Here is last night’s dreaming sequence. It is a hotch-potch and has no obvious explanation.
The dream opens in a Scandinavian wood. A large man with a deep dark ginger beard wearing a kilt is stood over a huge tree stump. His chest is bare and his skin is white and hairless. He has tanned and big, freckled forearms. His name is Eng and he is one of the last masters of an ancient Danish martial art of Viking origin.
I greet Eng. I am wearing my usual combat trousers and am barefoot. I too am shirtless. We do some arm wrestling on the tree stump and Eng shows me some grappling moves as we lark about outside his cabin. We pick us some towels and dry off.
We go inside to his lab-workshop. On an optical table is a prototype we are working on it is a novel form of three dimensional imaging microscopy. It is based around an unclad optical fibre which uses the evanescent field to image. The idea is to switch polarisation states of the probe laser in the fibre core. By switching between fibre modes and polarisation we can modulate the external field penetration depth. Any light “outside” the fibre will get absorbed. This is measured as light return optical loss. After the short duration laser pulse has gone the fibre collects any fluorescence. This is a new imaging modality and with data processing offers a way of imaging in vivo tissue. We are trialling it on plants and intend it for brain tissue imaging. It is a way to get accurate chemical and biological data in Alzheimer patients. It is not simply structural. Because the fibre is very narrow diameter it can be inserted directly into living brain tissue without causing too much injury.
The scene changes and Eng and I are now at some research lab. It is an agricultural research lab where new techniques for farming are being developed. Today we are having a visit from Chairman Mao. He has a deep interest in plant biology and is eager to see our institute and our new results. Mao arrives in a motorcade and is ushered into our lab. We show him around the greenhouse and then get him to look down the binocular eyepiece at images inside a plant stem with water and cells floating by. We project the images up onto a screen and everyone can see the flow of liquid along a living plant stem in real time and with very high optical resolution. Cells are visible.
The scene changes and I am in a car park. I am being stopped by two American security services men in black suits. They ask me what I have in the boot of my car. I say that I have a metal phial of element mass 258. They know I am joking. They get me to open the boot of my car. I show them the black high tech “briefcase” there. It opens to reveal a projector, a lap top, a USB memory stick, some documentation and a giveaway DVD information pack. They thumb through the documentation. It looks OK to them. I say that what is on the DVD is what I submitted to security vetting a week back. I am not going to get technical in the presentation because of the patent situation. The interaction is jocular with the security guys. They wave me on.
The dream ends….
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Mass number 258 corresponds to a transuranic element; Mendelevium has an isotope at this mass as do others.
“Mendelevium is a synthetic chemical element; it has symbol Md (formerly Mv) and atomic number 101. A metallic radioactive transuranium element in the actinide series, it is the first element by atomic number that currently cannot be produced in macroscopic quantities by neutron bombardment of lighter elements. It is the thirteenth actinide, the ninth transuranic element, and the first transfermium; it is named after Dmitri Mendeleev, the father of the periodic table.”
Dreamyoga 