Taking a breather..

I finished my last essay yesterday, now after handing it in I feel quite worried. It’s my first essay and for the first time in my entire life I will be judged by the same English standard that everyone else around me is held to. I can’t drop the feeling of not acctually accomplishing anything with the points I made for either one of them, and I will be so relieved if I pass…

Anyhow, I took a ride on the wild side and consumed alcohol for the first time in almost a month…it’s nothing special going that amounth of time without drinking, but considering the situation of University life, I think it is quite the feat.

My projects have been on the passive side lately…but that had everything to do with my busy work schedule. So now that I am again back to normal work loads, I will be getting a bit more creative in my cooking and I’ll start thinking up new projects.

Keeping up with the diary and dream journal is actually proving to be hard. I will often wake up in the middle of the night remembering a dream, but I haven’t gotten around to getting something to write them down on. If don’t write my diary in the morning I will often forget it before going to bed.

I think I’m going to set up a set schedule of what to do when and when to do what. I tried it during last week, and it works like a charm. It was probably that which helped me put in the last grueling days of work. It also helped a lot getting up at 5.00, it’s a good way of squeezing 11 hours of work out of a day where you still have to go to tutorials and lectures. I don’t know if i want to live my life this way, but I’ll surely put it to use in high stress situations.

Once Again, A Short One

I am still really swamped, but it’s the last part of the essay marathon, and I’m about to start sprinting. I am taking a break in my essay writing to write this. I’ve been really frustrated about not having time to write any updates…it’s been 4 or 5 days since I last posted. That’s just way too long.

As I mentioned before I decided to change my work habits…I wouldn’t say that I’ve succeeded yet, because this feels temporary and I know I won’t be able to keep it up. Instead I now begin to see how I can improve…for my next assessment I’ll try to start preparing at least a month before…so that I can focus my energy writing instead of researching and writing at the same time.

One things for sure, I should be way more stressed than I actually am…I have moments when I see the situation in another perspective, and that’s when I get stressed. When I focus on my own perception and try to put it into the real context, I can’t help but to be amused of how sickly I need this kind of approval to tell me that I am “worth” anything. That’s ridiculous! The outcome of all this will have some effect on my life, but it can’t change the reality of my life….the things that are really important have nothing to do with CAS results.

In 20 years time, if I look back at my life and think of good grades as the highlight of my life, I do not think that I have actually live or learned anything. It’s our experiences that make us into who we are, not our grades. Knowledge and Wisdom are two very different things.

Two Days Left

Tomorrow I’m going to reap the benefits of getting up at  5.00 . I’ll put the extra hours to good use, making the last push towards the finish-line. I have been having a little problem with a lack of sleep the last days, so I’ve been taking some naps…makes me eager to try the Ubermann Schedule….

Rise and shine

It’s half past 5 and I have nothing better to do! That’s my excuse for posting right now, actually I don’t need an excuse to post, but I thought I’d point out that I am still getting up at 5. There’s not much more to tell about that project, I do sleep in on Sundays ,but I am still waking up before my alarm!

I’ve been quite busy this weekend, and that’s why there’s been no new post the last couple of days. I am afraid the madness will go on this week as well, but after that I will only have to do the regular uni stuff. At least next semester I know that I’ll start doing my assessments in advance.

Right now I am enjoying a nice cup of tea, I actually feel increasingly british each passing day as I drink several cups of warmish delight while watching the the rain pour down and the leaves falling…. leaving the skeletons of what used to be green friendly faces.

A teeny-weeny Hello!

I just thought that I’d check in and do a little status report on the different things I’m doing.

Vegetarian

It’s going great! I’ve been a vegetarian for about a month, and I am just now starting to experiment a little more with different kinds of dishes and vegetables; this weeks favourite has been spinach! I never knew that there were so many different things you could make with spinach. I haven’t really been doing any over the edge gourme cooking, but I have been cooking. I seem to have a very bad habit of using way to much garlic though, today I actually felt it burn in my stomach a little while after I had eaten.  Looking forward to learning some new recipes to bring home and make for my family during the Christmas holidays.

Dreaming

I’m actually getting better at remembering my dreams. Last night I was even able to control one of them. I decided to do some downhill skiing,  after a while I lost control and ended up dreaming that I was in a commercial. It was quite weird how I went from going down a mountain and ended up right next to my house, which was frozen and looked like a icicle,  it thawed out and there suddenly was a jingle and a voice that went off right next to my ear!

I am still learning to remember my dreams though, so Lucid Dreaming is still a bit out of reach.

Time Management

It’s been going a little slower than I was hoping, but I have finally started writing on my actual essay. I figure I will finish the Philosophy one first, and then move on to do the politics essay. I might start writing more essays after I am done with these, I clearly need to practice if I’m ever going to get any better!

Dreaming, an Update!

How is it going?

This far I’d have to say that I am progressing! I have actually started remembering a lot more of my dreams than before. There are many nights when I wake up in the middle of the night clearly remembering my dreams, but unfortunatly I haven’t been writing these down. I should start having a notepad next to my bed.

What am I doing?

My approach to this was to learn how to have lucid dreams. So after reading different peoples experiences with LD I decided that I’d start with learning to remember my dreams, and this is what I’ve been doing for the last week or two.

How?

Before I go to sleep I repeat the sentence “I would like to remember my dreams when I wake up”, then I imagine myself waking up, remembering a dream, getting up and writing it down. Then I repeat this over and over again. It seems to be working, so I’ll be sticking to this until I find a more effective way.

Have I had any lucid dreams yet?

Not in the sense that I’ve actually been able to control my dreams, but I have been aware of the fact that I’m dreaming. I did however have one dream when I started to get control, but then I got excited and woke myself up.

I’ll continue with learning the basics, aka remembering, and I won’t stress trying to become lucid. Everything will eventually fall into place.

Short and simple

I had my presentation today, and I must say that I might have had a little high expectancies about the level that is demanded. As it turned out I was the last one of the presentations, and because of a shortage of time I had to shorten it down, so I cut out a lot of the factual stuff that had been said in the other presentations. What I had prepared would’ve taken about 10 minutes, but after the quick mental “revision” I got it down to 2-4 minutes.

A lot of the argument supporting my conclusion was lost, but I think that this will be taken into consideration.

The next thing on my list is setting up my arguments and doing some more research for my essays.

Time Management

Time management, not really my strong side. I have a horrible habit of pushing off important stuff for later, having to pick up the slack the last week or day before it is due. This is painfully obvious in the situation I am in at the moment.

During this first semester I have been preparing for my lectures and tutorials while at the same time having a comfortable amount of time to spend on my personal interest and hobbies. This turns out to have been an unbalanced schedule, and as a result I am currently preparing for a presentation for tomorrow and two essays due next week. This is gonna be a week of all work and no “play”. It will probably make me a dull boy. xD

This would’ve been a lot easier task if I’d ever written an essay before, but since I come from a different school system I have never written an essay of the kind that we’re expected to write here in the UK. These kind of assessments are not ones I am familiar with, and as a logical consequence I am expecting to do quite poorly, which isn’t really helping my motivating.

After reviewing my situation I am willing to accept that this is quite the character flaw, and if there’s something I should make a project of, this is probably what would give me the best direct benefits in my daily life.

I will have to invest some time to figure out how to ween myself off of the habit of postponing. I’m happy to say that I have plenty of early morning hours that I can do some of my work in, since time is something of which I can’t get enough of at the moment.

Passive Income

Making Money Without Selling Your Life

I’ve been reading about people making small (sometimes even large) sums of money on the side of their regular job, what is most commonly called a passive income. Some of these are actually able to quit their daytime jobs after a while, just because of their passive income source.

If you manage to establish a alternate passive income source you will be earning money while you sleep, eat, study, work out, drive your kids to school e.t.c. and this way you are guaranteed to keep your “job” whatever happens in life (lets take the current finacial crisis as an example, or a young woman losing her job because she got pregnant) what it usually comes down to is making a “one time effort” to build on an idea that will serve a useful purpose for other people. What it comes down to is exchanging values; you make or give a value to other people and they give you money in return.

The beauty of this is that you are actually earning a honest “buck” without having to put an daily effort into it.

Different Ways to Set up an Income

Many websites can be a source of passive incomes; blogs, companies’ website,personal sites, entertainment and so on. The way this is done is through advertising, affiliates, licensing, reviewing, and the list goes on. This is often depending on a lot of traffic, but that’s a whole different topic (you could hope for a “If you build it, they will come” occurrence, but I wouldn’t be to trusting of this idea.

Another way is to come up with a product or patent that people will pay licensing fees for. Or you could rent out property, sell merchandise or maybe even write a book.

Me, how am I going about this?

I am aware of the fact that to make this possible you must have something of value that others are willing to spend time and/or money on. At the young age of 20 I do not currently have any ability, knowledge or competence to give value to other people, but I will be doing some brainstorming on how to make this possible.

This is a long term project; I am going to come up with a way to make a passive income, doesn’t matter if it’s only a 1£ per month, and to  further develop myself to find a competence or talent that I can market.

This is something that probably will take years, but once one source of income has been developed, I can try to make it better and broader to increase the outcome.

It may sound ambitious ,but my goal will be that one day I won’t have to depend on a regular job to make all the money I need.

Dream a Little Dream for Me!

I have been having a hard time remembering anything from my dreams for the last couple of days. It seems like they are lingering around just too far out in my peripheral vision for me to see. I see nuances but I can’t make any sense of the “shape or feel” of them.

This seems to have something to do with the amount of sleep I am getting; Since I started the Lucid Dream project at the same time as I started getting up at 5.00 I think that I maybe got some “unstable” results the first part of last week. I have a fairly accurate sense of how my sleeping pattern has been changing and a little insight into the way it affected my dreams.

When I was getting “less” sleep than I needed (not really so, it just felt like it since I was getting up so much earlier than I used to), I had very strong memories of my dreams almost every time I woke up. Gradually as I became acclimatized to the new schedule my dreams became more like how they were before, almost nonexistent. This could be because I am no longer in mid-REM sleep when I wake up, yet judging the way I feel when I wake up, (awake and refreshed), I do think that I am somewhere in between phases or maybe in a lighter state of sleep (definitely not in deep sleep, because if someone disturbs me in deep sleep I feel like a popped balloon (picking myself off of the floor =P)

This would explain why I’m not able to recollect my dreams and my level of alertness when I wake up. I have read some forum posts from other people’s experiences with lucid dreaming, and I think I’ve found something that I’m going to try tomorrow (or today…or will it actually be tomorrow? I guess I’m doing the preparations for it today, but I will be doing it tomorrow…riiiiiiight, anyhow;

Strategy for tonight

I will set my alarm to go off at 4.15 am, when that time comes around I’ll go for a walk around in the flat, go back to bed and then sleep until 5.00

What theoretically will happen is that I will be up long enough for the conscious part of my brain to find it’s bearings, but not long enough to fully awaken…so when I go back to sleep my consciousness will have a easier time identifying the fact that I/it, or he….I think I’ll call it a he from now on =D, is actually dreaming. That way it should be easier to become lucid and to remember my dream afterwards.

I’m not sure whether or not it’ll work, so I won’t get my hopes up, but if it does work…this’ll be the first place I’ll post the update XD

Meditation Temptation

After spending some time online reading others’ different methods and thoughts on meditation, I decided that I wanted to try one of them, I chose this one.

I turned off my computer and sat down on a carpet and started going through what I could remember of the steps that were mentioned.

I made it through the initial steps and felt that it became a little easier to concentrate as I gradually calmed my mind. During this part I was very focused on my breathing, for some reason I stopped thinking consciously about it after a while, as I started shifting my priorities to forcing my mind to stay silent, I unconciously began holding my breath on every exhale….the first couple of times I did this I wasn’t aware that I was doing it.

What’s really interesting was that I suddenly started having films showing inside my head, they were so clear that I became completely focused on them instead of what was happening around and with my physical body. As I said, it took a while for me to understand what was happening and to connect the dots between my breathing pattern and how/when I saw these things.

I experienced some time dialation, or atleast I think I did….because even though it felt like 10 minutes there seemed to have been at least 10 more that are somehow “gone”, after finishing the meditation I felt a bit drained, but otherwise I did seem a lot more relaxed and at ease then before I started.

It was a very powerful first time experience and I am really excited about making meditation a part of my daily routine.  One thing’s for sure, this won’t be the last post I’ll write about meditation!

(If I get some better “reception” on my minds eye TV I’ll write about it the next time I do one on Meditation.