My eighth consecutive year in which I have recorded my health and fitness metrics daily. 'Beat last year' remains the motto and the ongoing target. The aim is the maintain optimal health and fitness as I slide slowly from middle age into ancienthood.
Some say it's a bit obsessive keeping a spreadsheet. I say it works.
So - a brief, hopefully not too boring, and maybe for some - instructive, overview of my year in numbers.
Walking - fifth year in a row where my daily average across the entire year has exceeded 11,000 paces. Moderate-to-high intensity walking has increased again, this time to 35 minutes a day. This means a maintained, uninterrupted 100 paces per minute.
Alcohol intake very near the UK Chief Medical Officer's guidelines of 14 units/week. In 2021, I drank half as much as I did in 2015. However, because I had more dry days than in 2020, on the days when I was actually imbibing, the input was higher (5.6 units per drinking day in 2021 compared to 5.2 units per drinking day in 2020). Target for 2022 will still be 14 units per week across the year - but with fewer dry days!
Twice as many 'lazy days' (no physical exercise) as last year! I attribute six of these to a strange period in mid-March where for a week I didn't have the energy or motivation to do a single press-up or sit-up. I am wondering whether that might have been a mild dose of Covid. Interestingly, I had three Pfizer jabs this year; none stopped me altogether from exercising, although the first one cut down the number of repetitions significantly. By the third I managed four lots of exercise including pull-ups, sit-ups, squats and plank.
The exercise routine is now more focused on health maintenance than physical strength. Key to this is the plank. Across this year, on average each day, I have held the plank for four minutes and 21 seconds, up ten seconds over last year. This works out at 26 and half hours over the whole year.
Figures below are per day - for each and every one of the 366 days of 2020 (unless stated otherwise). Red number indicates last year's target not beaten.
Measurable and manageable
2015
2016
2017
2018
2019
2020
2021
Paces (daily average)
10.7k
10.6k
11.0k
11.4k
12.0k
11.1k
11.2k
Moderate to high intensity (mins)
N/A
N/A
N/A
N/A
24
30
35
Alcohol drunk (units/week)
28.0
25.0
20.8
19.7
18.5
15.5
14.1
Dry days over course of year
123
155
186
196
198
208
231
Days with zero physical training
266
148
83
27
17
11
22
Press-ups/day
N/A
N/A
25
60
90
83
20
Pull-ups/day
N/A
N/A
2
7
5
11
12
Sit-ups/day
41
71
N/A
N/A
N/A
16
19
Sets of weights exercises/day
N/A
N/A
2.1
2.2
2.3
2.4
1.1
Squats/day
N/A
N/A
N/A
N/A
N/A
N/A
28
Plank time (min: sec/day average)
N/A
N/A
N/A
N/A
3:40
4:11
4:21
Portions fresh fruit & veg/day
4.3
5.0
5.2
5.3
5.4
6.1
6.4
Sit-ups are there to maintain spinal flexibility rather than as the primary stomach-muscle exercise. Again, higher quality repetitions - back fully flat on the floor, then twist so that right elbow meets left knee, then left elbow meets right knee. My record plank-holding time was 5 minutes and 16 seconds; more typically it's repetitions of one-and-half to two minutes held for two or three times. Weights - one set = 10 x lateral rises, 10 x interior rotations, 10 x exterior rotations, with 5kg dumbbells. These remain important as without them, my right rotator cuff aches a bit when sleeping on the right shoulder. Pull-ups - up until chin meets bar, from position where forearms are parallel with the floor.
New this year: squats - from a standing position dropping down to sit on my heels, then bouncing back up. Introduced not only to strengthen thigh muscles, but to maintain good balance. In early days, I'd fall over more often than not. By December, up to 45 in one go.
Less alcohol, but more portions of fresh fruit and vegetables. Spinach, leeks, salads - and lots of cherry tomatoes.
Fun Fact: since 1 January 2014, I have walked over 25,600km (15,900 miles).
Signing off for 2021, I'd urge all my readers to avoid complacency (subconsciously thinking "because last year/yesterday was good, next year/tomorrow will be good") and to be grateful for everything they have - mental health/state-of-mind, and physical health.
Blood pressure reading from half past eight this morning. Still optimal - 113/79 (average of three readings).
One interesting thing - I am laziest in summer. Any excuse to drop some exercises and take it easy. New Year's resolution - buy a pair of 5kg weights and a door-frame-mounted pull-up bar for the działka. I should recognise that in summertime, the living is easy, and I should let it go a bit - just a bit. Not as much as I did this year.
Above all - I give thanks, immense thanks, to the Good Lord for my health. Thank you God. May complacency never creep up upon me.
I finally got round to it today - a very long (19,000 paces!) stroll from home to the western portal of the S2 tunnel, which was opened on Monday 20 December.
Story so far - the A2 motorway/S2 expressway, which form the Polish part of European Route E30 (Cork to Omsk), got as far as Warsaw in 2012 (in time for that year's European football championships). Since then, transcontinental traffic heading east would get as far as this junction with ulica Puławska (below), and would then solidify into one huge constipated jam made up of local, regional, national and international traffic on Dolina Służewiecka. Now, over 11 years after the A2/S2 reached Warsaw, the route finally gets to cut through to the other side, via a 2.3km-long tunnel diving under the southern suburb of Ursynów. [The sign above the slip-road states that traffic over 16 tonnes is prohibited from using the S2 between 7-10am and 4-8pm. Much transit traffic will continue to use the DK50, but anyone who can will rather use the S2 - it's 27km shorter.]
For about two and half kilometres, the S2 runs parallel to a single-track railway line, the umbilical cord linking Warsaw's Metro system with the outside world. Rarely used these days (new Metro rolling stock now gets delivered by road!), the rails themselves are lightly coated with rust, suggesting the infrequent passage of a maintenance draisine. Below: looking west towards ul. Puławska, the slip-road joins the S2 to the right. The acoustic screens are effective - the roar of Puławska way behind me is louder than the traffic on the other side of the screen.
Below: looking towards the western portal of the tunnel. It dives down beneath the Metro, building the tunnel with minimal disruption to the Metro service was quite a feat of engineering! The sign says that average speed is being measured; cameras automatically capture each vehicle as it drives in and drives out of the tunnel and work out its average speed. You have been warned.
Below: going underground. Above the tunnel, there has been much structural change to the fabric, the look-and-feel of Ursynów. I found it difficult to get my bearings along ul. Płaskowickiej, a street which I once knew intimately from morning runs to my children's primary school.
I chose to return through the Las Kabacki forest. The Metro's rail link at this point, at twilight, takes on a very specific, eerie air. It is as if I have entered Tarkovsky's зона from Stalker by night...
Some subtle Photoshoppery going on here... That glow in the distance is from the Metro maintenance depot, but it feels like could be an atomic weapons manufacturing facility in the Urals...
On the way home I take the long way around to take a stroll over the ice on the pond on ul Pozytywki before it melts. The sign prohibits angling and littering, but there's plenty of evidence of ice-skating going on. Absolutely rock-solid ice - and you can see the high level of water in the pond this year. I like the horizon on this photo, the wires, lights and foggy sky.
Below: looking at ul. Pozytywki from the middle of the pond; a strong 1950s USA vibe. "Approaching the country club in midwinter."
I'd like to share two particularly atmospheric digital works from my brother; the one below is based on my recent photo of the new roundabout by the S7 extension viaduct - Cold fronts, Atlantic depressions and winter storms.
Below: the National Air Traffic Control radar installation, Claxby, Lincolnshire.
One of those Polish words that doesn't click into place with a one-for-one translation into English is zastanawiać się. A reflexive verb in Polish, it translates (roughly) as 'to wonder (about)', 'to reflect (upon)', 'to think (of)', 'to ponder', 'to contemplate', 'to puzzle (over)' something. A Polish synonym would be skłaniać do refleksji, which Google Translate renders as 'to provoke reflection'
So. Człowiek, który nie zastanawia się is 'the person who doesn't wonder (about something); doesn't reflect (on something); doesn't contemplate (something). The English equivalents are non-reflexive. But then an English reflexive verb denotes that the subject and object are the same person ('I wash myself'). Note too: Stanowić (without any prefix) means 'to constitute' or 'to determine'. Ustanowić means to establish, to enact, to legislate, to appoint. Postanowić means 'to decide'
This, by way of introduction to a thought I jotted down a while ago:
The person who contemplates not? The non-pondering person? What is it that they do not ponder? Well - everything and anything - contemplation is not their thing; it's not what they do. Reflection - self-reflection; "I just get on with it. If I spent all my time contemplating, I'd never get anything done". "You never achieve anything by philosophising about life, the Universe, everything." "I consider myself to be a practical person, not a theorist".
The self-described 'practical person' rarely has time for consideration of the great questions of existence - why are we here, what's the point of it all, why is there something rather than nothing. By not contemplating such existential issues, all that's left with is matter. Materialism. Ownership and status. What I have is who I am [relative to others] - a vain existence devoid of the rich inner world of the observant and curious person whose mind is restless in its zastanowienie.
Contemplation, over time, honing one's own worldview in light of experience and argument, does lead to a greater peace of mind, a happier and more joyous life. But is this a matter of choice or birth? Nature or nurture?
The feeling of being grateful is essential to living the contemplative life. Whatever you have - spiritual ease, peace of mind, health - be grateful for it and don't lapse into complacency.
When the temperature falls below -10C, the main task of the power grid is to keep homes warm. Overnight low was -13C, warming to -11C at 11:00 this morning. Below: out on the ice, ul. Dumki.
The ponds have frozen over again; a short thaw turned the surface to slush, which over the past three nights has solidified utterly. No worries about traversing this ice sheet.
Below: despite the day's beauty, the air quality is execrable. To the left a panorama of Warsaw taken on Christmas Day (-4C); not the best visibility in any case (compare the acuity of the foreground with the horizon). But just look at the picture on the right - taken today. Varso tower, the tallest in Warsaw (and indeed the EU) is just about visible in the right-hand photo.
The filth belching out of homes (typically older, single-family houses), car exhaust pipes do the damage. Warsaw's coal-fired power stations don't contribute much to the smog, but lots of carbon dioxide. Below: Siekierki power station; with all the sliders maxed out on Photoshop to extract the image of the chimneys out of the smog.
And still they come: another full train-load of coal on its way from the Silesian coalfields hauled by a pair of Newag Dragon 2 locos on the electrified mainline. Trains are typically 40 wagons long, each one capable of carrying 60 tonnes of coal. This train is heading toward Okęcie sidings, from where a diesel loco will take the wagons to the power station back down along the parallel, non-electrified, track swinging off to Siekierki beyond Nowa Iwiczna station. The chimneys of the power station are visible on the horizon, as is a band of filthy air.
Below: a Soviet-built M62 diesel loco with a full rake of coal wagons heading to Siekierki. Photo taken from the other side of the tracks to the photo above with a much wider-angle lens.
Back towards the warmth of home - two hours outside at minus 10C holds no terrors if you're warmly dressed. Below: birch trees along ul. Dumki.
The Christmas break on the construction site of the S7 gives the curious a good opportunity to check out the local stretch of this major infrastructure project. A chance to walk odcinek A ('stretch' or 'section A') from one end to another, and in particular to the southern end, which I've never yet seen.
Both sections have been troubled by contractual issues. Odcinek A was originally meant to have been built by Rubau; the contactor fell foul of terms and conditions and the contract was annulled before any work has started; Polaqua went on to win the new tender (more than double the price of Rubau's bid). Now 22 months after it began work on the project, Polaqua has displayed a staggeringly fast pace.
Odcinek B has had a similar history, but here the initial contractor, IDS-Bud had actually made a start on the earthworks before being thrown off the contract for being too slow. Another firm, PTU Intercor, was finally selected earlier this year and is now getting on with it at a better pace, according to Skyscraper City's S7-extension watchers. [A quick aside - the first post about the S7 extension dates back to 2005; based on a press report claiming that the expressway between Warsaw and Grójec would be opened in 2008. One and half decades of over-optimism!]
Below: here's the southern end, where the two contracts meet. This point is about 150m south of ulica Słoneczna, the DW721 between Piaseczno and Magdalenka, In the foreground, odcinek A; concrete on the ground, most of the ancillary infrastructure (crash barriers, lighting, service roads) almost ready. Beyond the barriers begins odcinek B. It's Christmas Eve, heavy wet snow is falling, the temperature is just above 0C, but the snow is settling.
Below: from one of the detailed diagrams of the S7 extension (the whole of odcinek A is available for download here). Oriented with the south at the top, it shows the boundary between odcinek A and B, and ul. Słoneczna (DW721) passes underneath.
Below: underneath the bridge taking ul. Raszyńska over the S7, linking Nowa Wola to the west with Zgorzała to the east. No street lighting for the local traffic, but at least there's a pavement.
Below: looking north towards the new bridge carrying ul. Raszyńska over the S7. On the horizon, the cranes on the building sites of Zamienie, where new blocks of flats are continuing to appear amid the fields.
Below: ul. Krasickiego, running east-west from Nowa Iwiczna to Nowa Wola, passes through a tunnel under the S7. Looking west toward Nowa Wola.
Below: Paul's drone shots of the bridge on Christmas Day (much finer weather, -6C and clear skies), looking north.
Drones are just the thing for following the development of road-building projects!
Below: looking east towards Piaseczno - the S7 is crossed by a new viaduct carrying four lanes of road from nowhere to nowhere. This will, one day, be the DW (droga wojewódźka) 721 bis, relieving the heavy single-carriageway ul. Słoneczna. Trouble is, the residents of Konstancin further east aren't happy with the concept of a new road. Still, building infrastructure now in advance of projects that may not happen for another 15 years is not entirely new around here. In the middle distance, ul. Postępu (lit. 'Progress Street') runs north-south from Zgorzała towards Bobrowiec.
Meanwhile, Christmas Day saw Moni and me heading the other way along the S7 extension, to where it will meet the S79 (below), taking the expressway into central Warsaw. No progress since I last came here a few weeks ago.
Below: traditional farm building, Dawidy Zwykłe. Behind the house, acoustic screens and the S7. To the right, a logistics centre. Immediately behind me - the railway line. I hear the low rumble of an approaching coal train, and the distant 'ding-ding-ding' of the level crossing barriers as they descend...
Below: the fully laden coal train on its way to Siekierki power station.
The bridge over the S7 at Zamienie would be a good place for photographing planes on coming in to Warszawa Okęcie airport if there were a pavement along the side. But there isn't. Still - no traffic, no construction work, so on Christmas Day a chance for a snap. Below: LOT Polish Airlines Embraer ERJ 175 (Warmia i Mazury livery) on final approach.
New for 2021 in the most immediate neighbourhood - the view from our back garden looking towards ul. Trombity, where the old farmhouse and outbuildings have been pulled down to make way for a pair of modern bungalows.
For the first two-thirds of my life, television was ever-present. Childhood and teenage years were dominated by it. When there were only two or three (from 1964) or even four channels (from 1982) to choose from, television created a shared sense of national identity. We all watched the same programmes and discussed them avidly in the playground the next morning. It created a sense of community unique in history; never before or since have societies bonded over the shared experience of watching the artistic endeavours. Thunderbirds, Dr Who, Top of the Pops, Tomorrow's World - this is what we grew up with, and it shaped our worldview and identities. If, like me, you grew up in Britain in the 1970s, the big debate at Christmas was whether to watch the Morecambe and Wise Christmas Special on ITV or the Two Ronnies Christmas Special on BBC1.
Then along came multichannel TV, first through cable, then digitally via satellite. It was around this time that I stopped watching TV as a regular pastime. The choice became mind-boggling, but as Bruce Springsteen sang, there were "57 Channels and Nothing On." He wrote that song in 1992; by 1997 I was in Poland publishing a TV guide that covered the outpourings of so many channels that I cannot remember the exact number. Certainly several hundred including all the satellite digital platforms. By now, the social effect that TV had during its golden age was fading fast. Rolling 24-hour news channels would soon run out of news and so start creating fake outrage which soon became news in its own right. Third- and fourth-rate channels, stuffed with low-budget shows and repeats. Viewers would sideline themselves into their favourite screen pursuits - sports, news, serials, chat, history, shopping.
And so at work the next morning, the conversation was no longer about what everyone had watched the night before; each individual is likely to have watched something else. Britain held out with nation-binding standards such as Great British Bake-Off or Strictly Come Dancing that could still draw multi-million audiences and be discussed socially - I can't say I've seen nor discussed either though.
In February 2005, an American start-up came along to offer something quite new - a place where you could upload your video content and the world could watch it. Today, nearly 17 years on, YouTube is the second-most visited website on earth after Google Search, with more than one billion visits each month. Within a few years of its launch, YouTube was a copyright-lawyer's battleground with content appearing and disappearing; these days with a business model that's far broader than just serving out ads, it works well.
The days of having a TV guide and arranging your free time around what is being shown at a given time is over. Watch what you want, when you want. But it also means does mean that the shared communion, the mass participation in a televisual event that would draw together a quarter or a third of a nation is over. Video on demand, Netflix and other brands, will be marginalising TV much like TV slowly turned regular cinema-going into a niche activity from the 1950s onward.
This summer, fed up of being unable to listen to more than one song before an ad popped up to annoy me, I signed up for YouTube Premium (36 złotys a month, about £6.75). I consider this money well spent; YouTube now works much better for me.
So what do I watch on YouTube? Mostly non-fiction. A lot of science - sub-atomic physics, quantum mechanics, cosmology, consciousness. Royal Institution lectures, PBS Space Time, Event Horizon and others, getting my science up to speed. A great favourite of mine has become Closer to Truth with Robert Lawrence Kuhn, which brings the science together with one man's search for God in all this. Over the years, Closer to Truth has brought out hundreds of excellent interviews with scientists, philosophers and theologians; although Robert Lawrence Kuhn's might be no closer to truth in his own personal journey, these discussions are extremely worth listening to. Also, Lex Fridman's thought-provoking dialogues with top thinkers from AI, science and philosophy. Thanks to my son, I've become a subscriber and habitual viewer of Jago Hazzard's short videos about London's railway history. And finally, for bringing together spirituality, science and more than a bit of UFOlogy - Project Unity.
Bright, joyous day; minus three Celsius, a gentle overnight fall of snow. The perfect day with which to start astronomical winter 2021-22. Below: ulica Dumki and footpath alongside the ponds.
Below: the northernmost pond, lightly frozen (nowhere near enough to walk on yet!), sprinkled with snow, under a perfectly cloudless sky.
Below: the corner of ul. Kórnicka and ul. Baletowa - and a reminder that there are still working farms in Jeziorki. Last week's works on the level crossing were finished a day early; traffic was back to normal on Sunday.
Below: looking west along an unasphalted stretch of ul. Sporna, one of Warsaw's more unusual thoroughfares, just before it gets cut once again, this time by the railway line.
Below: clouds are drawing in from the west, bringing with them more light snow. Looking from ul. Sporna towards the distribution centre on ul. Baletowa and W-wa Dawidy station.
Below: empty coal wagons heading back towards the coalfields, hauled by a DB Cargo Polska Siemens Vectron electric locomotive.
Left: drainage ditch perpendicular to ul. Kórnicka that runs under it and into the northernmost pond. The ditch also crosses under the railway line, draining excess water from the fields beyond. The low sun catches the dry scrubby foliage; in the distance a fully laden diesel-hauled coal train heading for Siekierki power station. The sky is beautiful - I am catching that 1950s USA vibe powerfully standing here.
Below: more views of the park, looking towards the middle pond.
Below: looking towards the southern pond, increasingly overgrown with reeds.
Below: making its turn before final approach to Okęcie airport, a PZL W-3S Sokół VIP transport helicopter. The first helicopter to be designed and built in Poland.
Below: bonus shot - I saw on Twitter that an Airbus Beluga was flying into Okęcie. I've never seen one in my life; it is carrying a helicopter to Japan. By sheer luck, it is back-lit by a moon shining through thin cloud.
It was on 1 June when a former colleague from work back in the Old Country sent me a link to a YouTube video about an interesting UFO case in Wales (thanks Nick!). After watching it, YouTube helpfully posted some more UFO-related links, including one that alerted me to the fact that on 25 June, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence would report to Congress about what the Pentagon knows about UFOs, or to use modern parlance, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP).
The report was duly delivered to Congress on that day (I wrote about it here). Couched in cautious, bureaucratic language, avoiding sensation, the report said in essence that yes, there is a phenomenon; it is real; it cannot be explained. Quoting from the report: "Most of the UAP reported probably do represent physical objects given that a majority of UAP were registered across multiple sensors, to include radar, infrared, electro-optical, weapon seekers, and visual observation." Out of 144 cases investigated by the military, only one was dismissed as a deflating weather balloon. The rest - they don't know. [If you're a sceptical debunker, you might like to help the US Navy with their investigations. They couldn't explain away these 143 cases - maybe you could.]
Since the report was published, Congress has passed the National Defense Appropriation Act for Fiscal Year 2022. This now includes an amendment calling for a new body to be set up to investigate UAP sightings, determining their source and their health effects on humans, and whether or not (as some believe) the US government actually has any alien craft in its possession. The amendment also calls for reports about UAP to be presented to Congress annually. The first of these is due on 31 October 2022 - Halloween - eight days before the US holds its mid-term elections.
On 17 December 1969, the US government's Project Blue Book, the code name for the systematic study of UFOs by the United States Air Force was officially closed. The final summary stated:
No UFO reported, investigated, and evaluated by the USAF was ever an indication of threat to national security
There was no evidence submitted to or discovered by the USAF that sightings categorized as 'unidentified' represented technological developments or principles beyond the range of modern scientific knowledge; and
There was no evidence indicating that sightings categorized as 'unidentified' were extraterrestrial vehicles
The UFO story has moved forward a long way since then. However, it's one thing to say: "There's a phenomenon - we don't know what it is; yes, there are physical craft - not ours, not our adversaries'." It's quite another to say: "We have possession of multiple craft and we've been trying for decades to reverse-engineer alien technology." And still another yet to say: "These aliens abduct human beings for their hybrid-race breeding programme", or that "we are being visited by numerous groups of aliens with their own diverse agendas, and this has been going on for thousands of years."
Each of the above statements is a red line; this year we - the human species - have crossed the first. I dare not speculate on whether there are more (I suspect the answer must be 'yes'), nor when we will cross them. The US government is now clearly saying, and for the first time, that these sightings by trained military personnel are something else other than misidentified flocks of geese, swamp gas or Venus low in the sky.
Next year will also be the 75th anniversary of the Roswell Incident - the alleged crash of a flying saucer in New Mexico in late June/early July 1947. UFO lore suggests that a craft - and alien bodies - was recovered, and the US government, through its preferred aerospace contractors, has been attempting to figure out how the craft functions. A leap of faith too far? I'm sure that next summer there will be an outpouring of works of varying quality into what happened at Roswell.
How quickly this will all unravel is a puzzle. Personally, I don't believe mankind is ready yet to face a reality that we are not alone.
Religion - big business - science - all stakeholders in the comfortable status quo - will find it a hugely difficult to accept as a fact the physical presence of beings (or even just their craft!) on our planet.
Science - which still has so much to discover, from the nature of dark energy and dark matter, to what happened before the Big Bang (nothing? Endless cycles of expansion and contraction?), to the nature of consciousness - will get its knickers in a massive twist over final evidence of UFOs. From what we can gather to date, these are craft without visible means of lift or propulsion, capable of trans-medium travel, almost-instantaneous acceleration, ability to perform manoeuvres that would rip apart any man-made airframe, and to mask themselves from view at will. From what the US Navy is insinuating, the technologies used are far in advance of our knowledge of physics.
Some scientists are open to embrace the Possible. One of these is the head of Harvard's astronomy department, Avi Loeb. Sceptical at first (when asked about the US Navy's videos of UAP, he initially suggested it was a camera malfunction), Prof Loeb has since set up the Galileo Project, which "is dedicated to the proposition that humans can no longer ignore the possible existence of extraterrestrial technological civilizations, and that science should not dogmatically reject potential extraterrestrial explanations because of social stigma or cultural preferences, factors which are not conducive to the scientific method of unbiased, empirical inquiry."
Is a timetable for a staged disclosure being set out?
This morning, as I was about to do my daily blood-pressure reading, the word 'preternatural' just swam, unbidden, into my stream of consciousness. From Wiktionary:
Preternatural - beyond or not conforming to what is natural or according to the regular course of things; having an existence outside of the natural world. Usage notes: in modern secular use, it refers to extraordinary but still natural phenomena. In religious and occult usage, used similarly to supernatural, meaning 'outside of nature', but usually to a lower level than supernatural. For example, in Catholic theology, 'preternatural' refers to properties of creatures like angels, while supernatural refers to properties of God alone.
Earlier in the week, I thought up the term 'superclassical' for physics that is above the classical Newtonian mechanics that everyone learned at school and can intuitively understand. This would start with quantum physics, and encompass everything that we might one day learn from other-world craft - wheresoever those other worlds actually are. (Imagine, if you will, three dimensions of time, paralleling the three dimensions of space. Not just time that runs from past to future (ie backward and forward) but also time that runs up-down, and time that runs left-right.)
And on my walk this afternoon to Dawidy, David Bowie intrudes:
Oh You Pretty Things,
Don't you know you're driving your
Mamas and Papas insane
Let me make it plain,
You gotta make way for the Homo Superior.
Look out at your children
See their faces in golden rays
Don't kid yourself they belong to you
They're the start of a coming race
The earth is a bitch
We've finished our news
Homo Sapiens have outgrown their use
All the strangers came today
And it looks as though they're here to stay
- Oh! You Pretty Things - released 17 December 1971.
If there's one short video from this momentous year that you must watch before dismissing it all out of hand - it's this. Let US Navy pilots, former Pentagon and State Department officials and a US senator talk you through it all.
It's been nearly a year since I embarked on keeping a dream diary. A most excellent enterprise, one that I thoroughly recommend to who regularly dream vivid dreams. We spend a third of our lives asleep, a rich seam of creative thought untapped; our dreams serving as a portal to another Universe. Capturing the essence of what you dreamt in words is a valuable exercise in developing writing skills. Dreams are so unique and other-worldly experiences that summing up what you undergo each night by writing them down enhances your creative writing skills.
Yet it's not a straightforward task. I often find myself in a situation in which I wake up in the middle of the night, having just experienced an interesting dream. However, it's quarter past three in the morning and I just can't be bothered to get out of bed, switch on the light, write down what I dreamt, and switch the light off before getting back into bed. Yet it's a interesting, valuable, meaningful dream. I don't want to lose the texture of its fabric - so I drift off back to sleep thinking about it, trying to remember its most salient points from which I can re-remember as much detail as possible when I awake in the morning...
But the result of my 'holding on tight to my dream' is that it gets in the way of new dreams.
As they start to form, they are pushed aside as my subconscious consciousness continues to attempt to maintain the structure of the old dream - the location, the narrative, the characters, the dialogue, its unique atmosphere. Meanwhile, nascent threads that would otherwise hold promise in the form of new dreams are stifled.
What to do? I feel that a bedside table with lamp would be answer. Getting out of bed to switch on and then again to switch off the bedroom light doesn't help. As Ayad Akhtar's English lecturer posited, moving your spine from the position in which you were dreaming erases memories of that dream. So capture it with a string of several key words, then return quickly to sleep with an empty mind. And on waking up finally in the morning, use those words to trigger a flow of memory. Still, with three or four distinct dreams over the space of a night, this is still difficult.
Hold on tight to your dream
After three weeks sleeping with my head pointing south and my feet pointing north, I could see that the vividness of my dreams was fading, so I turned myself around to my usual position - head pointing north, feet to the south. And goodness! The change has supercharged my dreams, with five separate dreams noted last (thought the last one was clouded by my brain subconsciously still dwelling on the fourth one). I guess the key thing is change; not to stay in one alignment for too long!
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