... with regards to libertarianism, anarchy, von Mises, foreign policy, freedom, etc.
Last night I had a strange dream. I was in Rome with a friend of mine. From our hotel balcony, I witnessed a Space Shuttle (similar to Challenger or Discovery) crash into the city. I was angry, because I knew it was a suicide attack and it was perpetrated by the US. But this was not the only incidence. Space shuttles of the same type as the first one crashed throughout the day, increasing in intensity. I even saw one crash right in front of my hotel. I managed to film it. My friend apparently wasn't worried, as long as it didn't crash into the Colesseum.
Well...my dreams on liberty tends to be more pessimistic (also known as nightmares, I guess you could say). For example, I recently had a dream about nuclear warfare. Couldn't tell you what it was about, but I think it was a combination of my fear that libertarian philosophies won't arrive to the masses in time, and me playing a little too much Fallout: New Vegas.
Wow, that's a pretty specific dream. The creepiest dream I ever had was I was standing on the Oregon beach looking out over the Pacific when this monstrous tidal wave rose out of the ocean, and I mean it was literally a wall of water no "surge" like in the Indonesian or Japanes tsunamis. It was a wall of water nearly 1,000 feet high and it sucked the surf out as it was coming in, exposing the sand for a quarter-mile into what moments before had been the ocean. And I could see driftwood embedded in the wall of water but due to the momentum of the tsunami, the driftwood was not falling down, it was like it was "impaled" in the side of the wave. The feeling of terror and awe was just indescribable. I had that dream twice actually, though slightly different each time. This was probably like 7 years ago. What's weird is that I had never seen anything like that in a movie or even in a documentary but for some reason there were all these detailed physical events such as the surf being drawn out in advance of the wave... I have no idea how my brain came up with that. It seemed way more real than a movie.
I had another dream where I witnessed all these volcanic eruptions occurring at the same time. It was a very surreal dream and I didn't feel scared at all. I was watching these massive orange globs of plastic molten rock hurling miles through the air and landing in a valley floor, squashing whole houses. While I was some distance away, I was close enough that I could have gotten hit but didn't get scared. This one was probably 10 years ago or so.
Clayton -
LOL, what a thread. OK, some time ago I had this dream. There was a ruckus outside my home and so I took a look outside the window to see what it was about, and it was some people stealing vans. They were doing it by hand. That is they picked a van with their bare hands and put them on top of some kind of mega-truck to be transported, they didn't drive them, and they were only taking the vans, no cars. But the strange thing about all of this is that it was my old street and my old window! In my dreams I'm still always at home at my old adress!
My dreams are very surreal, but I spend time writing my dreams and going into lucid states to make them more "visible" in regards to understanding my unconscious.
A part of a recent dream went as such: I was in a building walking with a woman and a young man, the woman was in charge (possibly my anima) and the rooms were white with control panels and monitors along the walls. It was a place where they'd enter people's dreams, I did not say much because I did not want to give them reason to enter mine. The woman wanted the young man to go into someone's dream, but he was scared as he was only a technician not an actual field agent. He was scared that he would be attacked by the "creatures" in people's dreams, we both told him there's secret places and grottos one can go where they cannot reach him. He enters a dream and I watch him on the monitors and then leave.
After that I go home and go to sleep (2 dreams in) and wake up at a safe spot which was a circular area of grass about 10 feet wide loosely connected to the mainland, one side is the sea. I see a creature in the water that looks like a dragon (or Loch Ness monster) and I go up to it and asks it's name. With a woman's voice it tells me it's name is Chlorine, I told the creature that's odd and when asked why I said "Where I'm from we use that to purify water." (The symbolism is rich here, at a body of water which typically represents the unconscious, when it's at night this means it's deep into one's unconcious, a dragon who's name means "purify" that's swimming in the sea (my unconcious), etc.)
I wake up from this dream and for a few seconds believe I'm actually awake then I realize I'm still dreaming (when I wake up from a dream in a dream I generally wake up in my bed with the lights off, it tricks yourself for a few seconds and can be problematic when you actually wake up - you don't know if you're still dreaming). This enters the next phase of the dream, but I won't write it all out here. Just to give an example. (I will say I was at the first level, and then entered a second, and then went back to the first. The dream would have taken a different turn if at the facility where they entered dreams I entered my own, and went 3 levels in.)
Dreams can mean a lot, but don't look for themes that are political or around something you'd look for specifically (like Mises or foreign policy) to compliment your daily interests, they are projections of your unconscious and should be treated as such, and their meaning can only be interpreted by the dreamer himself.
Shit its so hard to remember dreams.
I remember I had a dream last night about time travel. I think my subconcious is full of fantasy. ;)
Schools are labour camps.
The other night, I fell asleep to 7 hours of David Icke playing on YouTube in the background... had some odd moments of lucid dreaming where I woke up and heard bits of the lecture and I remember I was 100% in agreement with everything he was saying. I can't for the life of me remember now what he was saying and I doubt very much that it was something I would agree to if I was awake. Beware what you fall asleep to!
What kind of situation were you in where you voluntarily fell asleep to David Icke for 7 hours? I can't imagine that on someone.
LOL, Al_Gore_the_idiot said he was watching it, so I got curious and put it on... this was T+3 hours and an hour long drive after Thanksgiving dinner. System shutdown occured and I was sleeping for hours with that playing in the background. LOL
Is this thread still about dreams regarding political philosophy?
I mostly have dreams that span the whole night. Sometimes maybe two dreams each spanning half of the night. They're usually not exceptionally joyful or frightening, just absolutely immersive and epic like an 8 hour movie, indistinguishable from real life, and usually involving real people or current events.
About every other month I'll have a dream where I wouldn't call it flying, but jumping far and continuing to float forward above the ground instead of landing. Consistently, if I focus sufficiently before finally reaching the ground, in addition to not landing I can begin to raise up again (eventually coming back toward the ground, and repeating it). Sometimes I become consciously aware that this is a great ability that I didn't have before, that doesn't seem to make sense except that it is in fact working, without realizing it's because I'm controlling a dream.
I usually dream about boobs in my face, sometimes zombies, and I go flying on occasion. Nothing ever too deep, that's what life's for!
Wow, that's a pretty specific dream. The creepiest dream I ever had was I was standing on the Oregon beach looking out over the Pacific when this monstrous tidal wave rose out of the ocean, and I mean it was literally a wall of water no "surge" like in the Indonesian or Japanes tsunamis. It was a wall of water nearly 1,000 feet high and it sucked the surf out as it was coming in, exposing the sand for a quarter-mile into what moments before had been the ocean.
The 'wave' you explain is nearly identical to the 'wave' in the movie Deep Impact
The scene shows a father and daughter standing on a beach watching ahead as an astroid impacts the ocean. The surf is sucked in as the 1,000ft looking wave barrels toward the beach.
The scene can be seen here starting around 40sec: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNtsVP42bOE
the movie Deep Impact
I've never watched that movie nor do I believe I've ever seen that clip. In my dream, the wave was much slower but not sluggish and the detail was 1000x greater... I could see the crest of the wave being blown backwards, I could see every bit of driftwood embedded in the wave, it was unbelievably detailed.
I had a dream once where the Easter Bunny stuck a grenade in Indiana Jones's mouth, and confetti came out as the explosion.
sex/love
However, sometimes when im sleeping very lightly, i may sense myself playing a sport like basketball, or running (usually running), then falling, and actually jerkin in my bed because of the falling sensation.
i also had a dream that i stabbed and killed a public school teacher because he laughed at me for being a libertarian.
“Since people are concerned that ‘X’ will not be provided, ‘X’ will naturally be provided by those who are concerned by its absence.""The sweetest of minds can harbor the harshest of men.”
http://voluntaryistreader.wordpress.org
Clayton, I'm about two hours from finishing the 7 hour video. It's the first time I watched a long David Icke video. There are quite a bit of stuff I agree with such as the push to one world government. However, there are quite a bit a really wacky stuff (i.e. the moon is hollow theory.) And there are some things that I completely disagree on (i.e. free trade is bad.)
Well, free trade agreements are, in fact, bad. They are invariably just neo-colonial arrangements. I think that's what he's trying to say, though he is obviously abysmally ignorant of economics. :-(
I've gotten about an hour and half in. Not sure I can make it all the way through. I can only take so much wackiness at once.
Precisely. This sort of wackiness is what libertarians have to deal with all the time, such as how we believe in a gay couple's right to marry whomever they choose, however at the same time we are against "gay marriage" or marriage in general as it is known. This is why I hate it when people say Romney stands for "free trade." If he really was pro-free trade, he would get out of the WTO, the UN, get rid of all restrictions and teriffs, and lift the embargo off of places like Cuba and Iran.
But no. It's because of robots like that that we have people thinking of free trade as the bourgeoisie ripping on the little guy with the help of the state.
Icke is certainly ignorant of economics. He blamed free trade for the loss of a nation's sovereignty and the plight of Africa's poor. I do hope he meant that agreements were bad.
I think you have to throw physics out the window when it comes to understanding some of his wacky theories. Icke said that you can't take any one thing in isolation but you must piece everything together as a whole in order to get the real picture.
What's fascinating to me is how Icke and others like him are actually on to something (e.g. plasma cosmology/electric universe) but then they just go bananas with it (hollow Moon, etc. etc.) This is why I like to listen to Santos Bonacci... he delivers all the anti-establishment sentiment without all the wackiness (OK, a little bit of wackiness, but it's pretty conservative next to Icke!)
I remembering having one dream where I was in a city and I had to grab a cab to go somewhere. As I got into the cab, Milton Friedman was sitting in the other seat reading a newspaper and he looked at me and warned me about the dangers of government, then he left the cab.
Then about a few weeks ago I had a dream where I was in my house and I was sitting in a chair and my closet exploded. A portal opened and Mises and Hayek walked out and went to the kitchen to get a drink.
For some reason, I have been having dreams dealing with the military lately:
Earlier this month I dreamt (I do write my dreams down, by the way.) I was on a warship (or perhaps a warplane?) and our ship attacked an American battleship in a harbor (likely in DC). It was a surprise attack – kind of like Pearl Harbor. Our ship (or plane) rammed into their ship pretty fast. Then we poured out of our battleship and started exchanging fire. We killed quite a few of them. They killed some of us. I was surprised that we had the upper hand so far against the powerful American military. A number of us (about 10) made it into a room (I believe it was inside the warship (or plane)). In the room I, along with a couple others, attempted to guard the room from the enemies, but they eventually broke inside. The next thing I know, some of our men were busy typing away on the computers in the room, but I don't know what we they were doing. Probably hacking info. From here on, I didn't recall much of what went on. I think we were losing the battle at this point.
This dream I had last week: I was hanging out with some guys at a club. Evidently we were in Israel. Me and this young Palestinian person from the club decided to go out. It was a bright afternoon and we were walking in the desert. All of a sudden, swarms of military vehicles such as ships, planes, and land vehicles started landing from the air. There must have been tens of thousands of these. Apparently these were Israeli and/or American military vehicles who about to fight or getting ready to fight. I was thinking about what was going through my partner's mind. He must have been pissed, but did his best to hide his emotions.
I've had a few fairly vivid dreams of literally beating someone to death with my bare hands (always some kind of attacker). Woke up on more than one occasion absolutely sure I was on my way to prison... relieved after realizing it was just a dream.
Strangely, I had a vivid dream last night. In the dream, I was trying to escape a chaotic situation with my wife, and I had a hand gun which only had one bullet, and I had shot it at someone attacking us but missed. So the further we tried to escape, the more people kept trying to prevent us and I just kept waving the gun acting like it was loaded. I don't know if we made it out, a phone call awakened me.
I had a dream last night that my family and I went to Iran...on a monorail.
Also, I vaguely remember Santa Claus making an appearence in the dream.
The only dreams I have about political stuff is arguing with people about it. I think the other day I had a dream where I was like the head of a huge libertarian association... It was pretty nifty until I woke up.
A few nights ago I had a dream I was arguing with Walter Block.
I'm awesome at parties, btw.
Who won?
"I'm awesome at parties, btw"
i dun get it
@ Neodoxy
Quite interestering. A political dream I once had had to do with The Beach Boys in a debate with several Marxists, and played their music to drive the Marxists away.
Both of these dreams occurred two nights ago.
The first one had me on a beach with a few friends. The beach was on a very small island. I think I was wearing a backpack. We were all talking in wait for something when, for whatever reason, I fell towards the water where I quickly realized that the beach was a cliff. The cliff was composed entirely of sand and was about 15 stories above the water below. As I fell I punched both of my arms in the sand to stop myself from falling down. I only had to climb about five feet to get back on the beach, but my arms were really tired. I let go and fell. I landed in the water below totally unharmed. I just remember standing and looking up at the cliff thinking "Great. Now how am I going to make the flight to the DR?"
Odd.
This next dream was pretty cool. I would call it a nightmare if it wasn't so hilarious.
I was in the pool at my old address (I'm right there with ya on this detail, Marko) with probably ten of my friends. Standing outside of the pool was an older, stocky gentleman with red hair, a solid color shirt, cargo shorts, ankle high socks, and hiking boots (when I woke up, I realized that he was the warehouse guy that Lydia betrays in Breaking Bad). In the dream, I got the impression that he spoke fluent German--despite the fact that he did not speak in the dream at all. This latter detail probably has to do with the character's employment with a Germany-based conglomerate in the show. Anyway, things moved on and I realized that there was a huge brown bear running around in the yard just outside the pool, which was fenced off. For whatever reason, I got out of the pool and stood straight up to stare at the bear; bad move on my part. The bear's eyes were as big as dinner plates and he was about as big as a Volkswagon Beetle. The bear made eye contact with me and I jumped back in the pool to hide.
The red-haired gentleman tried to distract the bear by kicking two balls into the far corner of the yard, whereby the bear would run after them as if he were an excited puppy trying to "kill" a stick and not a Godless killing machine weighing about a ton. Unfortunately for his plan, the gentleman shanked both kicks, one falling right behind him, the other flying into another yard. The balls were those thin rubber ones filled with air. Each was a little bit bigger than a basketball.
Before I ducked my head under water, I saw that the bear was throwing rocks into the pool. Big rocks, probably the size of my torso. I ducked under water for a minute or so. When I picked my head up, well, there was Arnold Schwarzenegger talking to a friend of mine about conspiracy theories. The one that most interested my friend was the presence of cannibal witches on the Titanic as she sank. I asked about the witches, and Schwarzenegger told me that I'll have to go to his website to buy the DVDs.
I thought "Ah, the hell with this" and woke up.
If I had a cake and ate it, it can be concluded that I do not have it anymore. HHH
Funny. I had a dream a few weeks ago where I was walking with a professor I had, in the front yard of my old address, towards the street. In a voice that wasn't like his--he was Austrian, and had the accent in real life, but he sounded more like a high American teenager in the dream--he said, 'I can't believe you supported Bush, Sr., man...' I stopped, looked at him and asked, 'What are you talking about?' And that's it. That was the dream.
I have many dreams yet the problem is I can hardly recall even one of those dreams.
I remember a dream I had about a month ago where my Macro Professor mentioned Austrian Economics (something which should have tipped me off to the fact it was a dream right away since my teacher thinks Hayek is a classical economist) and he referred to Mises as "Adam Smith's Plumber". I remember being really pissed off when I woke up and it took me about an hour to fully register that that hadn't happened. What was also interesting was that in the dream I couldn't figure out whether or not this was an insult or a complement.
This leads us to another interesting possibility which is that my mind may have actually came up with that because of Mark Skousen. In his book "The Making of Modern Economics" he continually refers to "The House that Smith Built" as an analogy for free market economics, the invisible hand, and the Laissez-Faire system. He then talks about those attempting to tear down the house entirely and replace it with "The House that Marx Built" or "The house that Keynes Built" while others like Marshall are trying to refurbish the house, take out rotting boards and replacing it with a sturdier foundation.
In this way Mises being Smith's plumber might actually make him one of the most important economists of all since it meant that he was working throughout the house, even through the foundations of the basement in order to make the house inhabitable.
Or maybe it was just a dream about how my Macro Professor is a Keynesian...