social interaction on the internet not necessarily an unhealthy substitute for real life!

My grandfather typed up a letter to the editor from last month's Science:

"Recent evidence has shown that virtual reality-based treatments effectively combat anxiety disorders and allow subjects to develop real-world skills starting from virtual experiences. These successes raise the possibility of creating on-line immersive therapeutic environments for specific disorders. Image, for example, a patient with a social phobia who avoids any interaction with other people. After a number of face-to-face sessions with a therapist, the patient can use his personal vatar to explor a virtual environment, such as a virtual pub where he can ask the barman for a drink. In the following sessions, other people progressively enter the same virtual pub . . . and interact with the patient until he can develop efficient social contacts. . . ." [typos his]

The sad part about all this is that the mention of asking a virtual bartender for a virtual drink in a virtual pub makes me anxious. :(

chinese water/tapping torture?

There's some very faint drumming like someone somewhat far away with a hammer and nails or a drumset or someone right above us walking in high heels on a wooden floor really, really fast. And there's a yappy little dog barking in time with it also really fast and I think it's all about to drive me insane. It's like the last episode of Criminal Minds, without the psychopaths. Sadly I can't deny the neighbours' right to drum and/or practise stomping at two in the afternoon, even on Saturday. Even for like, an hour at a time. But that doesn't stop me from feeling murderous.

Oh! And then just now, in exciting developments, someone else - I think someone closer to us, maybe in the apartment directly above - banged back, faster and louder. But only for a little while and then they stopped. I guess other people are feeling murderous too.

Recurring dreams about unreal places

How many of you have recurring dreams in places that don't exist in real life? I don't mean that you've read about in books - I mean that your mind has simply made up, like an ordinary dream place except you keep going back to it.

[Poll #1120062]


As for me, it's like I have a whole fantasy version of my hometown that doesn't really exist in my head. There are recurring high school dreams set in a high school that doesn't exist, that I've never been to, and recurring trips to the mall, especially to a large Sears and a large JC Penney primarily with my aunts and cousins on my mother's side. There's also a recurring strip mall in my dream - rather a sinister strip mall in fact, where it's always a little gloomy and there's a rubber stamp store and a coffee shop that I never like going into, in my dreams. Last night we went to a paper store and a big craft store in the strip mall in my dream.

And then there's also this sort of recurring beautiful fantasy landscape, like a steep hill and a screen of brush and trees and around a corner to the bank of a river, with a steep crumbling bank in several layers that you can climb all up and down and a lot of small islands in the water. It's very beautiful and it certainly doesn't exist. It's located off the beaten path at a sort of petting-zoo kind of farm outside of my hometown that also doesn't exist, but recurs a lot anyway. The last time I dreamt about it I discovered - to my astonishment - that just down the bank in the other direction was the house of my father's step-cousin Caroline, the lady who used to take me contradancing every week in Massachussetts.

floordrobe!

Casting aside the personal, someone who spreads their clothes around the house, clean or otherwise, is said to be treating the room as a "floordrobe."

THIS IS MY NEW FAVOURITE WORD.