Appeal to lucid dream researchers

As explained in the previous post, my choice of lucid dreams as a research topic was determined by what I thought was most likely to get me reinstated as a salaried academic. Not only did my work on the topic fail to achieve this objective, but I found to my chagrin that it was being used by other people as a basis for developing their careers without this doing me the slightest good.

Many years later I wrote an open letter appealing to all those who had worked on the topic after me, to contribute some of their salary to relieving my position of exile and frustration.

I have now put this appeal on my website.

My "work"

copy of a letter to a recent visitor

You referred to some of the books I have written and forced into publication as part of my "work" when I rejected your previous description of them as part of my "career". So far as I am concerned, what one does in such bad circumstances is quite a different matter from what might be described as "work" in minimally adequate circumstances, such as those which might be provided by a university career.

I would never have worked on lucid dreams except under the duress of finding something which might get me back into a university career and which fell within the remit of the (only partially adequate) funding which I received for a short time from Cecil King.

You could say that it was "work" in the same sense as the chalk drawings of a pavement artist, inadequately clothed and fed and in a position of complete social degradation. If evidence of his ability in these circumstances led to enough coins being thrown down, he might be able to afford food and accommodation, and use his ability to express himself in oil paintings. He might in due course be elected to membership of the Royal Academy, show his paintings at public exhibitions, and eventually make significant amounts of money from selling them. In other words, he might then be able to make an actual career out of painting.

The disadvantaged underclass

copy of a letter to a visitor

We are looking forward to meeting you on Monday. The reason that we are very keen on getting to know people, but seldom can, is that we are in an anomalous and outcast position and want to make known our need for associates, moral and financial supporters, voluntary and paid workers, temporary, occasional, potentially permanent and long term.

But we are the disadvantaged underclass of modern society and no one wants to hear us say this. If we do meet anyone, saying this is usually sufficient to put an end to the acquaintance.

Typical interchange:

"We are badly in need of help and maybe you could tell your group with such and such interests about us, as they are prepared to do voluntary work in other contexts, so some of them might work for us."

Answer:

"You are not in need of help. You are physically alive/you have written some books/you get all the moral support you need out of one another. Goodbye. I need to leave immediately."

There are many elements in our situation which are at variance with, or ruled out of consideration by, the dominant fictitious ideology. We will not be able to put in much background in our meeting on Monday, so I am now writing a few of the most essential and unacceptable things in advance of meeting you.

We do not subscribe to any part of the modern received ideology. I am old enough, and was precocious enough, to have effectively lived in the pre-socialist world for quite a long time, but in 1945 it came in fast enough and hard enough to ruin my education and not only my life, but those of my parents. The forces that had ruined my education were continuously operative in preventing my recovery from my outcast situation when I had been thrown out at the end of the ruined "education" with a second class degree (i.e. no degree at all, only a disqualification), no research scholarship, and with the lives of both my parents ruined by the breakdown of my father's health.

I am still completely alienated from society, in that I still derive no feedback from it in any way for anything I have been able to do; I do not regard this as an acceptable situation and I need help in working towards a situation in which I can remedy it. If people do not give me any help themselves, I hope that they will at least help me by publicising my needs to anyone who might be free to give us some of the help we need and who might even derive some advantage themselves from a long-term (or short-term) association with us.

Signs of the times (1)

Recession drives adult children back live with parents

Newspapers continue to be filled with news of the development of the oppressive state and the downfall of civilisation, while the relevant departments of my suppressed and unrecognised university continue to be prevented from contributing their comments to the intellectual life of this time.

Front-page news today: Year of recession forces half a million adults aged 35 to 44 to return to live with parents.

But, in spite of the pressures on those living independently, and in spite of publicising our position as best we can on the internet, none of these people come to live nearby to become associates with our cooperative consortium for working towards a large and adequately financed institutional environment supported by a business empire, until such time as it can get recognition and support from the sources available to the ersatz universities of the oppressive society.

Parents, of course, may provide their offspring with advantages, such as ironing their shirts, without the offspring contributing any useful work or money to alleviate the position of the parents in return, and this – i.e. benefits without contributions – is something we could not do. But the prospects for long-term progressive improvement of our position, and hence of any new associates, would in most circumstances be better, although dependent on their actually coming. With no one willing to work for us we have, of course, found it almost impossible to improve our position from Ground Zero, although we might have been able to develop much faster with more people.

Signs of the times (2)

'Tough love'

There are often articles in the press about the increasing problems of both pensioners (poverty-struck and surrounded by feral neighbours) and "graduates" of "universities" finding themselves without prospects in life in modern oppressive society.

Now the government (specifically the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills) has issued an appalling "guide" on how parents "should" "help" graduate children. Obviously violating the basic moral principle of not imposing on people an official interpretation of how they should evaluate the existential possibilities of their situation, this guide viciously suggests that parents should throw their children out of house and home, to make them earn a living or else claim disability allowance. Oh yes, it actually advocates sending them to enter into an abusive interaction with a qualified sadist (“doctor”) if they show signs of depression!

And allow them to "relax" after qualification but not for too long, says the guide. Don't let the weeks turn into months, and cut their allowance so they will be forced to seek a "job" - or, of course, a disability allowance.

All of these ideas were applied to me, only then it was "don't let the days turn into weeks" and hide my Post Office Savings Book, so I would feel that I had no capital in the world except the coins I saved whenever I was given a bus fare and walked instead.

I never blamed my parents for this; I knew they were under pressure from people like the Principal of Somerville. Dame Janet Vaughan would have had no scruples about slandering me to a local educational authority and telling them to place pressure on my parents and hence on me.

Hence my plan was aborted to get my parents to move to Oxford so that I could live at home while writing my unofficial physics thesis. Thus at the end of the ruined "education", during which I had been prevented from acquiring qualifications, society moved in for the kill and completely ruined the lives of three people, not just the one who had been in its clutches.

King George VI’s Christmas speech, 1939

When war had been declared on Germany and hence the British Empire faced another world war, King George VI made a Christmas broadcast which became famous. I have always suspected that it was his wife, later the Queen Mother, who put him up to this, and this is confirmed by something found via Google, which claims that his wife drew his attention to this poem*, which he quoted. It places the whole thing in an open-ended context which is clearly very un-modern.

I said to the man who stood at the Gate of the Year,

'Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.'

And he replied,

'Go out into the darkness, and put your hand into the Hand of God.

That shall be better than light, and safer than a known way.'

According to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation,

The tradition of a royal Christmas Day broadcast began in 1932 with King George V, who spoke from a studio at the royal residence Sandringham. The message reached about 20 million people by radio.

The message began: 'I speak now from my home and from my heart to you all; to men and women so cut off by the snows, the desert, or the sea, that only voices out of the air can reach them.'

The war was certainly the Queen Mother's great project in life, although she was very angry with the Duke of Windsor for abdicating and causing her husband's early death by forcing him to become king. The war over, her husband dead and her daughter safely installed as Queen, she found herself with no purpose in life and it is scarcely surprising that she took to gin and horse-racing.

* by Minnie Louise Haskins; the complete poem can be read here

’We appeal for £1m as initial funding for a social science department in our unrecognised and unsupported independent university. This would enable it to publish analyses of the unexamined assumptions underlying current discussion of cultural and psychological issues. Such analyses could include an examination of what leads to the anachronistic tone of the quotation discussed above.’ Charles McCreery, DPhil

Some comments on coronation

One supposes that it was the purpose of the old-fashioned coronation ceremony to impress upon the recipient his importance in a certain context, and of his acting henceforward on impersonal motivation in the best interests of the territory of which he now became the representative and agent, without being led astray by the merely personal. This was made as impressive as possible so that he would not forget about it in the future.

And it is not irrelevant that the whole thing was supposed to place the royal person and his territory in relation to something outside of society, which was supposed to be run in accordance with a divine purpose. Cf. Land of Hope and Glory, performed on occasion at coronations, "God who made thee mighty, make thee mightier yet".

Fifty years ago I knew someone who read history at Oxford, and at her interview to determine whether she would get a first or a second, she was asked to discuss "the divine right of kings". I am sure that even then one was expected to make this idea sound ridiculous, and perhaps she failed to do so, as she was an old-fashioned Christian.

Nevertheless, I am sure that this reference to an outside context conferred some psychological advantages on the anointed ones.

The present Queen certainly seems to have a sense of divine mission and, not long after her coronation, made a speech to the nation in which she promised to consecrate her life to the service of the Empire. She has always fulfilled her role, as she saw it, impeccably, although this has not preserved her from criticism as cold and unemotional.

Comments on modern psychology – comparison of Princess Diana with the Queen Mother (continued)

To make the obvious explicit in the case of Princess Diana contrasted with the Queen Mother, the reason I say I find modern psychology incomprehensible is that I can quite easily imagine myself behaving as the Queen Mother did, and never giving away anything that the royal family would not consider it to be in their interests to have given away. But I cannot imagine at all the psychological events that went into Diana's very damaging public discussion of Prince Charles, to whom she was married. And yet I suppose a lot of people can imagine this, since such betrayals of confidence appear to go on all the time in modern society, at all social levels, so I suppose that there is no longer any such thing as a concept of something being in confidence between individuals.

From the television dramas one gathers that it is considered interesting and attractive to promise not to give something away, and then to do so, which shows there is an awareness that you do not have to keep your word, although you may have led someone to believe (more fools they) that they can rely on you to do so.

When people do insist on not giving away information about someone, this is virtually always portrayed as misguided. They are covering up for a criminal or pervert in withholding information from police or doctors, setting other people at risk and preventing the criminal or pervert from getting the punishment he deserves or the "help" which he needs.

Cases almost never occur in the television dramas in which an individual is protected by discretion from wrongful persecution by agents of the collective.

I say "almost" never because there was a case recently in which a policeman threw away a cassette which might have incriminated someone. But the "someone" was a doctor, hence "good". The crime of which the doctor might have been convicted was (so far as I could gather from a very inattentive observation of the unattractive episode) that of assisting a suicide in framing someone on whom he wished to take revenge, so that they would be supposed to have murdered him when he was found dead.

Princess Diana and the Queen Mother

When I say that I find people's psychologies incomprehensible this is because I find nothing in them that corresponds to basic principles in my own; in fact there seems often to be a deliberate inversion of them. I imagined that since Sir George Joy had had a mystical experience up a mountain in Arabia, even if he would do nothing to help me he would not actively create difficulties for me. I thought this would be a general principle which someone who had had a mystical experience would apply to anyone with an obvious aim or sense of direction. In fact it turned out not to be so and he joined in with the machinations against me as enthusiastically as anyone else. A friend of mine from Somerville, who had been brought up in a hotbed of socialist ideology, commented on my naiveté in having supposed he would do anything to help me, at least in the sense of not hindering me.

She seemed amused that I should have thought such a thing, as if she had more insight than I did, and no doubt she did, because this is one of the things that I always find incomprehensible, as I can find no parallel to it in my own psychology.

In fact one finds that what one might have supposed to be principles in the context of old-fashioned bourgeois psychology no longer are, and instead inversions of them appear to be regarded as appropriate principles of conduct

The behaviour of Princess Diana when she married into the Royal Family, in comparison with that of the late Queen Mother, might be regarded as a striking example of this. The Queen Mother maintained absolute discretion about the affairs of the royal family, even to members of her own family. Princess Diana, although from an equally aristocratic family, lost no time in spilling the beans on Prince Charles to the media, and washing her dirty linen as publicly as possible, which was successful in gaining the sympathy of the population for herself and accelerating the decline of the monarchy, which in turn is associated with an increasing level of criminal behaviour throughout the country. (The social workers etc. who act ostensibly against the criminal or antisocial behaviour are actually no less criminal than the muggers and rapists, although in slightly less obvious ways.)

Intellectuals sorting rubbish

copy of a letter to an academic

Please let all potential financial supporters (such as salaried and statusful academics who have never suffered from being deprived of a career) know of our continuing and urgent need for financial support.

A significant amount of extra work has been created for us (as it is intended to do) by the ridiculous restrictions on waste disposal. Small bins are provided, allegedly to discourage waste, so now every householder must spend significant amounts of time carefully sorting waste into different categories, crushing it to reduce volume, and burning what cannot be fitted in. Even if extra domestic workers are employed, of the usual unreliable and expensive sort, this is practically certain to be something which they cannot do without much instruction and supervision on the part of the employer, thus ensuring that his liberty to spend his time doing anything he might regard as purposeful will be still further reduced.

It is not only the amount of time that has to be directly expended on sorting and organising waste, but the fact that it adds to the burdens of one's mental organising capacity, thus seriously damaging one's life. Some responsible person has now to think constantly about the state of the bins and the variations in the waste which arises, in relation to the collection of different kinds of bins at various times.

The modern agent of the oppressive society likes to talk as if it was only the chronological time obviously spent on a given activity that entered into the equation. For example, the Master of an Oxford college asserted to a colleague of mine that geniuses are not frustrated by having to earn a non-academic living, since from time to time they have some hours "free" in the evenings, and it is impossible (according to him) to do concentrated intellectual work for more than three hours at a time.

Which only goes to show how hostile to ability the modern ideology is.