Rec for a Dream

These last days I've reluctantly woken up, hit the snooze button and continued sleeping until the nine minutes of snooze time have passed - just to continue dreaming a bit more.

These dreams have been very vivid and strangely rich in details I know nothing of in my wake state.

Like yesterday for example, in the last part of a dream I had I was hotwiring some kind of electric box in order to bypass the circuits of a giant computer on one of the moons of some exoplanet. I remember there was this really hot girl with me, she was telling me I was useless (I think) making me feel worthless. When I had hotwired the circuits she just stopped talking and started singing or something?! A strangely coloured sun filled the sky and a cool breeze filled the damp corridor we stood in. We were just about to have some hot sex when I woke up.

Other dreams I've had have probably been good candidates for a great action movie. I end up waking up with a 'wow that was great!' feeling that leaves me wanting to ''replay'' the dream again.

Leaves me wishing I could record the dreams somehow...

Culturally Determined Phenotype?

At school I learned that a phenotype (e.g., eye colour, skin colour...) is any detectable characteristic in an organism determined by the interaction between its genotype (genome, DNA) and environment.

It's interesting to consider the interpretation of phenotypes here in Sweden, at least in my own case - being half puertorican (latinamerican) and swedish (scandinavian). I think there are some interesting effects on peoples attitudes concering phenotypes when taking in account their own culture.

In my case I have observed that there often is a stereotypical image of the latino, where one easily forgets the fact that latinos differ wildly in phenotypes - white, brown, black, brown eyed, blue eyed, small, medium, big, caucasian like, hispanic like, indian like, african like, asian like...etc. The list continues.

In my case, its been often that since I'm not blond and having strong dark eyebrows my eye colour is mistaken for black or simply brown and that I've even been considered of dark complexion. Fact is that I have green-brown eyes (see picture) and I'm rather fair skinned. Even more interesting is that living in such a homogenues country (phenotypically speaking) as Sweden anything else that is not typical 'swedish looking' is almost immediatly labelled dark - except asian, which is just called asian looking here.

I'm wondering here about phenotypes being determined by cultural attitudes toward ethnic belonging or origin. Even if I myself may have a hard time knowing if a person is latin, arabic, italian or whatever I do try to not let it affect the simple observation of that persons phenotypes (such as eye colour or skin colour) regardless of my guessings at what that persons origins or ethnic background may be.