Archive for May, 2008

31
May

Lucid Dreams and the Subconscious

By Ryan 1 Comment
Categories: Pondering

A lucid dream, also known as a conscious dream, is a dream in which the person is aware that he or she is dreaming while the dream is in progress. During lucid dreams, it is possible to exert conscious control over the dream characters and environment and have them perform feats which would be physically impossible in the waking world. Lucid dreams can be extremely real and vivid depending on a person’s level of self-awareness during the lucid dream.

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucid_dream

Lucid dreams are something that I find very interesting.  After reading a blog post about dreams and nightmares on my good friend Amanda’s blog, my mind really started thinking about the subconscious and how mystical it is.  Everything that happens in a dream is happening in our head, yet we know so little about them.  Dreams can be amazingly powerful too.  I know that my mood for the rest of the day can be affected by a dream I had because it seemed so real.  No matter how strange a dream is, it can still have very strong emotional feelings attached to it.

The ability to control what happens in our dreams seems like it would be one of the most amazing experiences ever.  Just think, you could do anything you want.  You want to fly by flapping your arms?  No problem.  Want to breathe underwater?  Sure thing.  I think the ability for complete control over everything and everyone is a guilty pleasure of the human mind on the subconscious level, no matter how moral of a person you are.  This is especially true when all you have to do to erase everything you did is open your eyes and wake up.  I guess the other guilty pleasure of the subconscious mind would be the ability to have actions without consequences.

Thinking back on dreams, it seems that there are two different ways to look at them.  There is the overall impression of the dream, which sometimes can be an elaborate story that makes sense, however more times than not, is usually a jumpy, convoluted story that contains many events with only a couple things in common such as a person that appears throughout most of the dream.  I guess the best thing to call this would be the “long-term” memory of the dream.  The other way, as you probably guessed would be the “short-term” view of the dream where you think back on only specific events or short moments in time.  Usually, when thought about in these little segments, each little part of the dream makes sense, no matter how one part transitioned to the next.  Sure sometimes someone or something very strange can be going on, but when thought about on a small enough time frame, you don’t have the issue of your location changing spontaneously or people suddenly appearing in your dream out of nowhere. I’ve had times where I had dreams that take place over over a very long time and made sense, for the most part, from start to finish. When I woke up, I felt as if years should have gone by when in fact, only 7 or 8 hours have passed. I even had one night where I had trouble sleeping, so I managed to experience 3 completely separate dreams in one night, and I remembered them all in the morning. Talk about a brain workout.

This really makes me think about how the subconscious works because during the dream, it seems perfectly normal for things to spontaneously change around you.  You could be in your house one moment, and halfway around the world in the next.  The strange thing when this happens though, is that it usually takes me awhile to realize that I’m not in the same place I was before.  This is a little bit of a weird analogy, but its almost as if dreams are fluid and things can shift around smoothly, no matter how different or random it is, and the change is so smooth that it takes awhile to notice the change.

Ultimately, I wish there was some way to record dreams exactly how we see and experience them, no matter how strange or confusing they may be.  I’m sure if we were able to watch our dreams while we were awake, we’d basically be saying “what the hell?” for most of the time, but it would still be interesting to study.  I know a lot of times stuff that has happened to me recently, or even just stuff that has been on my mind lately, can be reflected in my dreams in very interesting, and sometimes subtle, ways.  I really hope we make some breakthroughs into understanding the subconscious part of the human brain as I would love to learn more about it.

28
May

Why Flickr is Awesome

By Ryan 0 Comments
Categories: Funny Stuff

This made my night. ‘Nuff said

22
May

Arrested Development, SNL and Hulu

By Ryan 1 Comment
Categories: Funny Stuff

Tonight I decided to begin watching the TV show Arrested Development on Hulu.com, and I must admit that the humor is very smart and very well developed. After watching a couple of episodes though, I started browsing and I didn’t realize how extensive their SNL collection really is.  I found one of my all time favorite SNL skits on there and thought I’d share it with you.  Enjoy :)

15
May

Garry’s Mod 3-to-7 Segment Decoder

By Ryan 1 Comment
Categories: Computer-Related

Yea… so I was realllly bored today when I suddenly got into the mood for some Garrys Mod. Then I remembered the ridiculous wire mod addon (http://wiremod.com) that lets you wire electrical components together in the game. So one thing led to another, and eventually I made this 3-to-7 segment decoder. The 3 buttons on the wall represent 3 binary bits, and the display outputs the current binary number in a decimal format. So for example ‘011′ will output ‘3′ on the display. My digital circuits teacher would be proud.

11
May

Anteater Craze (lolanteaters?)

By Ryan 0 Comments
Categories: Funny Stuff

Yea, so it seems the new cool thing on the internet is anteaters (especially anteaters in sweaters), so I thought I’d have a bit of fun myself and throw some captions on some pictures. More coming as soon as I can think up some funny captions :)

06
May

Back from School and GTA IV

By Ryan 0 Comments
Categories: Uncategorized

Well here I am, one year of college gone already. If there was one piece of advice that I got before the year started that came true, it was that the year really does fly by. Now that finals are out of the way and I’m at home, I’ll finally have more time to post to this blog.

So whats been up with me? Well it turns out I’m going in for surgery in a week. I have a prosthetic ear bone in my left ear and something is wrong with it. Probably just moved out of place. Shouldn’t be too major of a surgery, but its not a great way to start off the summer I’ll have to admit.

On the other hand, I know theres been a lot of talk about the newly released Grand Theft Auto IV. Definitely lots of mixed feelings about the game, depending on who you talk to. Some people say that the game is way too violent and it corrupts young peoples minds. Others take a totally different approach and say that the game is amazingly fun, well made, and is nothing worse than what you’d find in a major motion picture. To be honest, I’m going to have to agree with the latter point of view. I had the privilege of buying the game a couple of days ago and so far, I’ve been pretty impressed. When you play it, it really feels more like your watching a movie than playing a game. Everything is so well done that it all comes together smoothly in the end. Technologically speaking, the game is even more amazing. The city that you can explore is HUGE and there is never a loading screen when you go from place to place. Theres this cool depth of field effect that it does too which is probably to hide the fact that its loading stuff progressively in the background, but it works to its advantage cause it looks sweet. Apparently the game has a soundtrack of over 200 songs too, the most out of any video game.

All the technical aspects aside, what makes the game truly unique is its ability to make you feel like you are playing in a virtual second world instead of just playing a video game. The amount of time and detail spent even on the most mundane things truly is amazing. Depending on what part of town you are in determines the characteristics of the people walking around on the streets, for example. Its funny because at first, you don’t really realize what it is about the game that makes it so enjoyable. To be honest, I probably couldn’t even really put it into words. Its just that the final-product is so well developed that it just works really well.

As far as people complaining about the game being too violent, corruptive, ect… Well it should be up to the parents to regulate the games their kids play and I wouldn’t recommend this game to anyone under 18 years old, which is the same as the ESRB rating. So all you people complaining about the game being too violent, just go away already. It really is nothing worse than what you would see in most major movies.