Freeday 28 April 2000

Pic of the day: "... a society of butt-sniffing Internet users ..."
(This picture is obviously arranged. In fact, it is obviously deranged. Picture is for illustration purposes only. Actual size may vary. May not be legal in some states of consciousness. Not for resale, hiring, lending or public performance.)

Preface: Sleep. Sleep is not just a formless stretch of time bitten out of our lives each night. It consists of various levels which are fairly distinct. The passage into sleep normally goes through a relaxed state dominated by alpha waves, the most superficial of the synchronizing waves that can span much of the brain. Alpha waves are also common during meditation and silent prayer; it is largely incapable with vocalization. Talking yourself to sleep, then, is a bad idea. The extremely tired person can bypass this stage, though.

Normally we then descend quickly through two more layers of sleep, with drifting vague images or thought-like dreams. Then we spend a while in deep sleep, where large but slow delta waves span most of the brain. This stage seems important to the hormone regulation of the body: Most notably, growth hormone is released almost exclusively here. This hormone makes children grow and renews the body. Deep sleep also seems important to long term memory, together with REM sleep. Over a 90 minute cycle, the deep delta sleep alternates with the almost wake-like REM sleep, where the brain is working in high gear but isolated from the outside world. (Lungs and heart also work full here, as do the eyes and the reproductive organs.) For each 90 minutes sleep cycle in a night, the REM waxes larger as the deep sleep grows shorter. REM (Rapid Eye Movement) is the one where we have the vivid, life-like dreams. The deep sleep is virtually dreamless in most people, and the layers in between are hazy, diluted and disconnected. People with poor sleep quality spend more time in these intermediate layers, last I heard.

Normally, then, you would not have vivid dreams as soon as you close your eyes. But I notably had that three nights in a row last year. Dreams of REM photo realistic quality just after I fell asleep, as if they just could not wait to be dreamt. And it happened again this night. But what a dream.

My dream: The sheer ordinaryness of it just makes it more weird. In my dream, I was at work, beside one of the printers. (I work mainly with computer stuff.) There were people not far off. A female coworker was standing in front of the printer. I'm not going to tell who it was, because some of them randomly read my diary, though not regularly. Suffice it to say that this is one of my real coworkers ... I saw her today. Anyway, as she bent over the printer looking at something, I followed this sudden impulse to crouch silently behind her and, well, sniffed her butt. Then I thought, what am I doing? And then I woke up.

I guess nothing goes without saying, so I say it: I would not normally do this kind of thing. In fact, I don't even have a dog. And while I belong to the group of men who can find a closer inspection of a female behind tempting, this refers to visual and tactile inspection, not olfactory, which I must admit seems just plain weird. Nor was I in a state of arousal when I woke up, after just a few minutes of sleep, from this otherwise lifelike dream.

The memory: After I had written this episode in my diary, and even put emphasis on the words "sniffed her butt" did I remember that months ago, I read a piece by one of the many excellent journal writers out there. A woman, if I recall correctly, though I no longer remember her name. She had a web tracker that not only showed where people came from to visit her site, but also what search strings they had entered to a search engine such as AltaVista. One of her visitors had arrived at her site by searching for the text string "sniffed her butt". The journaller's curiosity was awoken, and she found that she had indeed used this phrase in a past entry - referring to her dog. She seemed to take some pleasure in the presumed disappointment of the poor visitor, who had to leave without any "poo scented panties" (if I remember her phrase correctly).

They say that on the Internet, nobody can see that you are a dog ... yet the idea of a society of butt-sniffing internet users out there seems at least as strange as the dream itself.

I now close this topic, at least until more dreams of this kind pop up, and leave it to my coworkers to speculate on who of them have made it into my dreams... :)

Aftermath: While casting about for a suitable picture, it dawned on me that the whole thing was probably a lot more ridiculous than puzzling. So I eventually came up with the above artwork.

I do feel there is a risk that this somewhat lighthearted entry will further alienate me from those of my friends who think that the presentation of one's life should be edited in such a way as to show only the parts which one is proud of, and not the other way around. I'm a bit sorry about that. I can really only say: May you get twice of whatever you wish or pray for for me.

(Well, unless it is a wife.)