Here’s a model of the GCHQ Building, built on the outskirts of Cheltenham, Gloucestershire in 2003. GCHQ does a lot of computing and listening to the internet as the Guardian noted today. But see how green the model is: a doughnut in parkland with hundreds of trees. Probably quite “green” too, I expect. Jolly nice, what?
And here’s an aerial photograph of what was built. Everything that is grass-green in the model is asphalt-grey in reality, and in contrast to the several hundred trees on the model, in this photograph I can’t see a single one.
Here’s a drawing of Apple Headquarters in Cupertino, California, designed by Norman Foster nearly ten years later. Apple does a lot of computing – well, you probably know that. But see how green the drawing is: a doughnut in parkland with hundreds of trees. Probably quite “green” too, I expect. Jolly nice, what..?
A Bad Guide 
I like trees to park under on hot, sunny days.
We’ve just been to our local Midnight Pharmacy. The car park has lots of pleasant little trees interspersed: they will cast fine shade in a few years time. In fact, at about the time the buildings will be torn down, I expect.
Trees tend to wreck parking with their roots when they grow. They should all be chopped down.
I ought to have mentioned that Foster’s doughnut has parking underneath the central courtyard rather than (as in Cheltenham) surrounding the doughnut with cars as if it were a sports stadium or a shopping mall. I’m sure it will be greenish – this is in northern California after all – but Foster’s lot drew a transplanted jungle, and I’m very interested to see if that will come to pass or whether, “sadly”, it will be cut back – given the chop, hacked down because it’s so expensive.
I park our car under a cherry tree, because we converted the former garage into the goat house. Blossom & fuzzy stuff drops on the windscreen in the spring, cherries during the late summer, leaves in the autumn and bird shit the year round.
Yeah one of our birches drops stuff on the car. When I was a boy my father’s car was largely parked in the open because our garage, which was an old stable, had unaccountably filled up with boats. (And in the hay loft we had our “gang” HQ: old armchairs and candles and other boyish stuff, plus various bits of kit for the boats. I must be getting old – more memories of schooldays come back to me now. (Or maybe it’s due to medication: I was prescribed some morphine recently and my memory and dreams have been particularly active since.)
One of the worst trees to park under is the flamboyant. Its leaves drop a kind of resin that covers cars with thousands of droplets which are very difficult to remove.
The flowers of the coqueluche can be quite a nuisance for cars as well.
Lime (Linden) is pretty bad for that in England. It is also one of several trees known as Flame tree. I remember a book title, The Flame Trees of Thica, I think it’s about colonial Kenya.
Stables are wonderful to have but they always get filled with stuff, it’s a rule of life. I wouldn’t mind trying morphine.
Fleurs de coqueluche – very pretty, though.
“I wouldn’t mind trying morphine.” It made me sleep a lot. If I had a hallucination it was disappointingly humdrum, so I put it down as a dream remembered. Then I wondered whether it is possible, even in principle, to distinguish a hallucination from a dream remembered.
I don’t know the difference. We don’t really have any doctors to ask, do we? Mrs Ø is a psychiatrist, I think, but she’s only been here once a long time ago.
We just been through the annual time when we are beset by pine pollen: coarse yellow slightly greenish stuff that covers my car, blows in the windows of the house, and collects at the edge of puddles.
Why are we comparing a hallucination to a dream remembered? Why aren’t we comparing a hallucination to a dream, or comparing a hallucination remembered to a dream remembered?
If I could just barge in here with a few remarks about the general use of the terms “hallucination” and “dream” as I know it.
Someone who is awake (in the opinion of others present) can report having a vivid experience of seeing or hearing something that the others can’t see or hear as they are present. This can be said to be a hallucination (or an anticipation of things to come, a glimpse of a parallel universe etc etc).
Some who is asleep (in the opinion of others present) can, after waking, report having had a vivid experience of seeing or hearing something that the others didn’t see or hear while the person was asleep. This can be said to have been a dream (or an anticipation of things to come, a glimpse of a parallel universe etc etc).
The main differences are 1) the state in which observers present judge the person to be when the experience is claimed to be taking place, or to have taken place, and 2) whether the person reports on the vivid experience as is it supposed to be taking place, or afterwards.
It would make sense, along these lines, to say that one remembers a dream or a hallucination. But a dream is not a candidate for classification as a hallucination. When you designate something as having been a dream, you exclude its having been a hallucination.
Of course you may have experienced something that you don’t know afterwards whether to classify as a dream or a hallucination – that’s where the opinion of others present at the time can help you to make up your mind. If you believe that you can decide on such matters without consulting others, you are imagining things (not the same as dreaming or hallucinating, and much trickier to analyse).
To “relive” a dream could resemble a hallucinatory experience, though. Also, one could recall a hallucinatory experience as having resembled a bad dream.
A good point. We demand to know…
A hallucination is delusion, whereas I don’t think you’re deluded by a dream, not by the time you’ve woken up anyway. So perhaps Dearie means that in order to compare their delusional qualities what’s important is your memory of how you felt during the dream.
… Damn. Nobody expects Grumbly Stu!
You may just be dreaming it’s me.
There were no others present, Stu.
dearie, you wondered “whether it is possible, even in principle, to distinguish a hallucination from a dream remembered.” My comment tends to show that you can indeed distinguish the one from the other in principle – by reflecting on what the words usually mean, and perhaps consulting others before reaching a judgement.
Of course, with “in principle” you may have meant something like “by sitting around thinking thoughts and comparing internal notes, without consulting anyone who was present, supposing anyone was”. Even then it should be possible to distinguish a hallucination from a dream remembered – it’s just that you may not be able to decide which one it was that you experienced. Or you may conclude at one point that it was the one, and later change your mind to believe that it was the other.
I must have been 14 or so when I first started thinking about this matter, as the result of reading “Dreaming” by Norman Malcolm, an annoying little book in an Oxford series with a handy format.. Here and are contemporary reviews of it.
Here and here
The first was contemporary, the second probably not.
As I said, most people do not usually find it that hard to distinguish a dream (remembered) of their own from a hallucination of their own. What’s is sometimes rather harder, in principle, is for other people to reach a reliable conclusion as to whether what someone reports on later, as having taken place in the absence of those others, is/was a vision, dream, hallucination, false testimony or something else.
These considerations help to account for the careers of those who claim to have had visions of the Virgin Mary, for instance. Nowadays, the recordings of a surveillance camera could be consulted as part of the historical evidence. It’s often hard to reach a reliable conclusion on a claim that something happened elsewhere at an earlier time. Everybody involved is is imagining things and talking about what they imagine.
Many people, especially scientists, appear to hold the view that, in principle, every claim about the world can be decided on the basis of considerations of principle. Because of its circularity, this view should be regarded as a statement of intent, rather than a demonstrable claim.
“it should be possible to distinguish a hallucination from a dream remembered – it’s just that you may not be able to decide which one it was that you experienced.” Eh?
I meant that the notions can be distinguished, in principle. In a particular case you may not be sure which of them, if either, accurately describes what you experienced. You may have just dreamed that you were hallucinating.
I’d no idea you were so well-read about & interested in dreams, Stu.
Actually well-read may be overstating it a bit. Judging from your link to the Mind criticism of Malcolm, it’s not a great book.
Do people ever dream that they’re dreaming?
You’re right, well-read is only a small proportion of well-bred. The well-bred person must sift through shitloads of well-meaning, ill-considered books, just to find one worth re-reading. Things have gotten better over the years, though.
I was interpreting dearieme’s “in principle” to mean: before one discusses the practical feasibility of distinguishing between X and Y, one might ask whether one really has in mind some difference between X and Y.
If one believes that the most noticeable difference between a dream and a hallucination is that the former occurs in sleep, then one can try to distinguish between them by trying to make out whether one was sleeping. This may or may not involve consulting others.
If one believes that the only difference between them is that dreams occur in sleep, then there seems to be no way of distinguishing between them except to try to make out whether one was sleeping.
On the other hand, if one believes that the only difference between them is that dreams occur in sleep, then one might also say that there is no need to distinguish: pigeons occur in cities, and rock doves occur in the wild, but they’re the same birds, so it’s all the same to me if we call these city pigeons “rock doves”.
In hindsight, Malcolm’s book was important to me because it was such a load of unconvincing codswallop published by the OUP. By annoying me, it spurred me to think.
I don’t know if I have ever dreamed that am dreaming, but certainly I have dreamed that I am waking from a dream.
The other day our daughter asked, “Mom, do I really have imaginary friends?”
How I felt on morphine is nicely illustrated by the “antidote” today at Naked Capitalism.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/06/links-61013.html
What I remember as particularly annoying in Malcolm’s book was the following argument about REM (rapid eye movement) sleep.
REM phases have been strongly correlated with dreaming – when REMs were seen in persons sleeping under observation, the persons were woken up and asked whether they had been dreaming. Dreaming was reported in almost all cases. Because of this strong correlation, it can be said that when REMs are observed in a sleeping person, that person must be dreaming, even though when he is woken he claims not to have been dreaming.
Malcolm would be good material for a fictional character.
Ø, did you say yes? (It’s a good question for Wittgenstein, I thought when I was looking up this awful old Malcolm.)
I love that Naked Capitalism picture. What is that? A wombat or sloth or something. Anyway it’s a perfect depiction of drug-induced cozyness and it made me wish (slightly) that I wanted to hug a bicycle tyre.
That’s no wombat, that’s a sloth.
Stu, I see that Malcolm believes that REM => dreams, but does he think you can also dream without REM?
dearie, I can’t remember, but I wouldn’t put it past him to claim that you can’t dream without REM.
The curious thing about his REM –> dreams argument is that it undermines itself. Scientific claims about cause and effect must be reproducibly demonstrable, but his are not.
First, he relies on the testimony of experimental persons who exhibit REM and then, when woken, say that they’re dreaming. Comparing this testimony with REM observations, he decides that REM must always be accompanied by dreams. Now, when persons exhibiting REM deny that they were dreaming when woken, he regards their testimony as unreliable.
The reliability of reports of dreaming has vanished, destroying one side of the original correlation.
Sloths really do wear algae in its hair, don’t they?
Is that a riddle? I have algæ in my hair in my facebook picture (but I’m not a sloth – as you are doubtless aware, sets of things being part of your job).
Dearie, the other day you sounded doubtful about the amount of original research that historians do in order to write books: I just found this short video about his card indexing system that my cousin made a while ago (they were made redundant by computers, but he seems to have had 1.5m cards).
Not exactly; my complaint was about the fact that they were too prone to repeat the well-known truths of earlier historians uncritically. Thus you end up with children indoctrinated with such tosh as: the British forests were all chopped down for iron-making, and (clever trick this) the forests were also all chopped down for building ships for the navy; the Forests (in the Norman sense) were made by seizing land and expelling the peasantry so that the land could be covered with trees and devoted to deer; when the Roman legions came Britain was heavily forested; when the legions left much of Britain tumbled down to forest again; when medieval English armies were fighting in Ireland the Irish armies would retreat into their endless forests; most hedges in Britain are only a couple of centuries old, dating back to the (Parliamentary) Enclosures, which, of course, covered the country with hedged fields on land stolen from the peasantry. The Irish forests were eventually cleared to make barrels for the Guinness brewery, and so on and so on.
I take these landscape examples because it happens to be easy to prove them to be tosh by pollen studies, or study of old maps and documents, and so forth. But many historians don’t much bother with those; one historian after another will repeat the errors of earlier historians, or even of belle-lettristes, until the crack of doom it would seem. I suppose you could say that my complaint is that historians are too inclined to work with secondary sources rather than look at primary evidence. Hell, I should add that these guys routinely repeat stuff that flies in the face of elementary botanical and economic knowledge – in other words, it should often be easy to see that the claims are implausible, implying that you should seek facts against which to test them.
How much in other histories I have read is similarly taken uncritically from earlier secondary sources?
Ok, I see what you mean – I must just say I’m very pleased to get the longest, least laconic dearie comment ever – I agree in principle of course but I’m not sure whose fault it is that everyone gets this stuff wrong. I don’t think it’s historians repeating errors made by earlier historians. I’d expect them to be extremely eager to prove their elders & betters wrong, find the buried treasure and thereby make their own name. For want of a better scapegoat I’d blame the schools: the O & A-level curriculum, course work, teachers’ reading lists etc.
Of course, I made an error of the incomplete-edit type; I meant to write that they wear algae in their hair.
Jeremy, I’d forgotten about that lichen-ness of you, which I like very much. A Crown of algae-tinted fungus is nothing like what the sloths wear. Maybe it’s for camouflage. I wonder if sleuths ever disguise themselves the same way. Asa has a very good friend, if you know what I mean, whose hair is a sort of sloth-style green.
We have a special senate election coming up here, for the seat vacated by John Kerry. In a real high point of the campaign, the Republican candidate has called his opponent “pond scum”.
You’re right, it’s lichen on my head, not algæ. I was getting my scums mixed up. Didn’t you tell us (a year or two ago) about a kind of scum or weed in the greater Boston area that was choking all the streams & rivers to death? Has the Republican alluded to that?
Alma doesn’t have any friends with funny-coloured hair yet – this being Norway most of them are very blond – but she is moving to London. When I was his age, I used to make pond-green bread. I think I used blue & yellow food dye.
You do have algae on your head. Lichen has algae in it (not for disguise but for photosynthesis).
Thanks. I never took any botany or even biology at school. A good thing, come to think of it, or I’d probably have been put off plants for life.
” I never took any botany or even biology at school.” We got as far as The Bean.
What about The Bean, dearie? By the way, this thread started with greenishness and somehow circled back to greenishness.
Properly supplied with water, nutrients and blotting paper, beans grow and develop quickly enough for twelve year olds to see the progress. We also did the Naming of Parts, none of which I can remember. (In those days if you could do maths you soon stopped studying biology.)
I remember the names dicotyledon and male gametes from Science when I was eleven, so we must have had a term of biology. The point of the class was left vague and it was never repeated. In retrospect, I think it was an abrupt and possibly mandatory attempt at sex education, but British conventions of that time (1964) meant that the words sex and human were avoided.
“dicotyledon”: boing!