The Loom of Heaven
Some 10 years ago I moved from a life where I was transforming reality with the use of my mind and language to one where this transformation mostly comes from the use of my hands. Today I don’t see any difference in using these two apparently separate tools as ways to learn and mess with reality.
Sailing taught me that the coordination between hands and mind is a learning tool that can greatly improve my health and knowledge of the world around me.
This is the reason why I decided to write about materials, fabrication techniques and night dreams all in one post. I hope I won’t create too much confusion in the reader by putting together so many things, but for me it is a way to synthesize what is happening around me in this very moment.
Lately I busied myself working with a particular material: Fiberglass. I am building a hard dodger, a structure that goes on top of the companionway to protect the entrance of the boat and the cockpit from spray coming from the bow and from rain.
There is another common and definitely more evocative term to describe this structure: The sprayhood, a space sheltered from the fury of the ocean or from its deceitful and odd slaps. Sprayhoods or dodgers commonly seen on sailboats are made out of canvas draped around a metal piping structure that can be lowered and raised according to need.
The hardness in the name of the one I am concocting comes from the construction method I am adopting which will bring to a permanent sturdy structure. The construction method is called glass-fiber reinforced polymer sandwich, or more commonly GRP (Glass Reinforced Plastic).
There will be a post about my new hard dodger with its design and building challenges once it is fully complete, here I want to go somewhere else.
Fiberglass contains the word glass, but it’s not exactly what we usually refer to with said word. What is glass anyway?
According to Wikipedia it is a transparent amorphous solid based on the chemical compound silica (a.k.a. quartz, a.k.a. sand). Fiberglass is actually formed by glass strands randomly flattened into a sheet or woven together into a fabric cloth. The weaving technique decides the weight and the direction of the fibers, both important factors in defining the stiffness and other properties of what we want to create. Glass-Reinforced Plastic is composite material which come from the marriage of a fiberglass cloth and oil based resin (polyester, vinylester or epoxy) that curing over the fabric forms a plastic matrix that constrains the fibers in the set direction.
Almost everything man made is a composite of fiber and matrix. Reinforced concrete is the marriage of cement and a steel armature and even papier-mâché is the union of glue and paper.
I have been practicing working with fiberglass since I started living on boats. The very first project I was involved with was tabbing the wooden bulkhead of a head (the boat’s bathroom) on a large sailing boat. The wood had rotted at its encounter with the bilge due to water leaking from the shower pan. Tabbing means to join two surfaces meeting in a sort of perpendicular way with one or more strips of fiberglass and resin forming a permanent bond between the two surfaces. At that time I was working under the supervision of Pedro the boatyard carpenter who was working on different projects on the 51footer and thought I could handle such a simple task.
That small and simple project opened my eyes to the uses and possibilities offered by fiberglass. Since then I fixed cracked keels, permanently closed thru hulls holes, fabricated slant gutters to drain cockpit lockers doors up to building a sailing nesting dinghy of my own design an this hard dodger now.
I appreciate the strenght that this material offers, its light weight and its resilience and the fact that you can create objects of almost any shape. I especially adore its impermeability to water, because I live on top of it and I prefer when water stays outside.
Other than fabricating with fiberglass and preparing for an ocean journey I have been busy hosting Online Social Dreaming events for the past three weeks, connecting with brave and generous participants from different countries in the world. I speak more about Social Dreaming in my website Psychology of Sailing, if you want to learn more about it. Here I will offer a very brief description of this technique for the purposes of this post.
The so called Social Dreaming Matrix is a space where participants safely share night dreams, as well as free associations emerging from dreams. They tell dreams, listen to dreams, look for images that connect them borrowing from cultural symbols and artifacts and from everyday life experience, letting their imagination run free, in the tradition of free association introduced by Sigmund Freud. If something reminds me of something else, no matter how weird or out of context, it means that there is a connection worth exploring.
In this context dreams tell nothing about the dreamer, they become instead a common story that circulates in the room, as if the dreamer was only a vehicle that deposits the dream in this imaginary space called the Matrix.
After the first fase the gathering comes back for a discussion about the content emerged and attempts hypothesis about possible connections with their own life and with society. Making sense of dream images allows the grounding to a more conscious cognitive level.
What do dreams and fiberglass have in common? They are both ways of transforming reality, which in a way it is a learning and growth process.
Imagine that your brain (or mind if you prefer) is constantly working on processing sensory information, solving problems and making new neural pathways.
Assume for a second that we are awash in an ever flowing river of information (cognitive, emotional, sensory) from the environment and of internal use (control and sensory feedback circuits).
Some of those signals will be received and decoded by higher hierarchic systems, some others will be missed because we don’t have the correct hardware to receive them, we are out of tune and or our bandwidth is full. An even smaller percentage of what we receive will reach the consciousness while the greater part is processed on a subsconscious level, because it is economically convenient, we don’t have the software to process it, and or it is so frightening or paralyzing that it would interfere with our basic day-to-day survival routine.
Fantasize again with me that all this rich information is finally processed by our mind, when it is convenient, which is basically when we sleep and our mind has the time and metabolic energy to run this complex calculations. In other words, when we are not busy directing and analyzing our own flow of thoughts.
Due to some not yet fully understood neurochemical patterns and brainwave organization we spend on average two hours every night running these simulations which is a particular way of learning from experience. Now consider that, if we only count human dreams, there are some 7 billion minds busy dreaming every night. What we do with this immense learning activity?
In the past dreams were regarded as important ways to make decision, in many cases were thought to be the voice of gods, or accepted as a way to make decisions for the social good as in many indigenous cultures. In our current society, as science has not yet fully understood dreams, they are often considered a weird happening not worth much pondering.
However not too long ago a guy named Gordon Lawrence from England devised the peculiar technique of Social Dreaming to explore dreams and put them to the service of a collective who shared the interest. This technique steers clear from the use of dream interpretations and other theory-driven approaches to dream analysi, and it looks at dreams as they are.
During the matrix participants spin the threads coming from dreams and observe knots that describe patterns. In the reflection time this preparatory work on the threads is then assembled into a fabric that hopefully would make sense, having a certain grade of “solidity” to our own critical thinking, exactly like a rug or fiberglass. In this Social Dreaming becomes a practice, a practice in paying attention to the signals that emerge from our unconscious mind and in connecting them with signals coming from other people’s night activity. Interpretation and the personal histories of the participants are interference when we look at the pure signal coming from dreams, the cognitive data generated during our state of maximum relaxation.
The structure of the Matrix we are living in could be described by the properties of the fabric we weave during the day and during the night and how we assemble this thread into a stable pattern. What we want to create, exactly like a fiberglass project or a Persian rug, depends on the design and on the desires of the people reunited to work together. The technology of Social Dreaming is a discussion where the opinion and ideas of the others are assembled in a bigger picture using the threads that come from a high level learning process that is common to all human being, the dream world. The practice of social dreaming train us to use dream threads to weave patterns of reality.
All those metaphors comes from a symbolic persistent connection between life and weaving. Ancient Greek and Romans venerated the Fates (Parcae in Latin – Moirai in Greek), three old women who controlled the fate of human beings and were on a higher hierarchical level even than gods. They were depicted as weavers and their activity on the spinning wheel decided life and death of humans and regulated what we call fortune.
The verb fabricate also belong to the textile world to put together diverse parts to create something bigger.
What is reality if not the fabric that is constantly spun by the action of the universe?
Everything can be seen as a pattern of connections, from the infinitely small like atoms and molecules bound together to the infinitely big structures of outer space. As Homo sapiens we have immense power in creating reality (up to a limit), yet we depend on the elements made available to us by the action of higher level transformations.
I enjoy transforming reality. The hard dodger briefly described earlier was nothing but an idea developed from imagination and it is now a solid reality that changed the profile of my boat. Transforming reality happens in many different ways, from designing and making a new structure for my boat to comfort a friend that has lost a parent and cannot touch her body, to pet and play with the cat that come to visit me now and then, to organize Sociale Dreaming events..
I enjoy messing with dreams. Learning how to use the threads that come from night dreams is an enriching activity that is helping me fabricating new thoughts for myself and for whom I am in connection with.
What is reality if not a shared dream?
Let’s Dream Together…