Please note however, that of the thousands of books I’ve read, probably only a few hundred were fiction and I never finished LOTR for the primary reason that I was not able to construct a method to remember what’s in it. I’m bad with names, but good with symbols and images. For example it took me a while to get used to the name “Frodo”, however in PKD’s Valis, “Horselover Fat” is described as derived from PKD so I just think “PKD” and I’m done. I could also probably draw the story-boards for “Matrix Revolutions” from memory.

I like the fantasists who seem like they’re living in the very universe they’ve created, like they know it, inhabiting it like God, and making me suspend my disbelief, which increases my enjoyment and satisfaction no end.

Granted that type of author is rare, but wonderful to find.

Any suggestions, Jeff, or anybody?

Then the boss spells out his 15 [crack], “Oy!” 10 commandments, and then the engineers making the light are almost done and all of sudden the boss says, “Oh, ya, wouldn’t it be cool if light could only go at 300,000km/sec?” and the engineers go and trash their photon designs and start over.

That’s what’s wrong with most fantasy stories. There is a hidden element of ancient thinking in them, or they are incomplete in some major way.

Can you tell I like hard-SF and satire?

Anyway, the reason I brought it up is that in many fantasy stories, if there’s something that’s wanted and there’s no method of translating it from a vague want to a hard physical reality, I’m not interested in the story.

The only thing in the real world that works like that is sales, which is backwards, you start with a hard physical reality and work backwards to convince someone that’s what they wanted in the first place.

Such beliefs are really just an sloshing overflow from the Stone Age and the Dark Ages, and we’ve been mopping all that up in fits and starts beginning back with Aristotle, and then later, with the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and since 2001, the Future.

I deconstruct rainbows, bad moods and folktales, constantly moved and inspired by what we have done as accidentally sapient animals in a muddy, confusing world (as opposed to aberrant angels expelled from Paradise), as clever and mean and mad as we are, as lonely in the universe as we are.

I ‘m not going to want to die, but God, what a wonderful life it is on the way there.

I also fancy myself a logician. Ask me about it some time.

I love my dreams and while I think about them, I try not to overanalyze them, no matter how interesting that might be.

You hear stories about ideas during the day triggering dreams at night, or that any impressions of continuity or consistency are just a post-sleep attempt to make sense of jumbled images, but I prefer to hold on to the story line view.

The day I had the Chinese wedding dream I had been considering re-reading Sean Stewart’s excellent Galveston, which takes place many years after magic reappears in the world and causes the total collapse of civilization, except in isolated pockets with people who know or learn how to deal with it. Another story in the same universe has part of its action in Vancouver’s Chinatown, where knowledge of old Chinese magic has helped a small part of the city to survive. Maybe a trigger for that aspect of the dream?

Now, I don’t think I knew about Pfizer’s product but perhaps the Soltano needed his Weltschmerz assuaged…

Thanks, Jeff.

I usually just dream about books or modern Japan. Usually when I dream about books, I say to myself, “Aha! you’re dreaming, I can prove it.” “Open a book, and read a page. What do you see, what does it say?” and as I concentrate, what is written becomes less and less nebulous and just as the text becomes visible and ready to be read, I wake up…

Now as for Lyrica, it’s a pain-killer by Pfizer. Immediately I think of the Pfizer building in Tokyo. Voila, 1 order of separation to my own mind/dreams. Heh.

As for “soltano”, Sultan in Italian is “Sultano”, so we can assume Italy conquered this unconquerable city of yours at some point. :)