If I Had a Million Dollars

I asked Steph what she'd do with a million dollars.  I'd build a tree fort in our yard.  But this is what she'd do...

I’m not sure what I’d do with $1,000,000.  It’s not really all that much now a days.  Probably I’d be boring and pay off my debts, move into a smaller place, and then invest the money conservatively.

If I didn’t have a house or car payment, then the 5% interest on a million per year ($50,000) would be nice. If I could write and sell books, and Greg could sell music – we could be semi-retired.  It would be fun.  

Lucid Dreaming Part 2

I began my last post by saying that I’d only had limited success in lucid dreaming. I say that because I was never able to become ‘lucid’ enough in my dreams to control them. Or maybe I did control them, but   just couldn’t remember doing it the next morning. I’m not quite sure how to measure my level of success.

An interesting byproduct of my obsession to become lucid was that I developed a rich dreaming landscape. I can connect many disparate dreams together in this Dreamscape. And if I focus on one dream setting while I’m awake, I can easily remember all of the other dreams that somehow connect to it. Sometimes dreams that I hardly remember come rushing in to connect with another as if adding a piece to a never-ending puzzle.

I’m pretty sure that when I’m dreaming (just about to dream or coming out a dream???), I can tell if the dream that I’m having fits into any of the dream neighborhoods that have evolved already.  And sometimes a new dream can connect two dream settings that were never connected before.

It’s hard to know how much I’m aware of while dreaming, and how much of it gels into consciousness in the few seconds after I wake, before opening my eyes.

Another interesting byproduct of my obsession is a recurring dreaming object / portal. In the year that was recording my dreams every morning, oddly constructed toilets and bathrooms started to appear in my dreams with increasing frequency. I saw these outlandish commodes so often that I stopped using the Nova Dreamer and I silently stated my intention to recognize them as a dream signal every night before falling asleep.

And again, I have trouble gauging my level of success in recognizing them while actually dreaming since, when I wake up, I only remember that the toilets connect different dreams together, not how or if I consciously chose to…I never actually went into one of these malformed toilets, it was more that their presence ushered in a new dream, and I could remember that fact.

My dreamscape is not nearly as vivid as it was in the 1990’s.  I believe that it takes active tending, like a garden, to keep it thriving. It also requires that you sleep more than six hours per day.  I used to do my best dreaming after the 8 hour mark.  Now, it’s rare when I sleep that long. But writing this has made me curious – I’m going to buy a notebook and try recording a few dreams. Stay tuned…

Lucid Dreaming

Lucid dreaming was at one time a very important fascination for Stephanie and me.  She did a lot of work trying to achieve it.  Here are her thoughts on lucid dreaming.

Since reading the Carlos Castaneda series of books in the early 1990s, I’ve had bouts of obsessive interest in Lucid Dreaming, but was only able to achieve limited success. I went so far as to purchase a Nova Dreamer, a mask-like device that you wear when you sleep that detects rapid eye movement and issues a series of flashes and beeps to bring you to the brink of waking. The signals can be remembered as becoming part of your dreams after waking, but the challenge is to recognize the signals as “signals” while dreaming in order to trigger lucidity.

I kept a dream journal and a pencil under my pillow for about a year and recorded my dreams the second I woke up, with my eyes still closed, to try and write during the tail end of my dreams, before the details disappeared into thin air.

I wore a watch that beeped every hour, reminding me to look at my hands and ask myself if I was dreaming. I was training myself to ask without the prompt, so that maybe I would ask myself while dreaming, and answer yes, and then realize – wholly shit, I AM dreaming.

I did find my hands (about a handful of times J ) but the effort required to hold them up and look at them was like trying to multiply two three digit numbers in your head. The next step was to pay attention to the details of my dreams long enough to spot a portal to take me to the next dream, and pay attention to the details of that dream.

The funny thing was that I was able to the paying attention to dream details fairly easily - without looking at my hands first. It wasn’t until much later that I decided to forget the whole finding my hands thing, because I was wasting time trying to do it.

I heard somewhere that Mike Gordon from Phish could lucid dream, so I wrote him a letter to ask if he had any tips.  He wrote me back and told me to buy this specific book.  I did, but I don’t have it anymore, and I can’t remember the name or the author (she was a girl), or why (or even if) the book was good.

The fact that all of that is true, is a pretty good indication that it was a pivotal book, because lucid dreaming is tricky like that. It’s a fun mystery – a wild goose chase whose details always seem to go missing – and then reveal themselves in the strangest of places…

The answer to this question will have to be a multi-parter – more to follow later

What's Up with the Next Book?

I've been working like crazy to promote Scarlet Begonias - it's official publish date was 4/20/2012.  Marketing isn't my style though, so I think I'm going to outsource the task to professionals.

 

 

The new book will be a semi-sequel.  I'm going to keep many of the concepts from Scarlet Begonias, but the plot and all of the characters will be different, at least in the beginning of the book, I haven't decided yet.

 

These are the aspects that I'm going to carry over:

 

     The Dreamscape - Overlapping dimensions of simultaneous perception.

 

     The Noumenon - The nexis of omnicience at the center of the dreamscape.

 

     The Qualia Spectarum - The map which specifies perceptual coordinates within the Dreamscape.

 

     The Ouisa - An elixir for accelerated evolution.

 

     The Denjee - a device, similar to a set of acoustic mirrors which harnesses the infinitesimal drifting mass of the International Prototype Kilogram and focuses it into itself (like an orobourus) transforming it into infinite energy.  This focused energy doesn’t travel with a velocity (d/t) which approaches the speed of light, but instead, it vibrates and activates a specific coordinate on the evolution dream-map.  The coordinate represents a super-dimensional fold woven into the phase-cancelled, negatively-curved music of space-time.  The Denjee uses focused infinite energy to vibrate an imaginary frequency, deeply nestled within the phase-cancelled luminosity-time continuum, which tempers (or tunes) the universal music, birthing new perceptual overtones.  These new evolutionary overtones are transits into the specified perceptual dream-map coordinate.

 

     The Helping Friendly Book - A book of rules for unraveling the ego - a prerequisite for entering the dreamscape.

    

The plot will be a conspiracy-theory to hide the unpredictable nature of the Ouisa which has been hijacked by the Inter-dimensional Bureau of Weights and Measures.  Prime number patterns, pressurized vacuums (I'm still researching this concept), dark matter and Lorentz butterflies will play key roles in the story which will further explore the limitations of measurement.

Quirks

I asked Steph what unique characteristics / quirks make her who she is.

Trivial Pursuit Question:

In what year was the 200,000,000 baby born in the United States.

Answer: 1967

It was me (and 4 others born at the same time). I had a full page spread in the December 1967 issue of Life magazine.

Physical quirks:

I have a strong aversion to metal. I can’t stand the smell and the sound it makes when it touches other metal. It makes me cringe, and my teeth hurt.  ME TOO!!!

I was a cigarette smoker for 20 years.  Now I’m not and can’t imagine ever liking it. It is an evil addiction.

I don’t like the smell of laundry detergent, fabric softener or flowery perfumes.  ME TOO!!!

Some part of my body is always in pain. I like to imagine what someone else would do if they hopped in my body for a minute. Would they be like “wholly shit, I’d freak out if my back felt like this all of the time”?

I have a hard time finding shoes and clothes that feel good.

Personality:

I am controlling

I hate conflict

I am rational

I’m OK being wrong as long as the other person is right beyond a shadow of a doubt

I have a shitty memory

Who am I like?

If I were a Star Trek character, I’d be half Vulcan and half Betazoid.

More than 50 people have told me that I look like Darlene from the Rosanne show.

I want to figure it all out:

I want to discover the overlooked dimension that unifies relativity and quantum physics. I haven’t taken a physics class in over 20 years. You should ask me a question sometime about the things I want to know.

I want to figure out the pattern of the primes. I’m pretty sure it has something to do with complex numbers (ai + b), trigonometry and harmonic overtones.

I wonder if the pressure of a vacuum is variable.

I don’t get organized religion:

Why do Christians join the army? Would Jesus fight for freedom or would he go offer bread and wine to the unenlightened.

Why do sports teams have a group prayer before a big game?  Doesn’t it become a battle of faith, not skill then? Is it possible to pray harder than the other team?

What the heck do Jewish people believe? I can’t ever get a straight answer.  you being raised Jewish?

I was once in a Castaneda stalking group (kind of like a religion). I had a squabble with its leader, became disillusioned, and quit. I later found out that he was paying Cleargreen, Inc. to tell him what to say to the group.

I hated the religious part of yoga and had a hard time chanting to Hindu deities. But I sang Bach’s b-minor mass and Mozart’s Requiem in college and didn’t have a problem with it. Weird.

Other:

I am a certified yoga instructor. I trained at an ashram in India for four weeks.

I am two classes away from being a certified Shiatsu practitioner.

I have a rank of 1409 on chess.com (but I believe that 1200 is probably more accurate).

When You Grow Up?

Today's question for Stephanie is: What do you want to be when you grow up?  This is what she had to say on that one.

Wow, that’s a hard one!  I used to always think that the perfect life was just around the bend – if I just lived on a commune with hippies, then I’d be happy – if I didn’t have to work a 9-5 job, then I’d be happy – if I was a rock star, then I’d be happy – if I could just find my hands and reach Carlos Castaneda’s second attention, then I’d be happy  - if I could just run a recording studio out of my house, then I’d be happy – if I could teach yoga and be a shiatsu therapist, then I’d be happy – If I could just unravel my ego, then…

It seemed that whenever I moved in the direction of “around the bend”, the bend moved. So I learned to move toward these imagined bends of nirvana with a full understanding that they would always morph into another bend long before I could reach the original turn. I also realized that the distortion of each bend was directionally proportionate to the velocity of my approach.

So I’ve developed a side-winding method of movement, venturing ahead in a zig-zagging pattern so as to not disturb the fickle destinations which ensnare my attention. Whenever possible, I try to employ a personalized version of Don Juan and Don Genero’s “Controlled Folly” – To act with the utmost purpose during every action, but never caring about the ultimate outcome.

This change in perception has served me well in many aspects of my life, but I’m unwilling to apply the esoteric paradigm to my personal relationships. I imagine this type of detachment to feel like the way food tasted when I was on the Atkins Diet. (I don’t think this analogy will make sense unless you’ve experienced the sensation of cutting out ALL carbohydrates and only eaten fats and proteins for three months straight).

So, you ask – What do I want to be when I grow up?  And to that I reply, it doesn’t really matter as long as I have predilections and pursue them with both tenacity and whimsy, never at the expense of my personal relationships.   

Social Media

Tell us about your online marketing and use of social media.

I am marketing challenged. If it wasn’t for Facebook, Linked In, Twitter, and the web in general, I have no idea how I would promote my book. I’d be forced to send hundreds of query letters and synopses to literary agents in hopes of getting signed.

That’s how I promoted my first book (for children), ‘Being Is Good’. I received 60 rejection letters before an agent (Parenting Press) showed interest. In my query letter, I made the mistake of mentioning the next ten books that I intended to write as part of a series. They were interested! (but in the entire series), and asked me to send them the first three books. Looking back, I can’t figure out why I never wrote the next two and contacted them again. Maybe I will now…

Anyway, I hated sending those letters, and hated the rejection mail even more. It takes one tough cookie to not be affected by sixty letters of disinterest. If I can’t pull of the marketing of Scarlet Begonias by myself, I’ll be forced to go that route again.  Except now the task has been made simple as pi by www.querytracker.net.  They have the contact info for every agent in every genre and what kind of submissions they are looking for. You can make a custom list of agents, and keep notes, and track status, and even send your queries right from the site – it’s a dream come true…if that was my dream.

My dream is for the book to gain momentum by word of mouth.  If it is compelling enough, and high profile people give it good reviews, then interest will grow like some recursive virus, and the book will sell itself.  That is my dream.

So, who are these high profile people?  How do I get my book in their hands? How many friends do I need on Facebook before I dazzle one of them? Where should I advertise and how much should I spend? (I’m currently advertising on www.deadheadland.com – top billing shared in rotation with nine other ads) The site averages 25,000 hits per month, so if 10% of those see my ad, then I’m reaching 2500/month.  If 9 of those 2500 (about 0.4 %) buy my book on Amazon, then I’ll be breaking even.  If they buy from my website, www.scifisteph.com, then I’ll break even at 5 sales.

But, I created my site myself and it looks pretty rinky-dink.  Brian Markovitz (from deadheadland.com) has offered to re-vamp it for me, but the prospect is overwhelming to me. I’m not sure why.

I’ve been trying to get as many friends and page likes as possible on Facebook, but I don’t think I’m approaching it in the best way.  I need direction.  Should I make a group? Should my book be a page, how do I get my personal profile and book page in sync? How do I get my 300 friends to like my book page? If they like it, does that increase my chances that they will buy it?

Some people post like posting fools on Facebook. Is that what I need to do? Or should I be replying to other peoples’ posts on their pages? My admin page tells me how many people I am reaching and the percentage of virility each of my posts has. But I have to be operating as ‘Scarlet Begonias’ when I post, or else it doesn’t count.

I want two buttons on my facebook page. One to go to my scifisteph site and one to go to Amazon.  How do you do that? 

And I have no idea how to use twitter – at all!  Somebody please explain why it is better than Facebook.

Any and all marketing advice is welcome – please post on www.facebook.com/scifisteph.scarletbegonias