My Quest into the Unknown: Lucid Dreaming

This mysterious creature appeared in my dreams, and now he wants revenge.

Children, be gone! For this adventure is not for you. And for the rest of you who get uneasy in the face of reality, and who get uneasy knowing they're uneasy, and thus will perpetuate themselves into a state of permanent and infinite unease, be gone as well! For this adventure requires bravery, valor, courage, and other such clichés.




"What adventure?" you may foolishly ask, since you failed to read the title of the entry. My friends, I have begun my quest into my own mind through the magic of dreams. It has interested me for a long time now, and I have finally resolved to get down and dirty in my own mind while I sleep.

First, let me explain what this all this is. Actually, more like third, since this is in fact the third p-graph. Lucid dreaming is reaching consciousness in your sleep, your unconscious state. It sounds paradoxical, I know, but it has been proven long ago in the 70s. I've been doing my research. Many of you may have experienced this, as it's not entirely uncommon (50%-80% of all college students experience it). You are dreaming, and suddenly, by some crazy miracle, you become aware that you are in a dream. From this point, you do whatever the J you want. You can create anything your imagination can fathom and then destroy it. You can sense whatever it is you want, be it sweet food, refreshing breezes, the scent of factory foam, your own symphonies, or straight up naked people! I'm kidding, but it's all possible. Your mind is, after all, the final say in what you experience. Not your fingers or your olfactory receptors or your cochlear implants. For this reason, your dream world can be just believable as your physical world. This indistinguishability could become problematic if you just want to know what is "real." Is the dream not real? That gets us in to a whole nother discussion, which I won't discuss right now. And why do people say "nother" instead of other? I think I do it too.

So, I began last night, and I'm very excited about this whole snordeal. I've been reading, and apparently, to become aware you are dreaming in your dream, it helps to look at your hands. Your hands are always with you, and they can also help stabilize your dream if things start getting shaky. So, last night I stared at my hands. There they were in front of me, beautiful, as I've always known them (I'll let you see them some time). I looked at them and told myself, "Tonight, I will see my hands while I'm dreaming. When I see them I will realize that I am dreaming. When I wake up, I will remember everything." After thinking these thoughts in repetitions, I began getting sleepier and distracted by other thoughts. If I noticed I was distracted I started thinking about my hands again, and how I would see them. Eventually I fell asleep.
I remembered little to nothing of my dream when I awoke initially, but I fell back asleep again and had another dream, this one I remembered.

Everyone enjoys a good boulder problem

The dream involved going to a very cool gymnasium with one of the coolest climbing walls and boulder problems I had ever seen. My brothers were there and I was dating a fat girl who was clearly heavier than me. I was not ok with that, but felt terrible for even being with her because I felt like I would have to break up on very shallow grounds. She wasn't all that interesting either. I didn't get to climb, but I was very excited to. I woke up, never achieving lucidity.
But I am not discouraged. I will try again tonight, and the next night, and so on until I reach my first goal of having a lucid dream.

As I continue on this odd odyssey, I will try to convey what I experience and what I find useful for achieving lucidity. I do have one thing to say before I finish this, entry, and that's if getting too excited wakes you up, how about some strong sedatives? I'll get back to that later.

Breadwinner

Ah, the age-old food. The food that's has a band named after it; it's a slang term for money; The whimsical Patti Smith wrote a poem about it; it had a British sitcom from the 80's named after it; it's a proofreading acronym (Browse Read Edit Add Delete); it's a world renowned staple food, and it just might be a solution to world hunger. Ladies and gentlemen please welcome our guest, bread.
Let's begin our discussion with yeast. After all, without yeast bread would not be possible. Yeast are single-celled fungi that ferment and cause bread to rise. There are several types of yeast available and widely used for various preparations, including Baker's Yeast, Nutritional Yeast, Brewer's Yeast, Distiller's Yeast and Wine Yeast. Each has its specific function to the different users. You give the yeast a little sugar and it will immediately capitalize on the opportunity, consuming sucrose, fructose, glucose, and maltose. This is necessary for the fermentation of the yeast. Fermentation produces CO2 gas, and this gas causes the bread to rise. The fermentation also makes ethyl alcohol, which adds its own unique flavor to the creation. It's like the old proverb, "yeast said, soonest mended."
On to kneady greetty. As you know, kneading is important when dealing with dough. You must knead the dough so that gluten forms, and that gluten adds a cohesive property to the dough, thus making it doughy. And tyrosine, and important chemical in bread making, reacts with more tyrosine to become the scaffolding of dough through interlinkage.
On the gluten. For those of you who speak German, allow me to greet you: "Gluten Tag." Here's a definition of gluten from my dictionary: A substance present in cereal grains, like wheat. It is what causes the elastic texture of dough. For those with celiac disease, do not consume gluten. It's a mixture of two proteins, prolamin and glutamin. If you can't digest gluten but decide to eat it anyway then get ready for a wild ride. Your large and lower intestine's villi will be destroyed, and you will miss out on lots of nutrients when you digest stuff. Who knows? Your gums might even start bleeding. You do not want to mess around with gluten if you are gluten intolerant.

We meet again, Lactobacillus.

On to sourdough. One of my favorite types of bread, it starts with, strangely enough, starter. Starter? Yeah, it's that medium that keeps cultured yeast alive. And that specific culture of fungus, lactobacillus, is what is used and found in sourdough. Yummy fungi!
There are a few differences in making Pita, Injera, Naan, and those other wacky breads out there. For St. Pita, that distinct pocket is created with steam. Injera uses Teff, a special grain, filled with iron. Teff flour is mixed is with water and set to ferment for several days. The dough is actually liquid enough to be poured out on to the cooking surface, so the bottom is smooth and the top surface is porous. What a neat texture. Naan needs yeast water, yogurt and ghee (or vegetable shortening). Yeah, it looks like a bubbly pizza thing, and it's pretty good. Give that one a try sometime.

Chocolatl: The Food of the Gods

"¿Quieres chocolatl?" "¡No, güey!"

Well hello there. I didn't see you come in. Take a seat, please. Today I'm talking about chocolate, or as the Mayans called it, choclatl. I learned a lot about chocolate today, and really it's a fascinating product. I mean, who comes up with this stuff. It's interesting being born this late in the history of mankind and being caught up to date on the past several thousand years of recorded history. In a way we are very fortunate. Man has made many advances in the fields of science and art, including inventing science and art to begin with. And today they caught me up to speed with chocolate development, or at least up to speed up until the 80's, because that video we watched was pretty retro-looking.

A cacao tree with cocoa ripe pods.

The video began with a brief history of chocolate making and how it was done way back in the day. The narrator switched between Mayan and Aztec civilizations, but all that stuff is the same, right? Chocolate consumption started as a drink. Apparently, the emperor would guzzle down 50 cups of the chocolate drink a day. Guy likes his chocolate. Eventually, technology allowed us to solidify chocolate, and then we started eating. It all comes from the cacao tree. You take the cocoa pods when they're yellow. That's when you know they're ripe. The seeds are what you use, but they're covered in a sweet, sugary pulp. The pulp is actually delicious if you ever get the chance to taste it. Which is juxtaposed by the horrific bitterness of the seeds used. These days, after you ferment them and dry them, you remove the skins and grind it, I think. Then it goes through a million other processes, which involve extracting the butter, making it into a solid cake, melting it and mixing it, drizzling it over nougat or nuts (optional), or putting it in a mold. The Swiss added some milk to the mix, and there's where milk chocolate came from. Thank goodness for that. The factory procedures involved with producing chocolate are actually pretty ingenious. Skin removal was done by slamming chocolate against a wall and having a vacuum suck the skin up, but not too strong as to suck the seed with it. And now we get to eat it all the time if we want! I wouldn't want to live in a world without chocolate, although if I never knew about it I guess I wouldn't really mind, since I wouldn't know what I'm missing.

So I tried a few varieties in class. One of my three favorites was the Reese's, although it wasn't so much the quality of the chocolate itself, but rather the combination of the peanut butter and the chocolate. The chocolate was probably subpar, but what a delicious duo. It's salty, melts quickly (a little too quickly at times), and the composition and consistency is great. I happened to be a little partial to Reese's, but that's life.
The next highest ranked was the Symphony chocolate made by Herseys. It had a rich texture that melted just at the right time. By the way, I watched a video of a piece of chocolate melting on some kid's tongue while he didn't swallow it. He just sat there and let his mouth dry up and I bet he nearly gagged just trying to keep that chocolate on his tongue. It was Pavlovian even, just without the bells but with the drooling. I digress. That was one good piece of chocolate.
The last came from the Rasinets, one of my favorite treats. Luckily for me, somebody brought them (me). Also, luckily for me, not many people ate them, so I returned to a nearly full plate of my raisin things, which I dumped in my mouth promptly. Again, like the Reese's, it wasn't so much the chocolate that I enjoyed so much, but the duality of this fruit and chocolate. In the same way that chocolate goes well with strawberries, it goes very well with raisins. The chocolate itself was pretty shallow and there wasn't much of it, but it worked just fine for its duty in this case. Raisinets rule!
There was also a part of our day devoted to seeing where the money went in a two dollar piece of chocolate. As it turns it in the UK, 20 cents goes to the cocoa farmers. This makes sense since it's cheap labor and there are lots of farmers willing to work for very little, just as long as they are making something. 20 more cents go to the government of the exporting country. I think the rest was split 96 and 64 between the producer and retail seller, respectively. While it seems unfair that the hard working farmers only get 10% of their chocolate they're helping make, it's life. I think in an ideal world they might be making a little more and the government and producer might be making a little less.