{"id":6243,"date":"2009-12-07T14:12:55","date_gmt":"2009-12-07T19:12:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=6243"},"modified":"2009-12-07T14:12:55","modified_gmt":"2009-12-07T19:12:55","slug":"navigating-my-subconscious","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2009\/12\/navigating-my-subconscious\/","title":{"rendered":"Navigating My Subconscious"},"content":{"rendered":"

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When I was a boy, among my adventure fantasies was being a fighter pilot. There was something tremendously exciting to me in the idea of traveling at superhigh speeds and concentrating not just on the flight path ahead, but on the split-second change in circumstances in all three dimensions at once<\/em>. You’d have to keep looking up, behind, down, to both sides… and never, ever relax.<\/p>\n

(One obvious fallacy seems never to have occurred to me: if Dad’s characteristic high-speed highway driving gave me the willies, as it did, in actual aerial combat I’d almost certainly bail out more often than not.)<\/p>\n

Later, fresh out of college, I first worked not as the English teacher I’d been trained to become, but as a cab driver — a position for which, excuse the boast, I was eminently suited.<\/p>\n

Two apparently unrelated factoids about my life, separated from each other (and from now) by decades. But if you let your conceptual vision blur just a bit, you might discern the connection: spatial relationships; geography<\/em>.<\/p>\n

For whatever reason, I’ve always been interested in, not to say obsessive about, how one gets from here to there. Even now, I can spend hours poring over maps and atlases; Google Maps (and its macro-offspring, Google Earth<\/a> and Google Sky<\/a>) would be like a crack pipe to me if I let it. Furthermore, I’m blessed (or cursed) with a good intuitive sense of direction, so after I’ve driven someplace once I can almost always get back to it without conscious thought. (I say “cursed” only because this sometimes makes me impatient with others’ reluctance to venture into unfamiliar territory.) I actually hold a mental map of the route, including landmarks, traffic bottlenecks, relationship to other routes to other nearby destinations, and so on.<\/p>\n

This obsession extends, bizarrely, even into my dreams. I notice and generally remember how I’ve “gotten” from one place to another. As my dream life goes on over the course of years, I recognize intersections I’ve “been to” before (although I’ve never seen them in real life). And, what’s more, I sometimes record<\/em> these routes — write them up the morning after, in the course of recording especially notable dreams.<\/p>\n

(Yes, I’ve tried to keep paper and pen by the bedside so I can jot them down at the moment, so to speak. It never works for me: I’m too caught up in my dreams to want to wake up.)<\/p>\n

The most recent such report took me about an hour to write on Saturday morning, when I should have been working on Seems to Fit<\/em> instead. You can read it here<\/a> (irrelevant, non-setting-related portions excised, and hyperlinks to real-world places added (because — ha ha — doing so gives me a chance to use Google Maps)).<\/p>\n

In the meantime: how about you? Is there any ongoing thread to what happens between your ears as you sleep? Consider the common “Color or black-and-white?” question. Beyond that, though, think of your dreams as a very particular sort of fiction. Do you tend to remember the plots the next morning? or are you a character specialist? what about dialogue?<\/p>\n

Have you had the deja vu<\/em> moment in which you come to a real place for the first time… and realize you’ve already been there in your dreams? Do you find yourself dreaming about the same things, people, places, even in non-recurring dreams, even spread out over years or decades?<\/p>\n

C’mon. Spill.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I was a boy, among my adventure fantasies was being a fighter pilot. There was something tremendously exciting to me in the idea of traveling at superhigh speeds and concentrating not just on the flight path ahead, but on the split-second change in circumstances in all three dimensions at once. You’d have to keep […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","h5ap_radio_sources":[],"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[183,38],"tags":[992,1233,1388],"class_list":{"0":"post-6243","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-everyday-life","7":"category-backwards","8":"tag-dreams","9":"tag-geography","10":"tag-childhood","11":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-1CH","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6243","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6243"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6243\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6257,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6243\/revisions\/6257"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}