02.24 | dream states
Some people have vivid imagination, some not so vivid, but everybody has vivid dreams.
– Stephen LaBerge
✉️ letter #28
What's up friends! I took a much needed week off last week from these content-making pursuits, and it was enormously helpful. Not only did I appreciate freeing up some brain space, the relaimed time also helped me kick off two attempts at habits I'd been trying to restart - reviewing languages (I've got two of them that really need keeping up with) and drawing!
But I do like writing this newsletter, and I feel like if I stop for two weeks in a row, it might be a sad several months before the next one... so I'm back! I'm back even though, to be honest, I still feel like I'm insanely busy - sometimes to the point of paralysis.
Speaking of paralysis and habits: I realized this morning that the reason I perpetually set my alarm for a little too early and then hit snooze for an hour because I love the feeling of falling asleep.
It ocurred to me as I hit snooze for the fourth time that I get a strange comfort from recognizing my consciousness fading, to the point where I'm actually dismayed when - because my body has to wake up sometime - I can't get it to fade anymore.
Anyway, it turns out that state between sleep and awake actually has a name: hypnagogia.
For those interested in the science behind it, neurons in your brain communicate with each other through bursts of electricity, categorized into five different waves by current technologies.
When you're awake, your brain is dominated by beta waves, and as you become drowsy, alpha waves take over. And then as you drop into actual sleep, your brain emits theta and then gamma waves. In the time where alpha waves are decreasing into theta waves, but you haven't quite reached the first stage of sleep yet, that's when you're hypnagogic.
This state is when people commonly experience things as pleasant as lucid dreaming to as frightening as sleep paralysis. It's when you think you're about to trip over something or fall off the bed and your body involuntarily jerks you awake. It's when you experience hallucinations that feel just on the verge of being real, be it someone saying something to you or feeling your hands close around an object that isn't actually there.
And this morning, in my hypnagogic state, I realized finally that one of the reasons why I always ALWAYS smack that snooze isn't because I am a lazy yet masochistic goose, but because this specific habit of knocking myself into consciousness at 6am and then wading in and out every ten minutes until 7 or 8... is actively pleasurable.
Earlier in the week, I finished a pretty popular self help guide called Atomic Habits by James Clear.
I intensely dislike the self help genre, by the way - it always feels like I'm reading an intensely folksy version of a textbook. And, especially in the realm of business or productivity self help, there's usually some incredibly questionable science and ethics involved. (Ask me to go on a rant about 4 Hour Work Week one day).
I did not enjoy Atomic Habits any more than its brethren. There are a lot of productivity videos on Youtube that summarize most of the lessons in this book in less than 15 minutes, so the hours I dedicated to pushing through it felt like a waste of my time. But I guess one good reminder I got was: habits form when they're attractive to you.
Prior to this morning, I had thought that I just needed to make 6am a more attractive time to wake up. Turns out it already is for me, but because it's attractive to then fall back asleep.
Well. Several hours after this revelation, I have decided to embrace it. I've got enough other bad habits I don't enjoy as much to contend with anyway. One of them is to immediately obsess about optimizing my own productivity when, quite frankly, by any measure, I am probably productive enough.
Plus, apparently many people have specifically induced this state in order to help aid their own creativity: Charles Dickens, Edgar Allen Poe, Dali, Einstein... even Aristotle (allegedly).
So, to cement it as a part of me I actively cherish, I figured I'd list some fun and fanciful and fantastical names for this state that I found on Wikipedia:
- anthypnic sensations
- phantasmata
- praedormitium
- oneirogogic images
- dreamlets
Wonderful.
🌱 the ethical ideas newsreel
- To start with, if you haven't seen it already, this piece on Eileen Gu really hits home on how much pain the ongoing media circus around the ski champion's citizenship has dredged up specifically in us culture-straddling Asian-Americans. It's written by Helen Li, whom I've had the pleasure of working with both in Democrats Abroad and when she freelanced a bit for me in my last role at RADII.
I honestly believe that if Eileen Gu were not this good — she won gold in Big Air last week, added a silver in slopestyle earlier this week, and has a chance for another medal tomorrow in her favored event, the freeski halfpipe — Americans would never hear of her name. Twitter trolls and Tucker Carlson would not label her a “traitor.” People suddenly care only because of her gifts. Athletes switch countries all the time, and are also actively recruited by national sports federations to do so. (I certainly haven’t seen former Senator Claire McCaskill tweeting about the white athletes on China’s Olympic hockey teams, anyway.) It is the loss of talent that makes people mad. What does that mean then when your love is only conditional upon a good performance?
- Preaching to the choir, but I'm glad even Harvard Business Review is willing to call b.s. on greenwashing in the fashion industry:
Ultimately, businesses must disclose their lobbying efforts, use their clout to affect positive change while engineering a business system that is regenerative. To demonstrate progress, stewardship reports should become mandatory, more quantitative, thinner, more attune to planetary thresholds and be subject to annual external audits.
- A lot of essays about Toxic Positivity end up just being a takedown on the culture. I get that - I hate it too, but I also hate to end on a note that doesn't give us a way forward beyond "this thing in our modern world sucks." Toxic positivity does have an "antidote" - it's "tragic optimism," as relayed by this excellent Atlantic piece. I think I want to devote more time to this actually.
Nelson makes a distinction between gratitude—a momentary emotion—and gratefulness, an “overall orientation” that is “not contingent on something happening to us, but rather a way that we arrive to life.” Part of being human is that we will forget our past suffering and start to take our current life for granted. But as Nelson notes, “The work is to remember more often than we forget.”
- Related to that idea of proposing roads forward rather than just poking fun of the horror of the now, this piece in The Conversation argues for more positive climate change combatting role models in entertainment.
Evidence is mounting that green role models can affect behaviour. Following the Netflix film Don’t Look Up, 250,000 people pledged positive action via the movie’s website...
There are also initiatives, such as the Green Stories writing competitions, that encourage writers to develop more sustainable role models. The website suggests transformative sustainability solutions such as personal carbon allowances and sharing economies that writers can embed into their stories. This work is being extended into video, in association with Bafta’s Albert initiative, through a competition to create five minute videos that highlight the impact of fictional role-models and calls out those writers and characters that implicitly promote excessive consumption as an aspiration.
🎵 song of my week
In the theme of this post, I wanted to shout out Day'N'Nite, an old Kid Cudi song that's been repurposed very, very well for the trailer to the upcoming Disney+ Marvel series, Moon Knight.
I have no attachment to this character. Moon Knight was never a part of my repertoire growing up. And his comic book origins are pretty messy - a Jewish-American mercenary who stumbles into being possessed by the Moon God in Egypt and then takes on a bunch of different aliases that are ret-conned into being some sort of multiple personality disorder. It's like someone was playing ad libs with edgy tropes.
But this trailer looks trippy and dope, and I like this song, and I like how this song was used to fit so perfectly into this new retelling of what seems like a really wacky story. Here is the original on Spotify:
And here's its absolutely excellent music video. Wow 2009 was 13 years ago.
✨enjoying: one final piece of pop culture fun
So a couple of months ago, I highlighted a random Youtuber because he'd done a pretty great job of digesting 38 seasons of SNL.
Fast forward to now, and I've found out that not only is he like, a very successful top of Youtube Youtuber, but he's part of a crew of very successful top of Youtube Youtubers specifically doing comedic pop culture reaction videos... and that this group is so known with such a big fan base that sometimes, they get erotic fan fiction written about them.
Yes. You read what I wrote.
Even if you don't know these guys, or barely know who Logan Paul and Jake Paul are, this hilariously bad fan fiction written about them all is great and their read-along made me die.
Did you enjoy it?
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