Dream diary update. My dreams in the last week reminded me about why I started writing this diary. They are filled with fascinating & boringly-detailed objects: Book bags, supplies, library books, video rentals, religious paraphernalia, etc. All of them made up or fake. One of my educators told me that having this kind of detailed dream is a cardinal sign of
giftedness. Perhaps that objectivity is the reason for my past fascination with rose windows?
I've meant to keep a dream diary for decades. One of my wackier old therapists absolutely insisted I do it. He said that he believed I was almost as smart as Einstein and my dreams proved it. I didn't really believe him even after he administered another IQ test, but I listened to his crazy theories and I tried to get him to relax & party more. Back then I was still in my late teens and I saw myself as a college party animal. The therapy we were using was hypnotism.
Last week one of favorite TV shows '
Jeopardy!' reminded me of him. The last Double Jeopardy answer in a segment was "What is '
Oneiromancy'?" The reason this reminded me of my
hypnotherapist is that back then I didn't see myself as either a
genius or as a
savant IQ. I believed I was a sort of artistic oneiromancer with some simple depression and chronic
addictive personality problems. I didn't tell anyone this because I thought they wouldn't understand. To write my dreams down would be to steal my powers from me, so I refused to keep the dream diary or any diary for my therapists. I also didn't like referring to or documenting my addictive personality or delusions since that would make me vulnerable to threats of legal interventions. Our Westernized police-state society doesn't reward candor.
Since then I have recanted my wild partying ways and now I see myself as a common garden-variety savant with a slightly-altered brain chemistry that allows me to have some vivid dreams. Perhaps it was from some natural herb or organic poison I ingested when I was a child? When I was younger than 3 I used to run away to be alone in the woods for days around here and I ate a variety of stuff I found there.
I see myself not as a dream oneiromancer anymore but as just a silly artistic savant with no extralegal addictions or delusions. I use a broad definition of genius as IQ z-score over 140 and 'savant' as z-score over 180. The reason I use these limits is MENSA uses 140 as their membership cut-off and most of the pediatric IQ tests like the
Stanford-Binet are unreliable over 184.
I poorly recall my population rank putting me at somewhere between 1:600,000 and 1 in 2-3 million. About the same or slightly lower incidence than your garden-variety Nobel candidate. Unfortunately US society doesn't reward raw scores or savants who make mistakes, so I'd still probably be lucky to find some job as auto mechanic at Wal-mart with just that on my resume.
Matchmaker.com and other
message board ilk always automatically assigns everyone in my immediate family to the loser bucket, so I didn't bother with a dating profile myself. So much for rankings.
I have some negative associations with savants after reading prolifically about them as a child. I started by reading the
Time Quartet and the
Bagthorpe Saga after I turned 7. I quickly moved up from them to reading Will Shakespeare and
Oscar Wilde dark comedies over about 3 more years of sleeping in libraries until age 11.
I never liked being associated with Parade columnist
Marilyn vos Savant since I saw her as a sort of egomaniac and talking head. I've met lots of smart folks who aren't paid only to write about how brainy they are by a cheap tabloid rag. Though after arguing with her on the phone (I guessed the numbers ha ha), I conceded that vos Savant received her name not made up by some marketing
huckster like
PT Barnum but merely by family inheritance of French origin. IMAO It is likely that some ancestor changed the name to 'savant' in a fit of marketing pique but I refuse to accept it as coincidence. Among other things Marilyn is obsessed with protecting her images online and $uing so I'll just embed this harpy pic so you get the idea.
vos Savant has a dear Abby/queen bee column in Parade magazine harping on the countless virtues of Ronald Reagan and on the flaws of her (numerous) male inferior drones. The only thing I agree with her about is that all IQ tests are completely unreliable in the high ranges. Remarkable people named 'savants' are often crippled in some way like '
idiot savant' or '
autistic savant'.
Western society's freak show people. That's why I prefer to not be called a genius since geniuses are mostly well-adjusted cogs in Western civilzation. Geniuses are
bland Confucian ultra-conformists with prospering families. I'm a colorful savant &
hikikomori who might have been a writer and who may have some marginal
prescient ability. Might as well be proud of it.
So happily there are no longer any prohibitions to my keeping my online dream diary. The main reason I am keeping the diary though, is because
Google Blogger wouldn't let me follow anyone without my keeping some sort of marginal blog. I wanted this blog to be creative and challenging but as I expected I am the only one subscribed to it via Facebook
NetworkedBlogs application.
