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55. The Magic of Reality

Not sure how to count pages for illustrated books, if I do finally go back and count pages. And anyway this was the iPad version.

I liked it. Editing fell off for the second half, for some reason, at least on the app, and the detail level understandably varied with his expertise (he admits to be being pretty hazy on relativity and totally at sea regarding quantum). I should have known most of it already, and maybe I did in an "oh, right, yeah" kind of way, but my mind is a sieve for most kinds of science, so it was fun to learn or relearn. His atheizing was amusingly sly here: each chapter answers some basic question about the universe first with various myths or debunked theories, then the science and how it was arrived at. The editorializing's mostly in the juxtaposition, till the final pages where he and Hume tag team miracles to death.

The illustrations were on average fine but one blew me away: an unlabeled version of the periodic table consisting of clear plastic boxes each containing a chunk or puff of the element in question. Must have been thought up by someone before but I'd never seen it - just beautiful. I hope McKean makes it available as a poster.

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Dawkins discusses people who believe they've been abducted by aliens in one of the chapters, and touts the theory of an acquaintance that sleep paralysis accounts for not just this phenomenon but a lot of old legends - vampires, succubi, various chest-sitting creatures or spirits bent on stealing the breath of children. Made me realize I had such an experience fifteen years ago - the paralysis part isn't the remarkable one, it's that you're awake while not only still held in place by the sleep vise but also while some mechanisms of dreaming are still happening. I found myself hallucinating, but with my eyes open, a reddish demon head with shifting features looking down at me from close up. I tried to blink it away and laugh (and in a sense did, but found the commands weren't going through, and because of this realized my paralysis). The head faded after some amount of morphing in place, from one set of demonically slanted features to another, consisting of lights and holes in light, a reverse jack-o-lantern effect, and then a second, yellower one shifted about a bit further away for a minute and then faded off.

I'm no expert on dreams, but the visual element was fascinating: it seemed like a kind of actual, crude animation making use of my rods and cones, or anyway the parts of my brain that normally interpret those. The demon head was made of light particles, of the same stuff you see behind your eyelids when you close them, and moving like those, but gathered and focused. The comparative lack of detail was interesting because it implied we feed ourselves dream cartoons that then get believed in as live action, in a sort of weird feedback loop - our unconscious sense of reality gets drawn as cartoons, then it or some other process imbues those cartoons with a sense of reality, from which expectations the next cartoons are derived etc. The visual elements of dreams really are visual, it made me think, but kind of cheap, leant credibility only by our skepticism's being sequestered in the napping side of the mind. And they're half semantic, as much symbols as cartoons - those demon heads felt like they meant quite a lot, I was just too interested in their being there to pay attention to what. I can totally see such moments leading to freaky religious decisions - all the more for the fact that since you've awakened faster than your body knows you're awake to start with you've probably been shocked bad by something in your dream. In my case apparently demons, silly as that made and makes me feel. I do remember something absolutely terrible had happened in that dream, to the extent that the demon's invading reality was actually a relief, because of the simultaneous invasion of much-preferable reality into my awareness.