I introduce myself and ask a quick question

I want to say a couple things. Introduction first: I’m a looooong time lurker. I know all about buckeyes, grapists and the like. So, you don’t need to talk down to me. I know at least a few big words as well.

Interesting information: I often have dreams of watching planes crash. No clue why. I’m way too into science fiction. I’m a poli-sci major and a senior. We were having this discussion in class. Hypothetical situation: you go back in time where a little girl is giving Hitler a flower. You happen to have a grenade. Is it moral to frag them both, if it means stopping the genocide to come? I have no idea, but I did learn the correct answer doesn’t reference the space-time continuum.

I write the above paragraph in the interest of fairness. I wouldn’t feel comfortable soliciting advice from strangers. I like to develop a report first. Having read the most intimate details of my life in the above paragraph, me and my fellow dopers are now like this crosses fingers.

Anybody know any good books for a very basic introduction to the stock market? Like, Investing for Third Graders, by Monster, Cookie et al. I would eventually like to go into great depth, but just don’t know where to start. Advice for wannabe robber baron?

My financial planner highly recommended Simple Wealth, Inevitable Wealth.

I’m reading it now and have not finished it yet, but it explains things fairly engagingly and is targeted to people who are not at all familiar with how financial markets work. It’s been really helpful to me.

Me too - well, not exactly often, but I do have recurring one.

Do yours follow a consistent pattern? Could you describe them?

Mine consists of me watching a large plane (sometimes an abnormally large and odd-shaped one, like those gigantic cargo planes, and sometimes with disproportionately large engines) - the plane takes off and climbs steeply, then stalls and falls back to the ground, disappearing from my view behind buildings, then a huge fireball rises.

What’s the correct answer you guys came up with?

READ BULLETIN 1147, PEOPLE!

I have the “watching plane crash” dreams now and then, too. Mine are usually commercial airliners/cargo planes, and they also usually stall and augur in.

Welcome aboard, Walmarticus! Sounds like you’re a bit off like the rest of us… :smiley:

Oh, and sitting in my comfy chair here, I’d frag the both of them; I’m not so sure what would happen if actually faced with that choice. I’d start thinking, maybe we needed Hitler, or not have the nerve to kill the little girl (most likely).

Airplane crashes in dreams? Sure thing. I don’t know if I’ve ever had a dream with an airplane in it in which said airplane did not crash at some point. I am beginning to suspect that my subconscious has the mistaken impression that airplanes are just unusually complex apparatuses for producing fireballs and wreckage.

ETA: And this applies to the time periods both before and after an airplane crashed into my yard, narrowly missing me in the process, so I doubt that had anything to do with it. :slight_smile:

You say this like it’s an every day occurrence. The soup is hot, the soup is cold. A plane crashed in my backyard and almost into me.

I used to have dreams about planes crashing all the time. In the dream I’d be outside doing something and look up and see a plane, usually in flames, that would fall to the earth. And then I’d wake up or the dream would end.

When I was a kid, about 11 I guess, we lived under a flight path to the Philadelphia Airport. One day a friend and I were out riding our bikes when she told me too look up. Above us was a jet with flames shooting out of one of its engines. We rode fast to the home of a friend’s grandmother, because she had a police radio, and we listened and listened and then watched the news that night but there was nothing on about it at all.

I always figured the real incident and the dreams are connected, but since lots of other people apparently have similar dreams . . . maybe not.

A good place for beginning investors is www.motleyfool.com (or, at least it was last time I went there about a hundred years ago).

My top recurring nightmares:

  1. Planes crashing.
  2. Going back to college and living in my dorm.
  3. Can’t find the class I need to go to, plus I didn’t study for the test or write the papers so I’m going to flunk.
  4. Going back to the house I lived in as a kid.

Welcome, walmarticus! Since you’ve been lurking so long, I’m guessing you’re already prepared for the goat, squid and lime Jell-O.

FWIW, I’ve never had a nightmare of a plane-crash (just watch what happens in my brain tonight. . .)

Almost 21 years ago, my mother died; she was. . .moody. Never diagnosed, but I’d bet a lot of money she was bipolar, and possibly Borderline Personality. For about a year and a half after she died, I would have nightmares about her. Then I found out about ‘directed dreaming’, where you can be aware you’re dreaming (you all know about that, right? Where somewhere in your brain you go ‘this is so bizarre I must be dreaming’), and learned that I could tell her to go away. So the next time she showed up in my dreams, criticizing the hell out of me and nit-picking at the way I chose to live, I said to her (in my dream) “Mom, you’re dead, and we both know it, so you need to go away now”, and she did.

My only other recurring bad dream has to be with my husband acting like a major douchebag. He’s not that at all in real life (at least not to me; some of the people he oversees at work may disagree).

Hmmmm. Never thought before about applying ‘directed dreaming’ to my hubby’s dream-time douchiness. Maybe next time it happens, I’ll just say to him, “Look, you’re not really an asshole, and we both know it, so just knock it off!”

Wow… I never had any idea how common the plane crash dream is (and it is interesting that this is where the thread seems to be going). I also have frequently dreamed that I look up and see a plane and somehow watch as it slowly comes crashing to the ground usually fairly close to where I am. I’ve even sometimes been involved in the rescue efforts afterward.

It doesn’t seem like the typical anxiety dream of “oh crap… I’ve never been to this class and now I have a final.” But more like a “oh crap… this is something that doesn’t normally happen.”

Anyone with a serious analysis of this dream (although I’m sure this group could come up with some fun not serious analysis as well).

Investing for Dummies is a surprisingly good beginning book. Amazon has the first chapter online, so you can check it out and see if it is to your liking.

Happy investing!

Welcome, and I believe the word you were looking for was “rapport”, not report.

What? Someone has to initiate the newby!

Well, your username kinda lends itself, ya know.

And no, I’m not going to show you my receipt, thankyouverymuch.

Hey, I really liked that, even if no-one else did! Only thing, it was a bit short, I wanted more time-traveller-n00b-goodness.

Crap! I wanted to post that very thing! Only I was going to make a witty post about not usually correcting people’s posts, given my healthy respect for Gaudere, but I would do it in this case, given the closeness I now feel with Walmarticus due to our bonding over the whole little-girl-with-a-flower/Hitler dilemma thing, and now it’s gone all kerblooie!

sulks

Fine, then I will settle for informing you that the usual spelling is ‘newbie,’ so there.

walks away grumbling

Thanks for the book and website recommends. I’m an econ minor who doesn’t know the first thing about investing. Demand functions, I’m all over. Equilibrium prices? I gotcha covered.

The consensus was to frag away (we were studying Machiavelli at the time). Not quite sure how they could do it, since killing Hitler would erase the purpose for why they went back in time in the first place.

They happen weekly, with no pattern at all. I’ll be watching some passenger airliner and just know oh snap, it’s going to crash and sure enough. One time I was standing on the beach and it was like a meteor shower of crashing planes. Another time I was at the park and saw a helicopter crash. I looked in the cockpit and saw Stephen King was the pilot. I don’t even know what he looks like.

Drats! Foiled again by the spellchecker.