Grrl Power #1248 – Do aliens dream of astro-sheepazoids?
Dreams are about processing the day’s interactions as memories are sorted away… is something people say about dreams but which I firmly believe is total BS. If that was the case, why does anyone dream about anything other than the stuff they did that day? Why have I dreamed, multiple times I might add, about walking around the halls of my high school, which wasn’t actually my high school, (but I had that dream knowledge that it was) except instead of lockers, there were glass tanks up and down the walls filled with skinned things. Maybe they were students, maybe they were mutant experiments, the dream knowledge didn’t say. And before you’re like, wow that’s a crazy nightmare – it wasn’t a nightmare. I wasn’t scared in it. I thought it was rad, not because I’m some secret psychopath, but because it was like walking around the set if someone made a live action Splatterhouse movie.
Or, why did I dream about meeting April Ludgate (from Parks and Rec) – not Aubrey Plaza, mind you, but April Ludgate, at a convention, and I told her that when she got married, instead of changing her last name to Ludgate-Dwyer, she should have portmanteaued her last name to LudWire, then tell people that a LudWire is the proper name for a clothes hanger when it’s in abortion configuration, and she said “Oh my god, that’s awesome, babe!”
She said “babe” because she started the sentence talking to me, but finished the sentence talking to Andy, who wasn’t there, because dreams are random nonsense. They have no meaning. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either trying to write a book, or has read a book, or let’s be real, a Facebook post, and is trying to make “knowing things about dreams” part of their personality.
By the way, whenever I dream about going to a convention, which seems to happen about 3-5 times a year, I’m always there on Sunday while all the vendors are breaking down their booths and I realized I’ve missed the convention and everyone I wanted to see. I guess it’s a variation on the “have a test for a class I’ve never attended” dream, which I’ve also had, but thankfully less than the convention dream.
The new vote incentive is up! This is a bit of a weird one as it’s a character that hasn’t appeared in the comic.
It’s my Ifrit Pathfinder 1e monk, Fray! Ifrits don’t really make great monks in Pathfinder, as player characters they get a +2 to Dex and Cha, but -2 to Wis. For monks, Dex is good, Cha is largely irrelevant, but Wis is important as it can add to your AC and also has something to do with Ki points I think. But I didn’t care. I wanted a character with dark blue/gray skin and glowing orange hair, so that’s what I picked. (I don’t think Ifrit even really have dark skin, so maybe she’s 1/4 Drow? Don’t care. I think she looks cool.) Will she show up in the comic? I mean… maybe? Probably in a Dabbler flashback, but who knows?
As usual, Patreon has her in delicto flagrante.
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I always thought dreams were a way of processing emotions not details and physical minutia and just borrowed from the touchable world to make narrative. But what do I know I chose as a teen to not remember any of my dreams… So far so good bar the occasional heart stopper or soul crusher.
I’ve recently taken to writing down any that seem like good story seeds. It’s not often, but sometimes I wake up and find I really liked the narrative flow and/or central concepts.
Nice nod to both the blue hand problem and the alien hand syndrome.
… ‘Blue hand problem’? what’s that when it’s at home smoking kippers?
It’s a problem when using AI programs to recolour old images. Often the person has a hand or part of an arm coloured blue, because the program sees it as an item of clothing and not a body part. Sometimes it’s because a shadow crosses the arm or sometimes for no observable reason.
Not just AI programs, simply software (or artist) error when that part wasn’t fully closed and the paint-filler fills it with the other colour (it even happened in early comic books)
Peripheral cyanosis is when someone’s hands, fingertips, or feet turn blue due to a lack of oxygen-rich blood. Some causes include Raynaud’s disease, cardiovascular problems, and hypothermia. All organs and tissues need oxygen to function. A person’s body absorbs oxygen from the air that they breathe.
Oh that! Have that all the time, right hand turns purple (specially the ring and little finger) because the blood circulation slows down, still need to find a small water bottle (and cover) to put on back of the wrist to heat the blood before it reaches the hand (had one, but the cover had applique stickers that started to melt, but did work and, because use a trackball, little risk of it falling off while working)
Then there’s Argyria is a rare condition caused by an over-exposure to silver or silver compounds,
that the skin turns blue or blue-gray. It may take the form of generalized argyria or local argyria.
“have a test for a class I’ve never attended”
Yeah, those dreams are just pure evil. They always come when I stress out about stuff too much and I don’t understand why that gets mapped to hopelessly falling behind on learning for exams of all things when I haven’t been a student for more than a decade.
That reminds me of “Top Secret!” where Val Kilmer is tortured and he has a flashback to his time at highschool.
It’s very distressing (his exams were all yesterday), but also comforting. Yhe torture becomes a relief because it’s not nearly as bad as school.
I once passed a class I never opened the book for. After that I worried a lot less about being unprepared.
I once went to a school where they gave the finals for every class on the first day and if you got A- or higher you didn’t have to go to that class. Guess how many classes I had to go to that semester. I read a lot of trashy fiction that semester.
Tbh that sounds like going to that university or whatever institution it is, is a gigantic waste of money. Not sure if you live in the USA, but if you do then that’s an entire semester of them taking your money without teaching you anything you didn’t know already. School is a different story because you’re forced to go there, so if you could’ve skipped classes there it would’ve been awesome, but not if it’s something you chose to do and paid for.
I studied computer science and out of all the lectures I had that included an exam at the end there wasn’t a single one I could’ve come remotely close to passing without attending it. I would’ve scored a few points here and there in math and any other subject where the ability to think logically can get you somewhere even if you don’t know anything, but I wouldn’t have passed any of those either.
dreams are weird and not fully understood scientifically but my guess its because your brain kind of associates stressful situations with school and exams, which makes sence since we spend a good chunk of our young lives (when our brains are still malleable) in school stressing about clases and exams and other shit so your brain grabs on to that
At the university I went to I felt that pressure in some cases, but school had so many uninteresting subjects on the one hand and interesting subjects that were boring because of the slow pace on the other hand. Maybe my brain decided to merge those two situations. I dunno.
Prolly because a lot of what we process in the modern day is filtered through stuff we experienced early in our formative years. Like having a mortal terror of dogs at 40 because when you were 5 years old, you patted a dog too hard one time and it put its teeth around your hand to remove it from them, and 5 year old brain processed it as THIS DOG IS TRYING TO EAT ME, AAAAAAAAAAAAA and never really recovered.
For a lot of people, the first big stresses they associated with screwing up the rest of life tend to be school-related, I figure. My big stresses are around people leaving me and horror movies, though, so when I get generally anxious I start getting dreams about that.
Yeah, I can see that. I hate dreaming about horror stuff as well. I desensitized myself a fair bit from that by watching horror Let’s Plays. Initially I had to pause the videos every few minutes, but I got better and better at not freezing up in terror. Eventually I even took a shot at Amnesia the Dark Descent (best horror game ever in my opinion because it’s very atmospheric, not very gory and doesn’t even need many monsters), but only after watching 2 different let’s plays and I still only made it until I took the elevator, then it was enough for me. :-) That game slowly and constantly drains your sanity even when you just stand there, what with that eerie background music and heavy feeling of being lost and completely on your own. I know that game can be beaten fairly easily if you completely emotionally distance yourself and just rush through everything that isn’t a riddle, not caring if you die sometimes, but then what’s the point in playing a horror game really?
Before I gave myself that therapy I wasn’t even brave enough to enter Ravenholm from Half Life 2 without looking up a walkthrough first, even though there aren’t even any new monsters there. ^^°
Once again you confirm Ranma 1/2 is fack
fack? What does that mean?
it’s actually F.A.C.C. Frequently Awesome, Can Confirm
Sidney blurting out what could be the title of a Chuck Tingle novel is not something I’d have expected, but it makes a lot of sense.
Nah, it doesn’t really work as a Chuck Tingle title. He would probably call it “Pounded in the butt by the Lizardman boyfriend of the alien who tried to abduct me”. He starts all his books with “Pounded in the butt”.
A major problem in neural net programming is that the net will just essentially record the training data, instead of generalizing from it, leading to a neural net that is useless the moment it encounters something outside the training data. This is called “overfitting”.
One of the successful strategies for preventing overfitting is training the net on deliberately noisy data. It’s been speculated that dreaming is a naturally evolved version of this, our day memories are being replayed in a noisy fashion while we sleep to improve learning.
As someone who chronically starts new hobbies that kind of fits. Right around the point where I start dreaming about doing a new skill in my sleep is when I start to get good at it.
ahaha it goes both ways
I’m convinced that anxiety dreams are your brain trying to run a scenario about something you’re anxious about, so that you’re prepared for it. The only problem is that your subconscious only has a vague understanding of what anything even is, so you’ll get a lot of awkward symbolic things to be anxious about.
And lots of old anxieties seem to get baked in for years, which is why we all keep having high school dreams into our 30s.
I mostly stopped having serious nightmares after I learned lucid dreaming; It’s hard to be really scared by a dream when you know it’s a dream. You’re aware you haven’t been in college in 40 years, so that final you didn’t study for stops being scary.
OTOH, that “Wandering around aimlessly due to dementia and dying all alone under a park bench” dream had me waking in a sweat; I guess different things scare you when you’re in your 60’s.
I have fewer nightmares with lucid dreaming/ I still have some mainly because I can’t always be aware it’s a dream.
But when I’m aware, I generally just fly away from the situation, since there’s an amazing number of situations in life which can’t deal with a flier who is speedily soaring away.
Or alternately, I just hit on whichever females are in the dream and the dream freaks out because it can’t write unusual dialogue for female characters.
I think the main reason many people have high school anxiety dreams is because high school is extremely traumatizing to many. Even if you’re not one of the tortured, you’re still in the presence of torture taking place.
I think the real problem is that people try to assert that dreams are always one thing, when in reality, that’s not how brains work.
The two things to remember are that brains are big, inefficient, gooey information-relating & processing devices, and that they never really switch off. So, yes, dreams are technically a part of the information processing think, as far as it goes. At the same time, however, the brain keeps trying to make connections, and in this case without the benefit the conscious faculty to guide our association. As such, weird, nonsensical associations are quite normal. Is there “meaning” in a dream? Maybe? Sometimes?
In theory, you can toss a bag of scrabble tiles into a clown car and get something intelligible. They’re _is_ data in dreams, but data & information are very different things.
Yeah, that’s true of a lot of things in psychology. People can’t accept that the answer is often just “It depends.”
Also, like … how the dreams look gets more understandable if you say the brain is TRYING to sort memories. As in, trying but not always succeeding. But hey, eventually it gets it mostly right!
yappa yappa II Shan Ten
Dreams are just a random assortment of images and sensory experiences that tend to occur during REM sleep as the brain tries to reset itself in preparation for the waking hours. You only remember them if you wake up during the dream sequence.
On one hand, dreams are the trash heaps of the mind. But on the other hand, ask an archaeologist how they feel about middens!
Tonight I was dreaming something (dunno what, not care either) and at some point in the dream I saw someone who was cosplaying as Obi-Wan Kenobi but for some reason had a transparent plastic hood, raincoat style. And I immediately imagined Obi-Wan wearing one of those plastic cones put on cats after operating on them. It is hilarious.
That sounds like mixing up Star Wars with Dune (or at least the David Lynch one).
I was thinking that OTHER Harrison Ford movie. The “Do Androids Dream…” one.
“Bladerunner” has a few hooded raincoats.
Wait, do raincoats not supposed to have hoods where you are all from? Or is the Bladerunner raincoats a specific weird futuristic shitty fashion ala “Bill & Ted” or “BTTF2”?
A bit of the latter, and might have even informed the B&T example, (which I have not seen). They are shown prominently in one outdoor scene, and are appropriately garish enough to be “alien”. Alien as in not culture as we know it, not alien as in from another planet.
They are also day-glow and transparent.
I googled it, and didn’t find a decent still of what I was remembering, but Bladerunner has pretty much everyone wearing a raincoat.
Yeah, because Bladerunner is spent 90% of the time at night and in the rain
Depends on how fashionable the raincoat is. One of the plastic ones will generally have one, but something you would wear with a suit does not – because you’re also supposed to wear a hat.
The Blade Runner raincoats probably didn’t have a hood because a lot of the fashion in that movie was a callback to the 1940s, when almost everyone wore hats.
Obiwan was out in the rain on that planet where they made clonetroopers if memory serves me right. Perhaps that’s the memory your mind was processing?
As far as I know the current state of sleep science is that the ordering of memories happens during the deep sleep phases. Not during dreams.
Dreams may just be there too clean up some leftover Ions in the synapses. (My comment. Not Science.)
She should take the sex dreams as a bonus. Some of us only get a absurdist take on what happened yesterday.
I only remember my dreams when I’m really stressed and don’t have a way forward. Its an out of control dream.
I’m the only person in the back seat of some huge car racing down hill through multiple intersections of crossing traffic towards some major calamity like the deep ocean.
isn’t processing memory data like the whole deal of her specie? she could delete the memories she got from Sidney
Last panel needs to be expanded and posted on its own page!
So how long will Dabbler keep Lapha captured like that?!?
I am betting until Cora gets back with the body that Lapha was originally in. Archon likely has the one that Lapha tried to possess Sydney from.
And then the kidnapper and kidnappee are going to have it out, I bet.
Popcorn anyone?
Of course Rampage is playing in the background of Panel 1.
Noticed that, too!
I know so many people that go on about all these dreams and nightmares they’ve had. Like, many times a week, someone will come online and start a conversation with “I had this really strange dream last night” and describe it with detail. Meanwhile, I never remember any of mine.
…instead, all my crazy happens while I’m wide awake, and a good portion of them end up in the stories I post.
I have a mild case of envy – several times a month, my wife wakes up and remembers most or all of fairly complex dreams. A few times, it takes her a while to remember that they actually *were* dreams – she’ll try talking to me in Cantonese rather than English because “in my dream, you were speaking it perfectly!” or scold me for something that dream-me did.
Me? About the only dreams I’ve ever remembered on waking have been very infrequent nightmares, ones that woke me up with a jolt. Ordinary, fun, dreams? Not a chance.
one of my most memorable dreams was dreaming I was a hypothetical hypoteneuse. basically stretching off into infinity at an askew angle.
Speaking of nightmares, is Sidney still wearing gloves or oven mitts to prevent her from accidently blowing up the building while she sleeps?
We may never know but if we make assumptions about what her left hand was doing during her sexy dream we can get 2 very different mental images.
How far could it have gone? I mean, the guy’s pants were still on.
Dave is probably saving that for the Patreons.
Yeah, but is the picture half revealed on the right side of last panel going to actually exist?
I think that that may be a previous Vote Incentive illustration.
yes it was
It seems like the pants were just about to be torn into pieces.
So is Sydney’s
first edition AD&D Players handbook cover for Sydney’s night shirt.
nerd*
And proud of it :)
Sydney as a tailed-Smurfette, interesting cos-play
Way back in university I took a sleep & dreams class. The prof commented that while in REM sleep, the part of the brain that causes REM sleep sends out wide-ranging signals for coordinated neural firing throughout the brain at a very specific frequency. The frequency is in the grey zone between when synapse connections are strengthened (so each time the “previous” nerve fires, the nerves it connects to are more likely to fire) or weakened (each time the “previous” nerve fires, the nerves it connects to are less likely to fire). If the firing rate was higher, all connections would get stronger, if it was lower, all connections would attenuate.
The upshot is that using this very specific frequency would cause be strong associations to be strengthened (so memories become encoded and practice results in improved skills) and weak associations to fade awa(so unimportant events do not become memories and irrelevant activities do not become skills). I thought this also neatly explained why REM sleep dreams are both related to your recent activities and also super bizarre – because your brain isn’t trying to make sense of things, just build up or break down associations at the neural level.
Hah! Oddly, I never had the “naked in school” or “forgot to go to class all semester” dreams. Dunno why. *shrug*
Dabbler’s head angle/position does *not* look right in that last panel. Yes, I get that she a succubus and insanely flexible, but her neck would have to be way longer for us to not be seeing part of her cheek, at least. Her torso is arched back for the stretch, but her head is positioned at 90-degrees to the floor. Her neck would have to be capable of the neck-breaking bend seen in possession-horror movies to achieve that angle difference.
The panel otherwise looks great, but that torso/head positioning is causing some serious uncanny valley vibes.
Considering she’s “had her way” with Frix, I’m sure there’s no issues for her other than her mind just cox-blocked her. As far as Lapha’s issue… Well you brought it on yourself. At least the view is interesting for her! Although I wouldn’t mind watching Dabbler doing yoga either ;)
As awkward as Sydney seems to be around boys and sexual entanglements, I believe her memories of her early encounters are a perfect punishment for Lapha too.
Sydney: ”Hey Lapha, remember when I ate grakz?”
Lapha: ”Who would be stupid enough to… Oh no! Stop it!”
Sydney: ”Moahahahaha!”
LOL! Well at least she just has to deal with Sydney’s memories, rather than living through the smoke-filled bathroom, glowing, flaming butt with red motes floating around, grakz is a dish that just keeps giving! Novocain enema, STAT!
My experience is that dreams a the beginning of a long sleep do include stuff from the day before, in weird mixes. Dreams late in the sleep cycle is completely random and might get very weird. I only remember dreams when I wake up, but since getting a severe case of post-concussion syndrome and sometimes actually dreaming and being conscious at the same time, is that the conscious mind can’t do jack shit about the weird stuff the dreaming part thinks makes absolute sense. Like; the dream know what a page in a books reads, while the conscious mind just goes “its just random words and complete nonsense!”.
So damn annoying, but now I use that to try to get so annoyed I wake up.
Please tell me Dabbler isn’t keeping an actual person as a trophy, that this is just temporary until they can get her processed into space jail.
No where else to put her until Cora gets back with Lapha’s body and Tenri.
Top Shelf Accommodations.
+1
Those random-seeming dreams could still be related to sorting away the day’s memories. Just that it also activates the adjacent memories in order to fit new ones in.
Think about it as trying to tetris the new boxes of stuff into your memory warehouse – with dreams being made up of everything you knock over trying to find a space to put them.
Doctor Frost: So Sydney, what do you want to talk about this morning.
Sydney: Yeah, well. So, yesterday, I got invaded by an alien computer and now I am dreaming some of its memories.
Doctor Frost: Are you still infected with it?
Sydney: Nah, we got it out and I think Dabbler is holding on to it until we can deal with it properly. But you see, we shared memories while we were linked. Now those memories are showing up in my dreams.
[ Doctor Frost flips her notebook over and opens the back cover to a page headlined with Future Academic Papers, where she writes Alien AI Invades Human Dreams. Sydney’s name shows up a lot on this page. ]
Taken from behind with your jeans still on is one of the incongruities of dreams.
Crotch-less jeans? Or jeans with a double-ended wrap-around zipper? (Pulls down in the front, pulls down in the back.)
Lizardman looks strong enough to tear both her pants and his own to pieces.
“Dreams are about processing the day’s interactions as memories are sorted away… is something people say about dreams but which I firmly believe is total BS. ”
You seem to be assuming that our memories are more coherent than our dreams. I think you are massively overestimating how rational we are while we are doing something and you’re underestimating how often we rationalize away the stupid random shit we do for no sensible reason.
We only seem more sane to ourselves than other people, because we see our own choices filtered through our memory-correcting brain while we see others while they are acting in the moment before their memory managed to correct them. This also explains why people we know and like always seem more rational than strangers: We’ve started seeing them as part of us so we’re rationalizing away their madness as well. This is part of why gaslighting is so effective: We’re constantly doing it to ourselves anyway.
I’ve always kind of suspected that the Dreams as Memory sorting thing is true enough, but breaks down for NueroDivergents because our sorting system isn’t nearly as logical as it would normally be. So it’s like you’re having an unmedicated thought process as the input, and you’re selecting random parts of that chain, and trying to place it into a group of similar items, but they’re also all chains of random, so the item never really ends up exactly where you’d think it would but it’s close enough that it’s linked in what passes for your mind.
That’s how we end up with schools that aren’t our school but that have features that we associate with schools, but also with lockers which are storage devices for individuals which are storage tanks with individuals in them, but because school is about learning, and we like learning about what interests us, the tanks are filled with something interesting. But because we know we’re not like other people, and that people are some kind of animal, the things in the tank that interest us are something between an animal and human but we can’t relate them to ourselves…
Occasionally I’m able to grab that half phase just before full consciousness and “discuss” this shite with my subconscious. Typically when I’m trying to figure out what the hell he was trying to emote with a particularly poignant dreamscape, or attempting to catalog the important bits of a story world you’d built from the disparate pieces of fiction your brain decided to catalog that night.
I don’t think you need to be neurodivergent to have your memory sorting system not work logically. More likely the brain of neurotypical people actually spends lot of capacity on being neurotypical – like error recovery and so – but it doesn’t work when you sleep. So, maybe when dreaming, everyone is neurodivergent?
Sydney’s tail looks good.
Heh.
Is that a beast from Rampage?
The dream thing is sorta true. Any day where I spend the majority focused on a single task ends up with significant subdream / texture influence over my dreaming with, like, 70-80% frequency. The reason our dreams also include utter nonsense is because our brain is pursuing associations, so sorting difficult data > Egyptian hieroglyphics > now I am in a dream about needing to meet with the pharaoh about a coding job done from within my pyramid office building before the beetles arrive and eat everyone. Depending on mental chain I could easily end up dropping the coding angle entirely (the other 20%).
I expected her to be on a shelf next to a Lava Lamp.
LAPHA: “What are you in for?”
LAVA LAMP: {No reply}
But seriously…. Xuriel’s room is the best place to keep her until the Space Police/Cora and Friends show up. Top Shelf Accommodations!
Ok, I know the stone with three slashes is from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, there’s the Magic 8 Ball, and the ribbon looking thing between them looks like that hand device from Stargate SG-1, the mug is “Worlds Best Fellatio” or something to that effect, then there’s the scissors in there so maybe worlds best scissorer? So what are the other objects references to? I feel like most of them are references to other things, but I can’t for the life of me figure out what.