Nuts

So how does one tell if one is nuts?  I mean crackers, wacko, off, screwed up, wackadoo, loony, bonkers, deluded, hallucinatory, schizophrenic, loopy, raving mad, around the bend, screwball, ditzy, weirdo, disturbed, psychopathic, sociopathic, insane?  Crazy, in other words?  And what difference does it make, when you get right down to it?  If you're not crazy, then everyone else is, right?

There is a master reference work called DSM-5.  The "DSM" part stands for "Diagnostic Manual of Statistical and Mental Disorders." (As for the "5," that's there because there have been four other versions of the manual before it, duh.)  The DSM-5 is utilized by professionals to diagnose the particular flavor of nuttiness of their patients, and while there's a lot of controversy within the head-doctor community about some of what's set forth in the DSM-5, it's pretty much representative of the "consensus" in the field... until the DSM-6 comes along, of course.

Since the DSM-5 was published on May 18, 2013 there is no longer any such thing as "Aspberger Syndrome," did you know that?  If you thought you had that on May 17, you're just "autistic" today.  Now there's no "bereavement exception" to save you from a diagnosis of  depression if you're depressed because a loved one died, and there are fewer flavors of schizophrenia, and if you're confused about your gender, you no longer have "gender identity disorder," you have "gender dysphoria" instead.

Some have expressed concerns to the effect that the pharmaceutical industry may be exerting an undue influence on the content of the DSM-5... and on mental health treatment in general.  The knee-jerk response of many doctors is to medicate first, and ask questions later, if at all.  There are jillions of pills available, all different sizes, shapes and colors, and they are doled out like candy to anybody who asks nicely (and a lot of other patients, too.)  Hell, if you live in a major urban area, your GP may be willing to pass out some anti-depressants, based on your self-diagnosis, without any kind of a mental examination at all.  You might even be given a free sample of mind-candy.

Look, we're animals.  Organisms.  According to some scientists, what we experience as emotion is really just hormones and enzymes and things bubbling around in response to electrical alarms going off in the nervous system.  So it makes sense to smooth out the ride by introducing a little equalizer into the system, sort of like dumping a can of STP into the gas tank of your car to increase performance and get rid of engine knock.  Right?  Well, it seems that pill-popping is in the ascendance in the head-shrinking world, and that the efficacy of the Sigmund Freud / Tony Soprano-style "Talking Cure" is being called into question more and more.

The problem with seeing what is euphemistically called a "professional" to chat about what's wrong with you is that it costs a lot of money and takes a lot of time.  Americans are O.K. with spending a lot of money, especially if they can brag to their friends and neighbors about how much they're spending and what a good deal they're getting.  But they don't like to spend a lot of time doing anything except dashing to their next meeting, youth soccer match, hair appointment, restaurant date or personal training session.  Heck, shows get bounced off TV if it turns out they're hard to follow if the "viewers" don't actually sit down and watch the screen.  So fast-acting drugs are preferable to someone who doesn't feel well, as opposed to pouring one's heart out to a paid sympathizer for a couple hundred bucks an hour for years and years.

The other problem with non-drug therapy is that the patient actually has to be willing to confront the issues.  Since their unwillingness to confront the issues is usually the catalyst for the festering unhappiness that drove them to the "professional" in the first place, this is asking a lot of most patients.  They prefer to be given the answer to the problem, which in fact no responsible "professional" will even attempt to do.  "The answers lie within."  In other words, somewhere deep down inside you know for sure that your mother never liked you, and why, and that you're unhappy as a result and that because you're unhappy you eat ice cream in the middle of the night a lot and that because you do that you don't get enough sleep and are doing a crappy job at work and everybody now perceives you as fat and lazy and so you have no friends and no life.  But you'll never get over it until you confront the root cause of the problem, acknowledge your mother's faults, get angry with her, forgive her, let go and jump start your life.  And by the time the "professional" obliquely prods you into doing all that you'll have spent a whole lot of time and money.

Or... you could pop a few pills and feel better right away (unless you become manic or suicidal, as the fine print in the little booklet that comes with your pills will tell you). 

Or... you could pop the pills and go once a week to talk with the "professional," and spend the time talking about how much better or worse you feel each week without ever having to get down to the nitty gritty of why.  Some "professionals" are easy to fool.  Some don't care.  And the rest stick with the Prime Directive and go through the process of obliquely prodding you into figuring out that you're spinning your wheels.  Some people (Woody Allen, for example, or at least his movie persona) are able to remain in therapy for decades this way.

Unhappiness is the usual catalyst for a trip to the "professional," I'm told.  This is interesting, because it is only in the last couple of hundred years that "happiness" has been considered a possibility by most people.  For most of human history, the closest anybody ever usually got to happiness was to get through a whole week without developing a goiter or leprosy, having their village sacked and burned, or having a spell cast upon them by a witch.  And given the present state of the world as reported by the media you have to allow for the possibility that it might be the people who aren't unhappy who are the crazy ones.

And as implied in Paragraph One above, it simply may not matter whether you're officially crazy or not.  There really doesn't seem to be a whole lot of "normal" out there.  What most people seem to mean by "normal" is either "like me" or "boring."  (And when talking about most people, those two labels mean the same thing.)  Most of the truly happy people I've come across would fall into the category of "eccentric" or "free-spirited," terms which any "normal" person would recognize as euphemisms for "crazy." 

On the other hand, there are a lot of evil, depressed, violent and angry people, too.  But anyone who's studied history would recognize these terms as descriptive of a lot of high achievers, from Genghis Khan to Edith Piaf to Adolf Hitler to Andy Kauffman to Richard Nixon to Vincent Van Gogh.  In fact, you couldn't write the history of the human race without a lot of emphasis on the evil, depressed, violent and angry people, aside from a couple of short chapters on Clara Barton and Mahatma Ghandi, and what would be the point of that?  In any event, anybody who's been through History 101 knows enough to tell you that "normal" for the human race is definitely shaded toward the dark side.

"Times have changed, though," the optimists say.  True.  And we change with the times, too.  What may have passed for socially acceptable behavior in a Viking raider probably wouldn't make it in Manhatten these days (remember those credit card commercials with the barbarians asking "What's in your wallet?") but a lot of the assholes wandering around Wall Street in their two thousand dollar suits are just as dangerous.  Are they crazy, too?  Or are the rest of us crazy for propping up the system that bailed out their bonuses?

Eric Berne wrote a book called "I'm O.K., You're O.K." back in the 60's or '70's.  I doubt if transactional analysis is still en vogue anywhere, but the title of the book is worth thinking about all by itself.  I suppose at least some people (Anthony Weiner and that old dude in the Mayor's office in San Diego, for example) won't have any trouble with the "I'm O.K." part.  It's the "You're O.K." part that really causes trouble.  Sad to say, it's generally easier to see other people clearly than it is to see one's self-- if you take the trouble to look at all-- because we've got a little distance.  And then you've got to ask yourself, "If they're O.K. and they're not like me, how can I be O.K.?"

Maybe Anthony Weiner has it right.  Self-esteem trumps public opinion anytime.  And hubris is certainly a "normal" state for humankind.

Frankenbabies

Genetic science is progressing by leaps and bounds.  Crazed scientists are sequencing genomes and splicing genes and cloning right and left.  Congresspeople who failed high school biology and voters who never heard of it are passing laws regulating "stem cell research."  We're on the verge of Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World," but the thing that seems to scare the common person most is the possibility that "genetically modified corn" may be lurking somewhere in the freezercase at the grocery store.

Disaster is lurking in a lot of different directions:  Laboratories are incubating all sorts of deadly viruses, some only a couple of mutations away from being virulent and deadly enough to wipe out the whole of humanity if and when they are released.  Farm animals are being pumped full of antibiotics so that they can stay alive under atrocious factory farm conditions for long enough to be slaughterable, giving the "bugs" a chance to acquire immunity to those self-same antibiotics in time to keep the antibiotics from saving you the next time you've got an infection.  But if you really want to try to anticipate trouble, I'd suggest  you focus on humanity's inherent silliness and vanity.

Right now, it's becoming popular to breed fluorescent fish and clone dead pets (sounds like "Pet Sematary," only without the ancient Indian burial ground, to me.)  But it won't be long until we get down to the real meat of the matter and start concentrating on the serious business of making people look "better," and eventually act "better," too.  Now there you'll start getting into some interesting situations.

Of course, not every dad will want his kid to be an NBA star-- some will opt for football or baseball, instead.  And if and when it becomes both technically possible and marginally affordable for moms and dads to tinker on a cellular level to customize their kids I'm sure that you'll you see a lot of celebrity lookalikes and superheroes and Barbie dolls walking around, too. 

Because human beings seem to have a strong herd instinct, the longterm trend will probably be toward "standardization" of appearance.  But then again, people want to be distinctive, too, and therefore there will be a countervailing trend toward "customization."  And the genetics companies will be happy to oblige, offering "upgrades" to the basic "Hunk" and "Hottie" models for an additional fee.  Pretty soon kids will be like cars or cellphones or televisions: everyone has a "luxury" car and a "smartphone," and a flatscreen HD TV, it's just that some are more expensive... and better all around... than others.

No matter how much money some people have, it won't be enough to buy them good sense or good taste.  And that will hold true with kid-designing, too.  Just check out some of the plastic surgery abominations pictured in the tabloids on sale at your local supermarket if you want to know how warped people's vision of "beauty" can get.  Just think collagen lips, permanent makeup, facelifts after which one's ears wind up on top of one's head.  Your imagination isn't going to be good enough to prepare you for what's coming, at least not without a fistful of those mythical LSD-laced potato chips you may remember from your college days.

And suppose people had the power to insure that their kids had IQ's that were twenty... or fifty... or a hundred points higher than Mom and Dad's.  How's that going to turn out, leaving aside for the moment the indisputable fact that kids already think their parents are morons?  Imagine the resentment of a generation of real, not just imagined, geniuses raised by a generation of dolts.  "Logan's Run" time, for sure, for anyone over 30 in a world like that.

Let's be honest with ourselves, just this once.  Mary Shelley proved definitively, with her chilling tale of "Frankenstein," that human beings are too stupid and short-sighted to design a superman.  Aldous Huxley and Hitler gave us something to think about in this regard, too.  Just this once, couldn't we hearken to the wise words uttered by Jeff Goldblum in "Jurassic Park," when as Dr. Ian Malcolm he castigated the idiots who decided to clone dinosaurs by observing, "You were so busy trying to see if you could, you never stopped to ask whether you should," or something approximately like that and at least equally terse and profound.

With all the new "fertility science" and egg-freezing and sperm donating and zygote-growing-in-a-Petrie-dish going on, people have it in their heads that anyone can be a parent, whether that's what Nature wants or not.  That's bad enough, all by itself.  But if we start tinkering at the cellular level with the goal of achieving the dream of creating the "perfect child" for everyone, we'll deserve whatever cataclysm awaits.  Ever hear of Pandora's Box?

Unhappy Endings

We've all been conditioned by Hollywood to expect that everything will turn out right in the end.  It's pretty much a rule in Tinseltown that you've got to have a good outcome, no matter how twisted the tale.  And not only does the story have to end well, there can't be any loose ends left dangling, either.  No ambiguity allowed.  That's why all those one-hour crime shows seem to move faster at the end-- they have to cram in the answers to all the little questions that have been raised in the first forty-five minutes, along with a tidy ending.

Popular fiction, for those who still read, is fraught with the same expectations.  There are strict formulae for success in any of the "genres."  The books are so predictable that some aficionados of "romance" novels, for example, plough through two every day while doing the laundry or waiting for the kids to finish soccer practice or drying their toenails or eating lunch at their desk.  The object of this consumption is not to challenge the imagination or develop new insights, not by any means.  What it's really all about is anaesthesia, an attempt to blunt the dull pain of monotonous, everyday existence.

It's not just "romance" novels that provide this release, of course.  "Mysteries" will do it, too, and I remember that long ago there used to be a thing called "Westerns."  And almost every kind of book has vampires in them now, unless the book has got zombies, instead.  Mostly the vampires are assigned the more sophisticated, glamorous roles, while the zombies are concentrated in the areas of "gross" or "hilarious."

Now don't get me wrong, I've got nothing against a little escapism.  Hell, I spent all six years of my stint at the University of Blank stoned out of my skull, and I've imagined a lot more than I've actually lived.  (You have, too, Smartass.)  But I've paid enough attention to real life to know that those formulaic happy endings are more than elusive... maybe even mythical... in the real world. 

Now, if one were to accept the premise that real life is crappy, as Jean-Paul Sartre and the rest of the "Existentialists" did, it would be perfectly natural to opt out when it came to structuring your entertainment, and to demand "upbeat" or "inspriational" endings to your stories... which you would probably immerse yourself in every waking moment you could, because that would be the only way out of the crappy morass of existence.  That would make sense.

However, many of the people who consume this crap will tell you, if you can get them to put down their paperback or their I-pad or their Kindle for a moment, that they are happy... even that they "love" their lives, and life in general for that matter.  If so, why wouldn't they be more interested in exploring the joys and mysteries of life, as opposed to avoiding any type of honest reflection?

Again, that big river in Africa, "de Nile," rears its head.  My own take is that because people realize at some level that they are stuck here, and are afraid to leave, they have no choice but to try to convince themselves that their condition is A-O.K.  Many choose drugs, some choose religion, some choose popular fiction and the movies.  These diversions provide a buffer against the "real" world of war and disease and pollution and rape and murder and hatred and violence and poverty and slavery and disease and death and disappointment and frustration and guilt and doubt and so on.  Not only does formula fiction insulate them from all this chaos, but the happy endings allow the fevered reader (or viewer-- I know that many people don't read) to experience a vicarious simulacrum of good feelings for a fleeting instant before grabbing the next book (or DVD).

Here's a radical thought: maybe the people who "love" life would get more out of it if they were to love it the way you're supposed to love people-- with acceptance of the whole package, warts and all.  Is it really better to have everything sanitized and predictable?

You might have noticed, if you know any "intellectuals," that they are a pretty gloomy bunch, on the whole.  Not a whole lot of laughing in those smoke-choked cafes.  Not a lot of good times and humor in those dense tomes they churn out.  (Ever try to read "Atlas Shrugged?")  All very serious, all very gloomy.  "Intellectuals," however, embrace at least some of reality... the part that hurts and is incurable.  (Check out "The Myth of Sisyphus" by Albert Camus.)

Both the mindless and the hopeless have it wrong, though.  There is a middle ground.  At least in theory, it should be possible to "love" life, even while acknowledging that it sometimes sucks, to navigate life with one's eyes open.  There is beauty in grief as well as in joy, after all.  I never felt love for my late father or my late brother or my dead cats any more intensely than when I lost them.  And when I read about war or death or hunger or disease, I feel grateful for the peace and the life and the plenty and the health that I am privileged to enjoy for the moment.  This is called "The Pleasure Principle," and it's something that you study in Psychology 101.

Again, there's nothing wrong with a little numbness from time to time.  But I'd suggest just using it as a spacer.  You might try picking up a real book next time, something with some real thoughts, ideas and emotions in it. 

Prophecy

Over the last 25 years, there have been a few changes in the world—agree or disagree?  Homes and offices and libraries and cars became computerized, phones became mobile.  Americans became fat.  Words like “blog” and “tweet” and “e-zine” and “phablet” and “Belieber” came into general use.  Bookstores and one-hour photo labs and print shops vanished en masse, and commerce in general moved “online.”  Shopping malls, once the throbbing heart of American teen and suburban society, withered away to the point that the operators had trouble giving space away, and stores like Banana Republic and Radio Shack stepped up to serve as the “anchor stores” of what was left.  Entertainment became largely home-based, with big HD TV screens, satellite reception, wireless speakers, i-tunes and i-pods, game consoles, Blu-Ray discs and video-on-demand.  (Just as well, in a world where it now can cost hundreds of dollars to take the kids to a football game, or a thousand bucks to go to a Madonna concert.)  The youth of America donned urban gang attire and pop “music” became first shouting into microphones in badly-metered “rap,” then repeating the same lines over and over and over again in a singsong monotone  with the assistance of a “vocorder.”  Illegal aliens voted in elections, served on juries and joined in huge rallies to demand the rights and privileges of citizens, while the U.S. government commissioned a really tall wall (to keep them from leaving, I guess.)  Healthcare became outrageously high-tech and expensive, and the illusory “right to privacy” died once and for all with credit bureau rating checks, unsolicited offers of credit, robocalls, social media sharing, government communications monitoring, face and voice recognition technology, online “cookies,” computerized medical records, e-books, credit and debit cards, YouTube and interactive TV.  Censorship became en vogue, with campus “speech codes” and book-burnings sponsored by Tipper Gore, helped along by the public’s fear of religious fanatics who blew up abortion clinics, crashed loaded jetliners into tall buildings, surgically implanted suicide bombs and stabbed to death filmmakers whose work they didn’t like.  Full-body scans and cavity checks lengthened the wait time at airports, as did universal overbooking of flights and cancellation of service to small, unimportant cities.  Legroom was at a premium, once you made it onto the plane, increasing the risk of deep vein thrombosis.  And we were at war almost the whole time, without ever declaring war, utilizing everything from “surgical strikes” to “black ops” to “multi-national coalitions” to huge invasions to “regime change” to “nation building” to “drone” robots to further our incoherent foreign policy, with the U.S. military maintaining a presence in over 200 countries, just in case.  The Soviet Union collapsed, but the “peace dividend” was spent before we had time to realize it, and the U.S. is now the biggest debtor nation on Earth. 

Demographics in the country are shifting to the point that European Americans will no longer be a majority well before mid-Century, more and more people are claiming "mixed" racial and ethnic roots, and the foot traffic in cities like LA looks like you're in some exotic foreign clime.  Not only are the people getting to look the same everywhere, with a McDonald’s and a Starbucks and a Kentucky Fried Chicken on every corner pretty soon there won’t be any point to traveling around anymore because everyplace on the planet is going to look exactly the same.  But since a lot of Americans stay at the Marriott when they travel, anyhow, it may be a while before people even notice that there's nowhere to go.

It’s easy to sit back now and say that you could see it all coming, the seven billion people, the drowning polar bears, the rocket fuel in the aquifers, the Global War on Terror, the first (almost) black President, DNA crimesolving (at least on TV), Twitter, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report supplanting the network news, legal “gay marriage,” the burgeoning lists of “threatened” and “endangered” species, Mars rovers, Chinese spaceflights, Americans hitching rides in Russian space capsules because otherwise they’d have no way to get to the International Space Station because all the American shuttles are either blown up or in museums.  The rise and fall of Amy Winehouse, River Phoenix, Bernie Madoff, Anthony Weiner, Paula Deen, Barry Bonds, Paris Hilton, Marion Berry, Scooter Libby, Martha Stewart, Sarah Palin and, of course, Justin Bieber and his mom… not to mention the Kardashians.  You get the idea.

So, since everybody will claim to have seen all that coming, the only way I can make this interesting will be to try to predict the next 25 years, instead.  Here goes:

1.    We’ll discover proof of the existence of life on other planets (life now, not at some time in the distant past.)

2.    Somebody will clone a human being, whether it’s legal for them to do so or not.

3.    The world’s population will increase to at least nine billion, despite massive die-offs from increasingly aggressive “superbugs” (courtesy of our obsession with “factory farming” and persistent misuse of antibiotics.)

4.    At least a quarter of the species of plants and animals now in existence will become extinct in the wild, including some favorites such as pandas, tigers, gorillas and orangutans.  (Countless others will, of course, take their place   on the “endangered” and “threatened” lists.)

5.    There won’t any longer be any “Islamic” governments... anywhere.

6.    All official U.S. government documents will be “printed” or published online in three languages (English, Spanish and Mandarin Chinese.)

7.    The U.S. Constitution will be amended so that a foreign-born person such as Arnold Schwarzenegger or Justin Bieber can be elected President.

8.    All infants will be “chipped” at birth, signaling the end of Social Security cards, picture I.D.’s, credit and debit cards, etc… and even the pretense of privacy.

9.    Robots of all types will assume ever more prominent roles in our “service-oriented economy.”  It will become a novelty to interface with a human bank teller, grocery store cashier, doctor, lawyer or librarian.  Police and military functions will continue switching over to the tin men, too.

10.Fossil fuels will become first, very expensive, and then, passé, at least in the “developed” world, as alternative power comes online.  A regional nuclear conflict, fueled by Saudi and Irani fanaticism,  will end the sad saga of the Middle East.

11.Scientists will prove that the human personality a) is not rooted solely in the brain; and b) persists, at least for a while, after clinical death.  This will result in an uptick in executions, as people realize that death is really just Round Two, and there's no more room to keep people in prison, anyway.

12.There will be a Second (or Third, depending upon what part of the country you live in) American Revolution, this one predicated on class warfare, a la the French.  The 98^th percentile will assume control when the dust settles;  the  99th percentile (the fabled 1%) will no longer be with us, one way or the other.  But the economic stratification of our society will persist.

13.With the elimination of the need for human workers, unskilled and skilled alike, as the result of advances in robotics and computerization, there will no longer be a useful function for many people born into our Brave New World.  Only the elite will have what we now call “jobs” or “careers” or “an education.” Whereas philosophers used to dream about the benefits to philosophy and the Arts that might accrue if everybody had more leisure, the devaluation of the Humantities and the Arts as worthy subjects for study in favor of math and science (so that we can compete with the Chinese, as the politicians tell us) will have left us with a population of idle, ignorant, unimaginative people with those not athletically “talented” enough to play professional sports or good-looking enough to appear in pornos having nothing to do but hang out, get high, watch pornos and reproduce.

14.All restrictions on abortion and euthanasia will disappear.  You won’t even need a scrip from your doctor in most states (and your doctor will probably be a robot, anyway.)  Instead of saving for retirement, which would just be more of the same for most people, people will save up to take the Big Sleep early.  You’ll get coupons for it from the robot at the grocery store, too.

15.Written language will follow the path to extinction taken by the protractor and the slide rule and the pencil.  Everything will be video.  Just as kids today don’t learn how to write (or read) cursive writing, the kids of the near future won’t even bother to learn how to text (or to read anything at all).

16.We’ll have regular occurrences of mass food poisoning as the factory farm food distribution system collapses, and then we’ll switch to meat grown in the lab from stem cells… just one step away from Soylent Green.  Then cows and sheep and goats and pigs and horses can go extinct, too.  (They take up too much space, anyway, the argument will go, just like criminals and the genetic culls who opt for euthanasia, and unwanted foetuses, etc.)

17.People will fight primarily over food and water, not oil or religion.

18.The weather shift brought on by “global warming” will continue, rendering the Great Outdoors ever more hostile and making it very dangerous to live on the Great Plains… or on the coast… or near any seismic fault.  Radiation levels will become so intense, courtesy of the porous ozone layer,  that it won’t be safe to go outside without protective goggles and clothing, including a ridiculous-looking, tin-foil-insulated floppy fisherman's hat which, on the plus side, will also keep alien thought-readers out of your head.

19.Congress will pass legislation creating an official American history, a version of events that will be required to appear in all online encyclopedias and any educational videos for the few kids still going to school.  It will be updated hourly, with all amendments having to pass muster before a secret educational court.

20.Genetic engineering will progress to the point that prospective parents (with lots of money) will be able to specify the height, weight, hair and eye color, gender, gender preference, skin shade and I.Q. of their bundle of joy, not just name them.  It won’t take more than a couple of generations of this before we’ve laid the basic foundations of a divided society much like that of the Eloi (the selected) and Morlocks (the random) as depicted by H.G. Wells in his classic, "The Time Machine," and won’t that be fun!

Now, all this might sound a little bleak to you, but I think these are pretty conservative prophesies, just extrapolations of currently observable trends and technologies.  The real "future history" will undoubtedly contain many surprises (including, hopefully, some positive ones) that will act as game changers.  But still, probably wouldn't hurt to hoard some canned goods or move into a bunker or something, just in case.

What Dreams May Come

Ever had insomnia?  If you have, you'll know why getting enough sleep is so important to one's mental and physical health.  If you can't sleep, your body can't recover from the stresses of the previous cycle.  But more importantly (I think) your cerebral cortex just keeps going and going, just like the late, great Energizer Bunny.

Some people count sheep when they are trying to fall asleep.  Not me.  Last night I occupied myself for quite a stretch by mentally apologizing to an endless list of people, living and dead, whom I've trampled upon, or disappointed, or betrayed, or slighted, or misunderstood, or wronged, or cheated on, or resented, or bad-mouthed, or yelled at, or ignored, or annoyed, or forgotten, or let down, or abandoned, or harrassed, or persecuted, or mocked, or fought, or stood up, or resisted, or lied to, or abused or failed to help over the years.  And if I thought about it long enough, I'll bet everybody I ever met would wind up on that list.  Brother, was I glad when the sun came up.

And what really gets me is that the bad stuff I was remembering was just the stuff that really happened and that I know about.  There are probably rows and rows of people out there who have imaginary grievances against me, too.  And people with legitimate grievances that I never knew about, or have forgotten about.  And what about all those impure thoughts?

If it's really true that your life flashes before you in reverse when you're about to die, I hope you get to remember some of the good stuff, too.

Memory is a funny thing, really.  Over many years, the justice system has demonstrated that eyewitness testimony isn't quite as surefire as always used to be assumed, because no two witnesses ever perceive the same event in exactly the same way.  Further, research has established that people see what they expect to see, are very susceptible to suggestion, and have a tendency to fill in and edit details over time.  A witness who's been carefully "prepared" to give testimony will sound convincing to most, even if the foundation for his or her story lies in somebody else's wishful thinking or artful suggestions.  Remember the McMartin Pre-school case?  Sock puppets wielded by state-retained psychologists were able to coax the most incredible stories from a bunch of allegedly-abused pre-schoolers, stories so incredible that even a jury of ordinary Americans wouldn't buy them.

You can coach yourself, too-- edit your own history. Say something often enough, and you'll come to believe it's true, whether you're recounting your high school athletic achievements or your noble ancestry.  And once you can believe, you can beat a lie detector any day.  My Mom's done her whole life over several times this way.

That's what we need dreams for, actually.  As a sort of reality check.  Other than frissons when you're walking through a deserted alley or a haunted house, or creepy feelings when the wild-eyed loser pulls up alongside of you in his windowless van, dreams are one of the few times that your subconscious mind will interface with your conscious self in a way that you can make sense out of without the discipline of meditation or prayer or at least a whopping dose of hallucinogens to help you out.  And unlike these other methods, the subconscious usually gets to select the program when we're talking dreams.  (Although I'm told that those who work at it have (sometimes) the ability to "incubate" a dream about a topic of interest, even then the subconscious has to agree on the topic before the show will start.)

"Vivid" dreams may be something special.  Sometimes they involve prophecies.  But regular old dreams are cool, too.  In my case, I think one of the best things about them is that they are not (consciously) expected.  But maybe I'm just waxing nostalgic, because to tell you the truth I don't often remember my dreams these days.  Sleep apnea, maybe?  Subconscious bored or dead?  Who knows?  At current rates, I can't afford a visit to the sleep clinic or the shrink to find out.