Dreaming

Isn't it strange?

It's odd how throughout our lives we spend so much time day dreaming, night dreaming, dreaming about futures, dreaming about events that could happen, never happened, or actually happened. All conjecture aside, I seem to go through phases of my life where I dream regularly, and other times when I don't dream at all.

In 6th grade I used to have reoccurring nightmares that would keep me awake late into the night, fearfully clutching my blankets in case what I had seen was real. The only time these nightmares would cease was on Sundays after going to church with my parents. I suppose something about a church building pushes away bad thoughts or something. I don't know, I'm not especially religious and would easily pin the correlation as my subconscious using what it knew about church and dreams to not torture me that night.

Anyway, these nightmares I used to have stopped when I started to take confidence in myself and hold my head up when I walked through the halls of my small town middle school. I was asked out by a few girls and the pleasure that I could be desirable to someone eased my mind I suppose. I didn't date any of them, that's a whole other blog with reasons in itself, but it was still nice to be wanted. A few years later, when I dated my first girlfriend I started dreaming regularly again, normally about her, sometimes about completely arbitrary things.

After the break-up, nightmares ensued again, but eventually I grew content in my niche of the world and they ceased. As did any dreams I had. When I dated another person a few years later, same thing happened, only without the nightmares at the end.

I suppose why I'm interested in this vein of thought right now is because for the past few days I've been dreaming about my girlfriend. It's always interesting to see what my subconscious has to throw at me, letting me waking mind push through it's glazed metaphors and tomfoolery. My most recent dream is halfway between a dream and a nightmare. I was falling, not  in any sort of scary way, but I was falling down a deep black hole. I could feel the wind flowing by and the way the air whipped my hair upwards past my eyes only increased the presence of the darkness around me and the velocity at which I fell. After however long this went for, I saw something in the distance. Hand outstretched, she reached out and took my hand while I fell. Bringing me closer towards her, and the falling slowed and it seemed like time stood still. I felt myself smile, physically or just mentally, I'm not sure, the color flowed back into the world around me the closer she got to me and we were above the Earth, floating through the void. Twinkling stars winked from far away and the blazing sun roared out from the center of the solar system. Looking down with her on the Earth, the blue sky was rimmed with sunlight as the sun broke over the curvature of the Earth. A sunrise from space. What better way to wake up in the morning?

A Busy Semester So Far...

Wow. So far this semester has managed to keep me busy at least 12 hours a day. It's a little bit crazy. Yesterday I did the following: Went to class, started working on a homework assignment for my Machine Learning Course involving computing a line of best fit using Cholesky Decomposition and Forward and Backwards Substitution on a matrix rendition of the dataset given to us by our professor, while I was attempting to do that I was helping out students for a class that I'm part TA for (An engineering course using Matlab), after an hour of that I went off to my differential equations class and learned about trying to pin down the interval of a unique solution for second order nonlinear equations, which was really brain numbing. After that class, I went back to my lab and continued working on my assignment, spending a large amount of time trying to figure out how to implement Cholesky Decomposition in Matlab (this involved a lot of reading from Wikipedia and googling scholarly articles related to the topic...) and a brief 45 minutes working with my friend Jack on implementing a forward and back substitution algorithm for a lower triangluar and upper triangular matrix. Really cool stuff, after finishing that, I moved on to working on my differential equations homework as well as a small amount of Physics homework involving Gauss's law and potential energy, which was pretty fun. After that, my friend Scott brought me some delicious Cinnamin bread glazed with frosting stuff and we worked on Object Serialization with a class we created for a project involving creating a smartboard from a Wiimote and an infrared pen. Really fun stuff. All told, I left my room at about 9:00am and got back to it a little past midnight after being productive all day (minus the half an hour to eat dinner and the ten minutes to eat a quick lunch).


All that being said, I guess my point is that it's completely ridiculous how much work one person can get done in a single day if they actually stay focused the entire time. My friend Jack and I were working on a flowchart yesterday to model the behavior of our project (the smartboard again, there's 6 people working on it) and we're(am I allowed to abbreviated we were?) talking about how when he goes home to relax he 'shuts his brain off' and does random stuff, he then told me that "the empirical difference between you and me is that you don't do that, your brain is working all the time!" and I suppose I ought to agree with him.

I don't know when this strange super-productive and workaholic-esk attitude infested me but I feel like it happened at the end of last spring semester. Ever since then I've been constantly working on things, whether it be homework or reading articles or books. I've just been trying to gain as much experience and knowledge as possible, and I feel like it's actually starting to show. Not that I wasn't attempting to do that before, but when I'm sitting in my linear algebra class, musing about how everything we're covering is so basic compared to the 10 minute introductive to linear algebra I got before being thrown to the Cholesky Decomposition methods in my Machine Learning class, that I can't help but smile a little when I do the assignments and think about how the Math, once hard, to me is now more like a friend who sometimes just plays tricks on my eyes. I don't think I used to like math as much as I do now, probably because I didn't see the use for it. But, a lot of the math I'm learning, within last semester's ridiculously difficult Calculus III class and the two classes I have now, are actually applicable to real life problems, and I guess that makes it easy to understand and want to learn it. It's interesting.

Besides just math, I feel like I'm always thinking about new ideas and things to try out. I want to develop an application that will use open-source text recognition to first create strings of words, and then throw them through a translator program and be able to translate text that the phone is viewing in real time. That would seriously be one of the coolest things ever. Imagine wandering around in a foreign country, ready with your phone, or hell, maybe a nice pair of snazzy data glasses (another thing I would like), and being able to actually read the things around you without needing to know the language. Hopefully the world is moving towards a common language, which would be Science. It'd be nice to carve out a niche in that realm.

Besides being ridiculously pro-active in my academic life, I've met a girl! Well, re-met her I suppose. Somehow, throughout all that productive-ness she was constantly in the back of my mind, making me smile while I worked. Unfortunately, she doesn't go to my school, so I can't go see her whenever, but talking to her through text messaging or skype always makes me happy. Before I get too sentimental, I suppose I should stop. Maybe one last thought, there's a saying, behind every great man is a great woman, while it's generally considered a feminist slogan, I'd like to interpret it in an unbiased way (yes it is biased to be a feminazi, you're biasing yourself when you're no longer struggling for equality but just trying to prove a point, ugh that's a whole 'nother article about an irritating teacher I had but anyway....), behind every great man is a  great woman. I'd like to think of this kinda like, a man is motivated to do his best because he wants to impress/provide for the woman he desires, and likewise for women, I'd imagine there can be a great man behind every woman as well. It's a circular system and one that really just betters both parties. Maybe that's why, in general, couples are happier than singles (at least in personal endeavors).  I've gone off the point, the point I was trying to make, is that even though this woman wasn't behind me last semester and I was motivated to work hard then, this semester I feel like I'm even MORE motivated to keep striving to better myself academically and professionally because this girl is always on my mind.