Dream Journal, Revisited: Sometime during mid-April and early June

gray train parking in train station

Tunnels and under/above ground transport played a large role in my dreams recently, mainly because of the long distances I’ve had to travel on metro lines between where I live now and Shanghai.

grey concrete road
Photo by Anthony Macajone on Pexels.com

Entering a tunnel, I see a round train car covered in runes inside, matching the runes along the walls. I enter the train car, but it becomes even more claustrophobic, closing in on me as I wake up.

gray train parking in train station
Photo by Piyush Arora on Pexels.com

The second dream, I am near a construction site, a heavy lift boom is in the process of building. I am able to fly up alongside the exhaust of the machine, intending to cross the river next to the construction, but I go too far – way too far in the wrong direction, away from where I’m trying to go. I keep flying uncontrollably through various tunnels, through apartment bathrooms and shower stalls until I finally come to a rest very far away from my original destination.

blue sky cables chain construction machinery
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Analysis: I live very far from the city now and these dreams appear to reflect anxiety I have about this fact. The claustrophobia of tunnels and metro cars appears to reflect the feelings I get when I go on long rides on these vehicles.

Dream Journal – First Two Weeks of April, 2023

The Dream Journal of Philbert’s Phables is one of the most popular sections of the blog, despite having not been updated for years. Well, here’s an update, and hopefully more to come – if I can remember them.

I am presented with very stylized versions of blue passenger jet planes, complete with what appears to be a ceremony for their first use. The planes have sort of flowery, jagged white frills surrounding them. The rest of the dream is forgotten.

The Tengu appears in another dream, of which all else is also forgotten.

Analysis: I often took airliners between Taiwan and North Carolina while I was growing up, and many of these routes would fly through Haneda or Tokyo Narita. Blue and white are ANA colors, although I usually flew United or what was Northwest back in the day. In the in-flight magazines of the planes would be featured prominently “Tengu dried beef jerky”, which was somewhat oddly out-of-place.

I figured the people marketing this snack must be really proud of their product to place it next to ads for Absolut Vodka and Beefeater Gin, which were also fascinating to me as a child since I could not drink, and now understand it was probably meant to be a drinking snack. There was a chocolate liquor and a sweet “ice wine,” appealing to a child but alas, my parents were not game.

Colors EP now available on all streaming platforms

Writer and composer Philip Hsu released his debut EP album, Colors, a first look at his life growing up between Taiwan and Chapel Hill, North Carolina

(Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/0Lu3vgJz6JBbAfvTtUdyYj).

“I wanted to let my passion show through, and D.A.I is a big part of this,” Phil said, “I’m connecting with independent music after leaving the stage for ten years, feeling confident about the songwriting and the overall need for music with this message.”

A scene in Northern Taiwan, where Phil grew up

Born in central Taiwan, Phil was a classically trained vocalist and attended schools in Taipei until studying international affairs at Georgetown University. In June 2022, after living through the Shanghai lockdown, Phil left a career in consulting and founded zusi, a music technology company that aims to make your life sound better (https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1010960/trove-of-discarded-cassette-tapes-brings-back-a-lost-shanghai?source=channel_home).

In addition to writing music, Phil contributes to a number of magazines on international affairs (https://jamestown.org/program/the-real-u-s-china-5g-contest-is-just-getting-started/) and is writing a science fiction novel about mermaids that create artificial intelligence.

Dream Journal, 10/26/2019

Sometimes I get into these one-night cycles of constantly having dreams each time I fall asleep, wake up, fall asleep and dream again. It isn’t good sleep at all, but quite interesting to record – especially the last dream featured here from the early morning of 10/26.

First of Three: I think this was the first dream, either that or it’s the second one. Thom Yorke of Radiohead is playing drums and singing in some unspecified apartment living room, and my friend from high school Winston Kung is there enjoying it too. Then I am in a dorm and am having a night terror (in the dream), my body is contorted and I call for help down a hallway where my father opens the door to another dorm adorned with a banker’s lamp I used to use in college and a calendar similar to something I had in the past.

Then it’s a bit fuzzy – something about clownfish, an awards ceremony/hall of fame, the Radiohead song Creep and Thom Yorke’s solo career.

Analysis: I have been listening to a lot of Radiohead and a bit of Thom Yorke’s solo work, which I did not find very interesting. Winston and I shared a liking to Radiohead’s song paranoid android from the OK Computer album which is probably why he’s there. Sometimes I have nightmares/night terrors/paralysis within dreams and always try to reach out to someone for help but there’s never anyone there. And then when there is someone there I don’t get the night terrors.

Second of Three: I forgot the first part of the dream but there is a platform high above the sky and rain, and there are people from Georgetown who are walking around trying to accomplish some tasks on the platform. I have to come down from the platform which is way up in the sky on a slippery ladder with other people coming up and down, so I go slow. My mother is encouraging me and I think about my grandfather for support. There is no rung at the bottom of the ladder so I try to breathe deep and I wake up.

Now – sometimes this can happen – I re-enter the dream as/in a plane, and fly across a map like the maps in the commercial airliner entertainment consoles. There are green, blue and orange markers and routes. There’s a lot of traffic in the sky and I’m trying to fly back in the direction of the ladder but I lose speed and land somewhere away from it, and turn into a jeep – the whole thing now looks like a comic book – and I’m frustrated that I can’t get back to where I was.

Analysis: Ok, I’m starting to think I have a subconscious fear of heights, because these types of fear to fall dreams occur a lot. The map just shows that I fly too often. There is a Tintin comic I’ve read called Land of Black Gold or something that features a jeep in the desert as well.

Third of Three: This is a wild one, and dreams like this are quite concerning since I feel like they are using parts of the brain that are normally subconscious, and for good reason. I see a lot of languages in bright pink made-up/random script overlaid over commercials, essentially the script/letters are randomly generated from what I think the languages look like, or the prototypical shape of the languages’ written form.

I see what looks like closing credits with “Arabic,” “Korean,” others and other languages, scenes of deserts, stones. The Korean “commercial” is a travel/airline commercial featuring an airliner and a woman garbed in traditional clothing flying in front of the plane – basically one of those celestial women. Again, a lot of squiggly lines, accent marks, curves, shapes – it’s like Chinese characters but exaggerated, ending credits, text overlays etc.

Analysis: The problem with these dreams is that I recognize my brain is in a state other than the one it was in in the previous two dreams. A “manic” state, so to speak, which I find to be slightly dangerous or, at least, similar to the night terror/sleep paralysis states that I experience otherwise. Or maybe I’m just overthinking things.

Dream Journal, Sometime in September and on 9/26/2019

My dreams have either been too vague or too embarrassing to write recently. But I heard you wanted dreams, so here are some more – uncensored (well, almost)!

Two dreams. The first is probably the first well-formed dream I can remember since moving to China but ends in a sort of silly nightmare. I am at some sort of hotel and get into a car downstairs at the entrance. We drive towards a train station through cloudy/misty/polluted cityscapes and enter a parking lot where I climb a spiral staircase to a semi-hidden room where top brass from what appears to be the US air force and army are gathered for a meeting in a sort of WeWork/hotel lobby with cushioned chairs/cushions for chairs.

One of the meeting participants is a “Rand person” i.e. from one of the think tanks and I recognize her as someone I saw on a Tinder app once but is kind of crazy. She is very driven and comes up to me to say hello. Her name is Laura Anderson [no connection to anyone I know in real life] and she has crazy person glasses even though she is quite attractive; anyway people know to avoid her in terms of romantic connections. Then suddenly a pillow is shouting and talking to me, which I take to be real life because I’m in bed and “woke up,” which is quite scary indeed. Then I finally wake up from all this nonsense.

Analysis: This is very heavily influenced by what I am seeing in real life, being in China. The meeting scene is influenced from being in DC for so long and attending various events where US military or thinktank personnel are presenting, but it also gives the allure of a secret meeting on/in China at the top levels of the US military that I get to participate in. Perhaps I always wanted to work in the military or a thinktank. The Laura Anderson part is somewhat self-explanatory, at least I know people like that in the DC space, having lived there for so long.

Second dream, begins at a temple in Taiwan where the rain is falling and I see a tall, slim mixed young woman and end up having a “passionate encounter” with her in the woods. She turns out to be a prostitute. My character is actually a cop from the FBI or some American agency sent to Taiwan for a cybersecurity/smuggling etc. investigation, so he asks if the payment of ten thousand is in Taiwan dollars or USD, to which the prostitute scoffs.

Ok, not quite Taiwan, but yes woods

The next scene is him comparing slides with the Taiwanese cops as he is sent to investigate gangsters involved. They brainstorm criminal involvement, discuss informants, etc. But the character continues to see the prostitute, sometimes at her own apartment, where she covers (turns down) a picture of her from college with some of her friends, and we find out from the shot that she went to Georgetown as she’s wearing a college hoodie in the picture. Then the agent is in an aquarium by himself, with creatures all around and even some Merfolk-inspired creatures about him; it’s a dream-like scene. The prostitute is actually an informant for the gangsters, but she has feelings for the agent too so the gangsters eventually kill her.

He is alone in the aquarium

The agent sees her as his guardian angel and at times even wonders if he was/is imagining her or not. There is somehow a banquet that both law enforcement and the gangsters attend, and of course a fight breaks out. Eventually there is an “awards ceremony” (this is all in a fantastical sense) where the agent is outed as having been with this prostitute with all the pictures of them together, but he doesn’t deny it as he says he was in love with her.

Analysis: Ummm…use your imagination. I will say this though, there was an attractive young woman at Georgetown, mixed as well, whose claim to fame is that she had previously starred in a pornographic film of an abusive nature. She ended up being kicked out of Georgetown for dealing marijuana. Anyway maybe this prostitute character is vaguely based off of her.

Dream Journal, estimated 8/26/2019 and 8/28/2019

I’ve been busy with the big move to Shanghai (more on that later), but here are a few more dreams I’ve been having sleeping on air mattresses and trying to get rid of a chest cold. Not working is stressful in of itself.

8/26/2019:

A race of Godlike beings dressed as wizards (quidditch gear, red robes) ride broomsticks into space and defend earth against dark clouds, like the dust creatures in Totoro but much more malevolent. They dissipate the clouds with their hands but some still get through to earth. It turns into a demon man who attacks a girl, police try to intervene and shoot him with a shotgun but it’s too late. The Old and New Gods decide to band together to work more closely now to defend humans against this threat.

Now there are men and women in goth(ic) dress, wooden swords and scaffolding and bridge that they let me pass through, though first challenging me. Next, one of the men who challenged me on the bridge earlier runs to me for protection as he’s being hunted down by an assassin; I throw a knife at the attacker but miss. I pull out another knife to attack him but the assassin holds onto me and starts slicing my wrist.

8/28/2019:

The Jay Chou song 雙刀 is playing as I see a mountain from afar at dusk with some lights already lit up, one of the mountains by the sea in Taiwan’s north coast. There are people practicing kung fu at the top of the mountain as the “camera” circles them and the mountain itself like drone/plane footage.

Then I am in an office at the side of the mountain at night with ships in the waters in the distance. My friend from grad school Peter Satre is there too. Again I have to close a window shade with the metal chain, I have to walk carefully along metal girders and reach over a precipice to close it, whereas Peter’s “dad” (who is actually actor Chris Cooper) closes it easily. Then I am fully in an office complex and getting into an office that is not my own, seeing colleagues that are not my own with my mom. One of the executive types there asks if I know the board of directors (which would explain why I am a stranger there). My mom thanks me for bringing in good business for her.

It’s window shades that look like this that I had growing up in Taiwan too. These are in FTI’s DC office

Commentary: I think those dust sprites from My Neighbor Totoro are a little more chilling than they let on in the cartoon, or at least they left a strong impression with me. The Old Gods and New is a reference to the TV show American Gods. Hard to explain the gothic folks.

I’ve been listening to a lot of Jay Chou lately to prepare myself for the big move. I used to go to the North Coast of Taiwan a lot with my father, we would drive up and sometimes go to the beach. The natural beauty of it all was always wondrous to behold, along with the starkness of the mountains against the sea. The window shades may be returning to my dreams as the ones I had growing up were placed directly over open windows that you (or a pet) could fall through if you really tried. So these were precarious things to open and close, and it was always so hot/cold in that apartment too. New colleagues, new office…sounds familiar.

Dream Journal, estimated on 8/7/2019

Two dreams. The first one is simple, I am in an apartment and there is water everywhere, pooling all around. I try to soak it up with towels and buckets. I’m not sure where it’s coming from, maybe a broken pipe, but it’s everywhere.

It wasn’t this bad and the apartment wasn’t this tacky, but oh well.

Second dream is much more involved. In a WWI-style trench warfare environment, a war hero’s M60 machine gun is recovered after his death in combat. A blacksmith is brought to the battlefield to retrieve the weapon and ordered by the Papacy to restore it as a way to commemorate the war hero and other war dead. Everyone is vaguely Italian. The blacksmith is a pacifist, though, so he empties the gun of all its ammunition before taking it back to his pacifist community on a mule. The Papacy orders a greasy/unsavory inspector type to make sure that the weapon is functioning again or at least restored. The blacksmith and his daughter bring the inspector up a flight of stone stairs to a small stone hill. All around them in the shallow water young men and boys are playing and practicing gymnastics. The daughter retrieves the restored weapon from a platform in the water and presents it to the inspector with a smile. The inspector lays the weapon down and begins to load it with ammunition to test fire it, firing directly into the crowds of young men and boys, whose bodies burst open with blood and everyone is screaming and crying out. The inspector is exacting payback upon the pacifist community for them not participating in the war. The dream ends with the blacksmith taking his tool and striking the inspector down in shock and rage, breaking his pacifist vows.

An M60 machine gun

Commentary: Water is a component of many of my dreams. The Pacifist story sounds interesting, hopefully I can turn it into a short film.

Dream Journal – 8/4/2019

One dream and one nightmare.

Mulan-style Chinese soldiers wearing armor march in a column carrying blunderbusses/muskets and banners. A rag tag group without armor face off with and charge towards the enemy (probably the Huns) and throw javelins before engaging in hand-to-hand combat, I see this from the Hun perspective. Then I am playing capture-the-flag and am hit with a beanbag from a player from the opposing ream who is actually a former classmate of mine from Jinhua junior high school in Taiwan who I don’t think liked me, maybe because I am half white. I punched that guy in the face (in real life), that shut him up. Anyway, tagged by the beanbag, I am “out” and receive scores of my efforts on an electronic blackboard connected to a drink fridge, high marks for earnestness but low marks for athleticism. I ride an elevator above the fray where I see Chinese soldiers standing in a winding, line around the grounds, lining up to their execution at the hands of the Hun.

Image from Instagram: @dee_age

Nightmare. I am at a window facing the city lit up at night (looks like New York, since there is a tall, skinny building known as 432 Park Avenue visible out the window.) There is a white plastic windowshade flapping in the wind and a metal chain at the side of the window (outside the window) that is flapping with it. I try to hang on to the chain to close the window and windowshade but it keeps eluding my grasp. Now a thunderstorm begins outside the window with thunder and the sounds and feelings of rain, it is afternoon and the clouds and rain are making the view dark, but there is still grey-ish green light. The rain makes it more urgent to close the window, and now the white curtain turns into a white dummy/mannequin with rubber covering her flat chest (there is only a chest and head), I am holding on to the mannequin with white fake hair and I stroke her hair without seeing her face, as she is facing a bit down even though her chest is facing up (it’s obviously mixed up, I see a bit of her face but not much). The mannequin seems to be on a swivel crosswise so I turn her up a bit, and then she fully turns around and upward at her own volition and her face and eyes are contorted in a grotesque, skull-like manner, and she emits a hissing sound. I cry out softly and awaken.

Commentary: The Mulan dream is influenced by my viewing the trailer to the new live-action Mulan movie. The mannequin dream, all I can say is that I was attracted to the mannequin at first, which made her transformation all the more frightful. Also the feeling of not being able to do a simple task (close the window). I think this nightmare is a good candidate for a short film, though. I would love to create the mannequin prop myself and it might be decently easy to animate her face, the city at night, and the storm outside.

Dream Journal – 7/31/2019 or thereabouts

I still dream about my grandparents; my grandma passed away in 2015 and my grandfather just passed away this March. But sometimes my dreams of them are distorted, not exactly the same face that I knew, but some variation that I still recognize. This happens a lot in my dreams, the “recognizing” of people’s faces that aren’t their true images.

Anyway, I haven’t been remembering my dreams very well recently, so this dream is a little fuzzy to me, even though I recorded it right after I woke up around 3 or 4 am.

I have friends who do bad things a la the movie Trainspotting, or A Clockwork Orange, though not as extreme as the latter. They are picking on someone and I vomit (or some substance) on my shoe. Then I am picking up a prescription at a pharmacy (Walgreens?) when they ask for my credit limit and I tell them. My mother, who is there, says don’t tell anyone who isn’t us. I fly away and see a a building and gardens and fountains down the side of a sloping hill similar to gardens I saw in Florence. I feel sad and am crying because the gardens are beautiful, but small and aging, but the groundskeepers have tried to keep it in good condition, but it still looks a little run-down.

There was a building at the top of the hill, a fountain and hedges beneath it arranged in a line

I continue flying down the hill until I see a level area with many Balinese-inspired stone figures, statues, monuments, fountains, and an empty stage made of stone with red/pinkish curtains. There is a monument or statue that circulates ashes (probably human ashes) throughout the stone edifice. I am flying to a hallway where I am faced with yearbook-like photos of young women (like my high school) whose faces transform into or are superimposed with cat and dog faces. Then I am by the sea, by a salesman I used to know, trying to make sales myself. There is a Japanese restaurant with a job board and employee in front of it. I ask if there is an opening and how to apply, she tells me I have to be a shareholder(?) or part of some Japanese scheme that I am not in and it would be difficult to enter.

Ubud, Bali, Indonesia

Analysis: I interpret flying dreams to be good. The stage beckons me even in my dreams. The ashes are probably those of my grandparents, who we buried in Westfield New Jersey (where they lived for a long time) last week. The transforming faces sound a lot like Deep Dream, but probably also influenced by one of me co-workers talking about her puppy at work. I keep thinking if I should switch over to a more BD client-facing role, and maybe the last bit represents how hard it is to find a job overseas (and the Japanese in general).

Dream a Little Deep Dream of Me (IV – End)

Does a machine have to know it is dreaming to dream?

The basic question to end our MML series on machine dreams and consciousness is, does a machine need to know it is dreaming in order to dream? In other words, if a dream tree falls in the dream forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

Humans and other animals often have dreams but do not remember them, or remember having dreamt at all. In such states we are still dreaming, because if we were connected to a CAT scan, MRI or EKG machine our brain waves would emit signs of a dreaming state even if we didn’t remember having a dream or the contents of the dream itself.

In addition, I have no doubt that at least some non-human animals are or become aware that they are or have been dreaming upon waking up. A dog could dream of chasing a ball or a lion could dream of chasing an antelope, and each wake up in a start, but each would know that their waking state is separate from their dreaming state. Or else, wouldn’t they keep doing the same activity that they had been doing in their dream even after waking up? Clearly the activity stops, although it’s less clear what knowledge animals take from their dreams to dictate their waking activities, or if it is mainly waking activities that dictate their dreams.

Same goes for humans, of course, we normally become aware of the difference between dreaming and waking states, at least once we wake up. The problem with saying a machine/computer program like Deep Dream is dreaming, is that it doesn’t have any transitions between sleeping/dreaming and waking/dreaming states, it only has the one or more states for which it has been programmed. You can’t just call a machine’s default state the “dream” state if it is no different from its “waking” or normal state. And furthermore, it doesn’t have any self-awareness of switching between states. Again, by this I do not mean one has to be constantly aware of being in a dream (as we often don’t realize we are in one), but that when a dream ends, we return to reality (as best we can).

So can we program dreaming and waking states into computers? Possibly, but this may require programming artificial consciousness itself. The Dark-Light-Bright state model could be applied in a way that measures neural activity as a function of not only external stimulus but also internal chemistry, with the internal state of mind only an imperfect reflection of reality and somewhat detached as well. Perhaps with machines, this reality would be sharper given the digital rather than analog nature of their perceptions.

At any rate, the fundamental concept with programming consciousness (and dreaming) is one that harkens back to Immanuel Kant’s Unity of Consciousness from his Critique of Pure Reason. This Unity of Consciousness is what generates a sense of self and time and the independence of self and other objects from “everything else,” also generating perception itself. Without the Unity of Consciousness, all matter coalesces together into one indeterminate mass over an indeterminate time, which seems to be the machine’s current understanding of reality, since neither mass nor time are concepts a machine presently understands or comprehends. I would suggest that without a full Unity of Consciousness, one would not be able to distinguish between waking or dreaming states as well.

Immanuel Kant

So there you have it, if you can program Kant’s Unity of Consciousness into a machine, it might be able to transition between programmed states and dream like a human or animal does. This Unity of Consciousness in particular will be the centerpiece of many of my My Machine Life posts to come. Thanks for reading this blog arc!