30 Day Supertrial

This morning I revisited my good friend Steve Pavlina who, though he's never met me, is a frequent participant in my life. At his hands I've tried many things I wouldn't have had the idea or motivation to try on my own. There have been many interesting experiments over the years: polyphasic sleep (the Uberman schedule), lucid dreaming, Site-Build-It!, blogging, staying unemployed, and probably a few others, but my favorite weapon of the arsenal of life-changers he's handed out has always been the 30 day trial. If you want the full treatment, read it on his website, but the basic idea is that changing any non-trivial aspect of your life is freaking hard. A 30 day trial lets you try out a new thing without committing to it as a lifelong change. It's a magical operator on life changes:

Hard Life Change X 30 day trial = Doable Experiment

Example: quitting smoking is hard. Quitting smoking for 30 days is doable. Eating healthy is hard. Eating healthy for 30 days is doable. Not going to the bathroom is hard. Not going to the bathroom...well, it almost always works.

Since I first happened on Steve's blog, I've done many 30 day trials. I've given up sugar, meditated daily, drank water, gone vegan, worked out, studied Chinese, blogged, and wrote jokes. I've even participated in a family 30 day trial, where we refused to get annoyed at each other for 30 days.

Then I took a break from Steve Pavlina for a while. His articles, although wonderful to a degree, make me feel wimpy. Plus, the last time I visited his blog he was blogging about being married and polyamorous (a friend of a friend of "promiscuous"), which seemed like a slight departure from his usual inspirational fare.

Anyway, I checked his blog this morning and discovered he'd posted another entry regarding 30 day trials. This time he wasn't addressing the average Joe, but the supermen among us, the above average Marks for instance. The upgraded 30 day trial was not particularly creatively but quite accurately called "30 day supertrial." Basically, you do several 30 day trials at once.

So here we go, the daily must-do's for the next 30 days:

1. do 200 pushups
2. study French for an hour
3. draw for 20 minutes (my patience for drawing is paper thin)
4. learn how to tie a new knot a day. This one's courtesy of Lucy, who apparently has people running up to her daily asking her to tie non-slipping knots on their poles...but not in the dirty way, whatever that would be.
5. write a blog entry (100 word minimum)

Doesn't sound too bad when you look at it in crisp Times New Roman font. I wouldn't even call it a supertrial, maybe a 30 day trial with extra cheese, but watch this:

1. Do 200 pushups EVERY SINGLE DAY
2. Study French for an hour EVERY SINGLE DAY
3. Draw for 20 minutes (my patience for drawing is paper thin) EVERY SINGLE DAY
4. Learn how to tie a new knot a day...EVERY SINGLE DAY. This one's courtesy of Lucy, who apparently has people running up to her every day asking her to tie non-slipping knots on their poles...but not in the dirty way, whatever that would be.
5. Write a blog entry (100 word minimum) EVERY SINGLE DAY

Capitalizing the first letter of the first word in each task description makes it so much more potent, eh? Oh and I suppose the EVERY SINGLE DAY adds that last grain of rice to the straw stack on the camel's back.

Going Blind In The Eyeball Area

Morning meditation:

Today was a big day. Today was the first time I didn't open my eyes sometime during the hour, thinking "surely I set the timer for 3 hours by accident," look at the clock and exclaim inwardly "another half an hour! Holy crap!...I mean...surrendering my impatience, surrendering surrendering surrendering...Okay, all patient now...now how much longer do I have to sit here for Chrissake? Oh yea, half an hour...crap...I mean..."

Well not today. Today I kept my eyes closed the whole time, all thanks to my formidable powers of patience...or was it the duct tape blindfold...holy crap that hurts to take off!

Evening meditation:

For the last three days, sometime between 9:30PM and 12:30AM, I cry like a baby for roughly 30 minutes. No, I'm not mourning the loss of my innocence or making a statement against manly men who don't cry. It's all much more simple: this is Gene's latest instrument of torture, designed to get us to enlightenment ASAP.

The idea is to practice mindfulness (yes, again), and to do it with the view of helping out the lucid dreaming experiment. Apparently mindfulness and lucid dreaming go hand in hand. The latest book in Gene's endless queue suggests picking a simple object (mine is hand-drawn letter A), and staring at it for long periods of time, displacing all thoughts from one's mind - doing nothing but observing that object. The book gives a number of helpful suggestions including: "don't blink." This one, this family has taken seriously. Evening meditation is now a sobfest. Oof, now let me go dump my prune-like eyeballs in some warm water.

Quick, Check If You're Conscious Before It's Too Late

Morning meditation:

Today I was plagued by melodies and lyrics from my own songs. I remember now that this happened on some of the other days, so just go ahead and add it to the general list of distractions. There were a couple of moments when I was thinking to myself - "hey, my mind's pretty quiet, right on, brother!" and then I'd realize that it was because my mind was wrapped so tightly around some catchy scrap of music that other thoughts just didn't stand a chance.

The new 30-day trials are only partially taking. Studying Chinese for half an hour is cake, even an hour is no problem. The lucid dreaming techniques are lagging behind though. I did maybe 20 reality checks today in total, which unfortunately doesn't average out to one every 10 minutes. And there are stretches of hours where I completely forget to do them. But I remembered today that another prerequisite is writing down dreams, so I'm going to start doing that tonight. Surely that'll clinch it.

Gene has also caught the lucid dreaming bug and now has some half-baked get-rich-quick scheme that he insists is exactly the opposite of that (not a get-rich-quick scheme). I haven't decided if I believe him yet, but I'll play along, especially since he reads this blog.

More silly jokes:

People are playing Scattergories:
The Letter: S
Category: Things that grow

Mom: self-awareness. But usually not mine.
Dad: Sri Ramakrishna. You haven't seen "grow" till you've seen my buddy Sri. You don't like it? Fine, then Snigfilunkers. You haven't heard of them? They're silicon-based creatures from the lower East side of the Horsehead Nebula.
Chun: sores. You should really get those checked by the way.
Tina: sadness and self-doubt. Ah, my old friends.
Mark: subscribers. Usually from 3 to 4, but sometimes the other way around.
Mario: sundried tomatoes. What? Why wouldn't that count? Well have you ever kept them on the shelf in high humidity for 6 years? No? Then you're not qualified to judge, are you?
Perry: snotty self-serving scientologists. Those little pricks.
Madelyn: sweet savory strips of seventy percent chocolate. No wait...those disappear.
Pei: single moms. No! Sex drive! Phew, nailed it.
Lucy: sluts. And sexist pigs. HAHAHAHA!
Igor: Rena...hmmm, no, that's 'R'...umm...yea...oh! Suicide statistics! Yay, I'm so happy now!


Question: What would you do with a billion dollars?
Mom: never work another day in my life!
Dad: never see any of you again! God, enough is enough.
Mark: I'd probably take it. Yep, there's at least a 10% chance I'd take it.
Mario: buy some Cheezits. They're on sale now: 10,000,000 boxes for $20,000,000. That's not a deal you miss.
Chun: go to medical school. What? Medical schools are like $30K a year these days!
Igor: buy a really authentic-looking degree. Renata won't suspect a thing!
Tina: oh, what's the point...
Pei: be a single mom. To a really fat spoiled baby.
Madelyn: die of chocolate overdose. And then probably go to work.
Perry: buy out scientology and burn it at the stake!
Frank: invest it. There's no faster way to lose money. Wait, did I say lose or make?
Lucy: ha! Gimme a break.


Question: What do you know?
Mom: lots of things. But please don't ask me to remember them. Gene can tell you which ones.
Dad: plenty, but it's never never never enough!
Mark: hah! You could fill a page with what I know!
Chun: I know exactly what I'm doing. And also how to busy myself every second to eliminate time for doubt.
Mario: that I am the duke of Mario! Or was it earl of Mendiola...wait, was that in the first one or the sequel?
Perry: huh? Let me tell you instead about intelligent design. It's retarded.
Lucy: everything. Name one thing I don't know. I dare you. Wait wait wait wait wait wait wait...except that one.
Igor: I know that if Renata ever...oh Christ, I don't even want to think about that. Brrrghf.
Tina: I know that if you ask me one more question, I'm gonna strangle you.
Pei: not nearly enough. I've already read 600 pages of zodiac today, and I still have no idea.
Frank: money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money. Or in modern jargon: lots of money.
Madelyn: oh, just a little secret. Hehe.

Breasts, And How To Squeeze Lucid Dreams Out Of Them...Or Was It The Other Way Around?

Morning meditation:

I have the attention span of the Memento guy.

OK, it's time to start more 30-day trials. I came up with two in the 3.7-nanosecond-long conscious section of my meditation.

1. 30 mins or more of studying Chinese per day.

I'm planning on going to China sometime in this or my next life, so it's about time to put some discipline into my studying. Lately I've paid more attention to my love handles than to my Chinese skills (and I pay less attention to my love handles than to my fictional great aunt Propecia. Hmm...I should call her).

2. Start trying to lucid dream again.

Lucid dreaming is a synonym for "stop wasting a third of your life on nonsense, just so you can write it down in the morning for a 30-day writing-down-dreams-in-the-morning trial." It was adopted at the Belgium-based Winslow-Gordon Convention in 1865, when people realized that they have had it up to here(Northern New Jersey, upwards of my head) with saying that long quote twenty times a day.

Normally, you have no control over your dreams. You can lie there right before falling asleep and chant the latest Miss World's name till you're blue in the face, but will she grace your dream with her scantily clad presence? Very doubtful, because she's too busy serving (servicing?) lucid dreamers. Instead, you get assigned the dream where you're filling out your taxes, you're late, all you have left to do is sign, but your pen's stuck up in some tree for some reason and a village of armadillo gophers is willing to lay down their lives making sure you don't get it in time.

Dreaming for the average man (women don't have dreams, it's something to do with their breasts) is like watching an in-flight movie. You have no choice in the content, and chances are the pilot likes The Lizzie McGuire Movie. Or sometimes you don't even get one you haven't seen yet, you get a "recurring" one. What movie did you watch ten times already? Beethoven's 4th? What a coincidence! That's what we're playing today!

Lucid dreamers don't put up with this. They're elite, they're first class passengers, they're "the foot" as the French would say. They take out a couple minutes every day to ensure they don't get trapped in squirrel paradise like the average dreamer. What they do is they do "reality checks." Every ten or fifteen minutes, an aspiring lucid dreamer will examine the world for a second to make sure he's truly awake. For example, look at your hands right now. ...Uhh, I meant look at your hands after the next sentence. If they start swimming in your field of vision/changing shape size or color/vary in their finger content/(insert whatever your particular set doesn't normally do), then you know you're dreaming. In that case, you snap into the reality of the dream, which is much more vivid that ordinary dream-watching, and find yourself in a world where you have almost limitless control over the content. This is what a lucid dream is. You own the dream, you're the master. You can do whatever you want. You can fly around circles, fly around in squares, fly around in triangles...yea, my imagination ends here, but fortunately you're only limited by yours.

Of course, there's a price. In exchange for additional hours of consciousness, during the day you look like an idiot - whipping out your hands every ten minutes, then explaining to the police why you suddenly punched that pregnant woman with both fists. My advice is to take it slowly. Don't rip your pockets off, just calmly withdraw your hands: "calm calm calm...OK, let's see what we have here. Hmm, only one hand, I'm dreaming!...oh, never mind, I lost that one in Nam, nope...not dreaming, OK, see you in ten minutes, hand, done." Do that as often as you can, and you're on your way to lucid dreaming.

In case you're tempted to try it, there are other techniques that can help you achieve a lucid dream, preferably done in combination with "reality checks:"

1. Surpreme confidence - you know you're going to have a lucid dream. "If that idiot blogger can do it, I can do it."
2. Affirmations - unlike Miss World, lucid dreams will materialize if you think about them constantly. Before you go to sleep, turn on a mental mantra - "I will lucid dream tonight, I will lucid dream tonight, I will lucid dream tonight, I will lucid dream tonight," etc.
3. Attach reality checks to everyday things - every time you feel you need to pee, do a reality check. Every time you flip a light switch, do a reality check. Every time you think about breasts, do a reality check. Especially if you do this last one, you're set. Unfortunately, breasts have very little to do with most people's reality.
4. Reading this blog. Twenty to thirty times a day should be enough.

Lastly, performing a "reality check" inside a dream is not the only way to obtain a lucid dream. You can go straight into a lucid dream when you're falling asleep. For that, you need to be a bit of a sniper. You have to lie on your back and wait patiently for that moment when you slip away into dream land. And in that moment, you have a chance to get into the dream, but not lose consciousness. Often, the falling asleep moment will be accompanied by strange bodily sensations, such as heat and full body vibration. These are signs that you're close, but don't get too excited, you'll spook the lucid dream away.

Alright, ready, set, reality checks start...three paragraphs ago! Happy hunting!