Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! by Richard Feynman Read Free Book Online Page B

interconnected. You don’t _notice_ that they’re not logically connected until you ask yourself, “What made me think of that?” and you try to work your way back, and often you can’t remember what the hell _did_ make you think of that!
    So you get every _illusion_ of logical connection, but the actual fact is that the thoughts become more and more cockeyed until they’re completely disjointed, and beyond that, you fall asleep.
    After four weeks of sleeping all the time, I wrote my theme, and explained the observations I had made. At the end of the theme I pointed out that all of these observations were made while I was _watching_ myself fall asleep, and I don’t really know what it’s like to fall asleep when I’m not watching myself. I concluded the theme with a little verse I made up, which pointed out this problem of introspection:
    _I wonder why. I wonder why._
    _I wonder why I wonder._
    _I wonder why I wonder why_
    _I wonder why I wonder!_
    We hand in our themes, and the next time our class meets, the professor reads one of them: “Mum bum wugga mum bum . . .” I can’t tell what the guy wrote.
    He reads another theme: “Mugga wugga mum bum wugga wugga. . .” I don’t know what that guy wrote either, but at the end of it, he goes:
    _Uh wugga wuh. Uh wugga wuh._
    _Uh wugga wugga wugga._
    _I wugga wuh uh wugga wuh_
    _Uh wugga wugga wugga._
    “Aha!” I say. “That’s _my_ theme!” I honestly didn’t recognize it until the end.
    After I had written the theme I continued to be curious, and I kept practicing this watching myself as I went to sleep. One night, while I was having a dream, I realized I was observing myself _in_ the dream. I had gotten all the way down into the sleep itself!
    In the first part of the dream I’m on top of a train and we’re approaching a tunnel. I get scared, pull myself down, and we go into the tunnel–whoosh! I say to myself, “So you can get the feeling of fear, and you can hear the sound change when you go into the tunnel.”
    I also noticed that I could see colors. Some people had said that you dream in black and white, but no, I was dreaming in color.
    By this time I was inside one of the train cars, and I can feel the train lurching about. I say to myself, “So you can get kinesthetic feelings in a dream.” I walk with some difficulty down to the end of the car, and I see a big window, like a store window. Behind it there are-not mannequins, but three live girls in bathing suits, and they look pretty good!
    I continue walking into the next car, hanging onto the straps overhead as I go, when I say to myself, “Hey! It would be interesting to get excited–sexually–so I think I’ll go back into the other car.” I discovered that I could turn around, and walk back through the train–I could control the direction of my dream. I get back to the car with the special window, and I see three old guys playing violins–but they turned back into girls! So I could modify the direction of my dream, but not perfectly.
    Well, I began to get excited, intellectually as well as sexually, saying things like, “Wow! It’s working!” and I woke up.
    I made some other observations while dreaming. Apart from always asking myself, “Am I _really_ dreaming in color?” I wondered, “How accurately do you see something?”
    The next time I had a dream, there was a girl lying in tall grass, and she had red hair. I tried to see if I could see _each_ hair. You know how there’s a little area of color just where the sun is reflecting–the diffraction effect, I could see _that_! I could see each hair as sharp as you want: perfect vision!
    Another time I had a dream in which a thumbtack was stuck in a doorframe. I see the tack, run my fingers down the doorframe, and I feel the tack. So the “seeing department” and the “feeling department” of the brain seem to be connected. Then I say to myself, Could it be that they _don’t_ have to be connected? I look at the doorframe