Tag: books

Pitching a Novel?

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

Last night we watched the last episode of “Stranger Things”. The last section was long and painfully drawn out filled with American saccharin and apple pie idealism. It was a bit “pass the sick bag”. We had to wait for the predictable ending for quite a while. It went out with a damp squib. No tenterhooks. Overall “Stranger Things” has been enjoyable, original and different.

Which led me to thinking, “could I do better?”

Anyway I am back to the notion of a novel. The theory being that my USP is that I once was a kosher scientist and I have a fairly deep understanding of the occult. I am no longer a practicing scientist in that I do not earn a living therefrom. There are not many like me.

That brings me back to the whole publishing minefield where many publishers require an agent. There are scam-self publishing houses or one can do Amazon-Kindle self-publishing. There are people who take advantage of the gullible who want to be published.

I know enough about how self-publishing works.

There is a catch 22.

Why write a book if it will be a complete ball ache to get published?

Is it possible to get an in principle interest from either an agent or a publisher before starting a book?

An advance seems impossible.

The big drawback in all this is getting enthusiasm for promotion. I am not sure I could be arsed.

My pitch to venture capital success rate remains very good. But I had to write a business plan for that, even if it did not get read until after the pitch. There was a manuscript of sorts with graphs, projections and shit like that.

I am pretty confident that I can come up with something original. Would it be too highbrow? Maybe. Perhaps there would not be enough intrigue, violence and shagging though. Mobile ‘phone use could be a little too sparse.

I am really not turned on by the idea of being a published author, in the book sense. I don’t want to be the story teller aiming at a world with three waterfalls…I don’t know what motivates others. There is a lot of “advice” on line about how to pitch, how to go ahead. Some of it seems very scam…

A novel would give me something to do. It is statistically unlikely to generate any revenue. The Kindle route is cost free but they hassle you for USA tax documentation. There is a lot of spam. The last dealings I had with prospective agents were unsatisfactory. I have had responses from small niche publishing houses and I did get one or two indications of at least an alleged willingness to read a manuscript. The responses were not rote bulk nor at the time AI bot generated. I still have these emails.

I have previously been interested in testing the limits of possibility…you never know where an idea can go, what it might evolve in to…

Hmnn…

Total Recall – Arnie Version

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The other night we watched the 35 year-old version of “Total Recall” starring Arnie. I have reached the age when all remakes cannot ever be better than the original.

Spoiler alert….

The gist of the plot is that Hauser has his mind adjusted so that he thinks he is Doug Quaid a builder and wielder of pneumatic tools, who then goes on a convoluted journey to infiltrate the underground resistance on Mars whilst trying to restore his memory. After Kuato the leader of the resistance is killed Quaid then refuses to be mind  wiped back so that he becomes once again the fascist special agent Hauser. There is a plot twist where which reality is real is tested. Quaid is led to believe that he has paid for a secret agent mind-trip at a company called Rekall. The Quaid/Hauser superposition is unsure. In the end the Quaid nice guy dominates and he sets off an alien machine to provide Mars with a breathable atmosphere.

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One scene suggests that the lowly manual worker Quaid is living out his fantasy as a Martian secret agent. It is all a bit far-fetched and the special effects, though leading at their time, now look a bit Blue Peter.

This is what co-pilot suggests for the above text.

“The plot follows Hauser, who is made to believe he is Doug Quaid, a builder on Mars. As Quaid, he becomes involved with the resistance, trying to regain his true identity. After the resistance leader Kuato is killed, Quaid refuses to revert to his former role as a ruthless agent. The story blurs reality and illusion, leaving Quaid uncertain whether his experiences are real or just a memory implant from Rekall. Ultimately, Quaid chooses his better nature and activates an alien device that gives Mars a breathable atmosphere.

One scene hints that Quaid’s life may just be a fantasy of being a secret agent. While the premise is a stretch, the once-impressive special effects now feel dated.”

AI has adjusted the reality…which is very considerate of it.

I guess we each choose our own narrative(s).

I have lost count how many dreams are in this blog. In the film Quaid is asked to consider if whatever he is experiencing is nothing more than a dream and therefore easily discounted.

With my feet grounded in everyday physical plane reality it is very simple to adopt the advice.

The everyday reality is simple enough. I can only rely on the measurable. Which tells me that around a dozen people read the blog according to WordPress stats. So were I to bin it only these would miss it. The basic reality is that I am a retired person with hip arthritis. Two decades ago I was a university teacher. {Assuming this is not a paid for implanted memory}. More recently I was a private tutor for ~6 years during which time I taught “A” level physics and chemistry. That is about it. I can still chop wood and do some gardening chores. My cooking skills are perhaps a little above average for savoury. The only “cakes” I ever made were hash cookies which were tasty and potent. Rocky was better than Leb, more chocolatey and unctuous…

In the circles I move in, life is very simple. On the cards is a visit to the hospital for a new hip. I will then be doing physio. Sometime around spring if we are not kicked out of France by the NF, I may be lucky enough to get a second operation after which I may eventually walk a bit better.

I am toying  with the idea of doing a blog / vlog about by incoming experience.

hip-hop-hip-op.fr and Bolshoi-hips.fr are currently available as is hippy-mchipface.fr

I’ll wager that such a blog would be more widely read…

I suspect that I could write something which is not dire, fearful and boring…perhaps when I was last at Rekall I purchased a mind-trip extension which includes delusions of creative writing capability…

Who can tell?

Dreaming Courses Dream – 14-08-2025

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Here is this morning’s dream had between 4 and 6 AM. Again another one seemingly out of the blue.

The dream starts in a faculty office. Behind a large desk is a woman in her 40/50s. She is powerful and dressed in an expensive skirt and jacket suit with a royal blue shirt. She exudes wealth and she is very accustomed to getting her own way, obeyed even. She tells me that the faculty have agreed to my proposals for a course on dreaming and that I may go ahead with these courses on an experimental basis. She needs to be kept in the loop of developments. She thinks that I am fearful and subordinate to her. When I simply very relaxed and fluid. I know that she has other agendas which she is trying to forward and that there are politics going on behind the scene. She hands me a book of mounted photos like a book of material swatches used in fashion or decorating design. The book of “swatches” has covers and I cannot see the contents. She intimates that she wants these included in the courses.

Her office leads out onto a full or partial quadrangle with a covered ambulatory or walk way. It has a light reddish-brown brick. There are cobbles in the quad. It feels a little like Greenwich but also has a sense of Berkley CAL. There is a history and the word meridian is to mind. On the side wall of the ambulatory there is a small wooden display case with a lockable glass front. In this cabinet I will display course synopsis for the passing footfall of students.

I go into an open room with whitewashed walls and a dark red stone or painted concrete floor. I am met there by a younger woman who has been assigned as to help me and, to keep an eye on me. She asks me why I think that there are no definitive books on dream content. I say that by their very nature dreams are nebulous and not well suited to reductionist quasi-logical methods. Dreaming is dreaming and it has to be approached via dreaming and not structure. Sense-making can hinder dreaming significantly.

I open the book of swatches to show to her. Inside it are photos of some kind of Tibetan centre, out in the country. There are images of coloured prayer flags blowing in the wind. One of small stupa only a few metres high. There are western white participants and a very few Tibetans dressed monastically. I know the word Drukpa is associated. It is clear that a part of the agenda from the powerful woman relates to Tibetan dream practices. There is more agenda.

The young woman has a notion that in dreaming cultures there is always a myth and a mythos. That these grow up around the dreams and the reporting thereof. As a part or her research she would like to see if we can seed a myth and a mythos into those participating in the dreaming. Rather than that being an ancient hagiography she wants to seed an artificial mythos and see where it goes. She ushers me over to the back of the room where there is a museum style display case with a sloping horizontal glass covered display. Under this are full depth “admiralty” drawers containing specimens. She pulls out one draw and there packed in cotton wool nests are several rock specimens. She selects a grey and black speckled “agate” egg. The black is dark like obsidian

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She says that this will or could be the dream egg around which we start to create a dream mythos or myth. She is excited and I say that I am happy to explore this avenue but that it needs fleshed out. We can use the egg for the birth of the course, metaphorically.

The power woman, the principle, from before knocks and enters the room.  She is wearing high heels which have been tricky on the cobbles. I show her two pages of A4 text which will serve as a flier for the course. This text will go into the cabinet. She asks what the syllabus will be and I say that the syllabus will be decided to a large extent by the attendees and mostly by dreams. She looks sceptical.

I usher her over to a tarpaulin. On which are several plants in black plastic pots tied to short bamboo supports. I say that these are going to go into the green house and that these will comment upon and be a part of the course. I ask if she would like to help us plant them. Yes. We load half the plants onto a flatbed trolley and head out of the quad-building to the university allotment where our greenhouse is. Together we all plant the plants. The principle comments that she found it very enjoyable and that it is the first time for a very long while that she has had dirt under her nails.

We go back to the quad room. The principle asks about a web presence or page. At her prompt I know that I have to send someone a link to the dream yoga blog as it currently stands. I will do this after I have written up and posted this dream.

The dream ends and I note with some surprise on my way back from the bathroom that its exactly 6:00 AM…

Alice & Bob – Quantum Jobs

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Prompted by the answer to a question on University Challenge, I typed Alice and Bob into the font of paid for promotion previously known as a search engine. The Mecca of product placed wisdom came up with a French quantum start up called Alice and Bob. They have received 100 million series B funding. They also have a fairly extensive job vacancy list. It was a tad French and probably not overly attractive internationally except for those fond of Alice in Paris Francophiles. French job descriptions can be as rigid as a rigid thing. They do not travel well.

Maybe there is a general shortage of quantum savvy job applicants….

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It occurred to me that the Quantum hype has been drowned out by the deafening AI roar. Maybe it has gone submarine like AUKUS.

That Luddite Herr Trump has been threatening the Harvard intellectual property (IP) portfolio. What a great way to ensure the death of US inventiveness and technological superiority, discourage invention and application for patents unless they are handled by MAGA lawyers, toadies and sycophants!! Already the incentive to NOT have an idea whilst at a university is high, because contractually the university owns your IP. Best stifle ideas until you are a free thinker…

Sometimes holes can be difficult to get out of. That can include ways of thinking and playbooks.

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It looks like Herr Trump is going to try again to leverage Ukraine into accepting a fait accompli agreed with Vlad the Impaler in Alaska. This forceful manipulation is an old Trump play. If he keeps alienating people, he may find himself in a hole like increasingly Billy-no-mates Israel. Trump does not understand that “friend” has a different meaning in KGB speak.

Oh look another groundhog…where did that come from….

What is the first rule when you find yourself in a hole?

Human beings can be pig-headed and stubborn. Inventive people do not share the same deal or no deal mentality as realtors. They are easily discouraged and disincentivised. One day the straw goes on the camel’s back, one too many.

Sometimes that tired old play book simply does not work. Thinking the same way that gets you into a problem cannot help to get you out of it.

There is no point in trying to explain this to someone who is vehemently adamant that they know best. Advice is as unwelcome as a dose of antibiotic resistant syphilis.

Some people are obsessed at the notion of a “corporate” solution when none exists. They may get all their ducks in line to present someone with a fait accompli sure that such a thing is irresistible. Even so-called intelligent people like professors can think like this. They can seek within group consensus oblivious that people outside the Olympian Ivory Towers do not think like them. This may not occur.

It is quackers.

People often talk with the monkey and ignore the organ grinder completely…

Anyway…

Has AI killed off the notion of quantum computation?

Where will they put all the server farms?

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Is this what our future looks like?

Castaneda and Neuroscience

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

Prompted by the dream the other day I have been having a little look into neuroscience. It seems that there is much interest in using hallucinogens to {perhaps} help with mental health. There is interest in the crossover between dreams and hallucinogenic activity. This from “Frontiers in Neuroscience”.

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In the books of Castaneda, don Juan introduces him to peyote (lophophora williamsii), jimson weed (datura) and magic mushrooms (psylocibin). Castaneda describes some of his outlandish experiences whilst off his trolly. Castaneda wrote a book on “The Art of Dreaming” which perhaps tacitly lies aback much of the Lucid Dreaming genre. One could suggest that Castaneda had an effect on neuroscience and the psychology of dreams. If you look at the graph below from the above article the similarity of psychoactive experience and dream lucidity is correlated with the don Juan substances of choice. Only LSD outperforms the “natural” substances. Cannabis comes close. {Man}

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When I was ill, I was prescribed the MAOI phenelzine which had no psychoactive effects, as far as I could tell. I had one hypertensive crisis at a business dinner in Japan, something iffy with tryamine in the seaweed. Those Nitrogen atoms look receptor ready…hydrogen bonding to the fore.

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“Phenelzine, sold under the brand name Nardil among others, is a non-selective and irreversible monoamine oxidase inhibitor (MAOI) of the hydrazine family which is primarily used as an antidepressant and anxiolytic to treat depression and anxiety. Along with tranylcypromine and isocarboxazid, phenelzine is one of the few non-selective and irreversible MAOIs still in widespread clinical use.”

I used this for probably one year. It is a MAOI to the right of the graph.

I have had limited exposure to magic mushrooms and LSD, over thirty years ago and I stopped smoking week in 1999.

Obviously if one is doing research, it must seem pukka and thoroughly scientific. I doubt anyone acknowledges Castaneda though some may have read him…

1984 Quotes – George Orwell

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“Orthodoxy means not thinking–not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”

“Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”

“If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.”

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.”

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”

“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”

“Sanity is not statistical.”

“The object of terrorism is terrorism. The object of oppression is oppression. The object of torture is torture. The object of murder is murder. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?”

“We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.”

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.”

“The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.”

“Those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future.”

“Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal.”

“All rulers in all ages have tried to impose a false view of the world upon their followers.”

Das Glasperlenspiel – Reincarnation – Missing Pieces

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It was not until I read Das Glasperlenspiel – The Glass Bead Game – that I gave much thought to past lives. Somehow the scope of the book and the Three Lives of Knecht appended caught my attention. Hesse was the first person whose mind was so comprehensive. At last. Somebody who thought a bit like me….

Based on the circumstantial evidence inter alia of dreams I can draw up a rough chronology of putative previous lives.

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The more recent graph starts ~2500 years ago as a disciple of Siddartha, possibly with a named individual. In principle I may have heard the esoteric Kālacakra first hand. It then proceeds with two further Buddhist lives, one Theravada Thai/Burmese and one Vajrayana Japanese. This is followed by a Christian priest-soldier in France and a seeker / occultist in Sicily Italy. Finally, I incarnated as a proto-scientist in Wales.

Inspection of the chart shows two “gaps”. One of a thousand years and one of ~ six hundred. It does not mean that I did not incarnate then. One can conclude that no memory / data has yet come through for these periods. A thousand years is a big gap. Looks a bit iffy.

Being cynical there is little history written for the -500 to + 600 time period. Therefore, it is more difficult for me to fabricate an internally consistent story / legend / delusion for that period.

I can cobble together a satisfactory rough explanation for this graph. What I cannot explain, what perhaps is the missing piece, is the occurrence of all the Tibetan “stuff” in my dreams.

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Speculating the most likely time for any “Tibetan” incarnation would be in the ~1200-1750 window.

No western “scientist” could publish a definitive claim for proof of reincarnation and expect a career of longevity, peer kudos and substantial research funding. A country {Tibet} can choose its leaders entirely on the basis of the Tulku phenomenon and “circumstantial” evidence.

The practice in London/Oxford/Cambridge differs from that in Lhasa and Shigatze.

Only very recently have I had imagery consistent with a Tibetan “maroon” life. I could have snuck one in before Wales.

We shall see what the dreaming brings….

Visions or Visual Hallucinations?

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If I understand it correctly the phenomena of visions plays a role in many religions. Things can be revealed by beings such as angels. Those prone to visions have been prone contextually to dreaming too.  

My general understanding is that angels are rare and play only a very important pivotal role in the religious context. They do not appear to common or garden people despite what many a new age book suggests. Helping you find the man of your dreams is probably not high on their to do list.

{I am generalising widely}.

Yet seeing something that others do not is classed as a hallucination, which can be a symptom of psychosis. Many of the figures in religious history might be diagnosed as having an episode of psychosis today.  They could be locked up and given anti-psychotic medicine.

In indigenous cultures going on a “Vision Quest” might be seen as a rite of passage. Isolated from the day to day and the tribe an individual seeks a vision of the future and his purpose. Visions can be had in caves, on high mountains. Usually, one has to step away from the mundane noise of life, maybe ease off the food.

I have participated in shamanic drumming and gone on a mini-vision quest. I can also use £250,000 femtosecond pulsed optical parametric amplifiers. It is possible that I am unique in this, there may be others. In non-linear optics world it is probably best not to talk about shamanic vision quests it could have a detrimental impact on promotion and employment prospects. So, many may have kept schtum like me.

It could be argued that I have relatively pure Welsh indigenous blood from the matrilinear line based in deepest darkest Snowdonia. As an indigenous it is not so weird for me to do indigenous things.

Anyway, I have had a number of visions over the years including when I lived in Brixton and was an academic. Needless to say, I told no colleagues nor a GP. This primarily because I always knew that I was having a vision/hallucination and was aware of my physical plane surroundings in day-to-day world at the same time. They did not overly impinge, nor were any of them frightening. If you speak to a medic about this kind of thing you could be opening a Pandora’s box and be exposed to pet theories and the latest pharma sponsored medication.

My working hypothesis concerning many of these visions is that most fall in the category of past-life recall. Some might think me whacko or that I have delusions of grandeur. People can have very closed minds.

Back in the mid seventies I used to travel by airplane from Zambia to school in Gloucestershire. There were six flights a year and by the age of 13, in the 1970s, I had 150,000 air miles. I am guilty about my childhood carbon footprint 😉. On occasion there would be a fuel stop at Malta. Each time I landed there I had a massive déjà-vu. Without knowing why, I knew that I had been there before.

This morning around 6 AM I was not sleeping so I started to do a meditation. For whatever reason, I was having difficulty and I started to have a relaxed enjoyable vision of myself in a cowled cloak and chain mail. The setting of the vision was around 800 years ago. I was aware of the vision and the bedroom. I could hear the wife breathing.

Why this is happening now I don’t know. It did point me back to a vision I had in 2003.

The vision last night may refer to “the knights of Malta”, a term used in Brittany for both Templars and the Hospitaliers, Ordre de Saint-Jean de Jérusalem.

I have had many visions associated with this putative life, a French one.

Nearby there is a hospitalier commanderie whose records do not go back past 1313 when the goods of the Templars were ceded to them.

There was also relatively nearby a Templar commanderie and the relics of a small church. The look of which is not far from one I saw in another vision.

What would you do?

Would you tell your general practice GP doctor?

Would you tell your line manager at work?

Would you imagine yourself off your trolley?

Or would you think that the sanest hypothesis was past life recall?

I am quite looking forward to seeing what may or may not happen over the next day or so…