SilverJacket

Just Say Maybe

Focus on Hallucinogens: This is a little gem I've held onto since my friends Ken and Glen mailed it to me as part of a care package when I was working in Alaska after high school. It's from 1991 and out of print but still in near-perfect condition. I wrote children's science books for two years but never wrote one as fun or useful as this. It explains to 9-year-olds everything from neurons to shamans. Rad!

It's basically a My First Reader version of D.M. Turner's The Essential Psychedelic Guide, minus the special section on how much ketamine to inject when you're on DMT and nitrous. The prose is lucid, but the pictures crack me up. Take the cover. Look kids, in a drug free zone, you can do all kinds of things, like play tic-tac-toe. Or even watch people play tic-tac-toe! And remember, friends don't let friends wear non-footie pants.

In some cases the book might be counterproductive: "Have you ever looked at yourself in an amusement park mirror? Look what happened to you! Now, try to imagine that the whole world looked that way to you." Awesome! Where can I get some?

The best pictures are in the chapter on LSD.

The text above this one reminds me of an Ali G interview with a drug expert:

Ali G: And what is its effects?
Guy: You can go paranoid, which means you think people or things are coming at you. It makes your heart race. Your blood pressure can go low, so you can feel a bit woozy sometimes. It’s got a lot of medical effects on the body.
Ali G: And is there any negative effects?

Ali G: Which is the type of acid that actually make you fly?
Guy: No acid makes you fly. Acid can make you think you fly.
Ali G: But ain't there one, cause me mate Dave said that he took this type, and he flew all around the room and then his mum told him to get some ciggies from the shop, and he actually flew there and flew back and was back in like five seconds or whatever, but he'd forgotten to buy ciggies.

This picture just makes me wonder what's wrong with this dude's friends. I mean, he's obviously flipping out about something, and they're just standing there waving at him with those shit-eating grins. Seriously kids, that is your brain on tic-tac-toe.

The Matrix Revonsuo

A couple years ago on this blog I mentioned Finnish scientist Antti Revonsuo's Threat Simulation Theory, which proposes that the purpose of dreaming is to rehearse one's reactions to real-world dangers so that we're better prepared when we meet them in waking life. It's like those training programs in the Matrix after which Neo unplugs and gasps, "I know kung fu."

The TST has definite surface appeal, but it's taken quite a beating itself over the years (with researchers noting, for example, that nightmares actually get in the way of daytime functioning, and that most dreams are not even nightmares), and there's now a paper in press in Consciousness and Cognition that puts a few more dings in the theory.

According to TST, the more threats you face, the more they'll show up in your dreams. So the researchers peaked inside the nightscapes of subjects in both South Africa and North Wales. (Guess where they're counting real sheep.) Turns out African dreams contained no more physical threats than Welch. And perhaps more telling, only about 1% of dreams in each group contained "realistic escapes from realistic physical threats." (Yes but what of flying away from killer electric sheep?) Without that crucial element, it's like the Matrix except with Neo sputtering "I know how to get the crap beat out of me."

P.S.
My colleague Jay Dixit also does a kicking of the TST tires in the December issue of Psychology Today. He concludes with the words of Harvard psychologist Deirdre Barrett: "Yes, dreams are worrying about disasters. But they're also planning for nice things and they're fantasizing and they're problem solving. [The purpose of dreaming is] as broad as all waking thought. That's why I say dreams are really just thinking in a different biochemical state." Check it out.