Puppet Kaos - where Kelvin Kao plays with puppets and tell random stories

Today, I came across an article called Dealing With Aggressive Dogs: Make Your Bark Worse than Your Bike. It was written by a cyclist who had tried different ways of dealing with dogs and eventually realized that barking worked well as well. Many people agreed with him in the comments section about the wonders of barking. The article went into the proper way of doing it, what words to use, what mental picture and emotions to conjure up. It was a good guide, if you ever need to know how to bark.

This, of course, reminded me of a post I wrote last year titled Barked at a Dog Today, written after barking at a dog to scare it away. Apparently, I didn’t need any lessons. It came naturally. I already intuitively knew how to bark at a dog effectively.

Nice talent to have, huh?

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I recently read this article called “Eight Ironic Effects of Thought Suppression”. It was about how trying to suppress a thought would make it come back even stronger and linger even longer, and therefore people cannot not think of a white bear when asked to not think of a white bear.

The article also talked about how people are more likely to dream about subjects they are specifically trying to avoid. So if you are having nightmares, perhaps it’s a good idea to stop suppressing those thoughts during the day, so they don’t come to haunt you at night. I don’t have nightmares very often, though, so what have I been suppressing?

Many people have this nightmare of being late to a test. Well, being late to an exam is also a recurring dream of mine, but I wouldn’t call it a nightmare. In the dream I would usually go to the classroom and saw nobody there. And I would realized that the exam actually took place several hours ago. Instead of panic, I would say to myself, “you know what? I don’t really care.” and go walk around the campus and enjoy the scenery.

Now, what’s with this dream? Perhaps I was too responsible in being where I was supposed to be and suppressing that urge to say “eh, I don’t really care” during the day?

How about those wacky dreams? I sometimes have these dreams in which a bunch bizarre and somewhat amusing things happen. And a few times I actually woke up laughing because the dreams were so funny.

Now, what was I suppressing during the day? Perhaps I suppressed some wacky thoughts. Perhaps I was trying very hard to not say so many stupid things in my daily life. I still think of weird things and say many stupid things.

Or maybe that research just has to do with scary and annoying things that people are trying to avoid and has nothing to do with what I am talking about here. Did you actually read the research paper? Me either.

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