First Blog

  Dream States. We now  delve into the great known unknown, the mind’s secret weapon, the dream.  Therein lies a power most certainly unknown, and scarcely studied. Let’s begin at the movies. What happens when you watch an intense movie late at night?  Your mind is absorbed in the pictures, dialogue, and sounds of the film.  Your mind still dwells on these, computing, digesting, and ruminating on all of these even into sleep. In your dreams, your subconscious mind recalls all these thoughts but convolutes them as only dreams can. Maybe you wake up with yourself a part of the distortion. Maybe, you make it through the night of restless sleep but you wake troubled. Dreams fade quickly, happily.  Has this happened to you?  To me, many times. As a pre-teen, my dad took me to the movie,  The Man with the Atom Brain .  The imagery and plot of that movie stayed with me for years. I know this was a childhood fantasy, scientifically unrealizable even now, but a remake of the movie titled, The

  Solution Methods of Last Resort G Donald Allen 1. Introduction . You and the team can't solve the complex problem. All the engineers, all the accountants, and all the plant managers can agree on nothing definite. Every tentative solution you’ve offered has been rejected by the higher-ups as flawed. Call this a Humpty Dumpty problem [1] .   When up against impossibility or at least complexity, the problem-solver looks for any clue to help. Just a trace of inspiration may do. When you’re trying to move a mountain, only a morsel of information can help. What is singularly important here is that these notes are not confined to normal propositional logic for consideration or resolution. They work with any problem-solving tool you may prefer, from beliefs to faith to emotions, to all. To this point, we’ve already discussed dozens of solution methods. In this chapter, we add on the final bunch, dominated by dream states and thought experiments. 2. The Usual Suspects. You