Not all about our dreams

Blind People Dream

Who become blind after birth can see images in their dreams. People who are born blind do not see any images, but have dreams equally vivid involving their other senses of sound, smell, touch and emotion. It is hard for a seeing person to imagine, but the body need for sleep is so strong that it is able to handle virtually all physical situations to make it happen.

 

You Forget 90% of your Dreams

Within 5 minutes of waking, half of your dream if forgotten. Within 10, 90% is gone.
Curiously, Robert Louis Stevenson came up with the story of Doctor Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde whilst he was dreaming.

Everybody Dreams

 
Every human being dreams (except in cases of extreme psychological disorder) but men and women have different dreams and different physical reactions. Men tend to dream more about other men, while women tend to dream equally about men and women. In addition, both men and women experience sexually related physical reactions to their dreams regardless of whether the dream is sexual in nature; males experience *****ions and females experience increased vaginal blood flow.

Dreams Prevent Psychosis

In a recent sleep study, students who were awakened at the beginning of each dream, but still allowed their 8 hours of sleep, all experienced difficulty in concentration, irritability, hallucinations, and signs of psychosis after only 3 days. When finally allowed their REM sleep the student brains made up for lost time by greatly increasing the percentage of sleep spent in the REM stage

We Only Dream of What We Know

Our dreams are frequently full of strangers who play out certain parts - did you know that your mind is not inventing those faces - they are real faces of real people that you have seen during your life but may not know or remember? The evil killer in your latest dream may be the guy who pumped petrol in to your Dad car when you were just a little kid. We have all seen hundreds of thousands of faces through our lives, so we have an endless supply of characters for our brain to utilize during our dreams.

 

 

Not Everyone Dreams in Color

A full 12% of sighted people dream exclusively in black and white. The remaining number dream in full color. People also tend to have common themes in dreams, which are situations relating to school, being chased, running slowly/in place, sexual experiences, falling, arriving too late, a person now alive being dead, teeth falling out, flying, failing an examination, or a car accident. It is unknown whether the impact of a dream relating to violence or death is more emotionally charged for a person who dreams in color than one who dreams in black and white.

Dreams are not about what they are about

 

If you dream about some particular subject it is not often that the dream is about that. Dreams speak in a deeply symbolic language. The unconscious mind tries to compare your dream to something else, which is similar. Its like writing a poem and saying that a group of ants were like machines that never stop. But you would never compare something to itself, for example: That beautiful sunset was like a beautiful sunset. So whatever symbol your dream picks on it is most unlikely to be a symbol for itself

Quitters have more vivid dreams

People who have smoked cigarettes for a long time who stop, have reported much more vivid dreams than they would normally experience. Additionally, according to the Journal of Abnormal Psychology: Among 293 smokers abstinent for between 1 and 4 weeks, 33% reported having at least 1 dream about smoking. In most dreams, subjects caught themselves smoking and felt strong negative emotions, such as panic and guilt. Dreams about smoking were the result of tobacco withdrawal, as 97% of subjects did not have them while smoking, and their occurrence was significantly related to the duration of abstinence. They were rated as more vivid than the usual dreams and were as common as most major tobacco withdrawal symptoms.

External Stimuli Invade our Dreams

This is called Dream Incorporation and it is the experience that most of us have had where a sound from reality is heard in our dream and incorporated in some way. A similar (though less external) example would be when you are physically thirsty and your mind incorporates that feeling in to your dream. My own experience of this includes repeatedly drinking a large glass of water in the dream which satisfies me, only to find the thirst returning shortly after - this thirst… drink¦ thirst¦ loop often recurs until I wake up and have a real drink. The famous painting above (Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening) by Salvador Dali, depicts this concept.

You are paralyzed while you sleep

Believe it or not, your body is virtually paralyzed during your sleep - most likely to prevent your body from acting out aspects of your dreams. According to the Wikipedia article on dreaming, Glands begin to secrete a hormone that helps induce sleep and neurons send signals to the spinal cord which cause the body to relax and later become essentially paralyzed.

 source - Internet

 

My first year in Mu Sigma

You might to want to read this first > My first two months in Mu-Sigma

There are two traffic signals on my way to Office. There's not a single day when my bus do not get stuck in the traffic jam, because of which the 15 minutes of journey often takes 40 minutes. So this was one particular day when sitting on the window seat I saw the signal, it was green and as if to please me the vehicles were moving smoothly but just as my bus came over the zebra line the signal turned red and lots of tut tut started to go around. Sitting near the window I started to look around to find something to interest me. There were people moving around in hurry to reach office on time. On one side of the road I saw some early employees of Big Bazar who were half heartedly opening their mega store. On other buses I could see people trying to pass their time by listening to the early morning radios. Smart phones have changed our life to a very well extent, games, musics, apps are enough to keep ourself occupied without even noticing who is sitting beside us. But then there was one person on the middle of the footpath towards the left side of the road. He was kind of short, in formals, a bag pack behind and holding some pamphlet in his hand. Nothing new in people distributing pamphlets to the commuters, but since I had nothing to do I tried to notice his activities. And for those 90 seconds I came to realise how different and difficult but very much similar his job is. He had to take desicions as quickly as he can like he has to decide where to stand so as to cover all the passers by. At one point I saw him to get to the edge of the footpath so that he can also cover those who were walking below the footpath. Many of them were refusing his pamphlet, but I could see him getting over the failure of rejection in a very quick time. I couldn't see what was there in the pamphlet but from the kind of energy he showed while distributing it one could easily be decieved there was something very important one needed to know and so he was trying hard to distribute it.

My first year experience in Mu Sigma is not less than the story of that person on the footpath at the signal. This was not a merry go round for me rather a roller coaster ride. I have seen the company growing with me (obviously with not the same pace :-P). In one of the article by Business Standard, India's analytics market will become $1.15 bn by 2015 and Mu Sigma features as the leading pure-play analytics organization. Excerpt from the article: Among the pure-play analytics vendors, Sequoia Capital and General Atlantic-invested Mu Sigma is said to be the biggest in this space. In another article which states - Decision Sciences Firm Mu Sigma Makes Inc. 5000 List of America's Fastest-Growing Private Companies for Third Consecutive Year. I also saw Mu Sigma CEO Dhiraj Rajaram winning 2012 Gold Stevie Award for Executive of the Year while Mu Sigma Takes Bronze for Company of the Year.

The number of Offices in Bangalore have increased. Mu Sigma started with shifting some teams to one of the most illustrious Tech Park in Bangalore which is SEZ ITPL, Whitefield, the vision is to have a huge building to accomodate more than 5000 employees but that is future let's not go in there.

With Client count increasing, I saw the employee count being doubled in the 1st year of my stay. Mu Sigma covered more Colleges this time around(2012) in the recruitment process thereby making people more inquisitive about the company. The way I was recruited one year ago and the process fresher needs to follow now is very different. I will be unable to answer correctly if asked "what kind of questions one is asked in the interview ?" or "How many rounds of recruitment process are there?" It's very different now after just one year. Training courses have also changed. Freshers are taught new topics too. Mu Sigma believes in constant learning, renewing your knowledge from time to time and hence they have started providing courses to people who have spent some time in the company as well. Work process and solutions providing has also changed a bit. Many new technologies came in apart from the traditional MS Office and SAS.

Apart from work fun is the integral part of Mu Sigma. "Do the Math" is the tagline as all of you must be knowing by now. Math is the fun in Mu Sigma, as stated by one of the article in Deccan Herald. With most of the Mu Sigmans in their 20s, fun is bound to be there, either in Office or out of Office. We have come a long way of playing Dumbcharade, Pictionary among others to play Volleyball, Football, Uno, Zenga, Treasure Hunt, etc.; and the USP is we have involved CEO too in one of these events.

Life is sometimes tough in Mu Sigma. Margin of error is very low. As in every other company you are expected to perform. But here the things are different, it's all because of the mindset. Freshers come in here with a view that they do not have to do coding but ultimately they do have to put in their programming skills to work with data so as to get the required results as they would have wanted. Most of the freshers do not have their say with their likings on the work, they got to do what their managers tell them which is not wrong in a way, they get to learn but it's kind of tough because they may not like the work so it is a "make-break" thing for them. I am not saying that staying late is tough for Mu Sigmans but we definitely hate and would like to avoid it but since it occurs once in a while and that too because of our own issue, erros and negligence, it's a learning period for all of us. Team mates are always there for help and support, so toughness are smoothened out (Others may not be as lucky as me, they may have counterview to this point).

This is a journey this does not have an end, well it may have but when that will come I do not know. Let's hope for the best because Allah knows the best!!!