unconscious consciousness

the title is my current and perhaps mostest favoritest google status yet. periodically it changes. either because a fellow gmailer has posted something witty which demands an attempt at an equally clever response, or i simply am tired of the old one. this one fits.

i was thinking this morning, as i lay in bed reflecting on my dreams from the night, that during the day i almost feel like im dreaming despite my obviously alert state. i intelligently interact with the world around me (most of the time), i use dangerous equipment and drive vehicles, and care for little people. i accomplish just all sorts of things that require movement of my person and even more so appropriately responding when encountering the environment surrounding me.

while i make a good show of my mental presence, i can assure you that i am more often than not in some other place doing something totally obscure. for example, when my wife frequently relays to me things she finds interesting or important she tends to do it in very long periods of time. i find that when she begins her tales i am very much with her. however, much later in the conversation or even at the end i find that im still back at the beginning where we started. i call it a conversation because she talks, i talk (respond appropriately) and so on until its all over. then when i realize that i just missed everything but the first minute of dialogue i confess to her my absence and we have the conversation all over again. and theres no garuantee that i stick around for the second go at it either.

then there are times when she will say to me something and i will think in my head what i want to say. and even think that i said it. unfortunately i dont realize that i have not responded until she has already begun to talk to her self and left me in the dust. " look, see what i did for you? isnt it nice?" she says. "yes thanks very nice" i think. "yes dear, oh i love it! you did this just for me? oh you are so great honey!" she says to her self. "well i thought you would like it." she says. " oh, i do very much, im just so impressed by your hard work and motivation." she says again to herself.....then im back. "What?" i cant help but wonder who shes talking to cause i know it aint me. so she informs me, "well i asked if youd notice what i did and you didnt say anything so i just started talking to myself." " i told you yes and i thought it was nice! what more do you want?" i defend myself. "no you didnt you just sat there." she claims...

so you see, while i am awake more than any other person i know, and perform various complicated and skillful tasks on a daily basis, while also being responsible for the well being of multiply children at any given time, i tend to be a little spacey.

the funniest part to me is the type of things i wander to. its seemingly random, but usually has some sort of ties to something going on around me. if not the conversation i am not aware of then something in my environment that sparked a chain of thoughts that lead to something i could hold on to. for instance, chris is talking about some beans in a soup shes never heard of and she might like to try to make sometime, that makes me think of the beans that the kids planted from the beans they picked off of the beans i planted this spring and how amazed i was that they actually grew, then i began thinking of my silly little garden and the summer we had and how well it did despite the weather, which made me think wow, what a mild summer it was, and then i felt a little smug about all the global warming crap, and then finally i remembered a little portion of a video i recently previewed which explain the relation of the moon to the circulation of the earths water, and the earths water plays a major role in regulating the our surface temperature by absorbing heat from the sun. isnt it funny that the scientist are putting so much concern into the fact that ice is melting in the polar regions (supposedly). if there is that much ice up there that its melting would cause global flooding. and the earths temperature is rising due to rising temperature from the suns "sun spot activity" then wouldnt it only make sense that the earth melt some ice create more water and control the rise in temp. (this would mean that despite the rise in the suns temperature and our ice melting the surface temperature of the earth would only tend to vary slightly in effect) also if the sun did slow in sun spot activity (which it seems to be doing according to the latest reports) then it would only make sense that the resulting even cooler temperatures would then cause ice making in the polar regions and therefore more ice and less water........MATT! ....huh?....." i said what are you thinking about" chris says again when she finally breaks through.

so then im left to explain. usually i just say something like, oh you dont wanna know, but that doesnt usually fly either, so then how do i explain how i am thinking about the sun and scientists and non man made global warming and cooling cycles and my uneducated opinion of them?

speaking of dreams.. i was speaking of dreams earlier wasnt i? my dreams dont have a lot of meaning from what i can tell. most of the time i can even give a logical explanation for their content. but sometimes i cant. sometimes its just random bits of stuff that dont make sense and i chalk up to dreams. interestingly though, seemingly random and inexplicable dreams revisit me in my consciousness further down the line. surely you have had dejavu. i think everyone has experienced it at one time or another. you visit someplace you've never been but its familiar, or you do something you know youve never done but when your doing it you remember something like youve done it.

i have experienced times when i thought i was having dejavu only to then remember that it wasnt something i thought i had done or someplace i had been, but something i had dreamt. ready to be really weirded out. after realizing something seemed familiar from a dream, and realizing i wasnt having dejavu, the dream now seemed very clear and present and i just sat and watched happen what i knew would happen as it was happening because i had dreamt it before and was remembering it now and watching it in amazement as it was happening.... just to be clear this isnt a case of observing the recalling then reasoning. this is observing, recalling, waiting and expecting a specific outcome and watching it take place exactly as i expected it would. when the dream to my recollection stops, so does the seeing of the future stuff, and its over. nothing tragic or significant has ever happened during these instances, and i cant explain it any better nor do i know which dreams it will be or when it might happen. i am just so curious about why this happens and what causes it. if i hadnt experienced it i might have said it was impossible... or at least been skeptical as to why it would even happen if werent at all significant. i dont suppose there is any reasonable explanation. but i hope to find others with similar experiences who might share some input. perhaps it is more common than i think, or maybe there are far weirder experiences than mine. i must say that while it draws the fullest of my interest i realize it is a topic that has the potential of drawing the fullest of weirdos out there and so i dont often talk about it to strangers. in this case there are only a handful of people who actually read my blog and im not concerned about your leaving my high and dry or you telling me that aliens give you dreams about the future so i feel relatively safe.

maybe i should give it a rest now. perhaps next time i will have a cartoon to offer. the latest and greatest in floyd toonage. later