite uncanny. Also, have you thought about putting the RSS feed on Spotify? I listen to most of my podcasts there these days, the Alexa integration makes it quite handy.
@arqeria I learnt to ride a bike very young, first of course with stabalizers but later without. Just got quite good at it I guess. There were times when I'd ride down the swimming pool path, where it was necessary to use my foot to train the curb, but in the open space between the fountain and the school building itself, I could very easily pull off a circle or two without hitting anything (or anyone) haha.
Re RSS and spotify, no idea how. Apple Podcasts can have a custom url, so I added it on my own device there just fine, I'd imagine spotify can do the same. If so, you can add it manually, but I have no idea whatsoever how to get it into a proper directory.
@Onj Yeah unfortunately you can't. I'll have to look into the process for adding it, but I think Spotify does draw from podcast directories like Itunes ETC, so if you've aded it to those it may just be a matter of time. @lerven may be able to help here. My spacial awareness has always been shit, it took me ages to figure out how to not get lost walking from the reception exit back to the 6th form hostel, that huge bit of nothing before you get to the path connecting the fountain to everything else always got on my nerves, though I did get the hang of it eventually. I can only navigate without reference to landmarks if it's an area I'm particularly familiar with.
@arqeria As for my wife, yeah I'm obviously very biased but I think she has one of the greatest speaking voices in history, and sounds great on a microphone. We've been together for almost 17 years and she's been too mic-shy to have been properly recorded until we started the podcast, so I never knew how good she sounded until very recently.
@Onj She definitely sounds far, far younger than she probably is, and that's a compliment BTW. I hope my voice sounds half as good as that in 20 years.
@Onj I definitely know what you mean about the nostalgia, and I often dream about being back there too, sometimes I even dream about somehow going back there for education as an adult. I never went to RNC but I've ocasionally thought about it, I'm only 21 so it might not be entirely beyond the realms of possibility, but in practice I'm only just on the verge of moving out, and I think it would probably be too much of a bother at this point.
@fastfinge@jaybird110127 Also my accent is now slightly off, and probably will be for the rest of my life, because I ended up spending way too much time with people posher than me.
