Political whodunit takes an eerie twist

[benburch]

http://www.cnn.com/2006/LAW/02/10/political.whodunit.ap/index.html

BIRMINGHAM, Alabama (AP) -- More than five years ago, Rod Spraggins made a sensational charge at a candidate forum, publicly accusing a political opponent of murder with nothing to back up the allegation except, it turns out, a vision.

Now police say Spraggins was right.

Barry Waites, Spraggins' opponent in the 2000 race for Lanett City Council, was arrested this week on murder charges in the 1998 slaying of his wife, who was found dead in their split-level home in this sleepy town of 8,000 along the Georgia line.

<SNIP>

[Whoa_Nelly]

1. Amazing

and there is something to be said for the stuff of dreams...

[hwmnbn]

2. I read that in today's Sun Times....

That was spooky. Most times when you go to the cops with information only the perp would know, you are just ASKING for trouble.

This is a TV show waiting to happen. Oops, wait, there already is one.

http://www.nbc.com/Medium/

[Mythsaje]

3. That's amazing...

And not nearly as impossible as some people would like to believe.

Then again, I'm not one to say much of anything is "impossible."

[TahitiNut]

4. Sleep is needed for mental integration and stress relief, I believe.

I don't regard sleep is required for physical recuperation as much as for mental integration and stress relief. I believe we use sleep time to reorganize and integrate our associative mental processes. I think dreams are representative of that set of perceptions and comprehensions in which dissonances and cross-links are evident, and the process of re-associating and integrating our 'world view' results in what we call 'dreams' - a kind of 'free-form' thinking unhindered by the massive influx of conscious input and maintaining an awareness of our awake experiences. Our conscious lives are more a matter of filtration than integration - we're blocking and filtering in order to focus on chosen inputs and triggering existing associations to segragate 'known' from 'new.' I think only the most easily integrated information, depending on the available associative connections at the time, is 'comprehended' in real time. "Sleep on it" is the advice we get for that which is difficult ... and that advice, I think, reflects the better state of organization subsequent to sleep cycles. I think the amount of sleep we require (more for the young than the older) reflects the state of the brain's associative organization and the degree to which we're integrating new information.

More simply, I think of it as down-time for maintenance and database reorganization - rearrangement and linkage clean-up time.