Sartre's Bad Faith

"Bad Faith" is Sartre's rather odd term for a rather odd concept.  The nearest equivalent that I could think of is "self-deception", although taking the term at face value as a description of misplaced faith might be appropriate as well.  Neither interpretation quite does the term justice.  The former is a bit misleading in its tone and the latter is a bit too broad in its scope.  Sartre employs the term with an implicit sense of familiarity, so I suspect the issue may be one of translation.  It seems to designate a certain type of self-deception, or an even better description might be: our perpetual quest to find substance and definition for the void at the core of our being.

Sartre provides the example of a cafe waiter.  He describes the waiter's quick steps, the eager way he leans forward when you speak, the deftness with which he balances his plates and trays.  All of it adds up to a kind of performance.  In a sense, the waiter is playing the part of a waiter.  He is carrying on as though the style and the purpose of all his actions were dictated by his being a waiter.  He is carrying on as though being a waiter were to be a thing, as a table is a table or a chair is a chair.  This sort of phenomenon isn't restricted to waiters, of course, as Sartre goes on to say, "there is the dance of the tailor, the grocer, the auctioneer."  Sartre suggests that these tradespeople lend this shallowly mechanical touch to their duties partly as a way of making their clientele more comfortable, "A grocer who dreams is offensive to the buyer, because such a grocer is not wholly a grocer."  But this sort of thing isn't restricted to the world of trade and commerce.  We do this in all walks of life.

In this context, Sartre describes determinism as "a perpetual game of excuses."  It is the veritable dogma of Bad Faith.  Certainly the waiter is a waiter in the sense of the contingency of his circumstances and situation and choices.  He has taken a job as waiter; he has to arise at a certain hour in the morning to fulfill his duties as a waiter; he gets the tips and pay and benefits of being a waiter.  But yet, he is not a waiter in the sense of being simply a thing in the world.  He can not rely on being a waiter as something that will dictate his behavior.  On the contrary, being a waiter is something he has to sustain with his behavior, a part he is compelled to play if he wishes to maintain his station in life.  

Likewise, an orphan is an orphan in the sense of the contingencies of their situation and circumstances, but yet they're not merely an orphan as a chair is a chair.  True, they haven't chosen to be an orphan, as the waiter has chosen to be a waiter, but regardless of whether they arrived at their situation by choice or not, one thing doesn't irresistibly dictate behavior any more than the other.  One cannot be an orphan as a thing in the world, any more than one can be a waiter as a thing.  One's being cannot be entirely exhausted in the concept of "orphan", any more than it can be exhausted in the concept of "waiter."  The orphan is always something more than an orphan, and the waiter is always something more than a waiter.  We continually transcend the concepts, the contingencies, and the "excuses" by which we might try to define ourselves.  We are always more than the sum of our parts.  There's is always something in the orphan and the waiter which can step back, consider themselves as an orphan or a waiter, and consider the possibilities which transcend those things.

Bad Faith is our attempt to deny this transcendence.  It is our attempt to find security and substance in a kind of a role which we can play in a given situation or in life in general.  It is a woman on a first date stepping into the coy flirtation of a "woman on a date."  It is a "Capricorn" or an "alcoholic" or a "middle child" or a "single mother" turning to these things as ready-made characters to play, essential parts on the stage of life with lines to read and marks to hit, rather than contingencies to grow beyond and rise above to see possibilities that are open to them.

There's a certain comfort in thinking that you can wake up in the morning and put on the uniform of a policeman or clock in as a waiter and find yourself consumed in the role.  You know your place.  You know what you need to do.  You try to assume a certain confidence that you'll do what needs to be done because you're a policeman, or because you're a waiter.  This is the comfort of Bad Faith.  It is the comfort of trying to escape the burden of maintaining the being of this policeman or this waiter, even the being of the orphan or the alcoholic, hoping instead that these things will sustain your being.  Once you strip away the waiter, the middle child, the Frenchman, the dyslexic hemophiliac, you find yourself staring into a most uncomfortable void.  You open the door and find no one there.  The problem is that that no one is you.  So we turn to Bad Faith rather than face this.

It's not easy being nobody, but there's freedom in being nobody, there's possibility.  Years and years before I ever heard of Sartre, I had long expressed my misgivings towards the growing trend of diagnosing teens and kids with all kinds of disorders like ADD and depression and so forth.  My feeling was that at such a young age, when these kids are still groping for an identity, they would take these diagnoses the wrong way.  They would treat them as something that they could hold onto, something that would define them, rather than something to be overcome.  Unfortunately, that trend has kept growing.  We may all fall back on that "perpetual game of excuses" from time to time, but we shouldn't be in such a hurry to indoctrinate our children in the church of Bad Faith.                             

Women & The Stupid Jerks They Love

There has been a sentiment going around for a number of years now.  I've heard it more times than I can remember.  Something to the affect of: Women like jerks.  Or the occasionally more extreme: Women like only jerks.  Sometimes a guy will say it as a bitter lament about life's unfairness.  Another guy might say it with a sly and brutal cynicism, as though justifying himself for being an asshole.  Either one will usually wait to bring it up in mixed company, as a confrontational challenge to any women who might be present.

On a certain level, I understand where these guys are coming from.  I'd be willing to bet that nearly every man reading this post has known, at some point in his life, at least one guy who was the biggest jerk on the planet and who also had girls lined up left and right.  We're talking about a guy who seems like he had special training to be an asshole, like he went to Douche Bag University or something.  We watch as this guy acts like a complete pig, and treats women like garbage, and if we're really lucky we get to hear these women go on and on about what a sweet guy he is.  After you known a dozen or so guys like this, and you've witnessed this same scenario so many times that your frustrated disgust has faded into a kind of dull nausea, then it's pretty easy to draw the conclusion that women are into that sort of thing.

Naturally, when a guy voices this sort of sentiment, the women are usually quick to respond with their objections.  Women like "nice" guys, they insist, or at least they insist that they personally like nice guys, regardless of what other women do.  But the guy isn't buying it because nearly every guy who says this has also gone through a phase in his dating life where he tried to be the "nice guy", or at least what he conceived of as being a nice guy, which usually involves fawning over the girl like a sycophantic puppy dog.  All that ever got him was watching his heart being ground into a fine paste under some callous girl's heel.  This is what leads to the bitterness and/or cynicism that prompts the statement in the first place.

The sad fact of the matter is that "nice" has little or nothing to do either way with what people find attractive.  Don't get me wrong.  We'd all like to be involved with nice people, especially if we're talking about a relationship, and most especially if we're talking about a marriage.  I doubt that many people would deliberately set out to get involved with a loathsome piece of human garbage that treats them horribly.  However, when it comes to those qualities that really electrify our hormones and get our blood flowing, "nice" is probably way down at the bottom of the list.  What's more likely to happen is that we find ourselves attracted to someone, and then we try to convince ourselves after the fact that we're dealing with a nice person.

Consider for the moment, fellas, that women could just as easily make the same statement.  They could claim that men like bitches.  Certainly we're aware that plenty of "nice" girls get left on the sidelines.  Looking at it from the other side, we see that there's a certain truth to the claim, but not quite.  We don't like "bitches", but we have been known to overlook the severe warning signs of bitchiness if we find the woman to be extraordinarily attractive.  Well, women often do the same thing.  We all allow our hormones to impair our judgment.  In fact, if I were going to make a generalized statement on the matter, I would say that men are probably more prone to overlook obvious red flags then women, but I'd also think that we're probably prone to be more cynical about it too.

And when you couple all this with that fact that jerks of either sex also tend to be manipulative jerks, then is it really any surprise that we've all fallen victim a time or two?  Then we go on hurting each other out of spite because some jerk hurt us.  There's a line that I remember from a song that was out years ago called "Torn."  It went, "You're a little late.  I'm already torn."  I don't really know what the song was about, but that line always sounded to me like the girl was throwing it in the guy's face that he hadn't known her before someone else had broken her heart long ago.  There's something so sad about that, pain needlessly perpetuated.  Life would be easier if niceness were a more attractive quality, if we kept our hearts more open to each other.  But those damn jerks ruin it for everybody. 

Some Radical Theories on the Cause of Deja Vu

I think it's safe to say that most of us are familiar with the phenomenon of Deja Vu, and have most likely experienced it at one time or another.  I've experienced it quite frequently; that unsettling sense that what is happening has already happened before.  Now, it seems that no one has a really solid answer on what causes this.  Explanations range from an association with another memory that you can't quite recall, to a crossing of the wires between long-term and short memories giving you the false impression that you're remembering your current experience.  Some of the explanations are slightly more exotic, involving delays in the processing times between your two eyes, or perhaps a mild epileptic episode.  But we want something more, don't we?  Uncanny experiences beg for uncanny explanations.  So with that in mind, I figured I'd throw around a few more radical possibilities (for entertainment purposes only, of course.)

THE MOBIUS THEORY

Scientists have speculated that The Big Bang may be a re-occurring event.  At some point it is believed that the universe will collapse in on itself in something called "The Big Crunch."  Possibly this could lead to another Big Bang and the whole cosmic carnival could set up its shops and tents all over again.  If this is so, we tend to imagine these cycles as consecutive, one following after the other in time, but what if they are actually concurrent?  What if The Big Crunch simply leads right back to the same Big Bang that started it all?  Rather than a series of universes, you end up with time just endlessly looping back on itself.  If this is the case, the fabric of space-time might be getting warn out and warped in some spots like a cassette tape that's been played over and over.  Deja Vu would be our momentary experience of these warps as we pass through them.

THE REPLACEMENT THEORY

Some have speculated that when you die your soul might go to a sort of Purgatory, a limbo-like place which is neither Heaven or Hell, but some kind of vague waiting area in between.  It's believed that your soul has to do penance in this place in order to move on.  Now, no one has ever been exactly clear on what this "penance" is.  Perhaps we have to briefly re-experience certain crucial moments of our lives, moments that might have seemed inconsequential at the time.  We have to briefly re-enter our bodies at some point in our lives and subtly nudge ourselves in a slightly different direction that will make all the difference down the line.  Our living consciousness, and our afterlife consciousness are momentarily unified and in sync.  One slightly spills over into the other.  This gives our afterlife consciousness the tenuous ability to affect our actions, while simultaneously giving our living consciousness the disorienting sense that it's remembering what's happening which we call Deja Vu.

THE CONTROL THEORY

How can you truly know that the things that you remember are real?  What evidence do you have?  Well, you have the fact of the memory itself, and you have the external evidence around you that bears witness to the past.  You continually use the one to verify the other.  You remember taking the garbage out.  You go look out in the can, and its there.  So what if there was an agency that could control your life by reprogramming your memories, with say, like a sort of wireless modem in your brain?  And what if they had people on the ground that could clean up the details so that it fit these new memories?  Everything would fit perfectly, and you'd be none the wiser.  Perhaps, though, there is a slight sensation you experience when new memories are being downloaded, or your existing memories are being altered.  Your brain has no way of noticing that your memories have been changed because it can't use the old memory as a point of reference, so it misinterprets this sensation as a confused double vision of the current experience called Deja Vu.

 ...and no, I'm not completely insane.       

My Favorite Part of the Resurrection Story

The story of the resurrection of Jesus Christ is one of the cornerstones of Christianity.  It is the "good news" of the Gospels.  It is not my intention with this post to delve into the meaning and impact of this story in any kind of general way.  Nor am I going to attempt to unravel the apparent discrepancies between the different Gospel accounts of the story.  Nor am I going to attempt to definitively determine what degree of the story is fact or fiction, or whether it is completely one or the other.  As the ringmaster of this nuclear carnival, I reserve the right to put these matters off until another day, or indefinitely if I choose.  For now, I just want to consider one teeny, tiny little detail of the story.

In the story as it is told in the Gospel of Luke, after his resurrection Jesus appears to the disciples in the rooms where they are staying.  While they were staring at him, hardly believing their own eyes, he simply asks them if they have anything to eat.  Now, there aren't many moments bordering on the cute or the comical to be found anywhere in the Bible, but this always brings a smile to my face.  You can picture the disciples standing there with their eyes wide and their mouths open as Jesus strolls in and asks, "You guys got anything to eat around here.  I'm starving."  And why wouldn't he be?  After all, he hadn't eaten for three days.  Strangely enough, of all the details of the story, this one seems to feel the most authentic to me.  If I were to believe any of it, it would be on the basis of this.

Consider, for a moment, the possibility that the story is entirely fiction.  Some ancient storyteller sits down to make all this up.  He reaches this incredibly significant moment where Jesus returns from the underworld and appears before his disciples.  It would seem to be an occasion for some great revelation, some profound statement, the imparting of some incredible secret about life beyond the grave.  Having him ask for something to eat completely underplays the moment, almost comically.  It seems especially out of character for ancient literature, where the characters were usually towering, and yet quite wooden, archetypes.  They barely ate at all, let alone upon their triumphant return from the grave.  Hercules would have broken up out of the ground on a bull of fire that he had tamed in Hades.  Jesus quietly, calmly asks for a meal.

The moment is so absurdly apropos, that if it is fiction, then it's almost a literary anachronism.  It would be like discovering a painting with linear perspective thousands of years before the Renaissance.  It displays a depth of sensibility, involving a subversion of dramatic effect that would have been completely alien at the time.  It's almost...ironic, ages before writers had the sophistication or self-awareness to be capable of such a thing.  It's such a little detail, and yet so oddly appropriate.

Of course, one could make the argument that the detail is included because they wanted to drive home the point that Jesus' resurrection was a physical one.  They wanted to make the point that he returned in the flesh, not merely in spirit.  I completely agree.  Whether fact or fiction, this is undoubtedly why the detail was included in the story.  But this just goes to demonstrate how revolutionary Jesus was, even as a character in a book.  The people of the Bible are in general more human than their counterparts in other mythologies, both literally and in the quality of their depictions.  Zeus and Apollo were gods.  Moses and Abraham were men, and as such, their stories are far more grounded, realistic, and relatable.  But there is no where that this is more evident than with Jesus himself.  Although he is the most divine person in the Bible, he is also, ironically, the most endearingly human.

It is as if, in driving home the point of Jesus' humanity, the writers of the Gospels were forced to really consider for the first time what those truly human qualities were.  Whether they were chronicling or manufacturing the details of Jesus' life, they were forced to break the mold of those old wooden archetypes.  As a result, the Jesus we read about in the Gospels has a substance, a vitality that the Greek, Roman, and Egyptian gods do not.  When he has to be woken from a nap when the disciples were afraid of the storm, it's oddly touching to thinking of Jesus taking naps.  When he turns water into wine, we want to consider him a friend.  We sympathize when he steadily maintains his patience in the face of Peter's continual lack of understanding.  We understand his fear and his ambivalence in the Garden of Gethsemane.  We feel his pain on the cross.

This is something we almost take for granted now, but at the time it was groundbreaking.  Not only the human character, but the human being, was seen in a new light.  Christianity gave rise to a concern for the individual soul and inner life that was unheard of before.  In telling this story of God walking among us as a man, and by considering in wonder the things that made him human, we became aware of ourselves for possibly the first time.  Even by the simple act of asking for something eat, Jesus Christ changed the world.      

Making Contact

More than once on this blog, I've mentioned the possibility of making contact with an alien race.  I've discussed the unlikelihood of them visiting us, and I've discussed the different methods by which we might cross the unimaginable distances of space to make contact with them.  Part of my fascination with this subject is the common idea of what life from another planet might be like, as well as confirmation that we're not alone in the universe.  Aside from these things, however, I also believe that real, verified contact with intelligent life beyond this planet would have a revolutionary impact on the human race.

We harbor a dream that some day we will put aside our differences with one another, end our senseless wars, and begin working together towards common goals.  Somehow, though, this dream keeps slipping away.  The practical purposes for war became obsolete a long time ago, but yet the fighting continues.  Wars were once fought for the expansion of territory and sometimes even for survival itself.  This is no longer necessary in the way that it once was, but we still find reasons to take up arms again each other.  It's as if we are compelled to keep fighting as an end unto itself and we need to fabricate excuses to perpetually sustain the conflict.  I guess we just like to kill each other.  I believe that contact with an alien race might be the one thing that could finally bring us together.

We seemed to have the concept of "us and them" hardwired into us.  We seem unable to conceive of an "us" without a "them" to contrast it to.  As long as we exist on our little blue island, isolated from the rest of the universe, we focus on the differences between each other.  We gather into a group on this side of the line by virtue of things that set us apart from the people on the other side of the line.  Yet, it's the existence of the line that enables the drawing together of the group.  Without the line, we remain scattered and disconnected, forming smaller groups and engaging in petty conflicts.  A clear, deep line drawn broad enough can bring focus and unity to smaller squabbling groups.

My fellow Americans will remember how September 11th seemed to briefly bring the country together.  Some people thought it was our common grief over the tragedy that united us.  I believe it was something a bit more basic.  That incident drew a deep line, and the terrorists who committed those atrocities were on one side of the line, and the rest of us were on the other.  The minor differences we had focused on between each other suddenly seemed small in the face of this larger divide.  We gathered together against a common enemy.  We nodded to one another.  We were "us"; they were "them."  It seems to be in our nature that we can't have one without the other.

Contact with intelligent extra-terrestrial life would draw a line across the cosmos itself; one deeper than we have ever known.  We wouldn't necessarily have to see them as an enemy, although quite honestly, it would help.  It might be enough just to see them as different.  Only by aliens occupying the role of "them" can there be an "us" that unites all of humanity.  Of course, it would nice to believe that we could reach a level of enlightenment where we could look past the differences of all beings.  One might suggest that such a dichotomy would only expand the same old problems to a higher level.  The yearning for world peace would be superseded by a yearning for galactic peace and then by universal peace.  I agree.  But what are you gonna do?          

Inception: The Calculus of Dreams

Inception seems to be one of those movies that people either love or hate.  When it came out last summer there were several complaints that I heard lodged against it.  One of the most prevalent ones was that the dreams were not strange and surreal enough, and that the endless complexity of rules laid out in the movie bore no relation to what dreams are really like.  Realism is a strange complaint to make concerning a movie about dreams, since dreams by their very nature are practically the antithesis of realism.  Still, I knew what these people were driving at.  The dreams in Inception do bear little resemblance to those visited upon our nightly slumbers.  However, these people were missing the whole point.  The surrealism lay in the concept of the story, not in its details.  The peculiar charm of Inception is that it takes a systematic and cerebral approach to an emotionally chaotic phenomenon.

The movie borrows from several basic phenomena of dreams to construct its elaborate rules.  It treats these phenomena as if they were precise variables in a complex equation, as things which can be measured and quantified with pinpoint accuracy, which is not actually the way these things work at all.  But the movie precedes as if this is the case.  The idea is absurd in and of itself, and I believe that this is done deliberately.  I'm sure Christopher Nolan has had the same lifetime of dreaming experience that we've all had.  Inception isn't meant to be a realistic portrayal of dreams.  It takes the subject of dreams and builds an abstract framework of intricate systemic design.  Dreams are merely a means to this end.  The following is a consideration of the pieces out of which this framework is constructed.

TIME EXPANSION & COGNITIVE COMPRESSION

In The Interpretation of Dreams Freud tells the story of a dream dreamt by a man name Maury.  In the dream Maury was on trial.  The dream was set at some time during the French Revolution, and this Maury was brought before the revolutionary tribunal.  After a lengthy trial, he was found guilty and thrown into prison to await execution.  The date of his execution arrived and he was led out to before the screaming crowd.  He was brought to the execution block, and locked into the guillotine.  When the hissing blade dropped, he awoke just as it hit his neck.  Upon waking he discovered that the headboard had fallen and struck him on the neck, which was what had woken him up.  Apparently, the entire long ordeal of the dream had merely occurred in the few fractions of a second when the headboard struck his neck.

Of course, we've all had similar, if somewhat less extreme experiences.  We've fallen asleep for a few hours and had dreams which seem to cover months or even years.  Mostly this is because events in dreams often occur in a more narrative than real-time fashion.  Just as a movie can cover the distance between March and June simply by taking a few moments to show us a tree flowering into full bloom, so too can our dreams give us the illusion of an epic passage of time.

Inception treats this phenomenon quite literally, however.  The dream infiltrators measure the time expansion with perfect precision.  They time things down to the second on the basis of this expansion.  They account for this expansion by crediting an acceleration of mental functioning.  The deeper the infiltrators descend into the dream-world, level by level, the quicker their minds are able to process information.  Since the dream is being sustained and created by the mind, the accelerated experience of it causes the actual real-world time that it covers to become more and more compressed.  Conceivably this compression could go on, descending down to an infinitesimal level.  At this level, which the characters refer to as "limbo", the mental functioning has been accelerated to the point that an infinite amount of experience can be compressed down to a single moment.

THE INCORPORATION OF EXTERNAL STIMULI

Have you ever fallen asleep with the TV on, and had the audio from the TV weave its way into your dreams?  Have you ever had the alarm clock go off, only to have the noise reinterpreted by your dream?  I know I have.  Maybe you've even heard the joke where the guy says he was dreaming that he ate a giant marshmallow, and then woke up to find that his pillow was gone.  Scientists have even done studies where they've tickled people with feathers or dripped hot wax on them, and then they've recorded how the stimulus showed up in their dreams.  Some have even argued that the entire content of dreams is constructed entirely out of stimulus external to the dream, whether it be a noise outside the window or the gurgling of our own stomach.

Inception takes a rather interesting approach to this phenomenon.  The film makes much use of the idea of "levels", dreams within dreams.  It uses this concept of external stimuli to demonstrate the way the dreams are packaged inside of one another.  When a van flips over on one level, the entire reality of the level below tumbles end over end.  When the van free falls through the air, the level below loses gravity altogether.  In addition to providing some  neat visuals, this also accentuates one of the spacial peculiarities of dreams.  In a dream, your physical body appears to occupy a space which resides inside your mind, which, of course, is  already inside your body to begin with.  As the infiltrators descend level upon level, their bodies are continually being tucked inside dream worlds that exist inside their minds.  It becomes a sort of existential Droste Effect, which again descends down to an infinitesimal level.  So limbo occupies not only an infinite point in time, but in space as well.

THE NESTED PERMUTATIONS OF FALSE AWAKENING

False awakenings are like the evil cousins of lucid dreams.  A lucid dream is where the dreamer realizes that they are dreaming and are then able to take control over the dream.  The lucidity of the lucid dreams lies in the fact that the dreamer seems to be in full possession of their mental faculties, which are normally blunted and limited in dreams.  In a sense, they seem wide awake and yet still dreaming.  If you've had the experience you know how odd it can feel.  Well, a false awakening is sort of the opposite experience.  This is where the dreamer believes they've woken up, often with the same surroundings where they fell asleep reproduced with amazing accuracy, but actually they're still dreaming.  This is usually accompanied by an eerie sense that something is wrong or "off".  Then something disturbing usually happens, and the dream flies out of control again.

Inception uses this phenomenon to construct the concept of dreams within dreams.  It employs it in a backwards manner, as the characters are usually seen descending down into the next level.  However, it should be noted that when this idea is first introduced to us, it is in the form that we're more familiar with.  The characters awake from a dream, which we the audience think is the waking world, only to find that it is just another dream, one level above.   Having the "level" concept demonstrated to us in this fashion, allows us to accept it when it's used backwards later on.  In reality, the phenomenon of false awakening doesn't imply any kind of nesting of dream levels.  The false awakening is just another of a multitude of common dream experiences.  It falls in a sequence of events, rather than demonstrating a layering of levels.  I don't believe it has even been shown that events in the false awakening dream affect the reality of the dream that proceeded it.  But then, how would you know?  Nevertheless, this nesting concept provides an ingenious means to demonstrate the  peculiar spatial architecture of dreams mentioned above.

PERPETUAL EXPERIENCE OF THE CREATIVE PROCESS

At one point in Inception, the main character, Cobb, explains that in dreams we create and experience our world at the same time.  This is absolutely true, and its really quite amazing when you think about it.  Dreams seem able to tap into a deep reservoir of creativity and invention that we can only access the merest fraction of while we're awake.  While we might struggle in our waking life to squeeze out the simplest shred of an idea, dreams create with a disposable abandon as though drawing from an endless well of inspiration.  This well, of course, is simply our imagination.  Awake, we keep it in check to various degrees by our intellect, but in dreaming it has free reign.  Like our inner monologue, it flows continuously, but we only seem to tune into it completely in our dreams.  It is as if we climb inside our imagination and then experience it as though it were reality.

Robert Louis Stevenson was said to have gotten his idea for Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde from a dream.  Coleridge was said to have gotten the idea for Kubla Khan from a dream as well.  There have been countless other cases of people getting ideas for everything from songs to paintings from dreams.  I myself, have gotten the idea for several stories from dreams.  Sometimes a dream seems to provide an inspiration that never would have occurred to you in a million years, but the ideas are there waiting.  They just required a loosening of the intellect and a lowering of inhibitions to bloom into their full form.

In a sense, the story of Inception can be seen as a metaphor for this process.  The title refers to the planting of an idea in someone's mind, a seed in the soil that takes deep root in the subconscious.  Again the level concept is employed to ingenious effect.  The deeper the level of the dream the deeper into the core of the subject's psyche.  Like space and time, the subject's identity becomes more compressed and concentrated as you descend.  A small detail, planted deep enough, expands up through the levels until it reaches the level of waking reality where it can become a fundamental part of the subject's personality.  This implies a model of the mind spatially equivalent to the psychological concept of formative development.  The further you regress in time to a person's earliest experiences, the more fundamental those impressions are to the foundations of the person's personality.  Like the seed planted in Inception, as the core of the person's life experiences grows, the more this foundational impression expands.  While these seeds often grow into weeds in the garden of our life, occasionally they can flower into something beautiful and creative.

WAKING TO THE REAL WORLD

The ending of Inception spawned endless debate.  Was he really awake or still dreaming?  Did the spinning top fall or not?  Unfortunately people were picking up this metaphysical ball and running in the wrong direction with it.  Too often people focus on the issue of "what really happened" in the story's plot, rather than appreciating the meaning behind it.  Inception leaves the story open-ended, not to encourage speculation about the narrative, but rather to encourage the viewer to speculate about the nature of reality itself.  The top is meant to demonstrate the old philosophical notion of whether we can truly determine the difference between reality and an illusion.  The idea is not a new one, but the truly clever thing that the movie accomplishes is to present the conundrum not in words, but in a single image.  This is the final result of the elaborate equation.  Everything in the movie is set up to converge on that single image.  The movie is like a complicated chess problem with all the pieces put perfectly in place for this final checkmate.

The levels concept introduces the possibility that there might be another level above what the characters consider reality.  Cobb's wife Mal introduces the enigma of what we require to accept something as reality.  The concept of inception itself introduces the idea of the mind's capacity for self-deception.  The concept of sub-conscious projections introduces the dilemma of being together with the ones we love or alone with only our idea of them.  The limbo concept introduces a dream reality that  in its infinitesimal compression can transcend space and time and the consequences of the waking world.  And finally we have the totem, the spinning top, representing an anchor to solid, physical reality, ambiguously caught between spinning and falling, caught between the world we live in and the world we dream of.  It begs the question of what really matters, what really makes the difference between the two? 

Nuclearheadache's Guide to Everyday Nutcases (part 2)

Yes, it's that time again.  Time to play America's favorite game show, "Hey! I know a jerk like that."  For those who are just joining us and who want to play along at home, this is where I profile personality disorders that aren't quite clinical, but are definitely enough to be an everyday pain the ass.  So, without further ado:

         Hook Up Man

You run across this sort of person from time to time.  If you find yourself in a situation where you have to deal with such a person on a constant and regular basis, then you have nothing but my deepest sympathy.  This is the guy that's always pushing you for small favors and rule exceptions that really test the boundaries of what you're comfortable with.  His every sentence starts with a hushed and conspiratorial, "Hey man...".  He could be a customer asking you to slip him a little extra something-or-other that you're not supposed to, or he could be a co-worker that wants to slip out the door ten minutes early and he wants you to punch his time card out for him.

Hook-Up Man doesn't really seem too concerned that these requests might get you in trouble, or even cost you your job; if you're cool, you'll do it.  He has a rather bizarre conception of "cool".  His evaluations in these matters seem based entirely on how much you're willing to do what he asked.  On the one hand, it's a cheap manipulation.  He's banking on the fact that your self-esteem is so fragile that you'll jump through hoops just to win his approval.  But on another level he really seems to believe this.  "Cool" people are his partners in crime.  They slip him stuff on the sly, and they help him get away with things.

The really strange encounters with Hook Up Man are the cases where he's a complete stranger, but yet somehow still expects you to put your job on the line to "hook him up."  For instance, you have the customer mentioned above.  He seems incapable of comprehending that you don't know him from Adam, and he means about as much to you as a stain on the wallpaper.  He just doesn't grasp that you don't feel the slightest inclination to put yourself out on his behalf.  The world revolves around Hook Up Man.  The rest of us are mere tools at his disposal.  He just has to grease us up by telling us how "cool" we'll be if we do what he wants.

      Lady Stavrogin

I've named this type after a character in Dostoevsky's novel The Possessed.  For those who have read the book, you might have some idea of the type I'm talking about.  "Imperious" is the word usually used to describe this sort of woman.  She is usually an older woman, strong-willed and self-sufficient, and completely beyond reasonable.  While Hook Up Man's cajoling is merely a pathetic nuisance, Lady Stavrogin has intimidation down to an art form.  Everyone that knows her is a little bit afraid of her, and God help anyone who has the misfortune of incurring her fiery wrath.  She has been known to reduce people to a smoldering pile of ash, simply by furrowing her brows.

She has an uncanny ability to induce people to obsequiousness against their nature and their own better judgment.  The means by which she holds this control over people is somewhat of a mystery.  She projects an air of authority that many hesitate to question.  She looks upon other people with the sort of contempt that one usually reserves for insects.  Everyone around her is a "fool" because they can't fulfill her will fast enough or good enough.  While this would reduce anyone else to an annoying whine about the futility of their own satisfaction, with Lady Stavrogin it is somehow taken for granted that she must be pleased.  The subjects in her court give a few quick bows and strive to do better next time.

Whatever the source of her power, she is definitely well aware of it.  At some point  in her life, she learned that opposing her will over others like a dark seething cloud was the way to get whatever she wanted, and she preceded to hone this ability like a blade.  She wants what she wants, and she wants it NOW!  "How" is for the disposable flotsam around her to worry about.  It's pointless to argue that such-and-such is impossible, or to make excuses.  She doesn't want to hear it.  "Impossible" isn't in her vocabulary.  All she has to do is loom larger and darker, and someone, somehow will get it done.  Approach this type with extreme caution.  She is like a black hole.  Once you fall into her overwhelming field of gravity, there may be no escape.

The Creature

The problem with guilt is that it always seems like the one's who should feel it the most, feel it the least.  On one hand you have someone who's mortified that they killed a spider, while another person sleeps soundly after defrauding an entire demographic out of their retirement savings.  As a parent you might feel awful that you lost your temper and snapped at your child, and then you turn on the TV and see some woman who is on trial for smothering her baby and tossing it in the woods, and she appears to have no concerns beyond negotiating with the Lifetime channel for the movie rights to her story.  As a mode of retribution, guilt seems ridiculously inadequate.  Yet, somewhere long ago, many of us probably had a moment where someone wronged us and we thought, "Well, I'm sure they'll feel bad about what they did."

At some point down the line, we wise up to the fact that things don't always work out like that.  More often than not, the other party sees no reason to feel guilty whatsoever.  They rationalize the situation from their own point of view and they find themselves quite content with that rationalization.  Perhaps you even realized later that you were the one in the wrong.  Morality can be tricky.  People have a wide variety of opinions about what is right and wrong, and on top of that you have the fact that few of us hold our own behavior to a standard of ruthless honesty.  Guilt is like a crushing weight we struggle to get out from under.  Rationalization is the method by which we struggle.  Some people are more adept at slipping out than others.  Some seem to operate under the implicit assumption that nothing they do could possibly be wrong.  Some don't seem to care if they do wrong.  And finally, there are some that don't even seem capable of processing the issue.  For the people along this scale, the magnitude of their sins is actually inversely proportional to the guilt they suffer.  It all seems grossly unfair, doesn't it?

So we appeal to other things.  We turn to the law to judge them, and yet we see scoundrel after scoundrel walk away free.  We turn to Karma, looking to the clever twists of fate to balance the scales of justice.  But yet, as satisfying as it is when things fall together ever so neatly, it doesn't happen nearly enough.  Sometimes we wait for God to punish the wicked, and then we're liable to grow old waiting, our lives consumed by the bitter hope of revenge.  Meanwhile, on the other side, you have people that push right through these moral roadblocks like so many straw men.  The law will control them?  They say the law is for the weak that need to be controlled.  They say they can escape the law or bribe the judge.  God will punish them?  They say there is no God, and they can do whatever they feel like.  Morality becomes a joke, the illusion of restraint.  They take all these notions at face value, and once they've disposed of them, they believe they've disposed of morality itself, and they think the way before them is clear for any unrestricted depravity they might have in mind.

Well, I would like to throw my hat into the ring on this and offer a hypothesis of my own concerning the nature of morality.  First, we need to return to the issue of guilt.  Conscience  is the most basic, primal unit of morality.  In my post The Garden of Eden, I said that conscience is our awareness that free will opens the possibility that we might make mistakes.  I said that it was an expression of our uncertainty when faced with making decisions.  I said that it was the responsibility that we bear for our freedom.  So what are we to make of people that seem to elude their conscience altogether?

You see, we've been looking at guilt the wrong way.  We've been treating guilt as if it is the punishment.  What if it's the eluding of guilt that is the punishment?  More precisely, what if it's the cost of eluding guilt?  You see, it's perfectly possible for a person to slip out from under guilt, but that slipping comes with a price.  In order to live with the evil you've done, you have to become the sort of person that can live with the evil you've done.  Taken to its furthest extreme, you would have to degenerate to something less than a human being.  You would have to become a horrible, nightmare creature.

I'm sure you all remember Jeffery Dahmer.  He murdered and ate people.  When he was arrested, there were several skulls found around his place and a freezer stocked with body parts.  Now, imagine for a moment living like that, the putrid smell, the knowledge that there are dismembered bodies all around your house.  I'm not saying to imagine the horror and revulsion that you would feel.  That's easy.  I'm asking to you to imagine what kind of person you would have to become to live like that and not have it bother you, the kind of person that might even enjoy living like that.  Or imagine being the woman who threw the baby into the woods.  Think about the love you have for your own child and the warm place it has in your heart.  Now, imagine that love ripped out of you and nothing but a cold emptiness in it's place.  What's worse, the guilt you feel if you did that to own child or being the sort of person that could be capable of doing something like that and feeling no guilt whatsoever?  Let's not kid ourselves into thinking that these people got away with their sins because their conscience didn't trouble them.  The normal human emotions that make life worth living have to be destroyed and damaged beyond repair for these people to make their clean escape.

Of course, things are rarely so extreme.  Most of our transgressions are on a much smaller and pettier scale, but we still damage ourselves trying to elude the guilt.  A little piece of our spirit gets amputated.  To rationalize stealing from someone, we have to become the sort of person who can no longer take pride in the things we've earned, the sort of person who can no longer feel joy over someone else's good fortune.  To rationalize infidelity, we have to become the sort of person who can no longer trust anyone they love.  To rationalize lying over and over, eventually we have to become the sort of person who can longer respect the truth.  That might not sound like much, but I certainly wouldn't want to be the sort of person who doesn't care about the truth, that would have to disappear into the dark cubbyhole of my mind while reality fades away.  To rationalize murder, we would have to become the sort of person who loses all sense of the importance of life.  The murder is two-fold.  The murderer murders the victim, and the most fundamental part of themselves as well.

The irony is that the person who thinks that dispensing with morality grants them unlimited freedom, fails to realize how intimately free will and conscience are bound.  As I point out here, free will is impossible without emotions.  Our choices are driven by our desires.  To escape their conscience, a person has to kill their emotions and cut off the flow to all the deeper currents of sensibility.  Sure, they could do anything they feel like doing.  They just don't realize that it's the feeling that's the problem.  They can no longer pursue love or joy.  You see them with the vacant look in their eyes.  They're no longer one of the living, but rather one of the undead, a creature that has torn their own soul to pieces.               

12 Monkeys: Mental Divergence

The Path of the Virus

I love a good time travel story.  I have seen all three of the Back to the Future movies more times than I can remember.  I could tell you precisely how the time travel rules change from one Terminator movie to the next.  I even sat through The Time Traveler's Wife, God help me.  But, my all time favorite has to be 12 Monkeys.  It faithfully follows the principle that the past can not be changed and then takes that principle to the point of absurdity as causality circles back on itself like the monkeys chasing each other's tails round and round, representing the twelve hours on the face of a clock.  The funny thing is, though, in a certain sense 12 Monkeys isn't about time travel at all.  It's about mental illness.  It's about the fine line between insanity and what we're willing to believe.

In the late 19th century a man named Daniel Schreber was treated from what was then known as dementia preacox, a illness which we now call schizophrenia.  He believed that God and his psychiatrist were trying to turn him into a woman.  He believed that God was trying to penetrate his skull with "rays of sperm".  At one point, he became convinced that the outside world had ended and that the people and doctors that visited him were only mere facsimiles of the people they represented.  In 12 Monkeys, James Cole is locked in a mental institution in 1990 following a violent outburst.  He believes he is from the future.  He believes that billions will die in 1996 from a deadly virus.  He believes that he has been sent to the past to collect information, and that the people around him are already dead from his perspective, ghosts of the past living in a world that has long since been abandoned and reclaimed by the animals.  He believes that there is a transmitter in his tooth that transmits his location to the people in the future.  He often hears a disembodied voice when calls him "Bob."  Much like Schreber's doctors, Cole's doctors consider him to be insane.  The difference in 12 Monkeys is that it's all treated as if it's completely true.

There's a statement at the beginning of the film that suggests that Cole's story is based on a real patient's delusion.  The issue the film raises is how do we know what's true and what isn't?  How do we know if a man who claims to be from the future is insane or telling the truth?  We hear all the time from people who claim to have been abducted by aliens, people who claim to be channeling the dead souls of Egyptian pharaohs, and yes, even people who claim to be from the future.  It's easy to be dismissive and declare that these people are either "crazy" or lying to get attention.  But how can we really be sure?  Maybe aliens really are secretly communicating with certain chosen people via their television sets.  When it comes to committing someone to an institution where do you draw the line between someone who needs help and someone who claims something that you "know" is impossible?

Having seen a few cases of schizophrenia for myself, I believe that the defining feature of the illness is the lack of internal logic.  It's one thing to have someone tell you that they've seen a UFO.  It's another thing to have someone show you a jar of chunky peanut butter as proof that Jesus controlled an army of robot spiders.  If you've ever been there, you know the difference.  I'm not saying that you necessarily believe every person that tells you they've seen a UFO.  I'm just saying that don't just dismiss them as insane because you don't believe in UFO's.  If it sounds like it makes sense if you granted the premise that it was true, then you can at least give them the benefit of the doubt, and agree to disagree and remain skeptical until you see some proof for yourself.  

Following the recent shooting in Tuscon, one of my cousins in Arizona posted links to some Youtube videos that this Jared Loughner kid had made a few months earlier.  Most of them feature little blocks of text talking about "conscience dreaming" and "a new currency".  I've watched these videos, and I really don't see the slightest possibility of making any kind of sense out of anything he's saying.  Obviously, I don't need to tell you that I'm not a doctor, and I don't know the kid.  It's hard to make a determination based on a few words taken out of context in an online video.  Is it possible that he has some valid theories about the true nature of reality?  I suppose.  But strictly on the basis of what I've seen, and with my extremely limited qualifications, I think there are definite signs of metal illness.  In any case, I can't quite imagine any insight into the nature of reality that he might have had that would justify the actions he took.

12 Monkeys presents a very extreme case.  True though it is, Cole's story sounds every bit as much like dementia as any story could.  Is the movie simply trying to present a concrete dramatization of a schizoid delusion, or is it just doing everything it can to push the boundary between the possible and the insane?  It's hard to say.  At one point he vanishes from a tiny locked room where he was sedated and restrained to the floor.  One of the doctors speculates that Cole must have slipped the restraints, climbed the high, smooth walls, and escaped through an extremely small vent in the ceiling.  Given what he believes, this is the only logical explanation that he can come up with...and it's just as crazy as anything else in the movie.

(This post is also available in extra cheesy version.)

Nuclearheadache's Guide to Everyday Nutcases (part 1)

The DSM-IV does a fine job of describing genuine mental illnesses, but what about the rest of the lunatics out there?  You know who I'm talking about. You run across them whenever you step out your front door, these other people.  Every last one of them is completely, hopelessly out of their minds.  Next month will mark my 35th trip around the sun, and I've yet to meet one of these so-called "normal" people, not even in the mirror.  This handy guide is for and about everybody else out there.  Not those in the padded rooms, or the people that get a pass because everybody knows they're a little off.  I'm talking about people that are still "Okay" enough to hold down jobs.

          Miss Migraine

You probably know someone like this.  Most likely you call them a hypochondriac.  Ironically, it's just this sort of casual, amateur, exaggerated diagnosis that's at the root of Miss Migraine's problems.  You see, she isn't technically a hypochondriac, at least not in the clinical sense.  In fact, she isn't really anything in the clinical sense.  But if you spend any amount of time around her, you'll learn that she has a growing list of ailments and disorders longer than your arm.  All self diagnosed, of course.  Miss Migraine rarely takes any of these fantasy conditions seriously enough to actually go see a doctor about them.  She mostly just likes to throw dire medical terms around and complain to you about her problems on her lunch break.

Although it might all come across as an obvious ploy for sympathy, Miss Migraine's biggest problem is actually her own stunning lack of empathy.  The rest of the world's problems are flat and inconsequential to her.  It's all just a lot of whining and noise, lacking any real dimension, until something happens to her.  Her pain is always a much bigger deal than yours, and she has to describe it in the appropriate terms so that you'll understand that.  No one else has ever had the kind of problems she has.  Last week, when you briefly mentioned hurting your back, that just got on her nerves.  Suck it up, and get over it!  Then she goes and hurts her back.  Whoa!  Now this is serious!  This feels way worse than what you were talking about.  My God, she must have slipped a disc.  Oh no!

The classic example is the migraine headache.  For every one person who actually suffers from these debilitating afflictions, there are nine others who casually refer to every headache they have as a "migraine."  Not because they're experiencing any of the symptoms of the condition.  It's just because calling it a "headache" just isn't good enough.  They have to make sure you know that they have a worse headache than you could ever dream of having.  They have the worst headache in the history of headaches.  To that I say, "You've got a migraine headache, huh?  Well, I've got a nuclear headache.  Top that!!"

           The Cynic

This is a person who casts anything that anyone anywhere does in the worst possible light.  Their lack of faith in humanity is bottomless.  If you give five dollars to a homeless person, you're just trying to feel better about yourself, or even more likely, you're probably buying drugs off of them.  If you don't give five dollars to a homeless person, you're a greedy, heartless jerk.  If you try to do a good job, you're a suck up.  If you do a bad job, you just suck.  There's just no winning with The Cynic.  They're like a human slot machine that comes up "asshole" every time.

Of course, this rigged game is exactly what The Cynic is looking for.  It reinforces their negative image of people.  It's a vicious circle.  Their negative image makes them see the worst in people, and then what they see proves to them how horrible people are.  But why are they so determined to see people this way?  Where does this circle start?  Did a lifetime of disappointment and discouragement turn them into this bitter, hostile husk of a person?  What kind of satisfaction are they getting out of this?

Well, first there's the simple pleasure of sitting in judgment on people.  There's nothing like really digging around in someone else's faults.  It can provide hours of enjoyment and conversational subject matter.  The only thing better than slowing down to see a gruesome car accident is knowing that the guy who caused it was drunk and had a baby in the car at the time.  While we all may be guilty of being fascinated by this sort of thing from time to time, The Cynic thrives on it.  And their rigged outlook provides them with an endless source of material.  Secondly, it makes them feels better about themselves.  If you're a piece of garbage any way you slice it, then there's no chance of you looking like a better person than them.  Hell, "better person", no such thing.  People are hopelessly rotten, so it's pointless to even try to do anything good.  Get the idea?  It's hard to even talk about The Cynic without being dragged down into their bitterness yourself.    

To be continued...   

A Demonstration of Consciousness

In yesterday's post I compared our conscious faculties of perception to a flashlight.  I said that the beam represented the focus of our attention.  Well, the following video provides a nice demonstration of how that beam works by asking you to perform a simple task that is surprisingly difficult.  So, pay close attention, follow the instructions, and enjoy.

Now, let's suppose that you had decided to stop watching video at around the 0:44 second mark and you just said, "Forget it.  Forget Bryan and his stupid blog, and his stupid video.  Screw him and the horse he rode in on.", and you just walked away and never watched the rest of the video.  I'll give you one hint what you would have dreaming about tonight.

Predictive Dreaming

The other day I wrote a post about a shared dream experience I had when I was a kid.  In the comments for the post, the subject came up of another familiar yet mysterious type of dream, dreams of future events.  As I pointed out then, I've had a few minor brushes with this.  I've never had a dream which directly featured an event exactly as it was going to happen, but I have had a few times where a dream was oddly related to a subsequent event in a way that seems to go beyond simple coincidence.  Once I dreamt that I was trying to fix a gas fireplace in my bedroom, only to wake up and discover the next day that my gas furnace wasn't working.  Another time I dreamt that I was in a crumbling, abandoned house trying to retrieve one of my cats that had fallen through a hole in the floor, only the wake up and discover that this same cat had run away again (don't worry; he came back.)  I had a few other instances as well that don't come to mind at the moment.

Now, I think I might have a possible, and I stress the word possible, explanation for this.  If I can't explain how two people can share a dream, an imaginary event supposedly taking place solely in one of the dreamer's minds, then I can hardly hope to reach any solid conclusions regarding predictive dreaming.  However, I tend to be of the opinion that things have reasonable, scientific explanations, elusive though those explanations may sometimes be.  Just because I lack a reasonable explanation for shared dreaming, doesn't mean I'm completely ready to throw in the towel of logic and embrace the world of black magic and wizardly incantations quite yet.

To begin with, we need to visualize the conscious mind's relation to the sub-conscious mind.   First, imagine your memory is a cramped room crammed full of filing cabinets.  The cabinets are stuffed to over flowing with files.  They're spilling out of the drawers onto the floor.  They're piled up onto of the cabinets for lack of space, wedged in tight against the ceiling.  It's a complete pandemonium.  In the middle of the room is the little desk of the over-worked filing clerk.  He's surrounded by mountains of files on all sides.  They tower over him and barely provide room for him to fit in his own filing room.  This clerk is your conscious mind.  Although he is surrounded by these towering archives, he only has room on his little desk for three or four files at a time.  If he wants to look at a different file, he has to put one of the ones on his desk back and retrieve another.  His access to the files is limited to the finite space he has to work with.  The subconscious mind has no such limitations.  It has access to the entire archive at all times.  You might say it's the room and the cabinets themselves.  Except, in this case the files are no mere pieces of paper.  They are a living, breathing thing, organizing and cross-referencing themselves behind the clerk's back.  

Now, that's inside the mind.  When it comes to looking out and perceiving the world and processing new sensory data coming in, the subconscious again has the advantage.  Imagine you're out in the dark at night and you have a flashlight with you.  Your field of vision is limited to what can be illuminated in the narrow beam of the flashlight.  It's useful to light your way, but it hardly provides you with a complete picture of the world around you.  This flashlight is once again our friend the conscious mind.  We carry this flashlight with us constantly, even on the brightest, sunniest day.  It is the focus of our attention.  Like the desk of our file clerk, this focus is extremely limited, and the more intense the focus, the more limited it's range.  Returning to our flashlight analogy, notice how the beam intensifies and yet narrows at the same time as we approach an object.  This how our attention works.  

Our subconscious, on the other hand, is like a cat with night vision.  It sees everything, all the time.  Even the most insignificant piece of sensory information that crosses our path gets received, processed, and filed.  This leads us right back to our filing clerk.  Every minute of every day, new files arrive in the filing room.  Most of it comes from beyond the beam of our flashlight, so it wasn't noticed on the way in.  And the filing clerk, he's far too busy to sort through all this junk, so it just ends up getting stuffed into a cabinet.  That's when that behind the scenes, organic process of cross-referencing and automatic filing sets in without the clerk's knowledge.  

An interesting thing happens when we dream.  It's like the filing clerk has fallen asleep, dozing at his desk with his grey nose hairs fluttering as he snores, and we have an open run at the files.  We have a broader, more liberal access, but it's also a very haphazard and unstructured access because we don't have the clerk to sort through it all for us.  We just start tossing out files left and right, without rhyme or reason.  We put two files together because they both happen to be in red folders, or they both have pizza stains on them, or they both have three Q's on the first page.  In short, we make a complete mess.  In making this mess though, we're liable to stumble across connections that the file clerk might never have noticed.

An experiment was conducted once upon a time, where the subjects were shown composite pictures that featured dozens of different random elements.  They were shown these pictures very briefly, then they were asked to write down what elements they remembered from the pictures.  Then, after they had slept that night, they were asked to write down their dreams.  In almost all cases, their dreams featured elements from the composite picture that they had not written down.  In other words, they dreamt of elements that escaped the beam of the flashlight and the attention of the file clerk, but the information had been processed and stored nevertheless.  

This is where predictive dreaming comes in.  I think, perhaps, that somewhere in this incalculable pile of processed information lies clues to forth-coming events that the conscious mind has failed to pick up on.  If a dream forewarns of this event, and then it happens, the result seems miraculous.  But the only thing miraculous happening here is the conscious mind's failure to pay attention.  Consider this, let's say that you notice, consciously notice, that your hot water heater is leaking a tiny amount of water from it.  You take this as a sign of the water heater's impending failure, and when the tank finally does give out, you're hardly impressed by your psychic prognostication.  Simple logic warned you.  But what if you didn't consciously notice the leak?  You were in the basement.  The leak was in your field of vision, but the beam of your flashlight never honed in on it.  The information still gets processed, and as the experiment above shows, it's even more likely to show up in a dream precisely because it wasn't consciously noticed.  The results could certainly leave anyone mystified and thinking that they had had a genuine premonition.

This is not to say that your subconscious mind is a secret Maytag repairman, diagnosing bad furnaces and worn-out water heaters.  In the case of my furnace dream, it would have been enough for my subconscious to pick up on the fact that something was subtly off or different in the operation of the appliance.  In the case of my cat, he probably slipped out the door without my consciously taking note of it, but I did see him briefly zip by.  He is pretty damn fast, after all.  A fleeting look on a friend's face that should have warned you they weren't quite telling you the truth if you had noticed it, a neighbor's door standing open when it should have been closed passing through your peripheral field of vision as you drive by, a subtle and imperceptible difference in the amount of pressure you need to apply to your brakes, these are the things that premonitions are made of.  Your subconscious might not know what to make of these things.  In fact, your subconscious doesn't make anything out of anything at all.  That kind of deduction is a job for your conscious mind.  Your subconscious just tags, processes, and stores the information.  It does conduct the organic cross-referencing process I mentioned, but it's up to the dreaming mind to stumble across these loose connections.

So that's my two cents on the subject, at least.  As I started out by saying, my own experience with predictive dreaming is limited to dreams of startling coincidence and association.  Maybe my idea breaks down when considering dreams where someone actually sees and experience the event exactly as it's going to happen.  I don't know.  This is just one humble blogger's attempt to tackle the problem.  My resources are limited, and my references are sketchy.  I know I can sleep soundly on my explanation.  Good night.  Sweet dreams.