I was taking an exam. I thought the duration is 3 hours, so I decided to finish a paper review first. The review took me about 80 minutes, but then the examiner informed me that the exam is actually 90 minutes. I tried to finish the exam in 10 minutes only to find out that the paper is made of a wet towel so I could not write anything.
April 24, 2018
October 7, 2017
Dream catcher
Waking up in the middle of the night, sometimes I can remember ideas from my dreams.
July 16, 2017
Dream this morning about Hong Kong
I slept inside a standing shower room, with my body balanced by my backs and legs against the plastic walls.
Afterwards I went to a laundry shop, which charged me 10761 HKD for 4 pieces of cloth. (It usually costs me about 30 to 50 HKU for a weeks’ worth of laundry.)
June 19, 2015
March 25, 2015
Pedro turning into a werewolf
This is yet another vivid dream I had earlier this morning.
I was waiting in line for I3D electronic theater with Pedro, chatting with other folks happily.
All of a sudden, he bent over the floor and started to vomit.
His bones deformed, with nails were protruding out of his fingers.
One of the two bear-like eastern European guys standing around us bit off Pedro’s right index finger tip, and that settled him down.
The eastern European guy told me that my bite would not help, implying I am a vampire.
November 19, 2011
Nightmare
The following scenario happened in one of my dreams early this morning.
During the committee meeting of one major graphics conference, a paper of mine got discussed. So I need to wait outside the room. I noticed that a lot of other people also walked out, and I wondered what the heck that was about. Eventually, the paper chair also came out and announced that nobody can review my paper because every committee member was in conflict.
A very senior guy came over and said: I told you not to make too many friends!
In the end, the paper was marked as *not accepted* (a new category beyond rejected, accepted, and togged) due to *lack of committee members for reviewing*. My co-authors told me they hate me and accused me of being an academic polygamist.
Well, clearly, being a dream, this is not entirely logical, as if there were no committee members who could review a paper it would have been discovered during the paper sorting process, not the meeting itself.
But still, an interesting beginning for a day.
July 10, 2009
Dream tapping
Waking up early in the wee hours is usually not a good thing, as it could cause fatigue and all other problems.
However, one good side effect for waking up early in that it allows us to tap into our dreams. It is known that brains do not stop activities during our sleeps, but we usually do not remember what have happened.
I have found that sleep interruptions, especially these happen in the early mornings, help me recall my dreams. I do not know about other people, but my brain tends to produce a lot of strange and interesting stuff (e.g. color movies) during my sleep. And judging by the frequency I came up with ideas after waking up, I know in addition to playing weird my brain also did some serious work.
The most interesting thing I have observed is that most my dream thoughts are less rational than my day thoughts, and many ideas that appear to be plausible during my dreams become apparently ridiculous after I wake up. But sometimes I got really useful ideas. For example, some of my SIGGRAPH paper ideas, as well as the previous two posts (I woke up at 3 am this morning), are produced during my sleep.
Maybe I should intentionally disrupt my sleep when I am short on research ideas.