oddly comforting

[click image]

I spend my mornings locked in dream, mostly, when I'm lucky enough to get all the way into the proper sleep phases for it, and there was a very lot today, but most of it is sitting right on the very razor's edge of memory. Roadside stuff, and the weird administrative overlay. When you are asleep, your brain is dumping short term memory into long term. This is a very good thing because one's short term memory is like a tape loop. When it gets too full it writes over stuff and you turn into an airhead. So when you are packing your brain full of a lot of heavy information, like cramming for tests, it's really better to take frequent naps than to stay up all night or for days on end, even if you are young. Works like a damn charm.

Except, with me, my brain has this fancy, high tech even, meta way of organizing information. I see patterns. I know x from seeing y or y from x or m shoots me forward to r or back to g. I even recognize things like drilling into the deepest meaning of something punches through into a universe where that something is its opposite. Others prefer not to confuse matters this way. There is some left brain filing of the straight-forward, but it only serves as marker for the parts of the patterns of bigger pictures. There is much to be said for this, but it also tends to keep me out of the reach of people who are bad at abstracting, bad at intuitive leaps. I'm supposed to be fixing this little communication problem and, well, that involves, I think, taking control of the way my brain orders itself. After a lifetime of letting it do its hotrod thing without me, because it never even occurred to me something could be done about it, this is not so easy, and harder because of my love for it. How to keep the best but add the bridges for those who can't leap? It's a big problem even identifying where the leaps are, to go back and try to sift through the spots where leaps took place.... I think I need a guinea pig pedant around to help me troubleshoot.

Anyway, I know that one's sincerity, of itself, is a big part of the reshuffling and fine tuning of the brain architecture that follows Zen realization, the shedding of habit and the awakening of enlightening being. So I do have a little faith that the good stuff is going on in this part that I call the administrative function dreaming, where it's kind of like the feeding of the old time magnetic cards into the super computers that were not even as powerful as what sits on our desks today. Or the old time file rooms of big companies, where there were little armies of ladies filing and pulling files from their assigned stacks all day to keep things moving in an orderly fashion for all the execs. Or the long slides of microfiche whizzing past on the projector actually filling the mind, stopping only to mark "rug sales" before pressing on with the endless process of arming oneself with the facts, stocking, updating, reordering one's own brain.

The cartoon image from the last Great Depression above was waiting for me in my email inbox. It comforts me that we're just as screwed up as we always were. That is NOT a good thing. That is something that definitely should change, but recognition breeding comfort can give usable energy and realizing that the source should not become an object of belief ought to keep the harm out of getting that little snatch of relief....