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Secrets


I once spoke to a friend regarding posting personal stuff online. When I mentioned I posted some entries of my dream journal online (on this blog), he was saying he'd never do that, for the fear of potentially being psychoanalysed by others. He, naturally, doesn't maintain a blog. A fair argument he had was, "You aren't a psychoanalyst yourself, so you don't know what kind of secrets you're giving away with these posts." Well, maybe not, but I can sure obfuscate the information such that no one knows which part is real and which part isn't.

Psychoanalysis (I'm making assumption here) would have to make use of the individual details of the account, say, like what the action and reaction, thoughts, but not the big picture like the setting, since it doesn't take an expert to tell you what it means if your dream setting is in school. But the thing is, not everything I post under the "dreams" tag is 100% true.

Firstly, all of them are half-truths (or varying degrees, like 1/4-truths, 7/8-truths, and so on). That is, I only put up the bit that is interesting and omit everything else, otherwise the post gets too long, and also for the reason of not being too revealing.

Secondly, I modify certain bits if I feel that it is too personal. Before you think you can spot modifications due to sloppiness etc, let me tell you: I analyse my own dreams, often so immediate that I could be analysing them while I'm waking up (i.e. in the half asleep state), or immediately after I wake up. This, many times, results in myself modifying the dream, such that I get two versions: one of which is the one I actually dreamt, and a patched version, which, if I'm still half asleep, can spawn into an actual dream, resulting in two legit dreams. I only post one of them, not the other(s).

I think you may also be aware that in half-asleep states, imagination basically runs with the same coherence (or rather, incoherence) as dreaming, thus my patching works as a full patch, and never seems out of place (if there can be such thing as out-of-place in the dream-world). Think about it as substituting a patch of white noise for another patch of white noise. They're random and different, but indistinguishable from each other (as long as care is taken to ensure that their statistical properties are the same, which is very easy to do).

Now then, "isn't that the same thing?" you might ask. Am I still giving out my secrets? Not quite. It's equivalent to Lucid Dreaming, where you exert conscious control over your dreams, so no, it's not the same. Couple that with omitting certain things, and no, you'd definitely be none the wiser of what I actually (in full detail) dreamt. Those who are not seeking to psychoanalyse me shouldn't find this a bother. Who cares if the enemy I was fighting was wearing a shirt or not wearing a shirt? Looked like... say... one of my childhood bullies or something. What matters was that I sliced them in two with a laser. See?

So there you go. You can protect your secrets without having to stay completely silent. I can see one question that might pop up, "why the hell post in that case?" Think about the purpose then. The post is to share an interesting experience (to whomever who might find it so), and also, as a log for myself, which, due to the way memory works, need not be a carbon copy of the memory, but just cues needed. As long as most of the information is retained, the original memory will be recalled. Easy for me to get back the original information, impossible for anyone else. Information theory! Go figure.

23:12 24 Jun 2015
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