Sunday 19 November 2000

Pic of the day: The starting "dream" or area of Furcadia. In this freee online game, areas are called "dreams" and players may create their own dream and add to the game. (The unassuming brown-clad dreamer looking at the statue is me.)

Progressive dreams

I did not go early to sleep this night. And not for some kind of sickness either - at least not of the body. No, one of my fellow fanboys over at The Class Menagerie had pointed me to an interesting link for us furry fans: Furcadia. Something inbetween a chat room and a roleplaying game, it allows you to create a furry persona to represent you. The furries are largely human-like, but retaining the fur and tail and facial expressions of their animal counterparts: Horses, cats, dogs, rodents and otters. No porcupines, I'm afraid. And I'm sure bovines are sorely missed.

Anyway, I spent a couple hours reading their large website. Even so, I arrived painfully unprepared. It seems Furcadia is intentionally keeping newbie hints to the minimum, on the grounds that you are supposed to learn from the other players. Oh yes, there are other players. The newbie area was quite packed with them. Evidently many people want to be a "furre" - and it is free.

I walked around the newbie area a while, listened to conversations and studied the simple graphical environment. You see small depictions of your own and other furres, and clicking on them brings up a larger picture and their chosen description. You can talk by simply typing, or whisper to one other furre. Since I'm not so very social, I doubt I shall be hanging out there a lot. But if I am, I'm likely to be a punk otter called Itland. :)

***

I was of course awfully tired when I stumbled into bed. I slept for over 7 hours, but several times I woke up at the end of a dream sequence. I shall not try to reconstruct these in detail, but I noticed something fascinating. The first dream sequence was dramatic and tragic. The second was horribly embarassing and left me with a feeling of failure. The third was challenging, while the fourth and last was short and fairly light-hearted, with a kind of shoulder-shrugging acceptance of a minor mishap.

I understand that this development of dreams is common in non-depressed people. That our earliest dreams in the night are emotionally tougher, and then they grow progressively more cheerful as the night goes on. This way, say the psychologists, our mind builds itself up for the new day. When their test persons are set in a bad mood late in the evening, by disturbing movies, they wake up with a much more sunny outlook in the morning. A large portion of chronically depressed people, however, have dreams that grow worse as the night goes on. They actually wake up in a worse mood than they went to bed. Sleep deprivation can sometimes improve their mood from terrible to just bad.

None of this explains why my dreams started off much worse than my reality. Furcadia may be a bit confusing with its current lack of a good handbook, but tragic it is not. (Yes, there are those other things, but I did not think of them. I was quite content until the dreams started.)

***

So I woke up around lunch time, but of course I was not very hungry. I never am when I sleep late. I am most hungry around 7 in the morning. If I rise by then, my stomach is grumbling loudly, it wants breakfast NOW. But if I sleep till 9 or more, it has somehow given up, and I can go through day with only a few cups of yoghurt.

But my fridge is full of food from yesterday. Let me pass on this sage advice: Don't go shopping before a meal. Wait till after. Or you will find a lot of delicious food following you home. I barely managed to chase away a pack of Mexican foodstuff, some of which I cannot even spell (much less pronounce). Only a small bag of tortilla chips actually snuck into my basket. Similar for the huge shelf full of salad dressings. Did you know there were so many salad dressings? I eventually caved in to a small bottle of yoghurt based garlic & curry dressing. It did not taste good with pasta, but it was quite delicious on thick flatbread with grated cheese. Too bad the flatbread is full of fiber - if I had eaten as much as I wanted, it would accelerate my guts toward supersonic levels...

For dinner I had my typical weekend dinner: Pasta and cheese. I had way too much garlic in it, so I could hardly smell anything except garlic while I ate it. Strange how it can be so pungent after being dried for years. Oh well. Garlic is so healthy - and it's the smelly part that's the healthy part, or so I read. Not only does it kill bacteria (no big surprise there) but it can supposedly also hurt some cancer cells. Now that was a surprise. Of course, it has so far only been done a couple studies on it; we may know more in ten years, or twenty. If we're still around by then. I've found that in medical research, things take time. And many of the wonder cures that have been hyped through the years have faded into obscurity.

But I actually like garlic, in moderation. It is one of my favorite seasonings. (I guess that proves I'm not a vampire!) And I am not bothered by the smell at all. It's only when it's so strong that it destroys the taste of the food that I don't like it. And if it's good for my health, so much better! But a panacea - a cure for all ills? As my best friend used to say: Keep dreaming! :)