Sunday, October 14, 2012
Dream on
Odd how I know, but I had two dreams last night, of which I can only remember an outline of the second. Slightly puzzled that I am so sure that there was a first, a first of which I can remember nothing. Remembering how fast dreams fade away if one does not work them over as one wakes, perhaps I only just caught the fading trace of this one, the empty shell, the box that it came in, as it were.
The second dream was slightly unusual in that it included a named person, a person who has never, to my knowledge, featured in my dreams before. Possibly triggered by recently popping up in real life. The dream pursued by my growing ambitions of being a busy. Moving beyond picking litter and complaining to the council about their infernal misdeeds to the affairs of the realm. In this case a flagrant abuse of our benefit system by a gentleman from Ghana, who, it seems, was able to claim enough benefit to run palm wine parties for his buddies on two nights in succession, claims which it seems, were entirely legal and above board. I decided to do something. To devote my quality time to scouring the laws of the land to find something that would enable me to win my spurs as a busy by putting an end to the palm wine parties. But then I found out that the Ghanaian in question had served in our own British Army, with distinction, in the second world war and all of a sudden the desire to bring him to book faded away and I woke up.
My working over of my dreams was overlaid by a sudden awareness of a new example of the Stonehenge problem. The problem, which as my heritage minded readers will recall, involves deciding exactly which version of Stonehenge to replicate when building a replica in some heritage centre near the original. A replica which visitors are actually allowed to visit and maybe even touch. The problem being that Stonehenge, like any large or complicated artefact, is a process in time rather than an object fixed and perfect in some particular point in time.
The new example is really a problem for the deity. When he performs the miracle of the resurrection of the body, how is he going to decide what version of each body to use? Is the soul invited to nominate a date in life? Is the soul allowed to chose what clothes to be resurrected in? On style of haircut and length of toe nails? Before or after four teeth were removed to make a bit more space for those which remained?
Perhaps the deity just takes the DNA (conveniently available in a little capsule at the back of the soul) and grows an ideal version of the body from that, unencumbered by considerations of how the body had actually turned out. All one would need would be a suitable growing medium, something to provide for the various needs of body and soul of the growing replica. One would want, after all, for all the replicas to be decently educated and properly brought up. Getting more tricky, which archangel would be responsible for the tricky business of injecting the original soul into the completed replica?
I close with a reminder from Amazon (in my morning email) of the way that 'boxed set' has reentered the realm of consumer snobbery. I remember the first time around (for me anyway), when a boxed set almost invariably meant a slim but substantial box containing a number of classical LPs. Usually, but not always, accompanied by a booklet telling one all about it, nicely got up and and printed in a size to match that of the box, not at all some cheap little leaflet sculling around loose, the sort of thing that is apt to fall out of a Saturday newspaper. I still own quite a few of them. Then last week I learned from advertising hoardings on the way to Epsom station that boxed set is all about selling off back numbers of television programmes, served up in a much smaller but rather fatter box, complete with the booklet, naturally. Or in the better class of boxed set, booklets. Not to mention the interviews with the stars and all the rest of that good stuff.
Interesting to see how Amazon prices the boxes, with quite a lot under £10, although sadly none of our ITV3 staples. I did pause on the 'Chronicles of Narnia' - we used to quite like the adaptions of childrens' stories which used to appear late on winter Sunday afternoons - but did not get as far as the checkout. Perhaps there is material here for a PhD in media studies at our University of Creation (http://ucreative.ac.uk/).
The second dream was slightly unusual in that it included a named person, a person who has never, to my knowledge, featured in my dreams before. Possibly triggered by recently popping up in real life. The dream pursued by my growing ambitions of being a busy. Moving beyond picking litter and complaining to the council about their infernal misdeeds to the affairs of the realm. In this case a flagrant abuse of our benefit system by a gentleman from Ghana, who, it seems, was able to claim enough benefit to run palm wine parties for his buddies on two nights in succession, claims which it seems, were entirely legal and above board. I decided to do something. To devote my quality time to scouring the laws of the land to find something that would enable me to win my spurs as a busy by putting an end to the palm wine parties. But then I found out that the Ghanaian in question had served in our own British Army, with distinction, in the second world war and all of a sudden the desire to bring him to book faded away and I woke up.
My working over of my dreams was overlaid by a sudden awareness of a new example of the Stonehenge problem. The problem, which as my heritage minded readers will recall, involves deciding exactly which version of Stonehenge to replicate when building a replica in some heritage centre near the original. A replica which visitors are actually allowed to visit and maybe even touch. The problem being that Stonehenge, like any large or complicated artefact, is a process in time rather than an object fixed and perfect in some particular point in time.
The new example is really a problem for the deity. When he performs the miracle of the resurrection of the body, how is he going to decide what version of each body to use? Is the soul invited to nominate a date in life? Is the soul allowed to chose what clothes to be resurrected in? On style of haircut and length of toe nails? Before or after four teeth were removed to make a bit more space for those which remained?
Perhaps the deity just takes the DNA (conveniently available in a little capsule at the back of the soul) and grows an ideal version of the body from that, unencumbered by considerations of how the body had actually turned out. All one would need would be a suitable growing medium, something to provide for the various needs of body and soul of the growing replica. One would want, after all, for all the replicas to be decently educated and properly brought up. Getting more tricky, which archangel would be responsible for the tricky business of injecting the original soul into the completed replica?
I close with a reminder from Amazon (in my morning email) of the way that 'boxed set' has reentered the realm of consumer snobbery. I remember the first time around (for me anyway), when a boxed set almost invariably meant a slim but substantial box containing a number of classical LPs. Usually, but not always, accompanied by a booklet telling one all about it, nicely got up and and printed in a size to match that of the box, not at all some cheap little leaflet sculling around loose, the sort of thing that is apt to fall out of a Saturday newspaper. I still own quite a few of them. Then last week I learned from advertising hoardings on the way to Epsom station that boxed set is all about selling off back numbers of television programmes, served up in a much smaller but rather fatter box, complete with the booklet, naturally. Or in the better class of boxed set, booklets. Not to mention the interviews with the stars and all the rest of that good stuff.
Interesting to see how Amazon prices the boxes, with quite a lot under £10, although sadly none of our ITV3 staples. I did pause on the 'Chronicles of Narnia' - we used to quite like the adaptions of childrens' stories which used to appear late on winter Sunday afternoons - but did not get as far as the checkout. Perhaps there is material here for a PhD in media studies at our University of Creation (http://ucreative.ac.uk/).
# posted by Jim @ 11:02 PM 
