The big news this week in the new york times is they are discussing
the Easterlin paradox: why money won't buy you happiness, or stuck on
the old hedonic treadmill. Get your freakonomics on. Some do and some
do not, i.e. social "science" research. It reminds me of Bukvich's
paradox: how come the guys who have PhD's in Economics don't have all
the money? Mine is misnamed though; it is not really a paradox as the
factual matters are *way* more complicated than you can put into a
four-year course.
I am going to give up the Vitamin B-6 dreaming. I have been doing this
for about two years around once a week. My conclusion is that it is
definitely true that a B-6 before bedtime will make for more lively
dreaming. In my experience it also makes for less restful sleep. The
best book on sleep I have seen is "The Promise of Sleep" by William
Dement. It is astoni****ng how little we know about sleep. Dement has a
sleep laboratory, where he has grad students watching people sleep
with all sorts of transducers wired up on their bodies. This wreaks
havoc on the poor graduate students sleep cycles by the way if you
want to go off on the topic of paradoxes. Anyway REM's and dreams do
not occur at the trough in the arousal-sleep cycle, but on the way
down and on the way back up. When you are totally out at the base of
the cycle there isn't any dreaming going on. So I am guessing that the
lively dreaming comes at the expense of goofing with the sleep cycle
and shortening the most restful ****tion of it. All that I know for
sure is when I wake up after the B-6 and lively dreaming I do not feel
as rested as I do when I skip it. So I am terminating the experiment.
The other thing I have noticed, in trying to track these things.
(Mostly what I have been recording is dream content for use in psycho
research which I think is 95% a waste of time but that is a whole
other can of worms.) That is that I do have periodic wakenings. Every
once in a while the up part of the sleep cycle gets so shallow that
anything--a car honking down the street, my refrigerator compressor
turning on or turning off, my next door neighbor's screaming orgasms--
will wake me. Right now I go right back to sleep but in the past I
have had problems with insomnia where it would take me 20 or 30 or 40
minutes to go back to sleep and if you are awake for 40 minutes in the
middle of the night the next day you can feel like you were awake all
night when actually you were only awake for 40 minutes. Dement doesn't
really address this as I recall but I think most people's complaints
about sleeplessness are biased by ignorance of the way the sleep cycle
works and how everybody, every night has intervals of being very
nearly (if not all the way) awake and having your sleep disturbed so
that you actually do wake up and even lay there sleepless for 40
seemingly eternal minutes is almost normal.
What keeps me awake? Well the ancient greek warning that for a mortal
man to lay with a goddess inevitably leads to his destruction is
certainly high on the list.
And class rage. That's always a good one. I am still bitter about my
stepbrother and my stepsister getting new schwinn bicycles (they
hardly bothered to ride) and mine was a ten dollar job from the flea
market. It was kind of like Cinderella except there was no fairy
godmother. Instead I eventually had an Uncle Sam who seduced me into
his military industrial complex so now my class rage is reflected at
me in the mirror and I can fully comply with the superego's first
commandment . . .
THOU SHALT HATE THEY NEIGHBOR AS THYSELF
(this is only on the bad days--on the good days I am pretty much
convinced that money can buy me happiness and I Love Everybody.)
Psychoanalysis is not for poor people. All of Freud and Jung and
Adler's patients were neurotic wealthy idlers. HOW MANY ORGASMS DID
YOU EVER SUCCEED IN GIVING TO YOUR MISSES DOCTOR FREUD? And then all
the latest research is done on twenty year old college students who
get coerced into being experimental subjects to fulfill bogus class
requirements and the sad fact is the psychologists know even less than
the economists. About real people, who they never see, never meet,
never talk to, and haven't a prayer of ever hoping to understand.
Christ what a racket.
My last psychiatrist was an accomplished member of his profession. I
talked to him as honest as I could but you know everything in that
room was polluted with my class rage at him because basically I
thought he was a rich asshole. Could he tell? Well he certainly should
have been able to tell that I disliked him but he never once asked me,
in twenty hours, "do you dislike me?" Talk about managing my therapy
to render it ineffective. Put that one down on my list of books to get
off my chest someday; "How to Manage Your Therapy so as to Render it
Completely Ineffective". Witty I know, but I stole it from max. (The
poster, not the car.)
And now I am going to go home and read The Hite Re****t. In the morning
I am going to drive to New Orleans. I am going to leave the book at
home.
Bukvich
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