Another year and then you'll be happy

The view from the top of a hill in mid-northern Ukobani looking west into the setting sun in the dying days of 2011.

Well it's hats off to comedian Mark Steel for mentioning Gef the Talking Mongoose in this week's episode of Mark Steel's in Town where he visited Douglas in the Isle of Man. There were reports of Gef  taking the bus and I can just see him sitting with a newspaper on the back seat, using his little nose to flip the pages, reading about the economic depression and the rise of militant nationalism, keenly aware of the mysterious forces beyond rationality or morality that lurk in the background, driving these events and enslaving mankind forever in world of cruelty and lies

Now I'm not sure Brian Dunning has ever done an episode of Skeptoid about Gef the Talking Mongoose but I'm fairly sure he'd give equal credibility to Gef's claims that human history is driven by anything other than humans. He does give an excellent description of a hypnopompic hallucination , his own in fact, in an episode about Shadow People. I've seen one too! Get this though...

"Early one morning, the characters from Sesame Street put on a show for me in the tree outside my bedroom window. It had music, theme songs, lighting cues and costume changes: A full elaborate production, and it lasted a good hour. To this day, I have clear memories of some of the acts. I even went and woke my parents to get them to watch, but by then the show had gone away. I knew for a fact that I hadn't been asleep. I'd been sitting up in bed and writing down some of the songs they sang. Those writings were real, on real paper, and even made sense when viewed in the light of day. It had been a completely lucid, physical experience for me. But it only existed inside my own brain in a hypnopompic state".

Cool eh? That's a hypnopompic hallucination which happens when you're waking up. The going-to-sleep version is  Hypnogogia. We've all had them right? I was so excited when I heard this that I wrote it all down but as it turned out I'd just woken up and that Brian Dunning is just an illusion created by the addled mind. You might think there's 2 links to his intriguing output up there but remember you are quite tired.

So yes perhaps it was just Gef's incredible brain, trying to create order in the confusing chaos of events that led him to believe that Elegabalus and co were behind the wars and depressions of the 20th century world. Surely Gef of all beings could see that human behaviour as in any system in nature like high-altitude winds or patterns of crop disease, are predictable to the point that they manefest ebb and flow, tipping points and circularity yet are inherently chaotic, capable of throwing up the seemingly impossble and at the very least, extremely inconvenient.

Or maybe that's the just the sort of lies that kind are good at sowing and its only closed-minded credible fools like you and Dunnung who fall for it. More later!