If you could have one small thing as a superpower. What would it be and why?
I mean small like I sneeze and a 20 dollar bill appears in my hand or something like that. Not classic answers like flying or super strength.
I mean small like I sneeze and a 20 dollar bill appears in my hand or something like that. Not classic answers like flying or super strength.
To actually fall asleep within a few minutes of laying in bed, and stay asleep until I actually need/want to be awake.
A friend of mine does too.
I'm ready to form a supervillain league with the sole motivation of performing unethical research experiments on your kind. This power must be brought to the masses!
I have it too. It took me a few years to figure it out but now I average 12 minutes to fall asleep and can sometimes do it in less than 3.
I used to have insomnia that came from anxiety about my future (I’m guessing.) When I started doing carpentry and started truly exhausting my body I gained the ability to sleep ANYWHERE ANY TIME FOR HOWEVER LONG I WANTED.
It’s seriously amazing. I’m 33 now and don’t have to work quite as hard, plus am used to the long shifts that are hard on your body. I can still sleep pretty much whenever, wherever.
I flew to England once (it was like a 14 hour flight) and seriously slept the entire time. I didn’t even have a window seat.
I did residential construction for a couple years, then 4 in the military, so no stranger to physical exhaustion... Insomnia hit even in those times.
The only way to predictably get a decent chunk of sleep is to kind of bank hours in the days leading up to it. Like if get 0 to maybe 3 hours per night through the work week, I'll sleep like a baby come Saturday.
Never been on meds for it. Was afraid to report it when I was active duty (fucking stupid) and now my rating isn't high enough to cover prescriptions and I don't have regular health insurance so... can't afford them. :-/
I've used ambien and that L one. Benefit/negatives = not worth it. My husband and friends switched to trazodone (safer and cheaper) and really like it. I've learned to put myself to sleep quickly by focusing hard on relaxing each body part for 3 breaths, starting with feet, ankles, lower legs, .... When i wake up in the middle of the night it's harder, but i can usually do it if i concentrate. Oh, when I'm really struggling, adding cannabis helps.
Trazadone works really well. The only drawback I find his if I need to use the bathroom during the night (getting older sucks) - makes me feel really unsteady kind of like I'm drunk.
Here's hoping. Cracking away at nursing prerequisites, so assuming that path goes as planned, I'm a couple years away from a job as a nurse, which will hopefully translate to a large enough pay check to afford health insurance.
Light at the end of the tunnel.
Thanks! It's going well so far! Actually rocking a 4.0, but the class I'm in now (microbiology) will likely be putting an end to that. Confident in a passing grade at least, and that's all I really need for admission into the nursing program. Things are moving along!
Fuck yeah! I’m a stupid tradesman so I don’t exactly know what 4.0 means, but it sounds high. I know from TV that it means good. But I don’t know why haha
I have the monkey paw version of this where I can fall asleep instantly but can’t stay asleep, I wake up several times throughout the night
Yeah, I get this too kinda. I find I get really vivid dreams when wake up but fall back asleep
You could make some serious money with this power. You could find anyone's lost pet or keepsake.
You could also find missing people. This one has serious potential for good. Realistically, though, the CIA (or your country's equivalent) would take you into custody and force you to do their bidding.
Not to mention the regular occurances of people asking you to locate something they've stuck inside themselves.
Oh shit. Didn’t think of that angle. But it’s okay, they’ll never recognize me because I’ll wear glasses while not using my power and take them off when I go all super and shit. That’ll work!
I guess but I would still use it to find missing pets and stuff. Other people are talking about finding missing people but imo that's more tricky. Finding 1 missing person is just luck but if you are some how finding 10 or 20 people you are going to be lopked into.
Ability to force anyone to objectively confront their own cognitive dissonance by maintaining eye contact.
Possibly too powerful. Some heads may spontaneously combust from a lifetime of preferring their own reality.
Ok but to balance it: it forces you to confront your own on the topic as well.
That would force you to selectively use it since often times reality is somewhere between our personal view of it and other opposing views.
Chose the wrong situation and you'll both be crying in the corner with shatter worlds. Chose the ones where the people are truly disconnected from reality and perhaps you'll change their lives - hopefully for the better.
Ok but to balance it: it forces you to confront your own on the topic as well.
I was actually tempted to include that in the original, but I didn't want to belabor it. :)
I'm fine with this, and would prefer it that way.
Nah, I say that's part of the superpower. After using it a bunch, the weilder will have little or no more cognitive dissonance of their own. Every time they use it will further purify their own thought process. That's like a superpower where every time you use it it replaces a little bit of your body fat with muscle. After you use it a bunch, you end up ripped.
That's not a negative, I think. It might hurt a little at first, but you'll soon have removed most of your own errors and be a better person for it. What more could we wish for?
Any insect that touches my skin realizes the error of its ways and peacefully leaves me alone.
How about any insect that smells you? I don't want curious insects all over me even if only for a second.
Hell if I know. My father and two of my kids are similarly immune to flying insects. They just avoid us.
For me I'd also like to add that I wouldn't wake up just because a loud car drove by. I can sleep fast, but staying asleep is difficult
ok debuff maybe, it's the right thing according to the current time period moral standards and not based on what I want to say
I was thinking the inability to speak falsehoods would be useful for troubleshooting. "The problem is with the router." Nope. Not the router. "The problem is with the modem."...
You know when you have a discussion or confrontation, and six hours later you realize what you should have said? My superpower would be the wits to always think of the right thing immediately.
There's a French idiom for this: "Avoir l'Esprit d'Escalier" which means "The Wisdom of the Staircase". Basically, you often think of the best thing to say after you left and are walking down the staircase.
The ability to fall asleep instantly, anywhere, and choose exactly how long to sleep... And get a full rest regardless of how long that is.
If you get a full rest regardless of the sleep length, why sleep for more than a minute or two?
Because I want to fall asleep and wake up with my wife. It'd be lonely staying up all night by myself.
Gotta hope they check your pulse right or they might just bury you after a few years. Imagine trying to figure out where you could lay down for 10 years. Immediately got overwhelmed thinking about paying rent and all the work I'd miss. House over run by plant life and roof started leaking until the black mold set in and half of the house collapsed on you laying there.... yikes
There ability to fall asleep instantly, anywhere...
I used to have that back when I started work at 4am... Oh wait, you meant voluntarily.
Perfect control over memory.
So able to remember anything with high detail, but also able to forget the cringey stuff from middle school
Maybe if there was a limit to how much you can remember. Like your brain runs out of storage kinda lol
But you have all the permissions in your brain. If you'd like you can delete English and learn Chinese when you're going on a trip. Maybe you can even forget how to breathe or forget what other food tastes like so I can go on a diet that has nasty food.
My biggest fear would be by the time I'm like 60 i would be attached to too many memories and wouldn't be able to learn new things
Ig it's not too different than regular older people lol. There are some people at work that I've taught them how to attach a file to an email like 5 times already and they just don't learn
I have a disease which limits what I can eat, therefor the ability to digest any food or drink comfortably.
God I feel this. I'm probably not nearly as bad, but I'd like to not have to carefully analyze what I eat anymore
~~What in the pseudoscience is this crap? Avoid garlic entirely, but no limit on the foi gras? ~~
Edit: FODMAP is not a ‘diet’ in the traditional sense, it’s a diet tailored to avoid triggering flare ups of medical conditions such as IBS. Wish the article had been more clear for those without knowledge of what FODMAP is.
I know this is ancient history at this point, but I wanted to circle back.
I was not familiar with FODMAPs at all before reading the article. And since the article starts by calling it a ‘diet’ I made what I thought was the reasonable assumption that it was a traditional diet.
After you responded I looked it up more generally and now understand that it’s less of a traditional ‘diet’ and instead used to help prevent some medical conditions from flaring up.
That’s on me for not doing full research, and on the article for assuming everyone knows what FODMAPs are and why they are so important to some people.
Sorry for my ignorance.
To be able to hear the soundtrack. Like, if I walk into a building and hear the Psycho “reep reep!” I’ll get the hell out. But if I walk into that same building and hear “bow chicka bow wow”, I’m staying.
When in an argument I want the ability to know what my opponent has to say in advance so I can always interrupt and finish their sentences. Every single one of them.
There are a couple scenes in edge of tomorrow where this is essentially happening. I love the Tom Cruise/Brendan Gleeson conversation
For people who are interested in the same things I am to glow faintly, the more similar interest, the more they glow.
The abilty to change the color of anything.
Anything that would be improved by paint is on the table at a thought.
Likely way to powerful in a combat sense. You could tag enemy combatiants on a battlefield in dayglo orange or turn the whole landscape into that zebra ship paint they used in ww2. Hell, you could just turn everything bright white during the day and black at night except the enemy. Would be a nightmare.
Still, really neat.
Even if you limit it by range, like only recolouring things within 1 meter of where you touch… It’d still be a great power! Imagine the money you’d make, flawlessly painting whole rooms in seconds.
Not quite mind control, but I'd like the ability to blast common sense into morons minds by looking at them. Like a psychic mind dart that says, "maybe this line has a purpose and I should get in queue instead of trying to force my way in from the outside" or "maybe I should listen to the sign that says 'don't put your kid on a railing above tiger enclosure.'"
I'd like to be able to give people arch cramps by making eye contact and saying "bipity bopity boo" quietly.
Damnit...I'm in. The ability to make someone believe they have to go to the bathroom really bad but when they get there, nothing was really there. Someone starts to annoy you while you're out somewhere, poof. They go a scuttling.
The ability to make someone believe they have to go to the bathroom really bad but when they get there, nothing was really there.
So, business as usual for men over 60? (Or so I'm told)
Prostate issues do exist. Hopefully you, I, and the rest of the world will get lucky
Only needing an hour or two of sleep per night, but getting all the rejuvenating effects of a perfect night’s sleep. I hope I would be productive with that time.
Why not just get rid of the need for sleep all together but still have the ability to sleep when you want if you want to?
Google for polyphasic sleep. By fucking with your own sleep schedule you can reduce the number of hours you sleep while still getting the same restful effect. There's a few different schedules, some work better than others. The concept does work though, I've done it.
I’ve looked into those, I’ve even done biphasic sleep a small amount. It sounds like one has less leeway the more one breaks down their sleep into smaller blocks. Which ones did you try?
I was fantasizing about all the things I'd finally do. On second thought I'll probably just use the night to scroll too lol.
If I can get a combo deal of; less sleep, super motivation, super disciple. That would be amazing. An extra 6-8 hours a day would be miraculous! Maybe I’d become like Batman