Wow. Today was off to a blindling mediocre start. Got up at 1:30 or so due to me going to bed at 7am the… earlier that day. I don’t really like sleeping past 12:30 or so, but when you go to bed that late, it’s only natural. I proceeded to do nothing for awhile, as usual.
Things kicked into gear at 5pm when Maren, Kelsey, Alex Johnson, Clint, and I all went to Strawberry Jam, a little concert of some local garage bands out at Sanderson Gardens, a strawberry patch. It was.. okay. The music was good, but the event wasn’t loud or fast enough. A bit too unorganized and laid back. Hopefully a similar event with higher quality can be arranged. I missed the Battle of the Bands and Tishfest unfortunately. I hear they were good. After that we went to Country Kitchen to eat and chill for awhile. That was good and entertaining as always. Oh, and I saw Sonya today for the first time this summer. That was good. Sonya is cool. She get’s the goldstar of the day.
After Bitchin’ (country kitchen) we decided to go to Central Park, that is, the playground at Central Elementary. Metal and Wood have gone the way of plastic. It’s kind of sad to see all the old equipment vanished. We then wandered to Pioneer park for awhile and then to rent a movie. We got Virgin Suicides (good movie, going to watch again later for Maren) and Waking Life.
We, or I should say I, ended up watching Waking Life. About 3/4th of the way through, everyone decided they were tired and that it was time to leave. I’m fine, but standing there saying “i’m gonna leave, meh!” for 20 minutes is kind of lame. The movie is really deep and needs to be paid attention to be understood. You can’t be talking to each other and grasp it. First off, the movie is beautiful. It’s actual film, but then drawn over for a surreal realistic cartoon look. Everything warps and is shifty making it a dreamlike state. It only adds to the movie. The movie talks a lot about different theories on life and why we’re here. It also taks about the different ways we perceive life. It is also heavily connected to dreams and goes into lucid dreaming, the ability to control a dream. It was just really thought provoking and I was sad to see everyone not enjoy it as much. The intellectual conversations may seem far-fetched, but they were conversations I want to have. I just really enjoyed it.
Something from the movie to ponder: See, in the waking world, the neurosystem inhibits the activation of the vividness of memories. […] See, you’d be maladapted for the perceptual image of a predator to be mistaken for the memory of one, and vice versa. If the memory of a predator conjured up a perceptual image, we’d be running off to the bathroom everytime we had a scary thought. So you have these seratonic neurons that inhibit hallucinations, that they themselves are inhibited, during REM [rapid eye movement] sleep. See, this allows dreams to appear real, while preventing competition from other perceptual processes. This is why dreams are mistaken for reality. To the functional system of neural-activity that creates our world, there is no difference between dreaming a perception and an action, and actually the waking perception and action.
Or simply, due to chemicals present when you’re awake, and not present when you’re asleep, there is no difference between reality and dreams as perceived by you. And really, the world is all as you perceive it. I’m starting to believe in existensialism, I am the master of my own fate. I love this movie.
That gives me goosebumps thinking about it.