Daily Entry: September 19th, 2020

Dream

Intention (2330 the night before)

Though I haven't been remembering my dreams, I think that may have been the weather. I like the habits I'm building. So, trying the same stuff again. Adding the reflection intention (stay still upon wake up and reflect before going to journal).

Note (midnight)

Success in new intents. Woke up in slight pain again. Focusing on relaxing the areas. Felt good. Thank you, me, for this note in the journal.

Melee in the Snow

Friend won't play Jigglypuff anymore, people know matchup too well.

There's a vast field of white snow that I am walking through with my friend.

That's all I remember. Thank you for the remembered dream, me, and for noting it at first real opportunity.

Wake-Back-to-Sleep (logged at 0600 this morning)

Maybe a bit late for WBTS, but I went to bed later than usual. Wrote down dream, and reality check done. Going back to sleep now.

The DILD via WILD

I am falling asleep. There's a song playing in my head. I hear it more and more in my ears. The song is about what I am hearing.

"I hear an old man singing

There's an echo in my ears

The passage must be winding

The voice is getting stronger

The vibrations are quite clear"

Not exactly how the song goes, but that is the gist. It has a tune as well, but I didn't record myself singing when writing down the lyrics and the tune is gone.

I am writing this song down in my journal as I struggle to keep my eyes open. And then I focus on letting myself fall asleep.

I wait.

I wait for my eyes to open into a dream.

"You're here." My new dream-native boss is speaking to me. "Your name is %#@@%, yeah?" I am not listening. I know I don't want to wake prematurely like last time.

He looks intently at me. I nod. He hands me papers. He's explaining what's written on them, but I know it's gibberish. I'm working up the courage to stand.

I get up, but I feel myself getting up elsewhere. I take this to mean sleep atonia hasn't set in and panic. I wake up, standing on my bed, blankets falling off of me.. "... but I wasn't sleeping with a blanket on me, it's too hot...." I think to myself.

I wake up for real.

Pre-nap (1400)

Things seem to be moving in the right direction, what with new lucid dream last night (and also I did slightly better at being in the dream). Will reinforce the habits I have been cultivating. Though, I've been wanting to do some serious pre-nap prep. So, I'm writing this digitally this time.

I think, for one, I should add pre-nap as a half-hour bit to my timeblock template in Notion.

....

Done.

Next, I want to... look up things I want to pseudo dream about? Something like that.

I guess, I can think about that before each nap, but maybe this time it's more an analytic meditation on how I want to go about Anki cultivation and/or certain habits I want to start (Language Learning with Netflix, maybe).

Post-nap (1500)

There is a bit of mind-wandering in the beginning. Madoka Magica and Smash thoughts play in parallel. I start reciting my intentions.

I think about Anki.

I switch to thinking about LLN (Language Learning with Netflix). I think about why I want to use it, and what my ideal version of it would be. An abstract answer comes back to me, and now I will do "verification and review" in general thinking area below.

Meditation (Day 107)

Prime number day, woo! Going to meditate around 1700 today.

Intentions for the day:

  • Stage 4 intention (vigilance on keeping introspective awareness continuous)
  • Fall back to stage 3 if necessary
  • Label the distractions, do it over and over so that it becomes automatic
  • Before adjusting posture, count 8 breaths
  • Learn the various different ways I guide myself back to the breath
    • E.g. away from tempting distractions, away from posture distractions, away from pain
  • Note where the breath was when you label a distraction (attention, awareness, or forgotten)
  • Mirror-check only when agitated due to worry and after counting to 8 in breaths

A reminder that I will not be doing body-scans today (and mirror-checks only when posture overwhelms and becomes temeporary meditation object).

Post-Meditation (1845)

Properly avoided body-scan. Did one mirror-check. Various gross-distractions, but still feel like it was a solid meditation. 45 minutes is feeling longer and longer, which I take as a good sign of growing my consciousness strength. Only makes sense that I have more opportunities for gross distractions. I'm also, I think, being stricter, which is good, too.

General Thinking

Twitter-relapse successfully avoided. There was a slight urge today, but I did not go to Twitter. I did end up playing a lot of extra SSBM, though.

LLN Habit Thinking

What I want is not to watch the show and learn, but to split up the show into its discrete chunks and have flashcards of those chunks. These flashcards would be:

  • Audio → furigana and English translation
  • Sentence in Kanji → furigana and English translation
  • Word/idiom in Kanji with Sentence it is used in → furigana and English translation
  • (Optional but would be cool) Video of scene with audio → furigana and English translation

I would want an Anki deck for a given episode, and once I had all of them "learned" watch the episode. Rinse and repeat.

My hypothesis is that after learning the words to a single episode in a series, that the number of new words to learn per new episode exponentially decreases. Lots of common words, with some-but-not-many new words per episode.

If I were to take it a step further, I would warrant a guess that one would not have to learn too much additional vocabulary from other sources to be able to have a spoiler-free way to study the vocabulary for a specific episode (though there'd be spoilers for the other stuff, however it'd be less effective because it'd be a single bit out of context).

This step further is not necessary for the proof-of-concept I want to get to. I am fine, currently, with spoilers if I can verify I am indeed learning to understand Japanese via this flashcard idea.

I think the MVP here would be:

  • Pick a reasonably-long-somewhat-standalone scene in an anime with proper subtitles on Netflix
  • Grab the subtitle information for this scene in the least-tedious way currently at my disposal
  • Make an Anki deck for this with the sentence → translation cards
  • After learning all the sentences to the scene, go back and watch scene, see if it seems understandable

At this point, I'd have to trust the "seems understandable" bit. The real proof of it all working is once I can reuse learnings from one source to understand another, which will be a bit deep into the process.

So, from here I want to brute-force to this MVP. I should have everything at my disposal to make an Anki deck out of a scene, though it may be tedious. Once I do that and like the result, I can maybe decide on ways to make software make various bits less tedious.