I stay up late reading David Epstein's Range. He argues that generalists, outsiders, kooks and cross-pollinators outperform people deep in the career trench. Even in science & tech, where I thought the need for a thorough technical grounding would cripple outsiders, there's no evidence deep specialization gives you an edge; no evidence expertise, beyond a basic threshhold, works.

Dream 1: DAD CAN'T SEE THARN

My dad's driving a freeway on the shore of Monterey Bay, west toward Santa Cruz. Ahead is a fishing harbor. Hanging low over the mouth of the lagoon, a huge orange moon. Only not all orange! Some gold and even green. And white. Oh. That's not Luna! It's Tharn, that dry but living airmoon bigger than Mars.

I gasp and point out the alien world to my dad. At first he ignores me. Slip into an underpass. A few heartbeats of dark, and then we emerge. Now he looks. Nothing! No time for it to set, but it's gone.

Figures. He never could see my dreams.

• Impossible moonrise: a lucidity prompt! Why don't I recognize it's a dream? But I get the dream-message, and that's what matters.
• Tharn: a virtual world I built. Literally "my world"!
• My dad can't see my dream world: he liked my art but rejected all it said--especially the predictive and telepathic dreams that forced me beyond my childhood's scientific orthodoxy into shamanism. He had some himself, but he had to deny them. He trusted Epstein's experts... in their little trenches.
• ACTION: go on being a weirdo. My dreams agree with Range. Trench diggers can't see what underpins my cross-disciplinarian work--haven't researched the odd corners I have.

Dream 2: HER BUSY NOISY LIFE

Friends want me to meet this locally famous woman. They arrange an interview... and spring it on me with no warning! And when unprepared, I get rattled and forget all I've been doing--all my art projects gone. To function, I really need my checklist! As bad as Twilight Sparkle.

Try to calm myself. "I'm not applying for a job! Strictly informational. Just have fun." Force myself to go.

She lives in a huge, rambling, shared house with other effective cross-pollinators, the kind David Epstein describes in Range. In the kitchen, to my surprise, is my old friend Rich, the man who can build anything. And in the foyer is Lance, of all my friends the toughest and most practical in the face of catastrophe. Men of the world. Unlike me.

This woman and I wander the house looking for a quiet spot. No one! Housemates so big, so busy, so noisy... all that expertise just fills the place.

Wait--one terrace is empty. Gorgeous blue flowers in planters. The lily family, by their long leaves. Pretty--to the eye. But to the ear, this deck is unbearable. Racket from across the street--movers or construction.

We never find a place to chat, in her high-achiever home. Unlivable for me! I need solitude, space and quiet--lonely or not.

NOTES

• Mover-noise: predictive! As I wrote this dream up, a huge blue moving-van came and noisily gobbled up furniture across the street, making my home unlivable.
• Feel intimidated, forget all I've done: as I read Range its accounts of superachievers intimidated me. Yet I'm clearly one of his 'broad' subjects. Consider his page on Tu YouYou, the 2015 Nobel winner in medicine for "discovering" artemisinin by reading ancient herbalists and testing Chinese wormwood on herself. Well, I did the same--dosing myself with that exact species. Trial and error plus reason led us both to the same discovery. Outsiders think alike?
• Crowded house: the cramped cabins of the Maurice Ewing, a ship charting the Pacific; in Range, Epstein tells of of a vulcanologist he met there, who blamed mass extinctions on vulcanism. Epstein touts him as an example of tunnel vision--after all, everyone KNOWS it was impacts like Chicxulub. Well, sorry, the vulcanologist was at least half right, and Epstein at least half wrong. The majority are actually guilty of tunnel vision on this one! See Volcanism, Impacts, and Mass Extinction for details. Summary: vulcanism correlates better with mass extinctions than impacts, though both are real hazards. One Dinopocalypse doth not a pattern make!
• ACTION: go on being a weirdo. Conformist social structures look slick and professional, but they're shoddy inside--and useless to me.

Dream 3: THE ESSENTIALS

My friend Lance is giving me a tour of his house above Santa Cruz. We avoid talking of his wife; a year ago she was diagnosed with a rare genetic disorder causing incurable dementia. Now she needs constant care; may not live another year. Instead, Lance talks of his work on election security. Most systems are still hackable. He says "...but we live in a world full of flaws. Systems break down--health, society, tools. Those failures limit what we can do, profoundly." I laugh and say, thinking of glitchy twitchy Windows, Photoshop (which I can no longer even USE), Word which I can, barely, but only since I have an antique version...

And then there's my body.

I say "Obviously! But it's only obvious to people like us who've faced catastrophic failures and had to live and work within their limits. Most just blithely drift along till they're blindsided. Then they're outraged."

I've always had a problem with philosophies that blame human failure on flaws of character, ability or motivation. Meritocratic justifications are as stupid in their way as racism or sexism, that blame failure on innate inferiority. Bad tools and illness have limited my life the most. So clearly environmental! Until we have a healthy non-starving world--and that'll be a while--how can we even talk of merit?

NOTES

• Lance's wife: I identify, since a year ago I too was diagnosed with a rare genetic disorder--though mine just makes me fragile & infection-prone. If I'm very careful, I may survive years yet. Or die tomorrow.
• Factors that let you work: literal! Safety, health, sanity, tools that work, space, lack of distractions--a dozen factors, and any one can cripple you. So go on. Be a weirdo, get stuff done! While the world lets you.

2020/1/8 POSTSCRIPT

I'm editing the last dreamlet, The Essentials. Needs an illustration, but it's hard to draw. At last I get some tough paper, a pencil, string, two thumbtacks, and draw twelve ellipses with one common focus; they form a flowerlike design round a central circle. Slowly shade & color the result. Label each oval petal with factors I need to do creative work.

A plausible dream interpretation. But does that make it true? Well, I could just ask...

Dream: MEET THE FACTORS

I meet a circle of 8-12 beautiful, charismatic women. Each is a personification of one factor needed to be creative--from tools to talent to health. They each struggle to maintain health and activity; inevitably, each has slumps and down time. Even if each is only down a tenth of the time, that means that on most days someone's off the job--and creativity's blocked! My interpretation of The Essentials was true. Much of the time, we can't achieve much--just too many factors to go wrong. Treasure the times you're not stuck!

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