The world here is turning greyer and colder and more difficult. This term has really worn down my reserves. The academic in me is turning up her toes and saying she wants to go to bed and sleep in tomorrow, when it's raining outside and so warm under the covers. If I'm here for two more quarters, we'll start back in January and only get a week for Spring Break until mid-June. Then it'll be back to school in New Zealand in mid-July. That route leads to a possible graduation in November, but it also leads to pain, and burnout, and confirmation of the feeling that I'm running through my undergrad degree as fast as I can because I want to get to the cool crisp air of the other side. I know there's no right way to go about school, and I love academics, but life shouldn't be about the next test, and the next and the next until freedom. All these young people I know work so hard, spending their years cooped up in boxes until they're opened up and let loose. To go to grad school where they continue to sacrifice themselves on the altar of academia. I'm not sure how long I can keep going, waiting until I start to enjoy it again.
Don't listen to me, I'm just worn out and tired and need a holiday. But I did have this really cool idea for a college where you'd study sciences, like biopsychology, and then interpret what you learnt as works of art. Like large models of cells made out of crochet, or films that reflect on some of the ways our brains receive and process visual information, or symphonies based on action potentials in neurons. I saw a photography exhibit down in San Diego where someone had taken close up scientific images of parts of his body and printed them up large. I think he did chromosomes as well. That was pretty awesome.
Also at this school would be this class about dreaming. This idea was inspired by my professor in Human Memory, who is pretty awesome, and written papers on another type of conscious awareness called meta-awareness which relates to "repressed" memories of sexual abuse. Exciting stuff! Sorry, going all psychology nerd now. But this meta-awareness is basically the consciousness we have about being conscious. Like, when you're reading a very boring page of some ancient philosopher, and suddenly you realise that you've been day dreaming for half a page. But you continued to read while your mind was somewhere else! Even though you couldn't process it. So there's an attention that's paid to what it is that your mind is doing, and that's meta-awareness. I hope you know what I'm talking about; it's like a reality check. When my professor was explaining this to us, he told us about lucid dreaming. The idea is that when you're dreaming, your meta-awareness is off in the corner twiddling its thumbs. When you have a lucid dream, it wakes up and starts paying attention. If you want to have lucid dreams, you can help by getting in the habit of giving yourself frequent meta-awareness check-ups during the day. One way to do this is to look at your palm, and check the lines on it. If you get in the habit of this, you'll do it in your dream, and when you can't see the lines (I guess the dreaming mind isn't too great with details) it'll provide a cue to your meta-awareness. So it can wake up (hopefully you won't) and you can start having fun.
Anyhow, at my school, there would be classes about dreams. And for homework, you would have lucid dreams where you went to meet with your professor, and he would give classes. Or maybe not, because dreams about classes don't sound great. But you get the gist (speaking of gists, have you heard about the gist text effect? Oh no... I really need to stop studying...).
Going up to Berkeley again in two days! Food! And flannel sheets!
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