Hecatompylos

 I did write a post in 2023, but never published it. It will become something later, I promise, and then maybe I will retroactively publish that post. For all of you who were so starved of content last year.

Now, here is something. A story about memory.

I woke on Thursday morning, about 7am, thinking: "Hecatompylos".

This word was repeating in my head. My wife had woken me up, sent me, as on most weekend mornings, to go sleep with the 3 year old while she gets the almost-8-year-old ready to catch the bus. I kept thinking, "Hecatompylos - what is Hecatompylos? Somebody? Some place? Hecatompylos.. Hecatompylos.."

This word repeated in my mind until I slept, and then, I think, it kept repeating. I think I dreamed of wondering what "Hecatompylos" could be. "Hecatompylos, Hecatompylos"..

When I woke up for good, about 8am, it was repeating, repeating, a one-word earworm. I'm not sure I've had this experience before - I'm sure I've awoken with a tune in my head, but a word?

As I ate my breakfast, I looked up the word on wikipedia, which told me that Hecatompylos was an ancient greek name for the Persian city of Qumis, in northern Iran. What? The wikipedia article mentioned that Alexander the Great had visited there.. I did skim the Alexander the Great page a couple of weeks ago. I had come across his name - mentioned not as "the Great", but as "Alexander III" - in an encyclopedia of ancient science I had been reading, and I had thought, who were Alexanders I and II? So I knew I had perused his wikipedia entry. I rechecked it, to see if maybe I had come across his significant visit to Hecatompylos in Persia, but.. no mention of it.

It was still repeating! Like a word-beacon, repeating, "Hecatompylos, Hecatompylos". I think I spoke Hecatompylos under my breath a hundred times. I can still feel it in my tongue, I have to resist mouthing the word now. It's so strange.

I went to the lab and did some things, but pretty soon I was googling "Hecatompylos". I came back to the wikipedia page, and now I saw that 'Hecatompylos" could also direct to Thebes, the famous temple city of Egypt. This felt more right than Persia. And, I realized, just last night, before bed, I had read with the 5-year-old a chapter of the Buildings Book on the monumental temple and pyramid of the Pharoah Djoser. Was it in Thebes? I couldn't remember.

Now I read about Djoser, but found that no, Djoser lived hundreds of miles north, close to Egyptian Memphis (as a Tennesseean I have to distinguish Memphises), and that during his time Thebes was a mere fishing village, no Hecatompylos - no city of a "Hundred Gates". I gave up again and tried to work.

A little while later, I tried once again: "Hecatompylos", into Google - but this time, I felt, I should try "He*k*atompylos". This time, a web page comes up, a page from an online Encyclopedia of Borges - Hekatompylos was mentioned in Borges' "The Immortal".

That was it! I had indeed read The Immortal a few nights earlier, Sunday or Monday night. Maybe I had read two pages on Sunday, then the rest on Monday (I have to squeeze in Borges between bedtime reading for the little ones, who alas do not enjoy my reading The Immortal or The Library of Babel aloud). I don't recall lingering on "Thebes Hekatompylos". Maybe I did? But I've read the story dozens of times before. The last time must have refreshed some habitual circuits familiar with the words and phrases of the story, and then again, as dozens of times before, they were dormant.

Then, on Thursday morning, dreaming, one of those circuits was randomly touched - maybe it was the previous night's reading about Djoser and other Egyptian temples and tombs - and the word "Hecatompylos" popped into a dream, without any context or explanation. So free of context that it followed me from one dream into another, into waking, back into dreams, and back into waking life, until I reconnected it with its origin. Once I understood why the word was there, it dissolved back into unconscious memory and the compulsion to repeat it was ended.

***

After an introduction, Borges story begins: 

"As far as I can recall, my labors began in a garden in Thebes Hekatompylos, when Diocletian was emperor."

https://www.borges.pitt.edu/i/tebas-hekatompylos

syncope

quick note:

went for the mri tonight; radiologist said everything looks ok, but wait to see what the neurologist says; and i can come get a copy of the pictures next week. mri was interesting, hypnotic, staring at a blank plastic surface inches from your face, keeping absolutely still, listening and feeling these musical, super loud rhythms coming from the machine.

interesting in a different way was what happened first: the nurse tried to put a contrast agent into my blood through a vein in my arm; she failed on the first time, sticking the needle into the vein and through the other side; the second time, she hit a nerve, and i went into vasovagal syncope.

everything started to tingle, my field of view started to fade, i broke into a sweat, i felt nauseated, and then

then, everything was black, and i didn't know anything or sense anything - yet i had some sort of minimal awareness. i had a vague feeling of waking up from a deep sleep in a place i didn't know. i remember feelings that i associate in some way with sunlight, trees, and mountains. i felt confused.

then, i started to feel my body - i was in a chair, but i couldn't move. why am i in a chair? where am i?

then i started to hear a shuffling sound, loud and abrasive, felt my body being rifled back and forth - the confusion was growing.

then my vision came back - when i asked her later, the nurse said my eyes were open all along, deviated down and leftward - and only then i remembered i was in the MRI clinic. at first i thought, when did i go to sleep? i wasn't sleepy.., and then i realized that i must have passed out. everything started to come back.

the nurse was calling for the doctor and others to come, and struggling to put a blood pressure meter on my arm. the sounds were all muffled for about 30 seconds or so, as though i had earplugs in. at the same time, there was intense tinnitus.

after a few minutes i felt normal again. the shuffling noise, i think, was blood rushing back into my ears, and maybe also the agitated movements of the nurse. i was soaked with sweat. they gave me a can of juice and an oxygen tube in my nose. i didn't notice anything interesting about the oxygen. i talked with the amused radiology resident, Amad, and we decided not to do the 'GAT', the contrast, unless the scan turned up something worrying, which it didn't.

this was the first time i've ever passed out, but i often get woozy from needles, getting blood drawn etc, and i stopped giving blood in college because each time the wooziness got worse - the last time i couldn't walk out of the clinic, had to lie down for 20 minutes. point is, this wasn't important, just weird.

so, the quick note is: order of losing consciousness - all at once. order of regaining consciousness - awareness of self, body, hearing, and vision. glad i've been reading those tononi papers - i would estimate my phi went something like this:

dream aura 2

dreamed last night that a scintillating scotoma was starting; i think i was trying to read, but couldn't see letters, space was distorted as though there were blind spots. i'm wondering if now that i'm familiar with the scotoma experience, the normal dream experience of being unable to resolve text in a dream is now naturally triggering thoughts, and ensuing dream experience, of a migraine aura.

i went to get my laptop so i could start recording the aura, but then i got distracted by downloading a video game, which then autonomously tried to download other games, which made it impossible for me to get back to matlab to run the aura recorder.

after a few minutes, i realized that either i had missed the whole thing, or it had stopped, because there was no scotoma and i couldn't remember seeing any of the big peripheral scintillations. at some point after that, i realized it had all been a dream, and i started wondering whether i actually had a headache or not; then i awoke, and went through the same train of thought again. but happily, no headache.

my tkd black belt test is sunday, and i am slightly nervous that i will get a headache sunday morning; i have a superstitious feeling that i have *caused* the headaches before by thinking too much about being about to have one, when in fact i think i've just subconsciously noticed aspects of prodrome. anyways.

dream science?

Too many entries - let this be the last one for August.

Fantastically, incredibly, unbelievably, implausibly, Monday night I had a dream that directly relates to Monday's entry. I'll leave out irrelevant details: I dreamed that I was experiencing a migraine aura.

In the dream, I noticed the phosphene-like foveal scotoma, and at first had the "is it an afterimage? what bright light did I look at?" reaction, and then realized what it really was. It was upsetting, actually, because the last one was just 1 week previous, and I felt like once a week is a bit too frequent.

I then set about trying to record the aura with my perimetry program, except that my computer was now a large, flat panel lying on the floor, like a giant i-pad. The layout was of course different - not a blank gray screen, but a thin-line black grid, like a Go board, on a wood-brown background. Jingping was there, and kept trying to move the grid around, and I kept telling her to stop.

Once I was trying to record it, the scotoma was no longer foveal, but extended 10-20 degrees out, straight to the left and then arcing downward towards the inferior vertical meridian. This makes me think that I wasn't actually experiencing an aura in my sleep - to get from the foveal scotoma to 10-20 degrees should take 15-20 minutes, and I don't think that much time actually passed in the dream - it seemed like less than a minute. Of course, time and space are both funny in dreams, so who knows. There was no headache on Tuesday, anyways.

It was very frustrating trying to set the fixation point in the dream perimetry program. I just couldn't fixate - I would set it in one place, and then felt that it should be somewhere else. I think I finally gave up and started sticking my hand in the scotoma to probe its size.

So, whether or not I was really experiencing an aura, or just dreaming that I was experiencing one, is an interesting question. It seemed like a real one, and I noted lots of spatial details: the tiny phosphenic bead of the foveal scotoma, the fuzzy noisiness of the peripheral scotoma arc (though the periphery seemed clearer somehow in than true peripheral vision), the thin black lines of the perimetry grid, the unfixable fixation spot.. If visual experience includes V1 activity, and if the visual aura occurs in V1, and if V1 is quiet or suppressed during dreaming, how could I have seen what I did, unless spatial vision includes a good deal of higher-level inference?

It seems that I proposed an experiment on Monday afternoon, and then did the experiment in my sleep that night. I have never been so efficient!

dream post!

recurring dream:

jingping and i are trying to get to the train station. the city is like a cross between boston and chicago - it's boston but with lots of overhead walkways and more of that chicagoesque feeling of sharp-edged criss-crossedness.

lots of things happen as we're on our way, it's like we're being chased, but the recurring part is where we get into the station and have to start climbing a stairwell, up and up. i know what's going to happen as the dream progresses. there's a fear of falling down the stairwell, but what happens is that it gets narrower and narrower, less and less place to put your feet, and you're crawling finally up a spiral tunnel, until you can't go further because there's just not enough space - around this point i know it's a dream, because i'm thinking that it can't really be this way, and i'm trying to change it because it's so damn uncomfortable. even in the dream, i'm thinking, why does this happen, why can't i fix it?

once it got to that point, i realized that my eyes were closed, but i couldn't open them, and yet i could still kind of see the twisting stairwell tunnel ahead - and there was a confusing sensation of being able to see but not being able to see, at the same time (interesting relevance to the visual consciousness stuff i was wondering about earlier, which is really why i'm writing it down). i was feeling around for the gap ahead, to see if i would fit, and i knew jingping was behind me and i couldn't back up, but i also felt like i could see it all...

i think i woke up soon after. i figure that noticing my eyes were closed and not being able to open them, and yet still having a sense of vision, must have been REM atonia - sleep paralysis, the sort of thing that gives you the feeling of being trapped and immobile in a bad dream.

anyways, i'm pretty sure i've had this dream a few times, the "shrinking stairwell dream".

dream post, yeah!

anyway, i told you guys that this war would be a great idea. it sure is turning out well.

i had a dream on sunday night which i think was pretty complicated, but here is the main part that I remember:

I go to this big garage, which is like an airplane hangar, but i'm there to get my oil changed, something like that. A guy in a uniform runs up to me, looks at me kind of funny, and asks what i need. I tell him whatever i'm there for, like, "can you change my oil?", and he looks confused. Then i notice that I'm riding a bicycle, and he says "I guess i could put air in your tires if you want", and i just sit there, kind of embarassed and uncomfortable. I don't remember what happened after that.