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« on: March 04, 2014, 03:39:11 am »
Had one of those blessings in disguise late Friday night. I thought I had totally f'd my computer when I was trying to be a cheapo and make a 990fx chip run on my old 890 board. So, I decided to go through my old drive and do some extra backups of the important stuff. Found an abandoned project I had started on Lucid Dreaming, although I was a bit resistant to the term "lucid."
But one entry I had noticed that really caught my attention. In it, I was trying to expand upon the notion of paradoxical sleep, and what the implications of bringing your waking consciousness into the sometimes chaotic realm of your automated consciousness.
Ok, initially I copied and pasted a friggin' wall of rambling text, but I think it's better if I just give you my conclusion: The paradoxical state, or dreaming, is simply the conscious mind pulling together hundreds of stimuli and memes from a magnitude of waking states you've experienced in your life, while attempting to file away the most recent stimuli in a manner of not just compiling for later retrieval... but for a reference point to analyze the "new" data. It's when your teacher uses a metaphor or a mnemonic device to teach you something complex and novel, but your brain is doing it at such a rate of speed, it forms a narrative (albeit, barely coherent). It's the only time when the mind's temporal analysis is no longer linear because it's analyzing newer and old data as the same. When people are "lucid" they aren't bringing waking consciousness back into the dreams with them, they are simply engaging in the only true form of metacognition, that being, the mind watching the mind reading itself.
One sentence summary: The idea of being awake in your dreams is an instance in which the mind truly recognizes itself as process, rather than a state.
I bring this to PD'ers attention because I finally got around to reading the Common Walls last week. I recalled, when I was active in dream work, analysis and building lucid experiences, that during my waking life (what the LD community refers to as CR, or Consensus Reality) in the days following a lengthy state of awareness while dreaming that I sometimes had a lot of trouble playing along. Like when you're doing a redundant task (Chopping olives, painting a wall, data entry, etc.) and occasionally come out of your day dream and ask yourself "Ok, what am I doing here?" and find yourself unable to perform a simple set of steps you had just been doing over and over again at a rapid pace, not two seconds prior. One of my journal articles noted arriving at lunch with a friend, being handed a menu, and suddenly I had no idea how to make a decision of what I wanted to eat. Was I even hungry? What do I feel like when I'm hungry, and how have I made this decision in the past? When I read these words, they signify what I will be served, but what happened to the impulse that usually ignites when I read one of these words and say "That is what I want to eat?"
Pulling away from the idea of dream awareness, where do you find yourselves in this almost paralytic level of analysis, realizing exactly how little you understand or know, but rather, initiate your responses and actions without too much conscious thought?
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