Dream

Intention (2400)

Didn't write anything down, just thought to myself "do what I've been doing". Think I should always write something down, though, as I didn't get any real results this time.

But that may have also been poor sleep hygiene last night (went to bed very late).

Wake-Back-to-Sleep (logged at 0550 this morning)

No dreams to report. Let's try for a lucid dream again.

Reflection (1500)

Don't remember anything, really. Will try to avoid repeating the poor sleep hygiene and assume that was the cause.

Pre-nap (1500)

So, I can do some more Japanese learning understanding thinking or.... Perhaps some code practicing thinking? I'll play with the latter and fall back to the former if I don't have enough data in head.

Post-nap (1530)

Immediately on laying down my mind is wandering, though they are not yet hypnagogic. I try to go through my intent, but find myself drifting away after each intent. I am unable to hold onto where my mind went, when I notice that it is drifting and look at where it is, everything slips away. Very quickly they become more clearly hypnagogic, and my vision is regularly activating.

I do manage to get through my intents. I maybe forgot the last two: "rehearse your experience on waking up (don't move)" and "compromise: write down at least one sentence", though these like various others are not important to the nap (I just want to make sure I remember them before proper sleep, and naps are good practice).

At one point, I am thinking about the nature of timers. There's a basic timer, and there are four other timers, so the thought is going. There's a bar graph showing the basic timer as a much shorter bar than the others. When I notice this thinking is happening, and try to make sense of it, it slips away.

Thinking about LLN and coding practice is in "general thinking" below.

Meditation (Day 108)

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
• During planned attention away from breath, keep breath in awareness

Post-Meditation (1815)

At several points during my meditation today, I got my posture to sing (is I feel the best way to put it). Like, this really harmonious effortlessness across the body as though it all vibrated as one.

This was also something I would characterize as a gross distraction. It has a similarity to body scanning, in its way, and I have started classifying body-scanning as a "planned" gross distraction.

But it does bring me back to the last bit of meditation prep: posture. Perhaps I can make posture much longer? As this part is already sitting, the timer will have already started, the main goal is to focus on relaxing and do any movements that feel required that don't "count" as relaxing during this prep stage. Once I hit this harmony, only relaxation is allowed from then on and in this sense it is fixing posture that went out of alignment without me noticing (aka it escaped awareness, where perhaps posture should stay).

Otherwise, today's meditation was really strong. Once again, I think I made labeling of distraction types stricter, but this is okay. It didn't feel quite as long as last time, though, so I may have been caught in distraction and dullness a bit more (I think the posture singing may have passed time a bit). No boredom distractions of note, and only one real timer one (subtle).

The breath was also very vivid today.

I'd say today was solid stage 4 training.

Experimental

General Thinking

LLN

There's another feature I want to think about: average native dictionary depth (should I call it ANDD? why not).

ANDD

So, at first while learning Japanese, I will be scaffolding English where necessary. But an end goal is to be able to be entirely within the Japanese language whist studying Japanese. Where this becomes possible exactly is fuzzy, but obviously it does become possible, because I have studied English in English. I think an interesting number to know is how many times I would have to look up a word when reading the native-language dictionary definition of a word. It would start at 1, with the word itself, and would be nested.

Across all words in the dictionary, what would be the average number? And, I suppose, what is the average number for a native-speaker (though I assume it's close to 1). The system that does this would need to know what words I know, and as such it's important that I keep this in mind for the sake of not making it a hard problem down the line. Also, this probably needs to be limited to some number of the most-common words (maybe 10K, maybe a little more than that).

Basically, I'm going to want to have a software-accessible place to store all the Japanese words I know. It would also be interesting to see what the number is for me in English, but then I need some quick system that would know how many words I know. Though I could just get a list ordered by frequency of use and go through 100 a day until I do some 10K words in English. Wouldn't take long to answer 100 yes/no questions a day and in 100 days I'd know.

Coding Practice

I may want to revisit spaced-repetition for coding problems. Especially since redoing a problem that I know the solution to is much faster than doing the problem the first time. It might be a good start to keeping certain problem-solving and coding-craft stuff in my head until I have a better means of spaced-repetition for them.