The Epigenetics of Thrift

I pull of a sheet of kitchen paper from the roll. Just the one sheet. I fold it carefully in half and wipe the sooty deposit from the bottom of a saucepan before placing the pan back in the cupboard. Cooking on bottled gas - filthy stuff. Were I to wipe this with a cloth, the cloth would be blackened in no time, the soot won't wash out. So kitchen paper it is. But - waste not, want not.

As I wiped the soot off the bottom of the pan, I unfolded it, and folded back the other way, revealing two more sides of unblackened surface, with which to give the pan a final rubdown. But there's still one clean side - so I use it to wipe down the window sill before finally discarding the sheet of kitchen paper into the black (mixed waste) bin.

A trait I have picked up from my father. An engineer, someone who survived the hardships of German occupation, the Warsaw Uprising and a prisoner-of-war camp - and then, having made it to a post-war London of austerity and rationing, he saved hard as a young married man for a deposit on a house, and was always careful with money and material things.

He'd make do and mend, repair and watch the pennies. As a youth growing up in the 1970s, I'd find this behaviour odd and different to my friends' fathers, most of whom had also gone through the privations of wartime. He maintained this approach his whole life, as though he realised that there was a greater reason for avoiding waste than just economics. 

I'm going that way myself. Count me out of the consumerist race to own more and more material possessions. Focus on saving money rather than making money - for the good of one's soul - and for the good of our planet. Making money just to squander it is a tremendous waste of effort. 

As I wiped the bottom of the pan, I wondered about the epigenetics of thrift. Had my father had a less materially challenging youth, would he have been so careful to avoid waste? I know many Poles, who, at the end of communism, threw themselves wholeheartedly into the consumerist lifestyle, as if to catch up with those decades of drabness. My daughter tells me of young people of her age, five or six years after graduating from university, who are earning 16,000 zł a month net, or who drive Porsche Cayennes. Their parents' generation didn't have the chance to wallow in materialism; they do.

So there doesn't seem to be a connection to be made here. Maybe it's not an epigenetic, but a spiritual thing.

Below: several days ago, I found a discarded pair of shoes beside the path from Jakubowizna to Machcin II. The shoes were worn right down, but the laces were still good - so I extracted them. Just what I needed - I had an old (1990s) pair of sneakers (below) which sat around unworn because the original rawhide laces had snapped, then snapped again; but now, with the found laces, the sneakers are back in service. Shame about the holes in the canvas. The sneakers may not represent Luxury, but they are Comfortable. Walking around in sneakers without laces, however, represents Discomfort - something to be avoided.

A propos of genetics, my brother had a DNA test done a few years ago, which showed that our father's Y-DNA haplogroup was I2a (subclade CTS10228). The I2a haplogroup is interesting, a very old European lineage - the phylogenetic tree goes right back the mesolithic period. Haplogroup I2a was the most frequent Y-DNA among western European mesolithic hunter-gatherers, found in 13,500 year-old remains in modern Switzerland. (About 15 years ago, I had a 'matching pair' of dreams of astounding clarity and emotional strength in which I was a cave-dweller living with a view of snow-capped mountains in late summer, the smell of the cave, burnt animal fat, dirty animal-skin bedding; very realistic, very atavistic.)

Connections across time, across space - we can be open to them if we cease worrying about material wants.

This time two years ago:
Between Warka and Radom - Bartodzieje

This time four years ago:
Purpose

This time five years ago:
Dreamscapy

This time seven years ago:
Sad farewell to Lila the cat

This time eight years ago:
Your papers are in order, Panie Dembinski!

This time nine years ago:
Topiary garden by the Vistula

This time 11 years ago:
Raymond's Treasure - a short story

Hold on tight to your dream

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!

This time last year:

A symbolic collapse

This time seven years ago:

Surprised by a lack of snow for Christmas!

This time eight years ago:
Man falls under train at W-wa Żwirki i Wigury

This time 11 years ago:
Kidnapped by Koleje Mazowieckie

This time 12 years ago:
Google Earth updates Jeziorki

This time 13 years ago:
Out and about with two foot of glass

Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar

For Moni

Before I start - a very serious spoiler alert. Proceed no further if this book is on your current 'to read' list. This post will spoil it for you more than me saying that the ocean liner sinks at the end of Titanic.

So. An award-winning playwright of Pakistani parentage writes about his life, his parents, the religion and culture into which he was born, Trump's America, wealth, racism.

But is he Telling It Like It Is, with the aim of Truthfulness of a reporter or autobiographer? 

Or is he spinning a compelling story, with complex narrative plot-twists to draw you in? 

Before engaging my critical faculties too much, before deciding whether or not to accept the narrative at face value, I should really know the answer to this key question. I did not; I found that just a few chapters in, I had subconsciously filed the book into the genre of reportage rather than creative fiction.

I have purposefully avoided reading anything about the book while reading the book. I did indeed approach it at face value. So this, then, is the autobiography of an American, born to parents from Pakistan who migrated to the US as brilliant medical graduates under a special visa program in the 1960s to begin a lucrative career in America's well-funded healthcare sector. The author himself went on to have a brilliant career of his own, as a playwright and author. 

The book is essentially about his troubled relationship with his parents - especially his father - and their troubled relationship with America, Islam and Pakistan. He dwells on two cataclysmic turning points in the arc of his family's history - 9/11 and the election of Donald Trump.

Ayad Akhtar is confronted by a society that is racist to the core, materialist, and configured in such a way to ensure the rich continually get richer. The poor, meanwhile, are systemically kept on a treadmill of debt and unfulfilling labour, as they toil to pass ever more wealth to the rich, so they can live in ever greater luxury. The book is strong on family detail, on growing up with a family in Pakistan, frequent visits to the Old Country, contrasts between the two nations. 

As I progressed through the book, and its essential premise is being unfolded, I found doubts creeping into my mind. 

Is this a true story - or is it a work of fiction? Or a blend of both? 

As character after character is introduced, I'm thinking - the publishers of this best-seller must have access to some pretty good lawyers to ensure to protect themselves against lawsuits. Defamation. As we meet Riaz, the Pakistani-American financier - were such a person reading this about himself - he'd be seeking counsel for how to extract millions for the accusations levelled against him in Homeland Elegies (bankrupting local authorities across the US on purpose, ones that had happened to have blocked planning permissions for the building of mosques). Or the heart surgeon who, on operating on patients' hearts, specially scratched lesions inside their aortas which he knew would turn into more lucrative surgical work for him in years to come. And how his employer, a rapacious healthcare company, settled out of court with his victims rather than let the secret out.

I reach the end of the book and finally, burning with curiosity, I check Wikipedia. Now here comes the spoiler: "The book is fiction, though written to resemble a memoir. It includes some autobiographical elements; the protagonist shares the name, background, and career of the author." The doubt that had been building up in me (did he really narrowly avoid sleeping with his half-sister, about whom he didn't know, the result of a long-term affair his father had?)

The crossing over from truth to fiction is unsettling when the author is trying to make profound criticism of America, his homeland. The legitimacy of his depiction of wealth, luxury, greed, debt - an utterly corrupt healthcare system, a banking system designed to keep large corporations wealthy, a legal system that is driven by racism - boils down to the question: fiction or reportage?

Great art belongs to the ages. How will future readers come to terms with this literary form? Will it become commonplace to blend fact and fiction in our post-truth era? Or will the conceit be seen to dilute or spoil the author's searing social message?

I wrote many years ago about another playwright who goes on to pen an autobiography. Janusz Głowacki, the hero of his own picaresque 'autobiography' that (I surmise) also strays deep into fiction. My main criticism of Z głowy was that Głowacki downplays the hard work and effort that goes into writing successful plays - I wrote: "one night [Głowacki] gets very, very drunk with assorted ne'er-do-wells in a dive on the Lower East Side; the next morning he tosses off a play that gets directed by Arthur Penn and stars Christopher Walken. But what about the endless hours of writing, re-drafting, searching for the right bon mot or delicate allusion, forceful punchline or hilarious gag?" Głowacki suggests that his path to literary success was effortless, all inspiration, no perspiration. Akhtar doesn't do this. He describes his writing technique, taught by his English lecturer at university, Maria Moroni (again - was she real or invented?). She tells him that you should keep a dream diary and pencil by your bedside, and return your spine to the position it was in when you had that dream to recall it. Akhtar describes beautifully how, when transcribing dreams, you should start with the most vivid part regardless of chronology, capture as much detail as possible - before scrolling backwards and forwards to other parts of the dream as you remember them. And this is how he captures scenes from memory, from life.

Głowacki pulls the same trick as Akhar in Goodnight Dżerzi - a seemingly straightforward autobiography of a playwright that morphs imperceptibly into fiction - this time a Pole in America, being asked to write a screenplay about a Jewish Pole in America - Jerzy Kosiński. And another Polish writer known for embellishing his reportage with some fanciful tales was Ryszard Kapuściński (about whom here).

It was an extremely worthwhile read for me - on so many levels. The relationship between two countries and two cultures; the relationship between parent and child; the critique of America; the concept of autofiction. One line stands out above all the others: "America is money-worship and racism." My thanks to Moni for suggesting I read it - I thoroughly enjoyed it.

This time two years ago:
Britain for Christmas

This time five years ago:
IT frustrations

This time six years ago:
Wałbrzych's Gold Train - the dream ends

This time eight years ago:
Kitten football

This time nine years ago:
The drainage of Jeziorki

This time ten years ago:
The Eurocrisis - what would Jesus do?
[Remember - the EU was about to fall apart.]

This time 11 years ago:
Orders of magnitude

This time 12 years ago:
Jeziorki in the snow

This time 13 years ago:
Better news on the commuting front

This time 14 years ago:
I no longer recognise the land where I was born

Reversing polarity

It occurred to me just the other night that for nearly all of my life, I have slept with my head facing north and my feet facing south. From my childhood bedroom in Croft Gardens, Hanwell, in adolescence on Cleveland Road, West Ealing; early adulthood on Ribchester Avenue, Perivale; then in Poland on ulica Gajdy, Pyry through to ul. Trombity in Jeziorki, and even on my działka in Jakubowizna - it has ever been thus. 

I woke up in the middle of the night and the thought suddenly struck me - "What if I put my pillow at the foot of the bed, turned the duvet around by 180 degrees with the buttons at the other end?"

I did so, and fell asleep. Result? More interesting dreams! I repeated this the following night, and indeed last night - and my dream diary suddenly expanded to fill an entire side, rather than the more usual one-third to a half-page of recollections. I rarely recall a first dream (anything before 2am). Now I have captured a couple. So far, so good - I shall continue to monitor this situation.

Is there any science behind this, I wonder? Or anything else? I check online - and come across this fascinating piece from the Times of India:

"It is important to sleep in the right direction. It is usually said that you must avoid sleeping with your head pointing north, at any cost. It is actually true and there are several reasons which back this up. We all know that earth and human body, both have magnetic fields of their own. Magnetic fields on the Earth are concentrated in the North and the South Pole. When you sleep with your head pointing north, your body’s magnetic field interferes with that of earth. This can fluctuate your blood pressure and can even cause heart problems. You heart needs to work harder to overcome this. If you are elderly or already a heart patient, then you might be at a higher risk of getting a hemorrhage or paralytic stroke. In fact, you can check yourself that lie down horizontally, your pulse rate drops.

"Another reason is that our blood contains a lot of iron. When we sleep facing north, the magnetic pull of the direction attracts iron, which gets accumulated in the brain. This is the reason why many people complain of getting a headache when they wake up. [Nothing to do with dehydration, then. - MD] Sleeping with your head pointing north can also disrupt your blood circulation and lead to disturbed sleep. In order to prevent such a scenario, it is better to avoid sleeping with your head pointing north. Sleeping with your head pointing south reverses the negative effects of north direction and thus, protects you from several health problems. It keeps your blood pressure under check and also maintains a steady blood circulation."

No scientific - or indeed spiritual - citations were given; just an unspoken assertion that this is how it is. The Vastu Shastra - and indeed Chinese Feng Shui - are said to be united in denouncing the head-north, feet-south sleeping position in favour of feet-north, head-south. 

Wow. I did not know that. Having stumbled by accident on something that the two most populous civilisations on earth have held to be true for millennia is an eye-opener! [Another interesting piece here.]

And this question: "How many times have you heard that sleeping facing north is harmful?" - honest answer - not once in 64 years. And the Western riposte to the Vastu Shastra or Feng Shui - the scientific method, based on repeatable experimentation testing hypotheses, and put to peer review? Well - "To date, there is no scientific study that has proven the veracity of these theories. Everything we know so far about magnetism, and that is a lot, tells us that the influence of terrestrial magnetism on the body is absolutely nil, because the power of that field is very low, insufficient for us to realise it." [full article here]. Little point in scouring JAMA, The Lancet or Scientific American then.

I have always been blessed with good sleep, so I can't expect any better from sleeping head-south; but as I wrote the other night, sleep opens the portals to magical experiences - unrepeatable dreams that vary wildly in content, memorability and vividness, as well as setting and dramatis personae.

For the purpose of n=1 experimentation, it isn't possible to rotate my bed through 90 degrees to see how east-west or west-east sleeping configurations work out, as the position of the door and radiator in my room preclude arranging the bed that way. However there are two vacant bedrooms left by grown-up children that I could have an experimental sleep in just to check whether indeed sleeping with my head pointing east or west makes any difference.

I will write more on this as new stuff comes to light!

This time last year:
Solar-powered house

This time two years ago:
Jeziorki's ponds are drying up
[Happy to report the water level's much higher today]

This time five years ago:
Jeziorki - second track, second platform

This time six years ago:
Pitshanger Lane wins London's High Street of the Year award

This time eight years ago:
Trouble ahead in Ukraine.

This time 11 years ago:
Jeziorki, dawn, winter

This time 14 years ago:
Tuwim's Lokomotywa in English

Sleep - a portal to another Universe?

It's the time of year to obsess about sleep - to get your sleep right; to maximise its effectiveness as the free-of-charge wonder drug that boosts your immune system while rejuvenating you. 

The cusp of wakefulness and sleep, as you slip away, is fascinating - I try to stay conscious so as I can be aware of those odd, almost dream-like thoughts - indeed precursors to dreams - and attempt to parse them... and then nod off as I try.

I am blessed with sound sleep. Typically eight and a quarter hours, waking once or twice in between (depending on evening fluid intake). Optimal sleep (as I wrote here) is bed by 22:00, zonk out, wake at 02:00 after four hours of sleep, 15 minutes interval, then another four hours of sleep and I wake naturally at 06:15. That's how it was last night. 

The pause at the halfway stage is a remnant of pre-industrial times, when our sleep (especially in northern latitudes in winter) would be punctuated by a break of up to two hours, assuming our ancestors went to bed shortly after sunset and rose just before sunrise.

While in the process of dropping off, feeling consciousness slipping away is to be savoured, for it is very much an altered state. One's train of thought is shunted onto a mysterious track and if you find yourself here consciously, and examine it, running it back, you may find it makes no sense at all. Often this would be an examination of the day; I'd find myself worrying about some work not done, or some minor problem... then considering it, I'd discover that it didn't exist at all. 

This is something that intrigues me; this is a phenomenon that sits within the brain/mind problem, on the cusp of the world of classical cause-and-effect physics and quantum mechanics - if Penrose and Hameroff are on the right track by postulating that consciousness is quantum in nature.

Our dreams - what are they really? Are they no more than a subconscious audit of the day's thoughts, concerns and emotions? Or is something stranger going on? Non-local consciousness at play?

I woke at 2am, emptied my bladder, returned to bed - and attempted to connect my consciousness into that of the Universe. The first word that swims unbidden into my consciousness is: 'CONFIRM'. After a while, the second one appears 'SEFTON'. A little later, 'LALE STREET'.  Note - these are not auditory hallucinations; they pop up telepathically, but clearly, unambiguously. I wake at 06:15 and check Google Maps. I find that Sefton, as a place name, appears in the UK (in Merseyside), in New South Wales, New Zealand and Illinois. None has a Lale Street. I check Lale Street. There's but one - on Honolulu. My nocturnal hope of waking to find it and to ascribe significance, just as I did that night in June 2004 when I woke to find the exact wooden hotel, the Zig Zag Inn, in Zig Zag, Oregon. Or the night two years ago when I woke to find the location of my dream of Biarritz.

But in an alternate Universe? Could there be a Lale Street in a place called Sefton but in another dimension? In an alternate timeline? On a parallel plane? Proponents of a multiverse consisting of an infinite number of alternate universes must accept that in one of them there is. The one difference between Sefton and Zig Zag and Biarritz is that the latter two were dreams, while Sefton was only a word that popped into waking consciousness during a brief period between sleep.

On a sleep-related note, I have long been fascinated by the linguistic gaps and overlaps that exist between English and Polish. The following occurred to me yesterday - that the notions of sleeping, dreaming, falling asleep, being asleep - and sleep itself - align themselves differently in the two languages. Sleeping and dreaming seem quite interchangeable in Polish; the notions of dreaming during sleep and dreaming of something while awake (śnić and marzyć respectively) are indistinct in English.

English	part of speech	Polish
dream	noun	marzenie
dream	noun	sen
sleep	noun	sen
sleepy	adjective	senn-y/-a/-e
asleep	adverb	we śnie
to sleep	verb	spać
to fall sleep	verb	zasnąć
to dream	verb	śnić
to dream	verb	marzyć

This time two years ago:
A month and much progress at Chynów station

This time three years ago:
Tram tips for visiting Edinburgh

This time four years ago:
Warsaw to Edinburgh made easier

This time six years ago:
Stuffocation: the rich-world problem of dealing with too many things

This time nine years ago:
Heroes on the wall (for my father)

This time 11 years ago:
Tax dodge or public service?

This time 12 years ago:
Warsaw's woodlands in autumn

This time 13 years ago:
Still here, the early snow

This time 14 years ago:
Another point of view

Qualia meditations

Coffee should be taken once a day, first thing in the morning. Yesterday, I fancied a cup around two pm. A small cup, one heaped tablespoon of ground coffee. Now, as is pointed out by anticoffee activist Michael Pollan, coffee has a half-life of six hours, which means a quarter life of 12 hours (ie it still retains a quarter of its potency 12 hours after ingestion). So, it's two am, and though I had no problems falling asleep three hours earlier, I couldn't return to sleep after waking for a wee.

No matter! Time to meditate!

But how?

A fresh insight came to me on my walk yesterday that the essence of qualia - a subjective experience, depends on having something objective, something material to have the qualia of! We might not agree as to the taste sensation of coriander or aniseed or chilli pepper, but we can all agree that such things physically exist, even though we all experience them differently.

Now, the essence of classic nonduality meditation is emptying the mind of objective thoughts (about what's on my to-do list, my worries etc), switching off the train of thought, and focusing down on the subjective innermost essence of me-ness - namely consciousness. Arriving at such a perfect state brings about a state of unity - your consciousness is on a par with every other conscious being in the Universe. And this, according to panpsychics, is every single subatomic particle.

So - here I am lying awake at half past two in the morning when I have another insight: Imagine brushing the tip of your nose with a feather. A wing feather or downy feather? You can indeed imagine both. Widthwise or lengthwise? Again, imagine both. This is the essence of qualia memory - capturing the experience for recall at a future time. 

Here's another experience of qualia to meditate upon; more usual this time. Imagine washing your hands. Run the tap, pick up the bar of soap, rub your hands together  under the flow of the warm water, feel your hands becoming slippery as the dirt starts to lift away; you rinse the soap off, dry your hands on a warm, fluffy towel, sensing the inner pleasure of knowing you have clean hands.

I take this further. I imagine washing my hands in the cloakroom of my primary school, Oaklands Road, Hanwell, London W7, the early 1960s. The specific smell of the small, cream-coloured institutional bars of soap. The slim metal chain connecting the rubber plug to the washbasin. The hairline crackles in the smooth ceramic. The gurgle of the water disappearing down the plughole. The machine that dispenses the long roll of cloth hand-drying towel... you pull a length down with a clunk, dry your hands, the next boy goes up to it... clunk. The clanging of a hand-bell, rung by Miss. Playtime is over! Back to the classrooms...

A short example of qualia meditation. I have conjured up a qualia memory, something objective, yet experienced subjectively by me, 55 years ago. 

Back to last night. I am on the point of falling asleep, when I remember a dream or dreams of a levitating hoop, and using it to travel between Ealing Broadway and Pitshanger Lane. Imagine a hoop, the sort you'd have in school PE classes, or a hula-hoop. Imagine it floating horizontally about a metre above the ground. You step into it, grasping opposing edges with your hands. You then lift your feet off the ground. The hoop wobbles, but it supports your weight - your feet stay off the ground. You lean back, then you hook one leg, then the other, over the hoop. You are fully supported by the hoop; backs of knees, hands, forearms and upper back all resting on it. It feels unstable, but you are hovering a metre off the pavement. Using your hand nearest the garden wall, you begin to propel yourself forward. You are gliding, but as you slow down, you once again need to give yourself some momentum by pulling yourself on a gate or roadsign or street light, and so, wobbling, unstable, but still a metre off the ground, you are moving along. Now this is a dream qualia memory. The memory of a dream, returned. I fall asleep.

All meditation requires one to set aside the ego. Neither a moment of triumph nor embarrassment; not a moment of despair or jubilation - just a moment of being supremely aware of all around, the consciousness pure, unsullied by your biology or predicament. The moment when the calm 'inner you' - not the 'outer you' visible to others or to you in reflections - is aware of being.

This time seven years ago:
Public and private land in Poland

This time eight year:
Two Warsaw sunsets over water

This time 11 years ago:
Farewell to the old footbridge over Puławska

This time 12 years ago:
Let's ban cars with engines over 2.0 litres

This time 14 years ago:
Ul. Kórnicka gets paved over

Flashback to a dream: déjà rêvé, subconsciousness and memory

I went to bed at midnight - no alcohol or cheese consumed, but a 500mg magnesium tablet taken, washed down with a large glass of mineral water. I woke up at quarter to three having had a intriguing dream, which offered a stunning new insight. 

The dream had exactly the same atmosphere (ambience or klimat) as one I had several weeks ago - I was walking down the same street I dreamt of then - there were bars and cafes, yellow, pre-industrial brick, tall trees in leaf. Some roadworks were going on. This was neither Britain, nor was it Poland, but closer in atmosphere to Poland than to Britain. Nothing much happened - no narrative, no people I could recognise. Yet it was instantly familiar. In my dream I realised what was going on: this is a flashback to a dream, a dream qualia memory, a déjà rêvé, the sleep equivalent of a déjà vu. And I knew that as I'd had this dream not long ago, I was bound to find it in my diary.

Back to bed, back to sleep - another dream about a NATO conference at a modern four-star hotel in Poland, filling my plate at the breakfast buffet and sharing a table with three RAF Harrier pilots. An entirely normal dream, then. But the earlier one intrigued me, even as I slept.

So when I finally woke, I consulted my dream diary. Before long, I found exactly the dream I dreamt I dreamt. It occurred on Sunday 7 March; a dream of Yugoslavia (a country which I've never visited in my life). I dreamt then that I there was on holiday, got into a fist fight with an old communist, lost my rucksack and had a meal in a café on that same street that I'd go on to dream of again two months later.

Wow! As I read those words, the flashback sensation was instant and powerful. 

What I had felt in my dream last night was analogous to - but not quite the same - as my regular anomalous qualia memory events (exomnesia) in waking life. The sense of feeling something entirely familiar and yet unplaceable. A déjà vu that I can now pick off with precision as being not from this life. Here, the feeling was the same. I'm walking down a street in my dream, aware of the fact that I've walked down this very street before - but in a previous dream.

The benefit of keeping a dream diary becomes clear - you can go back and track down dreams (I've yet to digitise or index them all).

When I read what I'd written on 7 March, it snapped back with a joyous precision and clarity. YES! That was it - that's just how it felt - the qualia of the two dreams matched!

I think there's an inkling of how reincarnation feels. It isn't that you will be feeling like you all the time in a next life. You won't be feeling or thinking like you for 99.9% of the time. As a new biological entity, the new ego will be in charge, with its own demands. But from time to time - and, I believe, increasingly as your consciousness passes from life to life, you will occasion to remember such subjective experiences felt in past existences, the ego stripped away. Pure consciousness. 

Sensitivity to such phenomena is a must - a sensitivity blunted by materialism and scientism. 

"Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you." (Matthew 7:7)

This time ten years ago:
'Old school' = pre-war

This time 11 years ago:
Britain chooses a coalition government

This time 12 years ago:
Landing over Ursynów

This time 13 years ago:
On being assertive in Poland

Analysis of a Nightmare

Today is the 119th day of keeping a nightly dream diary, and for only the second time since the beginning of the year I have had a terrifying nightmare. This one was far more powerful than the one on 23 January; I woke up quite literally shivering with fright for several minutes – the physiological effect of the dream took me over and shook me to the core.

And lo! did I dream...

In the woods above Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, at night, something evil is about. A man is decapitated by a laser-sharp blade of icy air. All around the woodland, an atmosphere of dread pervades. UFOs and aliens – or ghosts? Certainly the threat is supernatural; it is not of our material world. There feels to be no respite from this threat, no escape from its power... The scene shifts to a darkened theatre or music hall in nearby High Wycombe. A séance is under way; it feels like the mid-1930s. A medium steps off the stage and into the aisle between the rows of seats, packed with a terrified audience, dumbstruck with fear. The medium, who appears to be walking several inches above the floor, is summoning the spirit of the dead man. Ghostly moaning sounds, inescapable and inexplicable, fill the theatre, echoing ever louder. A name is conjured up – the victim was the son of Noël Coward. I can feel something filling my mouth, rising from my throat, something in texture like tapioca, but tasteless – I know that I will vomit, but I want to direct this stream of vomit at the medium in his shabby dinner suit and bow tie. I advance towards him, he backs away...

I wake up with a state of fear that I cannot recall ever having experienced in waking life. It is five to two. The most profound terror. In my dream, I had come face to face with the emanation of purest evil. The shivering took several minutes to subside (it was not a cold night, I was wearing warm pyjamas, yet I felt that the room was far colder than it really was. The first thing I did was to note down the dream in as much detail as possible, have a wee, drink some mineral water, and go back to sleep. Which I did. 

At quarter to six I woke again, more dreams, but completely normal ones – although I did witness a passenger plane crashing shortly after lifting off from a runway on a Scottish airport, as well as a crash involving a classic 1950s American car, and being cut up by a Porsche while riding a bicycle. And a chef getting angry at someone throwing out a quantity of apricot yogurt. But no more horrors.

So what was going on with the nightmare? How did it come about? What was its genesis?

Well, two things I can place. One is the Noël Coward reference. Two days ago, I was singing to myself the Ian Dury song There Ain't Half Been Some Clever Bastards. It was the verse about Einstein that was going round in my head while I was out walking in the fields across ul. Karczunkowska…

Einstein can't be classed as witless
He claimed atoms were the littlest
When you did a bit of splitting'emness
Frightened everybody shitless

So there we are – from Einstein and the atom to everybody frightened shitless. One element of the nightmare decoded, one root extracted.

On with the song. (If you're familiar with it, enjoy – if not, enjoy!)

And the very first words of the song? "Noël Coward"... (Incidentally, Ian Dury had Mr Coward as the writer of the drama The Gay Divorce - actually it wasn't a drama, it was a musical, and written by Cole Porter, not Noël Coward!)

More significantly to my nightmare, Ian Dury's secondary education was at the Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe. I did not know that. High Wycombe, incidentally doesn't have, nor never had, a theatre or music hall.

The second element that I can identify was source of the sharp blade of icy air that decapitated a man. Earlier this week I was reading about an experimental German WW2 anti-aircraft weapon, the Windkanone, a giant tornado vortex generator. It comprised a large barrel, bent upwards at one end, through which an explosive jet of compressed air was ejected upwards by the ignition of a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen. The aim was to knock down low-flying aircraft. One prototype was tested – it didn't work. So a 'kind-of' fit.

Perhaps this concept entered my subconscious state and emerged in the nightmare? But these 'unconsummated memories', as I call them – thoughts mulled around by the consciousness yet not properly processed – should not of their own trigger nightmares.

More interestingly in retrospect is the question of why such dreams should emerge and what factors lie behind them. After four months of nightly dream recording, I am becoming convinced that the processes are mostly stochastic in nature – caused by random variables that cannot be predicted or replicated.

Cheese is said to promote vivid dreaming (or at least making them more memorable). Yesterday evening I shaved some Parmigiano Reggiano cheese into my salad, no more than about 20g of the stuff. I took a 500mg magnesium tablet as I do every night, mainly to stave off nocturnal leg cramps which have been affecting me over the past ten years or so, but also to promote better dreams. But then my dreams are of varying intensity, despite a regular magnesium intake. There is no pattern emerging – nothing to which I can attach a causal link, no clue as how to create repeatable dream experiences. 

One thing that is clear after four months of nightly record-keeping is that the dream from the first sleep cycle (around 23:00 to 01:30) is the least memorable of the night, the hardest to recall, whilst the dream from the third sleep cycle (around 03:30 to 05:30) is the most vivid and interesting, and the fourth sleep cycle before finally getting out of bed tends to yield messy, jumbled though memorable dreams, plotless episodes.

And so I dream on; going to bed at night is like going into a cinema without having the slightest idea of what will be shown – a horror film once every few months, maybe – certainly confused comedies being the most frequent genre.

Dream logging is a fascinating hobby; it takes no more than about five to ten minutes each morning, but over time I hope this will shed useful insights into how the mind works when we sleep.

This time three years ago:
Diverse bird life returns to Jeziorki

This time four years ago:
Gold train film shoot – day one

This time eight years ago:
Jarosław Gowin quits his post as justice minister

This time 12 years ago:
The cycle-to-work season starts

Glimpses into past lives? Lent 2021, Day 37

And lo! I dreamt... I was a young man - hardly a man, maybe 17, 16 even... It was early spring 1831 and the Polish insurgency against the Russians was under way, with skirmishes occurring here and there. I was wearing a Napoleonic-style military uniform, bloodied and torn by brambles; I'd lost my hat and musket after the defeat of my unit by a much larger Russian formation. I had managed to escape from the resulting slaughter. 

I had made my way to a nearby estate owned by good friends of my parents. I'd been there last summer - wearing the same uniform - for a ball attended by the children of local minor nobility. I had danced with beautiful girls - and now here I was again, dressed in tatters, desperately seeking sanctuary from the Russians who were scouring the country for insurgents. Countess __________ greeted me and said that they would indeed hide me from the soldiers should they come looking, she bade her servants to attend to my wounds. I felt anguish, fear, disgrace; I felt that I am unfairly jeopardising the lives of these good people. I felt guilt at their willingness to help me. I felt the utter disappointment of seeing action for the first time, expecting glory and instead being painfully humiliated. Had I been a coward to run? Above all, I felt despair at the prospects for my fatherland, which just a few weeks earlier looked so promising - a restoration of independence after 35 years of Tsarist rule.

I woke up; the emotions I'd experienced in the dream were so real, so vivid, so intense; it was a relief to be back in 2021.

A rare dream, one of those that ticked the boxes of the Three Unities of Time, Place and Action, rather than being full of disjunctive cognition, where people, places and things blend together and action is illogical.

Now, I have long felt an atavistic, metaphysical link to the lands to the north-east of Poland's current borders - in particular the north-west fringes of the Pripet Marshes, but I'd felt by parsing my exomnesial qualia experiences of this time and place that "I" had been there, though not as the scion of a noble family. Instead, I have hitherto seen myself as a good-natured peasant who was neither Polish nor Lithuanian nor Russian but 'from there' who fished and hunted duck around those times, who went to the Orthodox church on Orthodox feast days and to the Catholic church on Catholic feast days, generally kept out of trouble by keeping a low profile and avoiding the gaze of his betters. The connection in time and place are strong - but as to the person?

Marais de Pinsk - Pripet Marshes on a French map, 1880

This was an intensely puzzling dream, one of those outliers well beyond the usual canon of my dream-themes and locations. In recent days I have dreamt of my old offices in London (twice); Covent Garden, London; a line of warehouses on the Chicago waterfront in the 1930s, Katowice, West Ealing, Poznań, Leamington Spa; Kraków, 1950s London. Here we have a time and place that has never featured in any dream I've had, only in flashbacks usually brought about by landscapes - wide sandy tracks between silver birch forest, flooded water meadows at a river's edge, moonlight through the trees. But here - a nobleman's mansion, the clothes, the period - nothing out of place yet unfamiliar. I have never been here before in my dreams.

It's good to keep a daily dream diary - it opens doors to new possibilities.

[I wrote a short story set in the aftermath of the 1863 rising, which strongly alluded to 1831, ten years ago. Link to it here.]

This time last year:
Prophetic

This time three years ago:
New bus stop for Karczunkowska

This time four years ago:
"Jeziorki bogged down in railway mud"

This time five years ago:
Ideas, and how they take hold

This time six years ago:
Russian eyes peering down on Jeziorki

This time 13 years ago:
The fate of urban wetlands?

Near-death experiences - do they tell us anything about the afterlife? Lent 2021, Day 23

Prompted by an article emailed to me by my brother about the work of psychiatrist Bruce Greyson [read it here], I'd like to examine near-death experiences (NDEs) as a biological and spiritual phenomenon.

These are commonly, though by no means universally reported by people who had been at or near clinical death. Both my mother and father-in-law claimed to have experienced something like this. My mother, who had suffered what was to be her first heart attack at the age of 58, talked about facing a strong light source and feeling of calm, but then the image of her garden on a sunny spring day brought out in her a powerful desire to be there, with her family, and this thought found her returning to consciousness.

[Before going further - coincidences hold the thing together. The night before getting my brother's email with the link, I was looking for a book from my childhood, about the World Land Speed Record. I remembered that electric-powered cars held the record for quite some time before petrol-engined cars became predominant, and wanted confirmation. I found the book, next to a translation into Polish of a book about reincarnation by a Raymond Moody. Turns out that Dr Moody, a psychologist and doctor of philosophy, had worked with Dr Greyson and was mentioned in the linked article. Not just that, but the same day, I got an email from the Bratislava office of credit-rating agency, Moody's, wanting to join the chamber. My brother's wife coincidentally, works for Moody's London office.]*

The reports mentioned in the article square with similar experiences I have read about over the decades, so I am not astonished by them. It's quite clear to me that, despite the scepticism that surrounds the subject, near-death experiences are quite common, though not universal. Prof Greyson's long-term research suggests that it is about one person in five brought back from clinical death or near-clinical death has a recollection on such a phenomenon occurring. The question is not whether they happen or not, but rather what they mean.

It may well be that NDEs are a phenomenon that has evolved in the human brain to sweeten the moment of demise - and that it has absolutely nothing to do with going to Heaven or being about to reincarnate; the spiritual dimension being something that science cannot ascribe to it.

Are NDEs related, as the more sceptical neuroscientists looking at the phenomenon claim, related to REM sleep? Memories of dreams, like NDEs, are stored in the brain for many years suggesting that it's a brain thing rather than a heaven thing. Wouldn't necessarily disagree - science and spirituality can coexit! Reading through the descriptions of NDEs reported to Prof Greyson, it's clear that they are related but qualitatively different to the regular experience encountered when falling asleep. The moments of passing from one state to the other fascinate me; I try to observe what's happening in my mind as it processes the day's events on the cusp of sleep. I find myself contemplating some issue, trying to unravel it, and then discovering that, though familiar to me, it did not actually happen. At this stage, with this going on, I fall asleep. This is the subconscious seeping into the conscious; it feels real - but isn't connected to reality. Or is it seeping from a parallel universe? Trying to think about this phenomenon too analytically at the time may bring me back to the fully wakeful state - otherwise, I just drop off into sleep quickly.  

Back to dreams, back to REM sleep. A dream I had about 15 years ago (now I can see the value of keeping them all in a daily diary!) involves me hovering above a body in a hospital bed in the wee small hours; the hospital, 1950s modern, spacious, bright; a nurse is standing by the foot of the bed, looking at her chart as she does her rounds. She is thinking - "Mr. Martin - you will not make it to the morning." I am about ten feet above this scene and reading her thoughts, and thinking that it's rather indiscreet and insensitive of her to think this in my presence. Floating higher, outside the night-time hospital, I can see a long, low (two, three-story building), white tiled, big windows, set among a forest of pine and silver birch, the hospital grounds illuminated by lights from corridor windows. I wake up. It all seemed familiar, fitting.

Was I Mr. Martin in a past life? Is is as simple as that? Was I recalling his death?

Halfway through Lent! Another 23 days to go.

* Spooky moody postscript... When my brother read this post, he was listening to a song by... The Moody Blues. The song, Tuesday Afternoon, was triggered by a song on a CD that Moni sent him, Derya Yıldırım & Grup Şimşek - Kürk. Marek noticed the similarity and put on the Moody Blues - and then read this post!

This time last year:
Build your own religion - choosing your rites and rituals

This time three years ago:
From the origins of conscious life to us and beyond

This time six years ago:
Underground connection, Świętokrzyska

This time nine years ago:
Nikkor 45mm f2.8 pancake lens tested

This time 10 years ago:
Old Town, another prospect

This time 11 years ago:
W-wa Śródmieście - commuters' staging post

This time 12 years ago:
Filthy ul. Poloneza

This time 13 years ago:
A sight that heralds the coming of spring

We live, we dream - what's that all about?

On 1 January I inaugurated a new procedure - logging all my dreams in a large diary by my bed. The purpose - to further my understanding of what goes on in the brain while we sleep. Given that we spend a third of our lives asleep, and around half of that time dreaming, it is a woefully under-researched activity, despite its universality.

Every night, as we go to bed, is liking going to the movies, watching two or three films, each with ourselves as the protagonist, not knowing whether we'll see a horror, a comedy, a drama or a romance. It's just that it becomes routine, and we forget to remember, we lose the lessons that dreams offer us about our human condition.

Already, after three and half weeks, I am gaining some interesting insights.

A bit of methodology. I am drinking a large glass of mineral water, a mild diuretic, before going to bed, to ensure two or three rises in the night to go for a wee - and before returning to bed, to write down any dream memories, capturing them while they are as fresh as possible. I find that one memorable image, written down, will open the gates to a fuller narrative. Noting down dreams at half past two or four o'clock in the morning can be tiresome, but it is important. One thing it has quickly proved to me that dreams do become more vivid and memorable as the night draws on.

One theory I have is that as we sleep, the body - and brain - warm up slightly, due to increasing amounts of body heat trapped in the bedding. In the same way as we tend to get more creative thoughts under a hot shower, in the bath or in a sauna, the effects of eight hours of duvet being warmed by the body is warmer blood passing through the brain.

In particular, I'm looking to see whether pleasant dreams can be achieved in a repeatable manner by using a given set of parameters. This is but the start of a journey I hope to continue for a long time.

A useful guide to oneirology, the science of dreaming is a book by Dr Mark J. Belchner, called The Dream Frontier. Dr Belchner mentions two phenomena that happen often in our dreams. One he calls 'disjunctive cognition', in which two or more persons, places or things do not match. For me typical such dreams involve the blending of my brother and my son as one person, or London and Warsaw as one place. Rarer are 'authentic dreams', in which the classic Greek unities of action, time and place. So far this year, I have had one, set in contemporary America's Pacific Northwest. No bizarre things happened (no unicycling walruses for example), no blended people or places - as real as real life.

Another proposal by Dr Belchner is that 'dreams don't lie'. "Our dreams", he writes, "are not concerned with disguise and censorship. They are our most honest communications, perhaps the only human communication in which we cannot lie. We can lie about our dreams, but not in our dreams." When you are dreaming it, you are getting the raw truth. Of course, once we wake, we strive to make convincing narratives from the material that's been dreamt - but I strive in my diary to make my notes as authentic as possible, and not to shy away from embarrassment or emotional discomfort. From our dreams we can learn much about our truest, deepest anxieties, often ones we don't confront in waking life.

And I am also testing the folk wisdom that cheese before bed sets of vivid dreams. So for control purposes I am eating 50g of vintage Cheddar or Parmesan. An effect I noted one night when I took no cheese before sleep was a lack of memorable dreams, something that's never happened on any other cheese-eating night. In the diary for Friday 22 January at 07:10, I wrote: "EATING CHEESE BEFORE SLEEP DOESN'T NECESSARILY RESULT IN MORE VIVID DREAMS, BUT IT DOES HELP YOU REMEMBER THEM!" The following night, I doubled my cheese intake. This resulted in a terrifying dream of a fiery apocalypse descending from the sky onto central Warsaw, and me in a darkened apartment off ul. Marszałkowska urinating blood, dying young in my early 50s, just as the worst evil imaginable was about to engulf us all. That was 03:45 on Saturday 23 January.

And lo! I dreamed...

At the end of this month, I intend to tabulate the results, with the aim of creating a quantitative database looking for common themes and clues that might further the undervalued science of understanding what goes on in our minds as we sleep. And every now and then, some more oneirological insights. In the meanwhile, Lent is less than a month away, and that will mean another concentration of blog posts of a spiritual nature.

My thanks to Beata for inspiring me with the idea, to Ben Hoyle (@bjp_ip), for the most enlightening Twitter feed (neurology/evolution/tech), and to my brother Marek, my chief intellectual sounding-board.

This time five years ago:
Searching for growth

This time eight years ago:
The more it snows - a decent snowfall in Warsaw

This time nine years ago:
A Dream Too Far - short story

This time ten years ago:
Compositions in white, blue and gold

This time 11 years ago:
Dobra and the road

This time 12 years ago:
Polish air force plane full of VIPs crashes on landing in bad weather