Category: Science

Chemistry Degree Course – Knowledge & Compliance Dream 14-03-2026

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

Here is this morning’s dream

The dream opens in a Chemistry undergraduate teaching laboratory. Myself and a dozen or so others are getting back our Chemistry degree first year examination papers. The faculty, all younger than me by decades, are wearing white lab coats. The exam results are generally poor, the idea being to shock us into study. I get my paper back and look at the marking and comments. I can see a couple of proofs which I sketched out but did not finish because I knew the answer from that point. I get to the end and see that my mark is fifty one out of a hundred. Appended is the comment “one of the top marks for this exam”. Various of my peer group have done less well in the exam. I know that reason I have done better is because of my stint teaching “A” level Chemistry. I know that to get marks answers must correlate to the marks scheme provided only. There is no scope for even correct deviance. The people who have answered at “degree” level as it was two decades ago have been marked down and wrong. I understand that this is because the knowledge has changed a bit and that the acceptable answers have become more rigidly defined.

I go to the library and thumb through a modern edition of Atkins  “Physical Chemistry”. I note that it has changed with bizarre “knowledge” boxes and artificially highlighted “take homes”. I am then back in the teaching lab. I ask one of the faculty what text books we need. He hands me a PDF which is entitled “how to pass courses”. It is a guide on how best to give the expected answers to exam questions. He says that the details of how to get the text are on the course materials.

I ask him if the course might accept that it is not right in all cases, that it is a simplification. I explain that I once bought an achromatic lens which was marketed as truly achromatic. I explain that using Nd: YAG wavelengths of 1064 and 532 nm the focal points differed at even moderate laser intensity. The lens was achromatic only at very low laser fields. The manufacturer would not listen to my findings. The faculty member says that this is irrelevant. There are only the accepted answers to the course. He is mildly threatening. “If you don’t answer the questions as we set them and provide the accepted answers, you will not pass the course.” There is an element of coercion and exercise of power over. “If you do not comply you will not pass. You will fail. You will not get the accepted qualification”. He is unaware of my level of knowledge and adamant that he is right. I must comply with him (them) and what they deem right and complete.

In the dream I know that there is a problem. Because of course metrics courses and answers are designed in such a way that they can be measured. The guidebooks on how to pass are there to ensure that students get good grades and thence the course providers and examiners get good teaching feedback. I note that there is a circular delusion about improving standards and qualities. I note also that compliance is a problem when it comes to what knowledge is accepted and acceptable. In the dream I think they are kidding themselves about what they know and about knowledge. I suspect that they are wholly unwilling to accept this.

The dream ends…

South Korea – Quantum Perimeter – Dream 13-03-2026

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Here is this morning’s dream the subject matter of which is out of the blue.

The dream opens on a bright sunny morning in a campus like estate with mid-rise modern buildings. It is “Singapore” clean and tidy. Many young people are milling around. They are smartly dressed and of mostly of East Asian appearance. The place is alive and buzzing. There is a sense of hurry and of purpose. From the signage and the writing thereupon I can tell that we are in South Korea at a hybrid university – business – technology campus of which Samsung is a major part. The logo is present but not dominant. The young people are well dressed and there is a sense of going to work. I have been invited there.

I notice that there is a lack of coffee shops and other outlets at ground level in the architect designed garden spaces. In the distance I can see a small kiosk come shop attached to the corner of one of the low rise buildings. I make my way there. For some reason I want to buy some cigarettes {I have not smoked in quite a while}. Looking through the window I cannot at first see any Marlboro Gold. I go inside the shop and ask if they have any Marlboro Gold. The man serving is an Asian man of a similar age to me. He is balding and has slightly unruly hair. He says in accent less {to me} English that he thinks he has some somewhere. I check my wallet and only have a limited amount of local currency. He finds some Marlboro Gold and brings them over to the counter. He gets the card payment machine and I make a payment using my dark blue French bank card. He then hands me the change, which is in the form of five gold coins, two of these are about four centimetres in diameter and three of these are about six centimetres. They fall on the counter in the form of the Olympic rings logo. The hue of the golden coins is slightly reddish like Welsh gold. This he says is the change and he hands me a packet of Marlboro Gold which contains fifty cigarettes. He says that these are all he has left, packets of fifty, and that they are especially for me. The coins morph into chocolate biscuits enclosed in a golden foil wrapper. I am able to eat the gold / golden covered biscuits if I want. I note again that there are five of them. I take out a velvet old school drawstring pouch-purse and pop the coins in. I pull the drawstring to and slip the bag in my pocket. I pick up the cigarettes and leave. There is a tremendous sense of confraternity with the man in the shop. We have known each other and do recognise each other. We bid farewell.

I am now upstairs at some trade delegation put on by the Korean government – university – incubator committee. It is top-notch with servers in traditional Korean costume. The buffet to one side is gourmet and presented with a marked attention to detail. There are a lot of “suits” there and the organisers are encouraging networking and deal making. I start having a conversation with a local big cheese and his wife. I am commenting that I find the spoken Korean language quite easy on the ear. It has a nice sound to it. In the dream I realise that I am actually talking Korean which the woman in particular finds very funny. She hides her mouth with her hand to chuckle. We return to English speaking. She wants to know if my wife is OK with the idea of moving to South Korea. I say that we have not discussed it yet but that the Korean woman can meet with her if she would like. There is a sense that they work to ensure the whole family is on board.

The scene changes and I am walking along a corridor in a low rise research institute. It has ceiling to floor glass windows and looks out onto the campus. The corridor leads to a  café come hang-out space. I am walking and talking with a man in a white coat who is some kind of prof / scientist. We are in the “Quantum Perimeter Institute” which is a specially funded new initiative here in South Korea. I know that in the basement there are a number of very high specification laser laboratories. To the side of the building is a purpose built refrigeration / cryogenic plant. It is high specification and can handle huge loads. We are talking about a theoretician, a recently recruited quantum specialist. The professor is suggesting that I work with him. I can add the experimental know how to his ideas.

In the dream I know that I am at the Quantum Perimeter Institute because of my left field and unorthodox thinking about some of the esoteric implications adjunct to quantum science.

We continue to walk down the corridor towards the smell of coffee.

The dream ends.

The Nature of Consciousness – Roger Penrose Dream 24-02-2026

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Here is this morning’s dream had between 4 and 7 AM.

The dream opens with me conversing mind-to-mind or telepathically with another being. We are looking down at a gathering of Tibetan Buddhists, lamas. They are dressed in robes and at the edge of the gathering, very much at arm’s length is Charlie, a nagal’s courier.

I say-think, “unfortunately Charlie is not very bright, not very intelligent. He is not intelligent enough to realise that he lacks intelligence and therefore assumes that he knows correctly a lot more than he does. It is a common problem that people are not sufficiently intelligent to understand their own lack of a well-honed intellect. As a consequence there is adamant assertion without open critical thinking.”

“Yes this is true people assume they know and understand more than they do and can be dogmatic.” Is the reply.

I then look again at the gang or committee of lamas.

“The difficulty with the Tibetans is that they have a vested interest in being the world experts in meditation and consciousness. It is a part of their brand. They may indeed have studied Buddhist texts and the Tibetan canon and may be expert thereupon but their thinking is developed only in one area. They have not a diverse nor modern intellect. They are arrogant and not open to external thinking, they want to incorporate things into their perspective solely. It is not a two way street. They may be intelligent but they do not have a far reaching wide knowledge based intellect incorporating science. In short they are a closed shop and stuck in their ways. They are not approachable in any meaningful way because they must be, in their eyes, the experts. They do not understand that they are insular.”

I go on.

“There is a limit to so-called pure consciousness. It needs grounded and generalised via an expansive and inclusive intellect. The latter word inclusive being of great importance. There is nothing you can do when people do not have the intelligence to understand that their intelligence is limited and closed off. You cannot explain to someone something about which they lack the intelligence to understand or encompass. It is by definition almost, an impossible thing.”

“Yes. Sometimes you can only go so far.”

“There are jhanas, states of consciousness and expansive awareness, past what most of these have ever perceived. There is no way that you can convince an expert.”

The scene changes and I am in a medical / dental consultation in Edinburgh. I am with a man who is slightly older than me, his post doc researcher and a couple of younger graduate students. He is a psychologist – neuroscientist and wearing a white lab coat. He has grey wispy hair and spectacles. His postdoc is Hispanic. She has long very dark hair and is wearing blue jeans and a hoody, hood down. They are making some measurements on my brain using electrodes. I am sat in what looks like a dentist chair.

I am explaining to him that the problem with neuroscientists trying to understand consciousness is that they lack the training in meditative technique. They have no understanding personally of the states  they are trying to measure. They are measuring like blind men who have never been there. It is like making a map of a land which they have never set foot upon. The intellectual understanding of consciousness is limited therefore to rational supposition. Only a truly great intellect could “hold” and understand these states without direct personal experience of being “there”. A mind would have to be very versatile and expansive yet well controlled and quiet.

I say that maybe I should talk with Roger Penrose about the nature of consciousness.  He perhaps might understand and get the gist. If one verbalizes a state of consciousness well one can “take” another mind “there” at least partially. One can build a “picture” which might be partially shared and imagined.

The guy is initially interested.

I ask him that given he is a psych-neuro would he like to collaborate with me and Roger Penrose on a book? He no longer has to worry about his career as he is essentially emeritus.

He  thanks me for the invitation but he does not believe that I can add anything beyond what “they” the neuroscientists already know. He declines. He thinks that I am waffling.

I think that he does not know that he does not know. His intellect will not understand how limited his understanding is nor where his knowledge ends...

I awake; the dream ends.

Water Spirit – Misogi – Clean Water Venture Dream 22-02-2026

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Here is last night dreaming which is in two related parts.

The first part opens on the shores of an alpine lake high up in the Japanese mountains. The lake is shaped like a glacial corrie or cwm and is of a pristine light turquoise blue colour. The water is hyper transparent and crystal cold. The air is crisp. To the rear of the lake is a snow covered peak. The scenery is magnificent with Japanese acers and maples. The water from the lake leaves by a small stream over a waterfall cascade which drops twenty-thirty metres over rock to a small plunge pool. The sound of the small waterfall is melody. The ambience of the environment is close to perfection. The view down from the mountains is far reaching out to the sea.

It is ago something like a thousand years ago. I am on the shore dressed as a Buddhist priest. It is definitely me and I am Japanese. In the dream I know this to be my prior life. The smell is also characteristic of Japan. With me on the shore is a spirit warlord and a small retinue of spirit warriors. There is a Japanese woman who is of high noble family and she has her retinue of ladies in waiting and an armed guard. They are dressed in great finery. The Japanese woman is part water spirit, the nature spirit of the high lake and part woman. Because of this and her relationship with the Imperial family in Shintō she is considered the goddess of the pure waters and an embodiment of misogi or purification. The water is already pure but must also always be blessed. The spirit warlord is angry and the woman must choose to either join him back in the spirit world entirely or relinquish her spirit part and remain human. In a sense I am adjudicating.

The woman does not take kindly to the angry demands of the spirit warlord. She walks over to me and places my hand firmly on her genitals on top of her clothes. She then slips it though her clothes and I can feel her flesh. Forcefully holding my hand there she rubs herself against it until she orgasms. At which point she shudders and relinquishes her water spirit aspect. She has become human.

The warlord watching says, “so you have chosen!!” He heads off into the pristine forest with his retinue of warriors. I reclaim my hand and the woman is surrounded by her ladies in waiting who comfort her. After she recovers she asks me to do a ritual of purification, of misogi, using the waters of the lake. Although it is Shintō I know the ritual well. I have a bamboo bucket and a small bamboo ladle. Which I prepare for the ritual with water from the stream.

I wake up for a visit and a 3 AM ibuprofen.

I am now in a busy city {London} office building. It is just East of The Strand and I am due to meet some financiers / venture capitalists. They have been funding a high end water business. The idea is to create ultra niche very expensive bottled water which is ritually purified and attracts a premium price. I have been asked to look into their investment. I am with a woman in a business suit who is in a rush. She is a bit “doff your cap” to the investors and anxious. She ushers me into a room in which there a number of “suits” sat around a boardroom style expensive table. They tell me that there is a prototype purification set up and pilot line that they want me to inspect. It takes impure near sewage water and makes it top end. They know I am a chemist-scientist-technologist with an entrepreneurial background.

The scene changes and I am in a laboratory. There is a huge blown glass apparatus with many coils of glass tubing. There are two sand-clay filtration stages and a long flow tube with an ultraviolet laser photolyzing chemicals and killing residual bacteria. The throughput is small and this is what is worrying the finance people. I look at the rig and it seems fine to me. It is obvious however that if they start with such impure water the throughput must be very slow. Purification is a process that takes time and effort. If they want top-end water they must start with a source which is already very good, premium and which only needs a bacteriological cleanse.

I am due to present my findings to the committee. As I walk through the building I am told that it is shutting up for the weekend. That I need to close off the lab and give my keys to the people on the third floor. The financiers have pretty much decided that they are going to pull the plug on the investment. I know that they have totally missed the point. All they can see is high throughput. They cannot see the value of purified water blessed by the likes of me. That brand which we might call misogi can attract premium price.

I go through the emptying building and I cannot find the office where I am supposed to deposit the keys. The occupants have rushed off for their hedonistic weekend jollies of excess. I walk past the front security desk and leave the keys with the uniformed man on the desk. I exit via the revolving door onto a busy central London street.

The dreaming ends.

Wet Memory – Intrinsic and Extrinsic Entropy Dream – 30-01-2026

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Here is last night’s dream which is out of the blue and does not relate to the day to day of fence repair after another visit by the wild boars. Where this came from I have no clue.

I am walking through central London, Mayfair Piccadilly. It is a bright sunny day. I notice people converging on an ornate building in light coloured near white stone. It is a hybrid of Burlington House the old Royal Society of Chemistry where I spent many enjoyable hours in the library and of The Royal Society. People are gathering for some kind of scientific meeting. There is a mixture of academics and industry figures. I am not invited to this meeting. Through the doors and in the atrium I can see a reception desk which is being staffed by some women whom I used to know, a generation younger than me.

On a whim I walk in to say hi. They greet me and I ask if there is any chance of a cup of coffee. They get me one and warn me that it is not all that. I see that the conference is on “New Frontiers in Memory”. It has the theme of molecular architectures and memory and is of a think tank type of conjecture meeting. Rob walks in with one of the invited speakers who is a yank around 40. He is some kind of big cheese at the conference. Rob and I recognise each other after all these years. He introduces me to the speaker who is going to talk on protein molecular architectures and memory storage in the brain. He tells me that memory is all about entropy. You have to work against entropy to remember.

Rob invites me upstairs to look around. There are academic posters and a coffee service area. We queue and get a coffee and then stand at a pub style chest height table. In my mind’s eye I can see the way the cheese tries to address a memory array stored in a synthetic gel matrix. It is his way of modelling a wet memory, a mimic of biological memory which he seeks to incorporate into the next generation computers. I say to him that the encoding is of two types and that there are intrinsic and extrinsic entropies. The intrinsic entropy relates to where an individual amino acid is found along a protein chain and the pattern of its neighbour molecules. The extrinsic entropy is related to its local environment, degrees of folding and how space filling it is, how many gaps and voids are incorporated in the macroscopic protein structure. He says that he not previously thought about the molecular location entropy within a given protein strand. It might answer one of the questions he has. I can see in my mind’s eye an address matrix or tensor in mathematical form which defines coordinates for a given amino acid in a 3d protein amongst a wider gel matrix. The intrinsic lack of entropy is how a memory is stored. Memory works my comparing entropy. Anything not expected entropically is a memory. Low entropy is memory.

I say that the coffee is poor and that I hope they enjoy the meeting. I am off in search of a Starbucks, Costa or Caffè Nero.

The dream ends and I think WTF was that…

Two Golden Dragons – Ogyen Trinley Dorje Karmapa – Laser Start-up Dream 29-12-2025

~ quantumdreamer ~ 1 Comment

Here is last night’s dream in two parts. The first had around 2 AM and the second part after 5 AM. In between I went downstairs to watch some YouTube and have a snack. Plutonium by people at Nottingham Uni was one of the clips.

The dream starts with me in an indeterminate space where I am inquiring of a disembodied voice. I ask for advice on why I am having trouble sleeping. It says, “It is because of the dragons, the twin dragons you have inside of you, the restless dragons. They keep stirring.” I note what the voice is saying.

Then in full visual field I can see two spectacular highly ornate golden dragons, “Chinese” in character. Theye are Li dragons with no discernible legs, serpentine in appearance with fearsome heads. I know that these are Mu {moo phonetically} dragons. They are my dragons, in me. I remember “collecting” the first Chinese dragon two decades ago. These dragons “swim” inside me. They are a part of me. They are also Vajra dragons.

{I understand Li to be fire in the dream but note that it might refer to the longer word Loong on waking.}

The image of the dragons persists for a very log time on and off. They swirl. They face each other.

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They then chase each other head to tail in an animated ying yang. They present over and over, in various shades of iridescent gold. They are present on the orange-yellow and red flag of Bhutan. They are druk and dragon, dragon druk. They are most definitely oriental and not western dragons. I feel them writhe in me like the opening sequence to “The Crying Freeman” film. Despite my real world handicap, I feel lithe, flexible and able. The dragons are on my skin and under it, in me. I am dragon like able.

I see the double Vajra dragons of Bhutan..

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I can see people in a Himalayan street with long golden dragon “puppets” held aloft on sticks dancing through the streets in procession. The puppet dragons are blowing in the wind and harsh Tibetan style horns are playing. There is celebration. They are making the druk, the dragons dance. It is a dragon dance, festival.

The image of golden two dragons head chasing tail disembodied in space against a cloudy thunder sky replays, over and over. I see dragons against a summer sky. I see dragons against the stars in the firmament. These are the two golden dragons, nimble and fluid.

I awake around 4 AM France time. I am unsure if I will get back to sleep. I have an ultra-present image of Karmapa Ogyen Trinley in my visual field. I understand that he is doing a morning meditation. I take some medication and go downstairs for a snack. The visual image of Karmapa remains very strong even when watching TV. I “tell” him to send someone for me if he is that interested. I go back to bed half expecting the Karmapa to materialise.

I doze off and find myself in an industrial unit on a technology park. I have taken it over at a bargain price and I am auditing the space therein. There are rooms for offices, rooms for labs and rooms for production. I am collecting together a group of people in an ultra-high technology laser based start-up. I have with me a youngish man and an organiser-able woman. She is taking notes and commenting where needed. She is my right-hand “man”. I show the man the lab spaces.

On an optical table there is an ultra-fast laser system with harmonic generation. We can see blue and green laser beams. It is a new type of time domain spectrometer /device. It is small footprint and completely novel. I say that we need to attract investors and grow the company.

Two men in suits join us and take the tour. They want to know what my objectives and milestones are. I say to them that under no circumstance will I adopt that old-fashioned way of thinking. They say that it might be difficult to attract investors if I do not. I say that I have a small track record, this is not the first time I have done this. One asks what is the first target. I say it is to manufacture and sell the first unit. After that all will be easy. He asks what the sale price is. I reply that it is a quarter of a million. He says that this will not pay many salaries. I say that people will work here for joint ownership and not for pay.

I take them all to lunch at a canteen in a neighbouring company. The woman serving knows me and although I have no money she is happy to put it on my tab, my account.

Back in the facility the people are setting up desks and computers. Some investors are coming. That investment must be on equal share. There can only be one type of share, no fancy preference shares. The younger people are nervous and sceptical. I am very relaxed because I know that the technology is one of a kind, unheard of. It will be easy to attract the investment but more difficult to invent an entirely new way of operating as a company. I have my dragons inside and they are auspicious.

The dream ends and it is 9 AM!!

Man of Knowledge – Science?

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I’ll suggest that I am too whacko for mainstream scientists and not whacko enough and therefore science-phobic for what might be called new agers. As a consequence I inhabit a no man’s land regarded with suspicion from behind the machine guns of each set of trenches.

From my perspective I have met a few people who have harped on that they are men of knowledge yet they know very little about modern science. Seems to me they have a whopping great gap in that knowledge. Call me nit picking but this seems big to me.

I am a “nasty” spoilsport scientist on one hand and a unicorn jockey flaky tree hugger on the other. I have looked into the ”occult” and things like Buddhist philosophy further than most. Those who are experts in these areas do not know modern science to the extent I do. Yet they may imagine they know more thoroughly than I, because I am tainted by science and perhaps not “pure”.

Once people even paid me to teach “science”.

This morning I had an extensive and  highly technical dream concerning the excited electronic states of small single ringed substituted aromatic heterocycles. It looked at the charge distribution among various atoms and how that changed upon optical excitation and what that did for the pKa of various protons. I was discussing this with someone as a means for a targeted and localised change in pH in vivo. There was a time when I probably knew way more than was healthy about such things. One can extrapolate from single to double ringed heterocycles to an extent. If you know why this is interesting, you know..

Quite why I had this dream I do not know. We watched a film “The Exorcism”, Master Chef Australia and Celebrity MasterChef UK  last night. Neither of these would point at configuration interaction in electronic excited states. Nor would it explain Naropa or seraphim.

It is funny that “new agers” and luddites like Trump are suspicious of science and scientists and equally weird that science can glance down the nose at the uninitiated. I have had my vaccinations and can also do Vajrayana chanting. I can solve a two dimensional particle in a box Schrödinger equation {still} and know how to light incense sticks and smudge with smouldering sage, I can do shamanic drumming.

It is all about Garry Glitter really.  People want to know whose gang you are in…what your true colours are…

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Hopefully in a few weeks’ time I will feel a little less crippled.