Time and Retinas

Here I am again, got through everything up to this part. So I'll write a bit here and then get into that story.

I had an interesting dream. Let me see if I can put it back together now. We, and I don't exactly know who we were. were putting together some kind of show or demonstration or class in which lots of people would come into a large multilevel room and demonstrate some principle for a general audience.

I think this had something with the article I read about time last night in bed. There was another article, very short, four paragraphs that had a tremendous amount of information, about how the retina is a specialized and exposed section of brain tissue that extends into the eye through the optic nerve and that is what we see with. It is the only part of the brain that we can see from outside the body.

When I read the title, the meaning became clear and my mind raced ahead. It thought, of course. Of course, the retina is a specialized part of the cortex. It was strange, in a way, I could see a murky evolutionary path where a mutation in small multicelled aquatic animals that needed to hunt in the daylight or hide under cover might create some open synapses that functioned as crude light receptors. Since they were transparent animals the mutation wouldn't need to be very involved to be stimulated by ambient light.

Really, maybe just shining light onto an exposed brain has some discernible effect. At any rate, it was a provocative article and going to sleep right after reading it was bound to have an effect.

You know the only part of the dream that is still with me was from the background music being played during the exposition or whatever it was. One of the first songs played for the procession was Borderline by Madonna and I remarked to whoever was standing next to me that I really disliked that song and wished "we" hadn't used it in the program.

I've been hearing that song in my mind since I got up and it is still there. I actually don't dislike the song that much and I don't know why I said I did. I am, however, getting quite tired of hearing it now. I should look it up because there must be something in it that resonated with something I saw o heard. I also watched the movie Popstar with Ben last night before bed because he wanted to see it and I wanted to watch a movie with him. It may have influenced some parts of my dreaming. There wasn't mush in it for me. It was a very teen & twenties ideal movie. It was like ... never mind.

I just looked up the lyrics to Borderline. I was wrong. There are no hidden meanings, no unhidden meanings, really, not much meaning at all, in the song. It does have an all right synth bass line as I remember.


More later,