Author: quantumdreamer

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South Africa – Richard W – Imperial College Colleagues Dream 29-06-2025

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Here is last night’s dream.

The dream starts in the South African bundu or bush. I am driving along a rough dusty unmade road. The road goes up and own and has a yellow-orange bull dust. I am in an open sided Jeep like vehicle of a classical pedigree age. It is four wheel drive and contrasts with an antiseptic modern SUV. I am dressed in faded olive green park ranger type clothes with shorts. I have a pistol in a holster on my right hip, suitable for my left handedness. It is tremendous fun driving along the road / path. We are near a fairly fast flowing deep river like at the Augrabies falls which I visited two decades ago. I can hear a waterfall.

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The sound of the water is loud. The wind is in my hair and I can smell and taste the dry bush all around me.

The scene changes and I am now in the UK. I am in a busy Tesco supermarket. People are queuing. Outside the air is dank and wet. There is a constant hum of urban traffic. In one of the checkout queues I see Richard W whom I know from school and UCL chemistry. He is miles away up in his head. I tap him on the shoulder. At first, he does not recognise me. Then when he does, he is totally surprised to see me. I motion to behind the checkouts and will wait for him there.

When he has checked out, he comes over to see me. Although he looks a lot younger than he would be now, I can see that life is getting him down and he lacks energy. I turn him around and stand behind him. I open up a battery compartment in his back by sliding off a plastic over. I take out the two AA style batteries which are there and replace them with two fresh ones from my pocket. These batteries are similar in colour and design to Duracell. I replace the plastic cover and Richard reboots.

There is a short break for a loo visit.

I return to the dream back into a dank drab UK urban environment. You can hear the noise the cars make on the wet road. I enter a large building which I do not know with some kind of large atrium. It is Imperial College and Chemistry related. The hallway / atrium is being renovated. I bump into various ex-colleagues {sequentially} who were at Imperial two decades ago, all of them now professors. There are more than half a dozen of them both men and women. They are slightly sheepish about meeting me, there is an air of awkwardness or embarrassment. They are unsure as to how to greet me and if to greet or acknowledge me at all. Two males with whom I worked are very noticeable by their absence. The absence speaks volumes. There is a weird feeling that the former colleagues are surprised to see me even though there is a sense for them that I never left.

I walk into some kind of a hallway. There are poster boards up with academic conference style poster presentations on a blue “felt” background. These are all chemistry related. I can see molecules and graphs. Walking past I think some things do not change despite modern technology. A poster is a poster. In the dream I do not know why I am there in that building with them. It seems anomalous to me if not to them.

The dream ends.

Narziß und Goldmund – Quantum Superposition State

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Finding “The Glass Bead Game” and Herman Hesse was a pivotal moment for me. In Knecht, the Magister Ludi, I found someone who innately sensed interconnectivity, the flow of consciousness and how one idea or theme intertwined others. His “lives” spoke direct to me. Finally I did not feel quite so absolutely weird. The scale of concept was vast and hugely refreshing. Someone on the planet was wired a little like me, though far more eloquent and expressive.

Like Magnus Pym and Bern, “The Perfect Spy”, had captured and conveyed a little of what it was like for me to have traversed life. His fiction more complex than mine. Yet I recognised the chameleon into which I once morphed for safety and to blend.

But it was with Narziß und Goldmund that I learned in the courtyard at Mariabronn of my own duality superimposed into a superposition state. There I sensed something of my monastic pasts and my reckless wild child. Initially I felt more Goldmund, later Narziß. The coefficient of the latter in my superposition sate is higher, when time averaged. I saw in this duality the autobiography of Hesse and his delicate and nuanced verbalisation. The sense of friction but not conflict, of phase and of interplay.

In a way each of my blogs are / have been by way of a glass bead game, only making sense to me. They are a way of arranging things like a sand Mandala, waiting for the brush of diaspora onto wind.

And again I am back with Narziß und Goldmund, wondering what fate may have left in store. Are there adventures left or is a retreat deeper into cloister on the cards…

Self-Diagnosis – Avoid Cannibalism

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The internet is awash with medical, pseudo-medical and dietary advice. It is very easy to ask Dr Google, Nurse Edge or Prof DuckDuckGo for advice and thereby arrive at a diagnosis. No doubt this may drive the medical profession up the wall, but on occasion it might be useful. I am able to research things thoroughly without arriving at a firm self-diagnosis. I don’t have a favourite disease, nor a goal I am aiming at. There is no bucket list of maladies. Looking through a list of rare diseases I found this one, which is quite specialised, no need for fava beans and a nice Chianti.

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Kuru

Awareness: There’s no known Kuru awareness group or dedicated day.

Discovery: Occurring at epidemic levels in the ’50s and ’60s, it was eventually discovered by Daniel Carleton Gajdusek, whose research won him the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Treatment: There’s no treatment for Kuru, other than the preventative measure of not committing cannibalism.

Symptoms: Tremors and muscle jerks (Kuru is the Fore tribe’s word for ‘shiver’), headaches and arm and leg pain, difficulty walking and swallowing, progressive and severe coordination problems.

Discovered only in a remote region of New Guinea among the Fore tribe and closely related to mad cow disease, Kuru is caused by prions, which is a protein that encourages build-up of abnormal brain tissue that results in irreversible brain damage. 100% lethal, it’s brought on by the consumption of human brains that contain the infection. The Fore tribes practiced cannibalism prior to the 1950’s to preserve the spirits of the dead, but it is now outlawed.

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The prophylactic advice to not commit cannibalism is not too arduous to follow. It should be within the ability of most. I read today that ~75% of Americans are obese. I just cross the threshold for obesity which means that ~70% are more weighty than me. That it is a serious arthritis epidemic in the making. Lardy, lardy.

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People can self-diagnose with all sorts of things including grandeur, omniscience and importance. They may imagine themselves angelic and incapable of the oral phase change of butter. Not all diagnoses are accurate.

Today my results for alpha-1-antitrypsin are in and the result is mid-range and very normal. Which raises a slight question about the low alpha 1 globulin data. I would like to see the error bars on reading a labelled electrophoresis result. My guess is that they could be a few percent. As a technique is does not scream highly quantitative to me.

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Alpha-1 (α1) globulins

Proteins migrating within the alpha-1 region include alpha-1-antitrypsin (constituting about 90% of the band intensity), alpha-1 lipoprotein, alpha-1-acid glycoprotein, and alpha-1 fetoprotein. A haze stain at the leading edge of this band may be due to high-density lipoprotein (HDL).

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The GP may wish further clarification. Up to her, if she thinks I need more tests. The thing making up ~90% in the electrophoresis is normal using a more quantitative method.

Logic suggests that having something iffy with my liver is possible / likely. But I am not yet yellow. One genetic problem has now been ruled out. There is a faint hint on line of some endocrine stuff implicated. We shall see what, if anything, the specialist suggests.

I may hear back from the Rheumatologist next week and it is possible something else needs investigated.

On exactly the ten year anniversary of my arse {colon} cancer operation I get to see an anaesthetist to ensure that I am OK to have a colonoscopy. Some blood / piss tests to measure creatinine may be on the cards….

Ten years ago I was in the GP’s office after a sigmoidoscopy. They has found 11 polyps in the lower part of my colon. I had read that 1 in ten polyps turn cancerous. Given that they has not looked “upstream” I said sampling the probability that often suggested that I may have colon cancer “upstream”. He looked shocked and wanted to reassure me. I was calm and knew the reason behind my statement. A few days later they found more polyps and a T3 cancer.

By the middle of July, just after Bastille Day, I will know the state of my chimney and if there are more polyps {or worse} or not. This sets the clock ticking for the next “gold standard” investigation in due course.

I will be enjoying industrial strength laxative on Bastille Day. There will be metaphorical fire works chez nous. We already have the Sudocrem.

I personally would not diagnose a MOT pass, I would fail my contrôle technique and should probably be kept off the streets to protect other road users…

Challenges – Genetics – Having to Endure – Lama Dorje

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A working hypothesis I have is that because I do not strut about, talk a lot and generally bullshit, people feel that I am need of education by them. Somehow, they are kind enough to bestow the benefit of their grandiose and unsolicited opinion on me so that I, a mere lowly pleb, might learn from their magnificence. So many offer me their opinions. Obviously, I am in dire need of education.

It is a catch 22. Do you let them rabbit on {endlessly} or flash intellect and make them feel more insecure than they already are. I don’t have an answer. Neither works well.

You may infer from the above that I am an arrogant arsehole. Your reflection in the mirror which is me may not reveal my essence.

Given all the tests in a medical sense that I am having its sounds a bit like someone meandering around in search of some kind of elusive diagnosis of sorts. That could be the case. Or it could simply be the generosity of the French healthcare system in action. The tendency for prophylaxis here is higher than in the UK.

The “health” finger continues to point at genetics. There is a non-normal make up, perhaps. Maybe I am special, so fucking special, or a creep, or a weirdo.

In my extensive recapitulations there is a recurring theme, “having to endure”. I have had to endure all sorts of things starting with bullying at school(s) and being gossiped about extensively, especially when my back was turned and I was not there. I am not paranoid; I have anecdotal evidence in support of this tendency. People curry favour by gossiping and in the past, they have claimed power by association to me. Those days are long gone.

I have an inkling that the current health drama belongs to the subset of “having to endure” challenges. There is little I can do; I simply have to endure and remain calm.

Śāntideva in the Bodhicaryāvatāra, has a whole chapter on forbearance. Bodhidharma was rumoured to have sat watching a wall for nine years.

Maybe one day instead of enduring I may give both barrels. I doubt many could handle it if I ramped up to 9/10 face to face with them. It would be very intense. Outside of experience.

The other working hypothesis I have is that I am tangentially involved in the drama, schemes and socio-political shenanigans of others. The thing is they are over “there” and I am only truly involved in their illusions. People make shit up; they make a drama out of it and somehow, I am caught up in their imaginations. I am written into their imaginary scripts.

I used to wear black Levi’s 501 jeans for decades. I now wear army surplus combat trousers. This dress makes me look a bit like a pikey prepper. I do not look for one minute like an ex-intellectual or the co-founder of a high technology high power laser company. So people tend, in the first instance, to talk down to me, even worse I do not speak high quality French, God’s only intellectual language. I must therefore be an idiotic stupid moron. They judge a book by their mis-interpretation of the cover. The French are as, if not more, arrogant than the English.

What can you do? Let them rabbit on {endlessly}. There is no point in trying to change their habits or self-opinion.

The wife and I have a joke. If I wore Buddhist robes people would treat me entirely differently. If they saw me thus attired in their dreams, they would find it weird.

“Alan always wore jeans in life!!”

There is a part of me that might order some robes on line and do a TikTok type experiment. Go in jeans to an estate agent one day and in robes the next…

But that would be fucking about…

Is there some as yet unseen diagnoses?

Or am I simply enduring the Gattling gun fire of multiple medical tests and appointments?

The current bet is towards the latter…

Low Parathyroid Hormone – Hypoparathyroidism?

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The results for the three different mutations of HFE gene are in. I don’t have any of these. Which excludes the vast majority of the diagnoses for hereditary haemochromatosis. The footnote from the lab suggests contacting the centre for rare iron related disease in the big university hospital 150 km away. They may just talk with me as an ex-boffin.

I do feel a tad rusty these days, like the tin man my joints could use some oiling.

That means the polycythaemia primary or secondary question is in focus. Is there a malignancy or did my blood just adapt to smoking tabs?

My parathyroid hormone (PTH) is low, it is 26 pg / mL.

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“The iPTH reference interval of a healthy blood donor population was measured as 25.2–109.1 pg/mL (2.7–11.6 pmol/L) at 2.5 and 97.5 distribution percentile. The iPTH reference interval from data stored in the laboratory database was 19.3–112.5 pg/mL (2.0–11.9 pmol/L). Furthermore, 60% of the whole population had prevalently insufficient vitamin D concentration (<30 ng/dL; <75 nmol/L).

Mineri et al., Clinica Chimica Acta Volume 521, October 2021, Pages 1-8.”

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So it is at the rare end of a distribution yet just within the 2.5-97.5 percentile range. It is probably within experimental error out of the range. The error bars on 26 picograms must be big in a small sample!!

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“PTH is secreted primarily by the chief cells of the parathyroid glands. The gene for PTH is located on chromosome 11. It is a polypeptide containing 84 amino acids, which is a prohormone. It has a molecular mass around 9500 Da”

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My results for Calcium and Phosphorus were very normal, this latter statement is a bit weird. Low PTH levels are very rare and usually come with low Calcium levels. That pathway is messed up. Low parathyroid hormone screws with the Calcium concentration and bone turnover.

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Symptoms of hypoparathyroidism

Hypoparathyroidism often starts if glands in your neck are damaged during surgery.

Symptoms include:

  • a tingling or burning sensation in your fingers, toes and face
  • muscle pain, stiffness and spasms

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I have these two but these are caused when Calcium is too low!! So I do not have hypoparathyroidism.

We have another “contradiction” of sorts so the GP has asked advice from an endocrinologist. My guess would be re-test and if the value is still low maybe do something.

I am going to have an Alpha 1 Antitrypsin assay tomorrow which may add a piece to the jigsaw puzzle, concerning my lungs.

I’ll wait to hear from the GP as to what the endocrinologist suggests. It could be more tests, or not.

On the GP front we are probably good until September now…fingers crossed…

The working notion is that whatever it is that may be going on, it is just not manifesting in a sufficiently serious way, yet…

It could just go away or it could develop.

I am a bit of an anomaly, so it is no surprise that my blood results are a tad skewed from the normal.

Girlfriend in a Coma, Punctured Bicycle and Caligula

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Reviewing my most recent blood tests in preparation I can’t help questioning. Is it serious? Probably not. But like Spike Milligan quipped “I told you I was sick!” Is the whole shebang massively overly dramatic?

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“I know you’re antiseptic, your deodorant smells nice
I’d like to get to know you, you’re deep frozen like the ice”

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I don’t think I am obsessing simply going along with it all but it being my nature, I do look things up. It gives me something to do and stops me playing outside in the traffic.

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“I’m knobbled on the cobbles
Cos I hobble when I wobble
Swim!

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Hello to you out there in Normal Land,

you may not comprehend my tale or understand”

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I did not come by this notion of surgery all by myself. I have not been the one pushing this agenda. It has taken up a lot of time and money so far, both for me and the French health system.

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But I’m a creep, I’m a weirdo
What the hell am I doing here?
I don’t belong here

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Perhaps I am missing the point entirely.

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We are stardust
Billion year old carbon
We are golden
Caught in the devil’s bargain
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden

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It all seems so very far away, so unimportant.

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Where be it Blackbird to?
I know where he be
He be up your wurzel tree
And I be after he
Now I sees he, and he sees I
Bugger’d if I don’t get him
With a girt big stick, I’ll knock him down
Blackbird, I’ll have thee

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I remember aged just shy of thirteen walking along a beach in Pwllheli North Wales, that sentiment is more timely now.

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People try to put us d-down (talkin’ ’bout my generation)
Just because we get around (talkin’ ’bout my generation)
Things they do look awful c-cold (talkin’ ’bout my generation)
I hope I die before I get old (talkin’ ’bout my generation)

This is my generation
This is my generation, baby

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The Problems of Should

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Many problems arise not because things are but because people think they should be different. This enforcement of conditional opinion about how things should be is directly causal of conflict and of angst. There is another level to this where problems arise out of people thinking that things should meet expectations. Expectations are a mental-emotional construct of largely human origin.

To give a trite example.

Data collection suggests that for the western European male population an average life expectancy is a tad over 80 years. Nevertheless many die in their sixties. People kind of think they should live to 80. There is even planning to that target. I am largely convinced, in my opinion, that it is very unlikely that I will live to that age. I should not have that opinion and it can make people uncomfortable that I do. Many people like the idea of a long life and the expression that X left us too early is not uncommon. You should not die that young. It is a tragedy.

If you say such a death is natural and therefore not a tragedy you are speaking heinous. You should not be so cruel heartless and frank. Because of opinion like that you are a problem. You do not comply with the social should. Should makes you a problem and a right bastard to boot.

Wanting things to be different, access to the green grass on the other side of the fence is a human notion of change according to how things should be. The notion of “rights” in a democratic society is currently being widely eroded. This is because people think that others should not have opinions which differ from theirs. There is suppression and on occasion violence because people should agree, have the same colour skin and follow the same notion of deity as the noble and omniscient US.

“If you convert to our religion, we will not slay your ass painfully! You should follow our God, the only true God!”

This should causes death and bloodshed.

I live as I do, it does not really impinge on the outer world over much. Theoretically there may be opinions that it should not be thus. I should not live like this. The holders of those opinions have created a problem by the notion of should. It does not gel with the reality.

There is a disconnect between should and is/are. Which can be viewed as problematic. If you drop the imposition of should-based opinion any notion of problem evaporates.

I am now prepared for no hip operation in the rest of this foreseeable calendar year {As a starter for ten}. There is no problem outside the compound with this. It will limit some of my gardening and I will be taking pain medication. As a thought experiment others might imagine that this should not be the case. Yet despite the should, it is. A problem in this kind of gedankenexperiment arises solely out of a contrast between notions of should, an aspiration to the contrary and some idea about what is right for me to bear.

“In this day and age…”

In the UK news people harp on about waiting lists for appointments and operations as if these were some God-given right. They are not. I am not owed, due nor do I particularly deserve an operation. Were it not for modern medicine neither the wife nor I would be alive.

Viewed from one angle a bit of end of life pain is no big deal. It is only a problem if people deem that it could be and therefore should be different.

Problems often arise out of attempts to alter reality and the unfoldment of life. People try to steer things towards how they think they should be, how they ought to be, of how they want them to be.

The infliction of people’s opinion of should is one of the A number one causes of strife.

Israel thinks Iran should not have nuclear weapons so they coerce Trump into using big bombs. It is OK for US to have nuclear bombs but THEY should not.

There is a part for me which thinks that if Israel had been a lot more friendly and cooperative helping local economies to develop a comfortable middle class over the last few decades, all the simmering anger and bile might have faded. However that is not the case. A different suppressive ideology has held sway. Oppression has no sell by date; it must be continued until revolution. The mind set of they should be taught a bloody vengeful and punitive lesson has endured.

It has not brought peace, it has not brought love, it has not brought harmony.

A little thought shows that should is a key component in many problems, local, relational and in terms of geo-politics.

Arguably should is more dangerous and destructive than nuclear weapons.

Sanitized Anodyne Clone-World Dream 25-06-2025

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Here is this morning’s dream from around 5 AM.

The dream opens in a vast underground complex under a dome like roof. It is overly bright, lightened in a stark LED high temperature way. There are no plants. I can see two gatherings of people. These are of the “currents” and the “futures”. There is no luxury only a sense of sanitized, anodyne, air-brushed even. There is no fecundity.

The “currents” are older than the “futures”. They are more organised. They comprise solely white caucasians both male and female. They belong to three groups and are dressed accordingly. They are wearing V-necked medical scrubs type garments with white long sleeved t-shirts underneath. The white sleeves protrude from under the short sleeved gown arms. The dress is either mid-dark pastel blue, fuchsia pastel Rhodamine pink or a shade of deep pastel yellow. They all have fresh haircuts. The men are clean shaven and the women all sport pony tails. They are late twenties early thirties and relatively physically without flaws. People each belong to one “caste”. The sense of quasi-androgynous infertility pervades, though the genders are clear. There is some ceremony test or ritual about to take place, for the “futures” to progress.

I find myself in the group of “futures” who are all slightly younger and similarly adorned. Someone gets up on a stage to initiate proceedings. They will be subjected to a test in pairs. There is a simulation, a business game, which they have to participate in. This has been outside of their schooling to date and is a rite of passage into the “currents”. There is an air of anxiety about the test. They are all young relatively beautiful, flaw free and expectant.

I am paired with a young woman with dark hair dressed in Rhodamine pink. I am many thousands of years older than anyone else in the simulation. I cannot see my form but I know that I am very physically handicapped compared to others. The woman is a little disgruntled to be saddled with me. I explain to her that I know the game, the simulation, inside out, because I helped to write it and am aware ahead of time of all the pressure points. We can use intelligence. The game starts and we go to a “market” store to collect materials. It is run by some “currents”. The others are all running around to other stores. We collect the critical materials first and head off to our prep station.

As we leave the store there are some know-it-all “futures” hurrying about. I am in their way and cannot move quickly enough to get out of it. They gesture threateningly towards me to get out of their trajectory. I remain unmoved. A young man runs at me with intent. He hits into me and bounces off with enhanced momentum. I am unmoved and unhurt. He is sprawled on the floor and bruised. He is complaining of his aches. He is perplexed that a cripple like me is so fixed and heavy and immovable. Over the thousands of years I have met many like him. I know his type. I have the weight of time accrued and accumulated. That time is near primordial in essence.

His female partner helps him get up and dust himself off. She looks at him with disdain and at me with a curiosity and unfamiliarity. She has not met anything like me, before.

The dream ends.

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Note: We have begun watching the TV series “humans” in which a family has a new female synth or android in their house, a very human like “robot”. Some of the synths are exhibiting non machine intelligence or in other words life.