Fever Dreams

I ate stale or spoiled curd rice from Bheemeshwara on Sunday, which made me puke, so I threw it off. This was followed by suffering for two days, with symptoms similar to food poisoning. I could not eat or even drink anything without puking... got fucked basically, but had some glorious, persistent vivid dreams. 

One was on how AI agents are going to make all knowledge workers obsolete. I was continuously dreaming over four-five sleep cycles of Agentic AI creating a physical temperature monitoring and regulation device, because I was constantly feeling too hot or too cold. This was the result of watching a podcast on the subject by David Kipping (Spotify link for those who hate the ads on YouTube). Another few cycles were on increasing competition between states in the space domain, and I imagined in vivid detail an MoU signed between Tamil Nadu and Karnataka on competing in space, and whoever launches more rockets getting more share of the Kaveri waters to support their activities! 

Dream Diary SGNP metro edition

 So this morning saw some weird dream where I was travelling in a metro rake through SGNP, going over the treetops. I saw a tank and some classic car outside the window, but there was some problem with the rake. First it went in one direction, left behind a few cars, then it started going backwards, and shed a few cars as well. I remember being frustrated by the journey because it wasn't going where we wanted. The frustration woke me up, which was the whole point of repetitive dreams that don't go anywhere and make you feel stuck I feel, another form of nightmare to wake you up, only it is frustrating instead of being scary. 

Was a nice metro though, something like this can be experienced in the airport line, especially if you go all the way to Yashobhoomi. 

Dream Diary book binding edition

 So I was in Bengaluru, at my Grandmother's house. For some context, they have a lot of books, some of them hand-bound into volumes, such as Phantom and Mandrake comics. The Asterix Comics entire series are there, and these have been covered with transparent material. Me and my two cousin sisters, and my grandmother did all these covers, as part of craft. Mine are a bit wonky. 

So in the dream, I was in that house, reading a low quality book, that just came apart as I was reading it. It was a fairly fat book, and part of a series, something like the Oxford Quick Reference series, but the books were even smaller. Some were thin, some where fat, not of uniform size. Anyway, so this book kind of falls apart, some of the gatherings (this is the clump of pages sewn together, also known as a signature) had been inverted, and one had come apart and was reinserted into the wrong position. 

I then got into an argument with my aunt and cousin as we all tried to put it back together. It was a bit argumentative, but it was like catching up at the same time. My grandmother was silent and not saying much, just working on fixing the book. I let them figure it out while they were blaming me, while I carefully covered the rest of the books in the series in nice brown and grey craft paper on the inside, and black covers on the outside, with gold letters in Times New Roman. 

This is the second time in two days that I have seen lettering in Times New Roman in my dreams. While I wasn't kicked to lucidity this time, I did sort-of realise everything was fake, and it pushed me towards wakefulness. It is one thing to be lucid and continue to dream, controlling your actions in the dream world. It is another thing to 'wrap up' a dream while you slowly wake up and the dream dissolves, where you transition from dreaming to kind of directing or wishing lol. Anyway, when I was done, I was awake, and had decided consciously (not lucid) that my completed, wrapped books looked like this! 

PS, apparently this is a rare book, and I have a copy back home lol. My grandfather was a homeopath. Now, if you are an uninformed atheist you are gonna say there is no way this works, and it is a placebo, but the thing is My grandfather and most practicing homeopaths do not dissolve the active ingredient seven times, they just give the second or third solution lol. My grandfather's treatment for cold was mercury, and they worked lightning fast! I think my grandfather had cured the common cold, and he brought up two daughters and a son like that! 

Dream Diary O BC edition

 So I got lucid early today morning because of a very strange reason. I was listening to Joe Rogan podcasts with Graham Hancock over the weekend, queuing up all 11 episodes in which he appeared, and also have been playing Anno 117 quite a bit, so it is not surprising that I was roaming around the excavations of a town on the fringes of a volcano... and came across a Roman Mural, that is pretty close to what is depicted here, only there was a single star chart of the eclipse on top... 

Now what made me lucid was seeing the O BC on the mural (not Year O as shown here), it was actually 0BC, and the font was Times New Roman too! Anyway, I knew there was no 0BC, or year 0, and that the years went directly from 1 BC to 1 AD, so I knew I was dreaming! Now what I am wondering here is if my brain already knew that why did it conjure that in the mural, and if my brain wants to kick me into lucidity because I enjoy it. 

Weird. 

Anyway, drizzled a bit in Delhi today, cab fares shot up, people got distressed about commuting back home. It was cold and I enjoyed that, but in my four+ years here, never seen it rain continuously for more than four hours... so I would not say that I have ever seen rain in Delhi. These Delhi people do not know what rain looks like. Also reading a book called Dinosaurs of India. More tomorrow. KTHXBAI. 

Missed a couple of dreams

Missed a few dreams because I had not logged in with my personal id on the laptop I am reviewing right now. These were quite immersive and colourful ones. Urban exploration has reached deep into my subconsciousness, where I explore decaying cities with interesting constructions, and document them with photos on my smartphone. Now this mental model of both the phone and the camera and the UI has all been sharpened, so things like photos not being saved, the device being an odd shape or the UI being off no longer occur, and I do not get lucid. I remember exploring a temple city with a tank yesterday. 

Today morning I saw some beautiful sights. One was of solitary glowing trees of bright bejewelled colours and textures like rubies and sapphires in fields of light or clouds. Another was lots of tiny blinking small glowing particles filling the sky and making different patterns like the murmurations of swarming starlings. Woke up feeling pretty elated. 

Something Something

 I am ditching the weird timestamp thing, and hopefully getting back to daily blogging at the ends of work days. I went to a wedding in Chandigarh of an office colleague, and it was a lot of fun. The hotel had an abandoned wing that I also explored. There are so many things that I want to do in a day, but am not able to. 

Delhi is a funny city. You can get a lot of things for cheap, but you wont even imagine the kind of tricks that people here pull off. Almost nothing is actually priced at the printed MRP, which I don't know why it is there. You need to bargain for everything. Now you do not expect to buy dubious screwdrivers that crumble when used on screws, but you can get them in Delhi. Similarly the immersion heater can fry your plug points, the tissue paper can be non-absorbent, nail clippers will break against toenails, zips of jackets will fail... the list goes on. Basically you need to buy only good quality stuff from reliable, expensive stores, so in the end, Delhi is not as cheap as people claim it to be. 

Freaking dubious merchants all across the city. 

I also went to the ISPA conference IISC, which is confusingly named similar to the Indian Institute of Science. The exhibition was sad, and there was nothing new compared to the second NSD exhibition. I really should have asked GalaxEye about which vehicle they are using to go to Space, has to be a SpaceX transporter mission. The timeline of ISRO is getting changed so rapidly, that it is hard to keep up. First they juggled the order of the missions, and now they have juggled the payloads on the missions! 

Almost every week the configuration of the NGLV and LMLV are being updated. At the conference, I met some top space reporters from the country even though most of the media section was empty. It was a fun, off-beat conference, but the press release from the second day is not out yet. Waiting for that. 

My laptop fan is making a lot of noise and it is driving me nuts. I used the dubious screwdriver to open it up, and the internals were not only dusty, but also caked with some long-dead fungus. I cleaned it all out, but I think I need to remove and properly clean the problematic fan. It is funny that I can get it to shut down by just pressing down on the chassis. I do not have a good working machine now, because my gaming laptop is overheating and shutting down as well. Need to do something about it, and I am going to go home now and operate all my machines. Might need to go to Nehru Place to fix both the laptops, but before that I want to try by myself by getting a good screwdriver kit from MR DIY. I found a new store in Saket that is just outside Select CityWalk, which is pretty good. 

Also The Jughead Special at Saravana Bhavan at Janpath is something else. It is a milkshake made up of figs, dates, strawberry icecream and cold milk. Just crazy good, among the most beautiful things made by humans. Like forget the SpaceX Starship or the Intel Processor, this Jughead Special is what can truly rival neutron stars or interacting black holes. 

Dream Diary fucking Police edition

It started off pretty innocently. Me and my friends were trekking in SGP. A freaking tiger started chasing us, my friends ran away, I jumped from a duct, and saw two small tiger cubs hiding beneath the duct. I just follow the stream out of the jungle, and catch up to my friends who had come out from another entrance. We are talking in excited tones about the tiger, when a man in a gorilla costume attacks us. 

Again, we run run run and scatter

I slide, dodge, let everyone run past me, and roll into a small store. I buy a cigarette, and some chivda. A bunch of locals catch me and accuse me of disturbing wildlife, and tell me to compensate, I have to participate in a Ramleela, and the guy in the gorilla costume is playing a vanar along with his friend who is also in a gorilla costume. These locals did not like us venturing into the jungle and disturbing a tigress with two young cubs. 

They ask us to pick roles, I decide to be Sugriv. They are placated, similarly, all other people are assigned roles and given costumes too. While these other people are getting ready, I give one of the poor local kids chivda. Her mother says I am good. 

Now, since my friends struggled with the locals, the police get involved, and demand a bribe of 120 bucks. I just pay the bribe. The police let my friends go. I go to buy more chivda to the shop, but when I am paying, some lout tries to scam me by trying to slip a key in my pocket, to make it look like I have stolen it. I catch his hands. The police sees this and tells me to hold his hand firmly, and handcuffs me to the lout. The lout does some sleigh of hand, and makes the handcuff go between my hand and belt loop. I feel like the lout and the police are together trying to scam me in some way, and continue to hold tight to his hand, preventing him from escaping. 

I start abusing the cop and telling him you guys are useless, cannot even catch a bicycle thief who is clearly visible on CCTV camera, are corrupt, just go about harassing kids smoking ganja, don't do any work, have no training, and are gundas just like the thieves that they are supposed to catch. 

Woke up feeling a deep disgust for police pigs. 

Space Travel Edition DD

 Woke up dreaming that I am an astronaut on a mission! 

It was some kind of tower launch complex. People were being selected for an important flight. I was slow, and took a wrong turn in an elevator, and someone else got my spot for reaching early. There were seven seats on the flight (so a shuttle crew?). One of them got bumped off after a health screening. I was talking to another cadet, and explaining politics. 

I said something like, this is not politics, this is something far worse, these are people tripping on power. They just like the amount of control they have over people's lives. 

I then calmly went for my flight, since the spot was free and woke up. 

⛭⛣⚴⛭∇⛭☿.♆☋☋⛭∇

Something weird happened today morning. I woke up feeling like the barrier between two worlds had been breached, like something very wrong and evil had happened. I had gone to sleep listening to a podcast. We were a bunch of people in a room listening to this guy talking. It was about all life in the universe being in the form of information, but the information was encoded within the fabric of spacetime itself. 

I woke up with the stale, salty taste, something that happens after a migraine attack. The dream was similar in some ways to another one I had a few days back, like as if Im on a different track only, and dealing with something very important, and universally fundamental. 

I went back to office and listened to the podcast, because the memory of the dream vanished rapidly as soon as I woke up. I even turned off the podcast and went back to sleep in an attempt to recover it, but I dreamt of something entirely different in round two. Im short-circuiting or hacking the sleep cycles, to see how it goes. Going to sleep at 11:00, with an alarm for 04:30, and another alarm for 7:00. Then, I can put in another sleep cycle or get some work done before going to office. 

No clue why I am doing this, just to give some more time for myself in the mornings I guess. Feels right tho. 

The Townscapes of Dreams

After documenting dreams for over 10 years, I am now convinced that dreams have a semi-persistent geography that can be mapped. This geography overlaps with some locations that I know in the real world. And as I am writing this stuff out, I can vividly remember at least some of the locations. 

[1] Is the home of my childhood. In my dreams, this location still resembles the way it was over 20 years ago. There is no clubhouse, and no buildings around, all are surrounded by greenery. The rooms are larger in the dreams, but these dreams are fading. My house is actually on the other side from the house where most of my dreams take place in, which is actually a mirrored version of my house, and belongs to my neighbour. [2] Is my school, and again it is larger in my dreams, with a bigger main building. The fixtures on top resemble the Louvre Pyramids in my dreams. 

Now coming to 3 and 4, which are the sites of most of the dreams. 3 is Joggers Park, which is much more denser with vegetation, almost a forest area. There is a big depression in the middle, with multiple walkways and ponds. The park is much, much bigger in my dreams than in real life. As kids, we spent most of our vacations in this park, waking up early in the morning just to go there. There is a convoluted monkey bar, as well as a playground in a sunken area, which may be why I dream of a depression in the middle of the park, a connection I made right now. I enjoyed climbing and standing on the swings, and once got mildly hit by an uncle after I drove away their kid. I was a naughty kid. We used to take our toys and play in the park till breakfast, and then return after lunch for another long session. Looking west from the park are the Yeoor Hills, in the direction of the black arrow. In my dreams sometimes, I see leopards and big cats descending from these hills, which is visible behind the park, and actually behind the school as well. A lot of my dreams take place between [1] and [4].

[4] is the location of my new home, that I moved to in 2000, just before my high school graduation in 2003. The building is taller in my dreams, with another smaller building in front of my house, which really does not exist. There are more buildings in the complex in my dreams, arranged in a circle. The play area behind the building is also expanded with many additional facilities and a playground. My apartment in this building is really interesting, it has a marbled bathroom leading to a terraced balcony, with plenty of pots and even a small fountain and pool within the house. There are iridescent flowers in this indoor garden. Outside, the house has a balcony, with tiers of habitation below. 

The dream additions include enlargements, layering and complex and unlikely fixtures. This dream house is sometimes connected to a massive building that seems like it is under construction, with some poor people living in large pipes as well. This seems to be inspired from an under-construction building next to my office, where people are living by the way. 

Now, my new home in New Delhi is a terrifying place in my dreams. There are locked doors within my house that open up into other people's doors. I feel exposed in an environment that does not provide adequate privacy. There is a secret corridor at the end of my home that opens up into a row of doors. Each of the houses are labyrinthine and occupied by people who do not exist. The ground floor resembles my old-new home in Panchavati [4], with a playground and a complex beneath. There are additionally commercial layers in the lower floors in the Delhi version, which is truly a scary place. So scary that in the first two years, incidents of sleep paralysis was common. 

All this makes me convinced that dreams have a geography, that can be mapped to real world locations. 

Old nightmare in new setting

When I first came to Delhi, I used to have frequent nightmares and even sleep paralysis because I was sleeping in a new place. I used to feel that the location is insecure, with one of the rooms having a wall or a door connected to another house, without my knowledge. This other house opened up into an apartment complex with a corridor full of flats. The lower floors of the apartment was full of commercial shops, with the buildings arranged in  ring, and a playground in the middle. The basement floors had an entire shopping mall kind of setup. I stopped seeing this place about six months after moving to Delhi. 

After a tox break, I saw this same setting again, but this time, it was not a nightmarish environment. I saw some old friends, as well as unknown people who were entirely imaginary old friends. They were all holed up in an apartment, and it was essentially a friend circle from Thane who formed a support group in Delhi to fend off social isolation. There was even a Nepali there who sort of resembled some dude I met at a party in the hills. I woke up thinking maybe refraining from smoking could improve my sleep further. 

Dream Diary persiplane edition

 I was back in college and walking around the ground floor where there was a science exhibition going on. There were different exhibits (and this was an actual real exhibition that happened at SIES about 15 years ago), and I was just observing everything one by one. I went to the top floor, some strange rooms and labs, and then came to an exhibit about weather and climate. There a teacher asked me what causes the seasons on the Earth and I responded initially with ‘attitude’ and then explained the orbital relationship between the Earth and the Sun; and that it was the tilt of the planet and not the proximity to the Sun that caused the seasons. Then a topper from my school suddenly showed up and said ‘persiplane’, while I was struggling to remember a single word that explained exactly what I wanted to say. 

There is no such word, but after waking up I remember thinking at least my dream explanation was right. 

Dream Diary magic sorting cat edition

Close enough but not at all exact 

I had a kind of dreamception, where I was dreaming within a dream. I dreamed of a game, woke up in a party with my dnd fwens and some other people I didn’t know. There was a guy playing a guitar with long hair and a dusky girl in a white shirt with lots of tats. We built and played the game.

 It was an occult themed game, had seven spinners instead of dice, you had to add things like age and current date to the rolls, and it was a coop game where everyone became vampires, werewolves or died, and you had to pass a cat, if it liked you, you became vampire, if it didn’t, you became werewolf. 

The main game board was a brown panel with what appeared to be watch faces, but these were seven spinners. The board was made of nails and black marker, and we actually placed the spinners ourselves, to make spinners for odd numbers that do not have dodecahedral shapes. 

The cat kept biting me and I woke up. 

Another walk through a familiar location

This is a location near Sewri that I am visiting repeatedly. This time around, I actually found a new place to rent, and was confused about what to do with the place that I was currently living in. I found someone who showed me their house and allowed me to take photos. I realised to my utter disappointment and horror that it was a dream when my phone was square in shape. 

I continued to explore though, and take photos. There was a man in a camera studio who tried to shoo me away, but I explained to him I was just taking a selfie. He smirked and said I know you are not taking a selfie, which is when I clarified, "I meant profile picture", that convinced him, and he said 'take, take'. Maybe Im confronting some kind of fear over capturing poverty porn in sensitive locations. 

I also passed three girls making a reel in front of fairies or superheroes, but when I started photographing them, too many people walked into the frame and ruined the shot. Then there were some hijras dancing, and I saw some queer graffiti, that Dall-E managed to recreate almost exactly. 

Cannot wait for the day when they can pull imagery straight from human brains, like they can do in rats. 

Also, Im scared or surprised by the fact that Im having such vivid dreams even when intoxicated, which never used to happen before. Maybe it was because it was Rose lol. 

Dream Diary radar bloon edition

I had a long dream about a bunch of scientists using balloons with radar and hyperspectral imaging payloads to map urban centres in 3D in high resolution for town planning and collecting data to appropriately direct national schemes. It was a typical boring government setup who were using cutting edge technologies, and had lot of funny incompetencies such as everyone breaking for lunch when they arrive at an impasse at a meeting, and a scientist being reprimanded for asking information from the ministry for data they didn’t have as if it’s his mistake rather than the ministry’s.

Dream diary sneks edition

Another 'tell' that informed me I was lucid has now become too normal to notice. This was being able to take photographs in a dream. At first, the phone was an admixture of form factors, from a square slab to some kind of bridge device with a touchscreen and a keypad. Now, the smartphone looks and feels like a regular iPhone. The second tell was the software itself, which would be glitchy and unpredictable, not function like the regular camera app. The in-dream camera app now works well enough, that I cannot tell something is off. 

However, this time around, something was off right at the end. On tapping the shutter, it just refreshed the screen instead of saving the photograph. 

Anyway, I was exploring what seemed like a vertical slum, venturing into a temple after climbing through a maze of narrow gullies. There was a temple right on top, and I was surprised and entered it. Got attacked by a rat-snake-king, a writhing ball of baby cobras and rats trapped together. It was on my currently injured leg, and it was a nightmarish enough experience to wake me up. 

Dream Diary dreamwalker edition

IDK what is happening here, spate of intense, powerful dreams. Eating a lot of fruits and drinking a lot of fruit juices, that is what is different. Also on a tox break. 

So this one was a bit weird. I was on street level, and saw the real world around me in the dream. I sort of floated - drifted through the city and I saw the whole environment like a library of dreams, with volumetric colour visions visible through the transparent walls of apartments. Most of the windows were dark in meatspace but lit in dreamspace, while some windows had their lights on in meatspace but were totally dark in dreamspace. The living rooms and kitchens were dark too, only the bedrooms were lit up. Some colours were hazy and diffuse, a few colours were more clear and bright. I floated upwards through my own apartment, and was tempted to enter other people's dreamspace, but I felt walls like the wills of people, and sensed that it would be impolite or cruel to intrude, and was also scared of what would happen as it was something that I do not know. I rose up to my own home, and woke up, with the dreamspace and meatspace blending together. 

Not exact, but close enough

Dream diary superpowers edition

Okay so this was good. It was as if my brain granted me some extra DMT lol, because I was waking up, drinking water, walking around, having a smoke, and then quickly sleeping and going into a deep dream XD. 

Was lucid enough to control myself, but not lucid enough to know Im dreaming. I visit a lot of cool urban exploration stuff, and now the camera app on my phone and the phone itself works and looks well enough to make me thing its real. This is because the phone not working properly is one of the cues that lets me know Im in a dream. 

I went past this place from Bandra to Kurla to Sewri, but it was all some dream version. Was in some complex in Andheri, got a random lift from a guy to Bandra station, took a train straight to Kurla and got out. There was some guy sleeping on a gadda on top of a tapri at Kurla station, who invited me for a smoke. I said no, and carried on, taking a rickshaw to Sewri. I passed some nice colourful buildings, that looked a bit like Sarojini market. Then I came to this vast theatre like place, but it was just the sides of buildings all around, like the windowless sides of compartment apartments in Delhi when one building in middle is demolished. The entire thing was done up in spectacular murals and graffiti. I happily took many photos. 

Then I took a rickshaw back, smiled again at the guy on the gadda but politely refused a smoke, Then I went to a friend's place in Mulund. There was a party going on with some friends I knew in dream, but no such people exist. They were actually mashups of random people on Instagram. The party was taking place in Yogi hills, in some guy's bungalow in the forest, who lived with his granny. 

Uh. There were a bunch of complex plans made, but basically, I flew back and forth between my home and the Yogi Hills place a bunch of times, then got bored of flying. This is where the cool thing comes in. For the first time ever, I teleported in my dream. I understood somehow that I was following Nightcrawler rules, of having to know the place before I could teleport. First time though, I ended up in Gandhinagar instead of Vasant Vihar. Second time, I was able to roughly teleport to a location even without having been there before. 

Then I did something even more strange. While hovering over a friend and telling them bye, I shapeshifted briefly! It was like Junoon, but instead of a weretiger I became a wereleopard. I could feel my eyes growing larger and getting night vision. I could also feel my canines growing longer and fur growing all over my body. But it was for a fleeting moment, because I smiled and teleported again right then. 

Fun all around. Did two things that I have never done before, teleporting and shapeshifting. 

Lets see what happens today. 

Dream Diary accident edition

 I just really wanted to eat Medhu Vada at Little Bite in Vasant Vihar. Walking down from Parijat to the Arcade, when I meet some building friends, and their work friends. Right at the Arcade, everything has changed. There is a new restaurant called 'RK's. It is a white restaurant with seating outside, and everyone is just sitting. I go and order my Medhu Vada. He says it will take at least 15 minutes to make. My friend says we need to go. I say no take your time, and make it well, I do not want chewy vadas, but well fried ones. 

While it is being made, I see that there is an attendant who is cleaning up a leaky toilet. 

Then, we are just talking, when two of my friend's office friends (unknown people, can see their faces), push me down to the ground to rag me. A towing van careens down the slope, turns around the roundabout, and straight up runs over me and the other two people holding me down. However, they die, while I am dragged away. There are big splashes of blood on the road leading up to me. My friends run down the road chasing the van and yelling at it. 

I run back to the restaurant behind a row of parked cars. I really want that Medhu Vada. Friends are wondering where I have gone. I wake up. 

The accident spot marked with star. 

Dream diary... taking notes to remind myself edition

TIMES - A reminder to use your time wisely. Not an acronym for anything. 

Weed and Videogaming

Addiction is actually about social isolation and dysfunction. 

The one Year Gaming Programme - taking a year to cut the faff, and unfriending everyone. Is a programme that is not meant to work in the sense that you stop gaming, but make you focus more on the people. 

Part 2: Rickshawwalah's daughter

This was a very strange thing. A door in SIES opened up to a locked door, on it was an old sepia painting, showing "The rickshawwallah's daughter." 

Then it was a series of handicrafts and different coloured feathers in muted colours though, blue, aquamarine, beige and brown. 

A black and white timelapse video of a guy rolling near the railway tracks. 

There was this one scene in school, with young children and blood on the floor. Someone is humiliated and paraded during an assembly. 

One girl asks for a train to come back, woman engine driver gets down and say's "don't worry, I know they are watching me", but makes the train go in reverse. 

It was just a mood board in video form I guess. 

Then this other maintenance lady starts rapping against the establishment and their atrocities.