My heart has broken open. not broken. Just broken open. love... wow... it had been a long time. I feel completely raw. I had forgotten what it was like. No wonder it is all the talk of the world.

Break...

There is the theory of the hypnogogic state of consciousness... this is the state just before you fall asleep, or just after you have fallen asleep. Just when you begin dreaming, but you are still awake enough to be aware that you are asleep. It is as if you are watching yourself. Your dreams are very vivid. Ideas abound. I don't remember who it was off the top of my head, maybe Davinci or twain or Einstein... perhaps none of them, but I remember the story where he used to sit at his desk with a string attached to a bell hanging above him. just as he fell asleep his arm would fall which would make the bell ring. He would then wake up out of dreaming and immediately start writing down everything he could remember from the dream great thoughts can come out of this state of consciousness. There is another story about another man, again I cannot remember who it was, who used to do the same thing by holding a ball in his hand so as soon as he fell into sleep his grip would loosen and the ball would drop to the floor waking him up and he would also immediately write down everything he could remember.

It is a given that artists of all kinds, writers, composers, etc leave pens and notepads by their bed and all over their home so as not to miss an idea. as Loren eisley contemplated once ideas are so fleeting... one minute you are in the center of it and in the next minute you don't even remember that you had an idea at all about anything. It is quite remarkable how the brain works like this. kind of sad and frustrating but very true. I do have a pen and pad next to the bed of course, and in every room of the house. always have. in the car. in my back pocket of course. and it is true, I find that some of the best ideas come just before sleep.... in that hypnogogic state somewhere between being awake and dreaming... when it is hard to tell if you are thinking or you are dreaming. This is a magical place. some of the best ideas come from this state. But the problem of course is in the remembering. Hence the tricks that past creatives have invented to wake themselves up out of it and take advantage of it. By my bed I keep a special pen I found online that has a light at the very tip of it so you don't have to turn on a light in the room. You just give the pen a little twist and this light comes on, enough to light up the paper you are writing on. It’s a brilliant invention. I would be lost without it.

When I am really knocked out and can’t even sit up to write, I use another method whereby as I get a thought that I wish to remember the next day I hold my hand up in the air for a few seconds with my forefinger up signifying that I have one idea to remember in the morning from the night before. if I get another I will hold my hand up again for a few more seconds with two fingers up to remind myself that there were two ideas. And so on. I have become accustomed to automatically asking myself how many fingers I had held up the night before just before I fell asleep in order to re-trigger those thoughts. It almost always works. 90% of the time I can remember upon contemplation what the thoughts were so I can get them down when I first wake up.

Having given up cigarette smoking many years ago – I was one of the lucky ones; I was just very determined not to be an adult cigarette smoker, so I managed to kill that demon at a rather young age --- I still find myself battling the smoking bug but with cigars, as everyone knows. they are something that I find very sacred and yet very destructive and frustrating at the same time. God knows where I would be as a writer if I didn't have a good cigar and glass of some liquor sitting next to me to keep me occupied doing something besides just sitting and writing. I find the process of writing very boring and tedious. It is said that mark twain smoked 40 cigars a day. lets hope I never get that bad. But cigars are something I phase in and out of. One year I will smoke and the next year I will not smoke at all. as the years go on I hope it starts to shift towards less and less time smoking... even though I absolutely love them with an almost obsessive passion. as many men do. but as a singer... it just doesn’t seem very likely I will be able to keep both of them up. it is cliché how many writers and artists have died prematurely from either smoking or alcohol or both. and I do not intend on dying from either one. whether dead or alive, I despise clichés of any kind.

The other night I was half asleep but found myself longing to have a smoke. Funny and sad even, but I reluctantly admit that there has been more than one occasion where I have gotten out of bed after being asleep and gotten dressed again just to sit and have a smoke and write for an hour or so. but this time I had this realization that if only I had some way to trick my mind and body into thinking that I had just had a smoke, then I wouldn’t feel the desire to smoke again. I kept going with the idea... what does it feel like to feel as though you have just had a smoke? It is both physical and mental and probably even emotional... you would have to reproduce both a false memory and a false biological state. Neurological. You would have to trigger either a real or an imagined series of neurons firing in the brain and one or several endorphins releasing so that both the mind and the body felt as though you had just had a smoke.

The implications are endless. The potential limitless. If we could produce a machine that could do this... something we hook up to the brain. Something small and simple to use. Something that can be programmed. In fact better to use little memory chips, each one programmed to reproduce to false memory or feeling in the person’s body and brain.

Reminds me of the matrix movie actually. The way they plug in to download skill-sets such as judo. But imagine being able to satiate a persons hunger by tricking them into feeling as though they just ate. Or imagine plugging into a ‘oh we already broke up two years ago and I'm totally over her’ program for a few minutes and never having to go through the heartache of those first few weeks and months of breaking up... a bit sinister certainly. But wow. What a concept. I picture something that just sits on the head. A small device that emits some kind of energy, wave patterns perhaps that simulate whatever feeling the person is trying to induce through the manipulation of brain waves, neurons, and endorphins. This is beyond virtual reality. We wouldn’t be trying to simulate the experience. We would actually be reproducing the after effect, the feeling one gets right afterwards... so the person would have absolutely no clue that they didn't just experience the desired activity.

This will come. Perhaps in our lifetime, perhaps not. I am sure as I am writing here there are labs of people already attempting to build such a device all over the world. the idea is certainly not a novel one. I just wonder what the actual challenges are of building such a device. Scientifically speaking what are the biggest obstacles we need to overcome?

Reminds me of pheromone research. You extract or synthesize the pheromones from animals that are released during or just after they have had sex. when a human wears this pheromone as in a cologne or perfume it is believed to create in the person and in others around him a biological sensation that he is very sexually active or has just had sex... this in turn supposedly makes this person more attractive and appealing in a very biological and primitive way to the opposite sex... Ferret and I bought a bottle of one such pheromone once to give it a try. it was ridiculously expensive and we rubbed it all over ourselves. I never noticed that we got laid more I must say. Although I would love to report that we did.

So I think the idea of this device might be a more surefire way of accomplishing a similar outcome. Imagine walking around all the time with that feeling you get just after you have had great sex. kicking your heels, feeling all high and happy and confident and a little giddy... I'm sure you would get laid more often. again, the possibilities are limitless. And all you have to do is plug into this device for a few seconds...

So yeah, while Davinci was busy researching the human form, architecture, structural engineering, and painting the last supper and mark twain was spending countless hours writing twenty of the greatest American novels, I like to just sit and dream up machines to trick the brain into feeling as though you just had sex so you could have more sex. certainly a noble goal indeed. LOL.

Current spin: Sam Roberts, had a lot of hope for this CD. read a good review. I did not like it. like so much pop and rock, it is just the same old.....