Saturday 11 November 2017

A dream or being awake: same difference

I was on my way to my family doctor to make an appointment. Making my way through the hallways of what looked like those of a sci-fi-looking space station, I could see the GP office's entrance when I made the discovery that I could feel something weird in my groin. A quick check revealed that my testicles had regrown. This made me feel both unsettled and happy, as though unexpected, it would help me make the point towards the doctor that my body was doing weird stuff and that I would need help, stat.

Sitting myself down at a nearby table with the laptop which I was carrying with me, a waitress commented how great it was that one can look up information everywhere these days. I was readying to investigate what Google et al. would have to say about this phenomenon of organs which had been removed before suddenly regrowing by themselves. Then the scene shifted.

I was in a similar location as before, but with more large windows, with light pouring in. Some other people were there. I talked with one of them about a package that was lying in front of him on the table. It turned out to contain a brand-new Commodore 64, which he didn't want any more because it used the newer type of power plug. I said that I would gladly have it.

I was lying in my bed, suppressing feelings of terror and general fear and discomfort at the thought of all that is coming my way the coming weeks. Whether I'll be okay. Also the realisation of needing to sleep more. That sleep is essential if I want to get through those weeks at all.

I was walking through this shopping mall, admiring the fruit and vegetables that was put out. After a bit of walking I came to what seemed like a real-life demo for a video game. It had me walking into this room that had like a hill in it, everything with a slightly purple tint to it. Walking up the steps carved into the side of the hill, I got to a section with a wall that I could walk in front of. Walking to the right side, there was a section of the wall that I could take off, with a carving of a goat.

Next to this carving was a bit of netting stuck across the opening of a cave, inside of which I could hear a goat. Tearing the netting away allowed the goat and another animal that was inside to get out.

I was lying in my bed, nursing bad pains and numbness on the right side of my body. Getting out of the bed, I got some diclofenac gel to put on the worst part the pain, namely on my right hip. I noticed that I could barely walk from the pain, and was on the verge of crying because the pain was so bad.

After making breakfast and taking an ibuprofen I began to feel better. Donning headphones to block out any environmental noises helped even more. I'm assuming that I am awake at this point. Not because I'm typing this, but because I'm feeling cold and uncomfortable. I cannot recall ever having felt that in a dream.

Dreams are better, I think.


Maya

4 comments:

DanielB said...

Hey Maya I'm Daniel nice to meet you, it may seem inappropriate to ask it here in what it seems your personal blog, but I found it interesting while I was searching for some info about the Mastering C++ Multithreading book from Packt, I've been wanting to purchase it since May or so, but it looks unfinished even after the release date, and I was wondering if you will ever finish it, if not will you redo your work to make another about the same subject with another publisher like idk Amazon?, I'm specially interested in the gpgpu chapter. I`m currently pursuing a software engineering bachelor's degree, I got an Nvidia Tegra TX1 to work on my thesis, and I hoped you can teach me about the tricks of the trade through your book.

It seems like you're having a bad time lately, so I wanted to tell you that I enjoy a lot reading your Programming & Electronics blog as well, I believe you're an admirable person and professional, I also believe that dreams and reality aren't necessarily exclusive, I work hard every day to make my reality dreamy, get better soon.

Maya Posch said...

Hello Daniel,

What do you mean exactly with 'unfinished'? The content for the book has been finished, edited and the book published.

If you mean the GPGPU section and the cluster processing chapter, they are only there to cover these topics from the view of applying multithreading techniques to them. One could definitely make an entire book out of the topic as a whole, but that wasn't the focus of this book.

Thanks for your interest at any rate. I may do a book on GPGPU and such topics at some point in the future, as I find them to be very interesting myself as well.

That will however have to wait until the current fall-out in my life has settled somewhat :)

DanielB said...

The thing is, that I usually preview the books with Mapt before acquiring them, and in this specific book after section 6 they say "coming soon..." in all of them, and they lack any subsections. take a look:

From 1 to 6 :

http://imgbox.com/zsRdDGkf

then:
http://imgbox.com/miLD1vy1
http://imgbox.com/z2BsF9nI
http://imgbox.com/2Yo2QpQ2
http://imgbox.com/HcMlRDkj

Also, in the appendix section there is some writing telling me that they will send me the next chapters when they are ready.

http://imgbox.com/TC4Ta2nN

And last but not least, the number of pages (244) seem a little low since the finished sections (1-6) look somewhat extensive and I'm quite sure it is the same number I saw in May or so, is 244 pages the right figure? or the number is wrong as the preview?

http://imgbox.com/CTOr5xbF

Thanks for your quick response.

Maya Posch said...

244 pages is the correct count, yes. I would have wanted to add more content, but the time failed for that :)

And weird that it doesn't show 'coming soon' for those chapters. Someone forgot to flip a switch somewhere, apparently =/ Could send off an email to complain, I guess :)