Record players are great for dinner parties. But this new one I got, I could not figure out how to turn it off.

Usually these things you just pick up the needle and move it off to the side and the music goes off. But on this one the record kept spinning and the music didn’t stop. How could it keep playing music if the needle wasn’t reading the music? I thought maybe it had buffered some music (somehow) and was just playing that out, but it kept going. I looked closer and found all these buttons and exposed electronics. Weird labels and LEDs. A “sleep” button? I tried pressing them all but the music wouldn’t stop. The reggae kept saying, “Come on and dance with me…”

Then I realized it was morning and my radio alarm clock was going off. Sometimes you need to jump up a layer of reality to solve a problem.

The strangest thing about dreams is that we come up with them. Entirely. It’s all in our head. For example, I once had a dream that was set up like a mystery. I wasn’t sure what was happening, but when the mystery was revealed at the end, all of the previous clues made sense in hindsight. The end was a surprise to me in the dream, but it couldn’t really have been a surprise–I made up the whole thing!

Our conception of reality is like a dream in the same way. Unlike a dream, when we’re awake we get input from the real world through our senses. But even while awake, we still construct our own inner model of reality from these external sensations. And like a dream, we accept this mind-construct as given.

Everything in our high-level experience comes from us. I find this can be a useful way to know my own mind. For example, I sometimes think I know what someone else is thinking. But this other person’s thought is by necessity my own thought. Any thought that someone else can think, within my mind’s model of the world, is my own thought. Using this reasoning I can find thoughts in my own subconscious which I have projected onto other people.

Examining our dreams and experimenting with lucid dreaming has value in our dream life. But these practices also have value in our waking life. In a dream, we often accept the world our mind presents to us as being extrinsic. We have no idea that we’re in a dream. The same holds true when we’re awake. Sometimes we accept features of the world as extrinsic when these are actually just assumptions about the world that our mind has presented to us as reality. Identifying these features in waking life is as difficult as identifying when you’re in a dream. We can only do it by carefully and critically observing the world our mind presents to us, and becoming aware of the assumptions upon which we build our worldview.

I dreamed last night about having regions of space copied onto other spaces. The same way I can include an “iframe” in a webpage to have a window onto any another webpage, in my dream there were these community spaces that existed simultaneously in multiple locations around the world.

When I woke up I started looking for technology to implement this, specifically 3D hologram technology. I found this video of Cisco doing an on-stage 3D telepresence demo:

I was thrown off when the physically present Cisco CEO says he can see the hologrammed guy in front of him. He can’t! He’s pretending that he sees the other guy standing next to him.

This is a video showing how the illusion works:

I had to watch a few times to figure it out.

Hint: the “foil” is a one-way mirror, which means it’s both reflective and transparent depending on where the light is coming from. It’s like looking through a glass window at night in pitch black: you see your reflection. But if there’s light coming from outside then you see the outside.

This “hologram” is the same technology that’s used in Disney’s Haunted Mansion ride during the Ballroom scene.

Patrons ride across the track, looking down at the ballroom.

There’s a huge one-way mirror between the patrons and the ballroom. The ghosts are underneath the ride track. The patrons see the faint reflection of the ghosts, making them look transparent. By turning the lights on and off, the ghosts seem to appear and disappear.

The hitchhiking ghosts use a similar effect.

Patrons face a mirror (actually a one-way mirror) and see their reflection. The ghost is behind the mirror, moving on a track in sync with the ride.

Mirrors are folds in space. I’m excited for emerging technologies that can fold and rearrange space into “hyperspace” — the way that it is done on the web, with doors and windows leading you to new spaces unconstrained by physical geometry.

I’m reminded of the psychogeographer Constant Nieuwenhuys who would cut up and collage together maps of European cities to envision his utopic city, New Babylon.

I have in mind several projects exploring this theme:

1. Using mirrors to reverse gravity (interactive sculpture in progress)
2. Treadmill surrounded by projections, allowing you to physically walk through Google Streetview
3. Grids of cameras mounted to the ceiling of an indoor space, creating a live video “Google Map”

I'm in a hotel room with Okie. We're recording bits of our conversation. Is it Wednesday. Yeah it's wednesday its not thursday. no it's not thursday until 15:33.

song about the seasons. that's the bomb divers. riled the men with every _ riled the women with every _.

here we go, here we go baby. here we go, here we go baby.

my room is in a completely different configuration.

that man, he's not who he pretends to be.

unidentified flying building lands on top of other building.

a word about the original building. has a courtyard filled with full-body statues of every president. but you can't get in through any of the doors in the courtyard. you're supposed to go in through the front. but the highways are really confusing and i can't get to the front. also i'm late for my plane. there's no way i could go around to the front. i climb over Warren Harding and find a door that is open. i'm too late though for my plane. this is the second plane i missed out of this place.

take the elevator to the top of the compound building, investigating.

discover alien plot. okie would know the rest.

I’ve been working on developing habits recently. Lots of creative work, regular physical exercise, eating breakfast, things like that. One habit is keeping a dream diary. I’ve kept some awesome dream diaries in the past. I highly recommend this practice!

The key is to have the recording implement right next to you when you sleep and be consistent about getting dreams recorded. This way you start getting better at recalling details from your dreams. You also end up having more lucid moments since you associate dream-flavored events with the recall of those events. Dream diaries are also good for creative material and doing long-term analysis of your subconscious (whatever that is).

So far into this diary, my dreams (as remembered) have been pretty lame. But I’ve kept at at it, and this morning I had my first “interesting” one.

was living in some place with two floors, sort of like danny and dmax's place. had two stories and lots of outside light but was night. place was kind of lonely. was "figuring out some fig-v's", that is, practicing breakdancing from diagrams on the internet. was talking to.. cha? about it? also talking to chuva about it. she said she could do a turtle. i said she must have strong wrists. we tried to exchange a torrent file. i thought maybe she was into me (non-platonically).

I wake up, write this down, and go back to sleep

i'm in highschool. trying to figure out the three axioms of frege (logic). had been wondering for a while. mentioned to chuva that it’s super hard to remember these axioms, it’s not like just symmetry, transitivity, reflectivity, they’re like weird. phil wadler was in my school but when i went to go ask him (in teacher’s lounge) he just started having some personal conversation with another teacher so i excused myself, “i’ll just ask wikipedia.”

wadler actually had "the three axioms of logic" printed on his office door, but the three things listed were some joke (you know, about academia, like teachers have). this was originally what got me interested in what are the actual three axioms of logic.

i ask a few other people but they don't know, of course.

so i'm in the teacher's lounge, i can't get a school computer to work (totally busted with old windows and malware) so i go back to where my laptop is but i'm sort of lost. dr marchitell is there he's administering some "computer science" (something with databases) test with mr rafson (and the testee (redhead? boy) there in front of them, and several other people) and looks really bored/upset about this.

not sure where i'm going, i end up in a stairwell going down, then see a short dark passageway (that must've been blocked usually) ooh that's weird, this must be the fourth floor. go through the passage, end up in another stairwell that i've never seen before.

see a really interesting looking girl (one eye bigger than the other, skinny, black hair, small, kind of pasty) walking. i say hey, introduce myself shake hands. small, slightly cold grip. never seen you before. yeah i transfered from -some other school-. i say you look really interesting. i'm really glad i found this girl and this new place.

we're going up the stairs. (it's sort of normal white fluorescent light. stairs go up counterclockwise, just normal stairs. walls are brick white. just stairs so far, no exits.)

we find a perfect mini replica of the girl sitting in a corner. we're like whoa super creepy (but not scared, we're having fun). i pick it up and compare, it's really really similar, even the eyes. not sure what it's made of, but it's dark grey, maybe hardened clay (but it's not brittle). then keep going up the stairs and find another smaller one! isn't this weird, there are just these things that look exactly like you left here years before?

then go up more and there are some doors to classrooms. we go into one and there are a few rows of long tables (like mit). there's an old lady with long silver hair in back and several black girls with buzzed hair and no eyes (taking a test it looks like). the old lady looks at us when we come in.

At this point i got excited that this place was so cool, so woke up and wrote it down. Now i’m fully awake.