Dreams
I've always liked being lost in it — abandoned to nature and its true way — who doesn't? The point of this losing it, is to exit the social conformity and enter into a different state of mind where we are free from the normal constrictions. Sleep is the only time that we are completely abandoned to it; all waking time has survival deep in its root as its ulterior motive, subtly influencing things unbeknownst to us. The society is now the survival mechanism, and so nearly all our actions are guided by it at some level when awake.
The sleeping dream is so much more the true base, uninfluenced by space and gravity. The place where we started from, pre-birth. The separations evolving from comparisons, all come post-birth.
When we dream, our sensory inputs are switched off, but when they are switched back on when we awake, we assume that the dream mechanism also stops. I believe that when we awake from a dream, the dream does not stop; it is just that our awareness has been overwhelmed with sensory information which drowns out the dream, but it is still continuing to a degree, subtly underneath. The dream space is one without sensory load. Inhibitory mechanisms shut down most of the normal waking state and create a nice quiet environment for the mind to play in. This blank page allows us to become aware of the sub processes of the mind, and it is these processes which manifest into dreams, and are I believe happening all the time (to a degree and within a cyclical pattern), and are influencing our waking hours at a low level. I think thoughts are part of this mechanism, which implies that some kinds of thoughts are actually dreams. We are not quite as awake as we like to think we are.
It isn't one mysterious process ending and a different one beginning when we wake up, it is the same thing happening all the way through. The difference is the sensory information we get when we are awake, and this allows the continuity while awake to differentiate the two states. The consciousness and awareness of self that underlies it all, continues and remains unbroken throughout both experiences, as can be verified by lucid dreaming and the results of meditation.
The dreaming mechanism is derived from the normal brain processing of the senses, and so effectively it is all a dream — a construct of imagination. The dreams continue in the background while we are awake and alter our course in the dream we call waking. There is continuity in the waking dream which there isn't in the sleeping. To make that continuity is a construct of the mind. That construct is no different to a dream, but without the new sensory information coming in there is nothing stopping it from jumping around in wild fantasy. The idea that there is a 'somewhere' that you go to in your dreams, is a steadfast refusal to acknowledge that illusion is happening. The construct of self that exists in the dream is the same as when awake, and is illusory in both.
~
My first puzzling awareness of dreams came to me when in my cot when I was a baby. I distinctly remember crawling to the bottom of the seemingly large cot to go down this chute which led to somewhere else. But it wasn't there in the morning, and I searched and searched all around my cot for it and was most disturbed that I couldn't find it as I was absolutely sure that there was another place I could go. I could remember it distinctly, but it just wasn't there anymore. My memory is not so much of the dream, but the discovery that there were two worlds and from this moment on I was never really sure if anything was actually real.
A few years later after having a dream of flying down the stairs, and still not understanding at this time the duality of experience between dreaming and waking, I decided that I would perform this technique which I could remember doing, by jumping off the top of the stairs. Usually there was a gate across the top but today there wasn't. It seemed very high and there was a voice telling me not to do it which I dismissed. The memory of the previous night's dream was so strong that I had in effect a confirmed experience that flight was possible, but decided that I could always do a second jump and so went down a few steps (which were quite big) and chose to jump from further down the stairs instead.
The thinking process of this was like it was coming from somewhere else — a spiritual experience — as I obviously hadn't acquired the distinction of me being my thoughts at this time, which later in our lives seems to be a common illusion for us. The voice telling me not to do it, was not my voice because I did not have this at this time. Our first mental dialogues cannot be with our own voices, and I think are heavily influenced by our mother's voice. Reading Homer's Iliad many years later, I was struck by the way the heroes were spoken to by the Gods, and realised that they were hearing their own thoughts, and I believe this was what was happening to me on the stairs.
So, ignoring the Gods, I leant forward and let myself fall — bump, bang, bash, crash, clatter all the way to the bottom of the stairs.
I could hear the adults in the room expressing concern and a vocally intentional "whoops-a-daisy" downplay, which I knew to be a manipulative understatement and one that I personally found to be a little patronising. I initially expected them to be cross with me, because I somehow knew that you weren't supposed to jump off the top of the stairs, which was why they put the gate there I supposed. However, upon hearing that condescending "whoops-a-daisy", I decided to try and avoid all the fuss and suppressed the almost obligatory tears that I was supposed to cry, by simply pretending that I had not hurt myself — which wasn't true — and walked purposefully and nonchalantly through the room as if nothing unusual had happened. It was a determined and very conscious effort and an example of an early ego construct; a self-identification relative to society. I estimate my age to have been about 3 or 4. I never tried it again!
~
Waking is perhaps only for the necessary maintenance of the physical form and may be nothing more than a platform from which to pursue the sleeping states! Life was primordially in this state of sub consciousness, and perhaps it is these states that are both the lowest and the highest forms of being. Our daily waking experience is primarily for our survival, and perhaps we don't sleep to keep ourselves healthy in our waking, but are awake so we can be healthy in our sleeping! I'm half joking of course, but also it is only by our own private investigation into these dream states that we can know that world and by reflection, our physical world experience too. It is a valid path of discovery. It may seem that I am dreaming my life away, but I am just interested in discovering myself to a fuller extent. Our full life includes these sleep states anyway and to be unaware during them is what is truly wasteful. It is not enough to just remember the dreams, we need to be aware that we are dreaming whilst within the dream.
My own experiences of becoming aware that I am dreaming whilst in a dream (lucid dreaming), have proved to me that we are conscious while dreaming in the same way that we are conscious while awake. The dream is so real that we just accept it as real and respond as we would normally respond in that situation, with the same personality that we have during wakefulness. We are aware in our dreams but completely unaware that it is a dream. Becoming lucid in a dream is such a shock, because you can remember the previous moments when you were absolutely sure you were awake, but you were not.
Lucid dreaming is the operation of the most advanced virtual reality machine there can ever be. We've been using this virtual reality machine all our lives, but whilst inside it we have acted as if it wasn't virtual, and we were unable to utilize the advantages. We behaved as if there was gravity, but there wasn't. We thought the walls were solid, but they weren't; we thought the people in it were real and had free will, but they didn't. We behaved as if it was all real because we couldn't tell the difference. What a waste! Surely this virtual reality machine that we have is the best thing ever. Surely this is more important than the rest of it. We are making extraordinary efforts to create VR when in actuality we already have it — better than we can ever make it. Even in the real world everything we attain is temporary, and our joy is but jumping between fleeting moments which ultimately dissipate into normality, like waking up from a dream. But in dreams you can do anything and there are no consequences. The ultimate playground. All we need to do is become aware while we are in it.
When in a lucid dream though, we really are completely stupid (and as is usual in such cases, completely unaware that we are). Most of the pre-frontal cortex is off-line, though our mental functioning does its usual good job of seamlessly stitching it all together. Just like during waking, the experience is being filtered, mixed, added and spat out as our conscious experience. But our ability to reason in it is seriously compromised, to the point that while actually being in a lucid dream, I have tried writing down what is happening whilst within the dream, to read later after I'd woken up! It didn't work — duh!
Even when fully aware that one is dreaming, it takes great courage to put your hand into a flame, even though you know it is not real. The resulting coolness of the fire is a fascinating and rewarding experience, and although walls will push back against you as a real wall will, with a little wiggling of the fingers you can penetrate through them and walk into greyness.
The neurological circuitry that creates our dreams is the same neurological circuitry that creates our waking experience; that is why it is so hard to tell when you are dreaming; it is effectively the same thing and looks identical. The same neurological circuitry also creates astral projection, out of body experiences, visions, and hallucinations. There are differences in all of them, but the basic generating machinery is common to all of them. They are all dreamscapes with varying degrees of conscious awareness and immersion.
The sensation of 'returning to the body' is the re-engaging of the somato-sensory cortex which has shut down during sleep (or astral travel), to stop you from acting out your dreams physically. There is a definite feeling of shifting as your mental construct of your body in dream, reconnects with the sensory matrix of the awake physical body, giving people the illusion of moving back into their body, which I guess is also true in a way.
The imagery that is produced by the mind in dreaming, can also be superimposed onto waking sight. The same goes for sound or any of the senses, and once we realise that the two mix, there are any number of unexplained phenomena that can be accounted for. A lot of these mixed experiences occur shortly before or after sleep, in the hypnagogic and hypnopompic states respectively, when it is more normal for the sleeping mode to overlap the waking mode. I believe people have these experiences far more often than they realise, but they can't remember what they have experienced because the mind ignores it and filters it out because it does not fit into our nice orderly world. Our experience is constantly being edited and you need exceptionally acute awareness to notice this happening. It might even be necessary for us to be unaware of it for us to even function effectively.
~
An interesting example of dreams overlaying waking 'reality', is my experience of seeing angels.
I was looking at clouds in the sky — an activity that is common for me and why the only club I belong to is the 'Cloud Appreciation Society' — when the area that I was looking at transitioned into an oval of distortion, out of which popped a figure of a man sitting in the clouds. The oval of distortion that preceded the vision was like the static on an old television screen that was not tuned into a station. Countless shifting dots of grey and black — visual white noise. The perfect blank canvas for the mind to draw upon.
I must stress that this was not pareidolia — the imagining of faces or other shapes from the form of something — this was a full-blown vision or hallucination which is indistinguishable from what we normally see with our eyes. It looks utterly real, regardless of any impossibility of its situation or likelihood. For this to be pedantically defined as an hallucination though, I would have to have believed that it was really out there, but because I witnessed the transitionary phase, I knew instantly that even though I was fully awake, that this was a dream projection constructed in my mind and projected onto my visual field. It is much easier to see through the illusions when you understand the nature of the creation of experience. I didn't close my eyes to test the vision as I have done with others but am sure that if I had done the image would still have been visible. This is the nature of visions; it has nothing to do with the eyes at all. It is entirely constructed within the brain, like dreams are.
The figure of a man that appeared out of this visionary prelude, was an amazing surprise, and almost a little corny, just sitting there in the clouds. I was immediately struck by his attire. He was wearing what seemed like large shoulder pads, like what the ancient Greek Hoplites wore (possibly something to do with his wings which were hidden from view!), but this attire was unlike anything I had seen before. He was looking into the distance and then noticed me looking at him and returned his gaze. He started to speak to me, but I heard nothing, though it seemed he was saying that it was too early and that I should not be able to see him. Then in the periphery of my vision I saw another one pop into view, who was smaller and appeared to be further away. I then lost contact and they disappeared.
It is interesting that they had no difficulty in seeing me, even though I was sitting in the middle of a room looking out of a window, and they were sitting on clouds that were miles away! They would have to have been enormous to be the size that they appeared to me if you take into account the distance and perspective. The logic of these scenarios never works out — because they are not real.
These visions/hallucinations are effectively natural AR — augmented reality. The scale of the visual manifestations is experienced relative to the actual scenery that they are being augmented upon. If the vision of the figure had appeared within the undergrowth of a wood for example, the scale in this scenario would have made it seem closer and smaller, and it might then been called a leprechaun (one of the little people) or similar, or if in a house, then possibly a ghost; but floating in the sky it has to be an angel. All are constructs of the mind using dream apparatus — dream figures no less, and one of the fantastic experiences to be had when the dreaming mechanism overlays the waking machinery. I believe we have them far more often than we realize, but they usually blend into our environment convincingly enough to be unremarkable and consequently go unnoticed because they are assumed to be real; just like we assume everything to be real when we are dreaming. Whenever I have had a vision, it is like part of me is trying to ignore it and dismiss it as unimportant (presumably because it happens fairly frequently), and it is only the times of greater lucidity that I am able to over-ride this hiding of sub-conscious experience which others would call a spiritual reality.
~
