"A tree is a tree -- although its meaning to the man who views it ("the truth") depends upon his relationship to it.  Does it give him fruit or shade, or is it an obstacle in his path"

    -- Surveying Kierkegaard, Homer and Buhler, 1969

While reading Monsters and Magical Sticks, the following quote and exerpt on reality stuck out at me.

"Scientists who study human behavior have argued, and continue to
argue, as to what constitutes "reality"; if there is a reality, why a reality,
and...ad nauseam. In spite of this debate, one general consensus has
come into being: There exists a "consensual reality." As the name
implies, it refers to a consensus, or general agreement, as to what to call
certain things and how generally we should respond to those things. We,
at least in our society, generally agree that a chair is a chair, and what we
can do with a chair (careful...).

We know that we can't, at least at this point in our development, flap
our arms and fly. We all agree that a beach is a beach, a tree is a tree, etc.
In a very narrow sense, we might state that consensual reality is primarily
a function of conscious processes: that is, I see a tree and accept the
object as a tree. Unless one of us is marching to a very different
drummer, you would agree that a tree is just that—a tree. Thus, we have
consensual agreement as to the reality of that tree. However, our
individual response to that tree may be more important than our
agreement."

I wanted to take a minute and share what I've been working on recently. 

I've spent the last couple weeks setting up my new personal wiki.  My ultimate goal is to use a wiki, and other open source applications/tools, to act as a personal knowledge manager and learning aid.  I've also been evaluating a fantastic extension called Semantic MediaWiki (or SMW).  SMW essentially "upgrades" the capability of a wiki, which really is blobs of inter-related text by adding semantic meaning to various items in each page.

I figured I'd experiment and make a real-world application.  Since I was a teenager, I've been intrigued by dreaming, and lucid dreaming in particular.  And, starting last year, I experimented with keeping a consistent dream journal for about 4 months.  I managed to import all of the data into my semantic wiki and can now run some pretty elaborate searches on the dream actors, location, clarity/type (lucid or not), and major objects or themes in the dream.  With just 4 months of data it's shown some interesting patterns and has started to give me insight into some of the dreams.  I've decided to keep up with the dream journal habit, and we'll see what interesting things I can discover.

Now.... what's with all the finger and toe mention?  I was searching for some lucid dream related articles a few minutes ago and came across this bizarre/interesting post on somebody who was having a lucid dream and decided to take acid (while he was in the dream, of course).

Here is an excerpt to think about:

"I can't stop feeling like my life is a dream, that everyone I know is actually just a personality dreamt up by my own mind, that even my own self is an imagination, and that really there is nothing at all, nothing whatsoever, except for this one mind with no dimensions and no time that dreams up life to escape the horror of its utter isolation. I think I now understand the meaning of the Zen phrase "I alone am the world-honored one."

Now I think that it must be truly horrible to be God, to be IT! Nothing else beyond you or apart from you, no help, no world, no god to pray to, no nothing except your own self. Maybe he couldn't take it and blew himself up into fragments just so he'd have some company and something to do for a while, and that's what our universe is. Maybe we are so frantic to live this life because we're terrified of the truth, that we are all that is, and we are ALONE! We are fingers and toes making friends with eachother, making up stories and dramas so that we don't have to think about the terrible eternal nothingness."

Source: http://www.yahooka.com/forum/51459645-post1.html