Lucidity

I've heard of the phenomenon of lucid dreaming, but until this morning (perhaps) I had never experienced it. I was downtown, in a city which my conscious mind does not recognize but where my dream-self seems at home, and I sensed that something unpleasant was about to happen, or was already happening. I said to myself, "No, I'm not going to put up with this. I am wearing pants, and I have my wallet with me." Neither of these things was true at the moment that I thought it, but a couple of (subjective) minutes later, when I thought about them again, they were. The dream proceeded without embarrassing incident from that point.

Green Patches and Danellians

It interests me when an author writes something which is in direct philosophical contradiction to an earlier writing. I'm currently reading Asimov's Foundation's Edge. (I read it when it first came out, but somewhere along the line I lost my old copy, and this is only a second reading.) In that book, Asimov introduces, and speaks generally favorably of, a planetary superorganism called Gaia, seeing it as a possible alternative to a Second Empire dominated physically by the First Foundation or psychically by the Second Foundation. The odd thing is that Asimov had previously written of such a superorganism in the short story "Green Patches" - and in that story, it is presented as a very great evil, and the violent efforts by the human characters to avoid absorption into it are praised. (There are differences between the superorganism in "Green Patches" and Gaia, but I'm not sure why they have any moral significance.)

The other notable example comes from a comparison of Poul Anderson's story "No Truce With Kings" and his Time Patrol stories. In the former, a race of aliens, possessed of a Great Science of psychohistoric prediction, are covertly manipulating human history to guide it in what they see as a favorable direction. There is no indication that the aliens mean any harm, but when their intervention is discovered it is rejected forcibly. In the Time Patrol series, the Patrol was organized and is guided (if tenses make any sense in context) by the Danellians, who are apparently what humanity will become - if it proceeds in the direction the Danellians favor. The human characters react to the presence of Danellians with awe and, nearly, worship. And yet, I do not see any real moral difference between the interference of the aliens in the earlier story and that of the Danellians in the series.

Perhaps the similarities, in both cases, are merely superficial; perhaps they reflect a real change of heart on the part of the author (and I'm fairly sure Asimov's view of the Foundations had changed greatly by the time of Foundation's Edge); or perhaps there are real differences that I'm glossing over. Still, I find them interesting.