Thank you for the clarification. I agree 100%!

Not once have people channeled negative emotions into action or art. It’s impossible.

Except, no? Art is about expressing one’s self. There’s tons of art out there inspired by negative emotions. Anger-fueled protest songs, Emily Dickinson’s poems about death, countless paintings created to express a people’s or an individual’s plight, the list goes on.

Being positive is definitely better for one’s health, but to say negative emotions have never and could never be used to create art is absurd.

Edit: Or was your comment sarcasm? I truly cannot tell anymore.

Aw, actually I did have pet cockatiels as a teen. (Sadly, not for long - my parents didn’t know how dangerous Teflon was, and my babies paid the price.)

They didn’t care to be held like this, but boy did they love face scratchies.

Who knew that even birds could be fans of bondage

Funny, I expect all penguins to have that name.

My 7th grade English teacher didn’t let our class use the word “nice.” She considered it a lazy word, one easily replaceable by a variety of adjectives without any meaning being lost. Every time we thought to use the word “nice,” we were challenged to explore our vocabulary and come up with something more fitting and descriptive.

Therefore, the argument that there is no better word to describe one’s self than “nice” is weak. English is a rich language full of diverse vocabulary, much of which carries more powerful meanings than “nice.” If 12 year olds could do it, I’m sure you could too.

Maybe it’s because it’s still night where I am, maybe it’s because I’m on the spectrum, but those blue lights feel like an assault on my senses. I had to scroll it off my screen to type this because it made my eyes hurt. I can’t imagine having to deal with that every time I have to pee in public.

I also can’t help but wonder where people go to do their makeup. I don’t use makeup, but I often see others using the mirrors to touch up this or that. I can’t imagine blue lights are helpful in that regard.

Interesting, I think of the lyrics as describing the way a baby or toddler feels when looking at the stars. They don’t know what those bright lights are yet, they just know they’re shiny and too high up to reach.

If all the yeast in our bodies’ microbiomes could coordinate together to take us over, we’d be so screwed.

Not OP, but I can see their point. I may have a different perspective from them, though.

Dreams aren’t simply movies our brains make up. They are multi-sensory beyond sight and sound. In particular, I can feel things in my dreams. Not just textures, but emotions. Those emotions include enthusiasm for nonsensical ideas that take place in those dreams, or fears based on abstract concepts expressed through metaphors (but that wouldn’t make sense IRL.) I’d say that emotion is key to our enjoyment of dreams, and that emotion comes from inside us. Without it, we’d basically be watching abstract art films and wondering, “This is weirder than I remember. Why did I like this so much before?”

Can such a dream-capturing device recreate all the emotions present in the dream?

But also, would we really want a device that could force someone into experiencing something so intense? It sounds like something that could easily be used to manipulate people, and that worries me.

It bugs me how I get some of my best ideas while driving.

I’ve had a number of “car journals” throughout my life, because sometimes I just have to pull over and write some thoughts out.

It sounds to me like the sleep paralysis episode began, then you realized you weren’t awake.

Our brains are really good at rationalizing all sorts of experiences. A lot of “editing” goes on in our brains between initially receiving a sensation, and becoming consciously aware of the sensation. Sometimes it can even trick us into believing things happened in a different order than they really did.

The fact that you felt a sense of panic, which is a typical reaction to sleep paralysis, makes me think some part of your brain became aware of the paralysis by that point. All parts of our brains don’t wake up simultaneously - deeper, older parts usually wake up before the outer, younger neocortex (where rational thoughts and impulse control take place.)

The awoken amygdala can send out panic alarms due to the body being paralyzed, but the young, rational part of the brain is still mid-waking up. As you begin to gain awareness, you could simultaneously realize you’re in an altered state of consciousness, but also feel terrified for no clear reason.

So, good news! You probably didn’t do anything to cause the sleep paralysis (except maybe by sleeping on your back?)

I could feel this. Like how the person you were with was your sister, but also not your sister. You had a sense of familiarity with whoever you were traveling with, the same feeling as when around your sister. But at the same time, she wasn’t literally your actual sister. It makes sense in dream-thought, even if it doesn’t make sense in awake, logical thoughts.

I could imagine dreaming that whole thing out myself (except maybe the being in England part, since I’ve never been there.)

I don’t want full lucidity, because I like seeing what my subconscious comes up with. I have enough control to steer dreams away from things I find unpleasant, and I’m happy with that.

But I also have recurring “places” I go to in my dreams. There’s one particular place I enjoy going to, which feels like close to Florida (in my mental GPS) and has an eastern coast, but its geography otherwise is more like southern California, with mountains and rocky beaches/islands. It has the games, rides, and boardwalks of New Jersey, as well as an unlit stretch of a moonless beach that I once experienced in Delaware. (I was a child, and I vividly remember walking into a pitch black void, hearing the waves crashing, but not knowing how far away the water was. My family was ahead of me and kept telling me to keep going. That moment comes up a lot when I think about the future.)

Anyway, I’ve spent dream times all over that place. Sometimes it’s part of a road trip and I’m just traveling through, sometimes I’m visiting people who live there, sometimes there are events going on, or I need to navigate a busy, multi-story shopping mall.

It’s a pretty pleasant place, honestly.

There’s also this wonderful comment about memories of playing “peek-a-boo” in the bathtub.

It’s important to take time to enjoy the simple things in life.

I would like to second this. Researchers are standing by and ready to learn.

It isn’t common in the US, but I was lucky enough to grow up with it as a staple in my dad’s garden. Funny thing, our family referred to it by its Polish name, so I didn’t know the English word for it until I was a teenager.

More and more of that cheap tacky plastic crap littering front lawns.

The inflatable decorations are my pet-hate. If you don’t keep them running 24/7, they look like a bunch of garbage strewn across the lawn.

She needs to be defrosted from her summer stasis in time to sing about Christmas.

Though in all seriousness, it’s sad to think that enough people saw that AI slop of an update summary and thought, “Yep, that sounds better than anything I could’ve come up with. Let’s run with it.”

Reach out and spend wads of money on someone.

I’ve got a season pass to Six Flags, and part of the deal is getting free “bring a friend” tickets.

Unless the guy’s treating his taxi driver to meals in the park, this outing could possibly have been free.