Thread: Sakata Gintoki's Workbook

^^ Me neither. One even more terrifying thing I read is some scientists are actually trying to reduce our sleep even more (by cutting out unnecessary?! parts - this was mentioned in scientific magazine a while ago by the way, yikes!) so that we can work longer. Luckily for us all, they haven't succeeded yet. If anything, we need to be sleepying more!

I know about that, but saying "scientists are actually trying to reduce our sleep even more (by cutting out unnecessary?! parts" makes it sound like some kind of evil plot I don't know how it started and you can do some Googling if you are interested, it's called polyphasic sleep. The most extreme version is called the übermensch and you have a 20-minute nap every 4 hours. 6 Naps in total so just 2 hours of sleep a day, that is the only sleep you get. There are bloggers doing it and reporting on their expieriences. I read that this idea of napping a few times during the day to sleep less but still function originated from the millitary where they were forced to use such methods under extreme circumstances. There are many variations and Wikipedia has some good info. Being born in a healthy body is the greatest luxury a human can have and you shouldn't screw with the natural processes. If you use just a tiny fraction of this beautiful machine between your ears anyobody should know that living like this is absolutely useless unless you want to ruin your health and your life, in which case I highly recommend this method xD

Spoiler for rant:

Here's a rant, it's good to rant once in a while..
I think it's ridiculous for people to think that this is healthy.. Sleeping less and being more productive by using some crazy new method, are you kidding me? The human body is an incredibly complex machine, a single muscle fiber, a single cell has so many profound details and complexities which are quite beautiful to me. Even what I learned in biology class which barely scratched the surface of this complexity makes me realize this. And the brain? Did you know that the brain contains about 80 billion neurons, a single neuron having 1.000 to 10.000 connections or "cables" to other neurons? Every cable has a different strength, depending on how often it is used. In a ted talk I heard that not a single neuron is the same. Also that the computing power of a single neuron is roughly equal to the computing power of an average laptop. Can you even imagine this complexity? I can't, I can only let my jaw drop by thinking about it. Sometimes, when washing my hands I look at it and notice all the movement in my body, from my fingertips to my knuckles, the inside of my hand, the wrist joint, forearm, elbow, upper arm, shoulderblades, I even feel the involvement of my lower back muscles, abs, obligues. All moving dynamically and smoothly, perfectly coördinated, all just to wash your hands, to rub your hands over one another. There are so many tiny muscle fibers which are filled with tiny little endings of cables coming from the nervous system, each little ending capable of putting out electrical signals of varying degrees of strength and length of time, each tiny little muscle fiber has to be moved in such a way that it enables the movement of a certain body part in a certain direction, but this is not enough, because the body parts are moving and therefor the movement is in a slightly different speed, angle and strength for fraction of a second. To coördinate this kind of movement with so many body parts moving and acting at the same time is quite an unbelievable process to me. But this is not everything, because we are not even thinking about how to wash our hands, we are seeing in the mirror how we look, thinking thoughts, feeling the soap and the water, processing emotions. It's a shame that some people don't seem to appreciate this beauty. Getting caught up in things like what other people might think and (more importantly) say about you, pride, money, it's so silly. Just appreciate and enjoy the simple joys in life, damn it! Take a deep breath, do some meditation, have some good food, hear some violin music , share some laughs and watch some silly videos on Youtube..

Sleep provides not only rest for the whole body, but it's the only time the brian ever gets real rest, though meditation seems to do a great job too. This amazing machine needs to function optimally!! To play with something as profound as sleep is ridiculous. No matter how poor I get or how little time I have for the rest of life, taking 10 hours out of my day to prepare for sleep, sleep, and slowly wake up from sleep will be the last luxury I'll give up.
Here is an interesting video, it explains the cleansing process that takes place during sleep.
I'm ashamed to admit it, but I am quite sleepy right now and should have gone to bed about 3-4 hours earlier. And even though I can sleep all day and will get 9-10 hours of sleep, somehow my quality of sleep seems to get reduced if I am still sleeping after about 10AM.

Lol! I was being sarcastic, but really the way it was written in the article didn't make it sound very appealing. I wonder if I still have that particular magazine around. It has been like 3-4 years. Here is one related article by the way. In this one, some people have a special genetic mutation that allows them to sleep less.

Rare Genetic Mutation Lets Some People Function with Less Sleep - Scientific American

I have heard about those polyphasic schedules, but am not a big fan of them either. Adding naps to normal sleep, yes, but reducing sleep? Not my piece of cake. Sleep is way too important to play around with it. And there's even no need for complicated medical tests to prove such crazy schedules are not healthy - one look in the mirror is enough.

You said it!

It's an interesting article. This is why I love science so much. Although their main interest is probably to satisfy their endless curiosity about the world, these people solve serious problems! All this brain research will eventually provide a cure for so many terrible mental diseases.

"Fu says helping people sleep a little less while maintaining their health and well-being is her ultimate dream." This is really silly, but maybe she meant it more as a milestone for knowledge than as an actual thing she wanted to do.

I didn't get lucid and onnly had some dream fragments. I promise right here right now that I'm going to do at least reality checks more reality checks to get progress.

The last time I remember checking the clock was about 12 in the afternoon and I woke up at 3AM. Maybe it was not 12 but 14PM? I don't know but I do know I slept a lot! The dreams were filled with friends and family because I was feeling lonely yesterday and I had a girlfriend in 1 dream. I remembered 4 dreams. Once when I was about to order something, I remembered being 75 euro's in the red on my bank and I thought "I hope the power of expectation works and puts some money in my wallet". It worked and I had a 10 euro bill. The thought of lucidity never popped up Beside that, everything was completely nonlucid.

I read somewhere that sleep weakens the emotional strength of things in your life, positive and negative. That might be why whenever I'm feeling really lonely and longing I get dreams where I am always doing stuff with a group of friends/family. I was with a group of at least 5 people in 3 dreams and in 1 dream I started out alone and soon met my violin teacher and sat down with her at a restaurant. It felt nice and really helps deal with it, but I still wish I was lucid so I could enjoy it a little bit more.

The duration of my meditation depends on how clear my mind is. Apparentely my mind this morning was really foggy because I took an hour and 25 minutes.. Damn. I didn't remember any dreams either. Right now I am more lost and at the same time more determined than I've ever been in my entire life.

Taking longer to meditate isn't that bad per se, if you manage to find the time, that is. Every session is unique and if not anything else, you have gained by being relaxed for longer and also are always training how to quiet down your mind. You know it takes a lifetime even for zen monks.

Yes ofcourse, and I do have enough time, but I was just surprised to find out how unclear my mind was.

I think I am expieriencing mild emotional trauma. It's a bit long but please bear with me. I think it really is a trauma and needs to be dealt with because I am really jumpy, any unexpected sound or just ssing someone on the street gives me that strange feeling in my belly and my heart rate increases.

A few days ago I was playing a game on Armorgames called Upgrade Complete and you had to upgrade everything, game graphics, sound, the logo of the game, loading speed, all kinds of things. There was also an upgrade called "increase heart rate", I thought it was ridiculous and clicked. About 5 seconds later some stupid face popped up, screaming sound blasting through my headphones and the colors of the stupid face were rapidly changing, a typical jumpscare. I gasped slightly, jerked the stool backwards (it has weels so it didn't fall) and turned right to my father who was watching tv, my face in shock and I was unable to speak for about 3-4 seconds. That was I think 3-4 days ago.

This morning was a little more intense. That jumpscare from the game was the first thing leading to it. The second thing was that I was staying up pretty late, while I normally went to bed around 11PM, I was awake until 6AM this morning. Also, there is this corner of the furniture that I kept noticing that looked very very much like part of a horror movie. Idiot that I am, I realized I should just put a pillow in front of it at about 5AM So just being sleepy makes me more jumpy, which made that furniture cornor seem scarier and the effect of the game jumpscare was still not completely gone. So I go to bed finally at 6Am. But the problem is I have to get up again at 8AM to go to school. I fall asleep at about 6.30AM I think. But I really don't give a damn about school and just want to sleep, but my mom doesn't agree with that AT ALL and I always make her mad every single monday morning for arriving late at school. At about 8AM my alarm went off and I remember telling my mom "okay okay I'm getting out of bed". But then I thought screw that, sleep is more important so I just slept. Then at about 9AM she banged on the door twice and really loud! That banging on the door would have been enough to keep me from going back to sleep even though I am horrible at resisting sleep and I had only slept about 2.5 hours, that's how scared I got just by the banging. I jolted awake. Then she aggressively opens the door and rushes towards my bed (which is about 4-5 steps from the door) in order to pull the curtains away. But I had just been jolted by the banging noise and looked at the door trying to figure out what happened *I have been getting chills since I started typing this*, my mindstate more asleep than awake and it's dark because I have a rolling shutter. See it from my point of view: extremely loud banging, I wake up "ahh!! what's that?" *slightly shocked/in fear*, then this dark figure, after opening the door hard, comes rushing towards my bed (in order to pull away the curtains and get me out of bed) and I just start making this sound for about 3 seconds that my brother describes as if I was expressing pure fear "uheaweawawhaheuawha", something like that. Then my mom apoligizes and opens the rolling shutter and I am shaking in fear for the next few minutes trying to understand what the hell just happened. To me, it felt like I was screaming as loud as I could for 10 seconds but my brother said it was about 3 seconds, I was not loud and not screaming, I was just making weird noises that he described as expressing pure fear.

The event in itself is already quite scary but I think the combination of the jumpscare game, being sleepless and the scary furniture put me in a more vulnurable state. I haven't been meditating the past few days and I'll start again. I googled emotional trauma and it says that emotional trauma is not an event but an emotional response and the constant replaying in your head of the event. Meditation apparently can bring suppressed negative emotion to the surface which is obviously necessary if I want to get released of this. It also said the the quicker you begin treatment the easier it will be to get cured.

I am reading this now to understand what to do. 25 techniques for treating emotional trauma and PTSD | Living Well NLP


I want to say one thing. I do realize that there are things that people have gone through and still go through that are so much scarier than this. Things like mental torture, being raped (obviously), being abducted/attacked by something that overpowers you, natural disasters, child abuse by the parents and that is maybe the most horrible one because children feel emotions very strongly and are very timid and I can't possible imagine what a child feels when being abused by parents. This scare I expierienced is absolutely nothing compared to the horrible things some people have gone through and probably right now people are expieriencing horrible things, but it doesn't mean that I should ignore what happened this morning. I hate this jumpy/fearful state of mind of mine right now and want to get rid of it as quickly as possible. I feel like writing this already helped a great deal and I'll write some more tomorrow about this. Right now I'm going to bed, meditate and then sleep. I really hope I won't get any nightmares.


EDIT: I'll also keep some kind of light so that I won't have to wake up into complete darkness. Right now I don't even care about getting enough sleep, I just want to shed off this fear

Hey Ginsan, seems like you've been through very stressful couple of days.

I think one part of dealing with this problem would be to just get more sleep. I know from experience that when people don't get much sleep they are even more jumpy. On top of that, being woken up right after falling asleep or in the earlier REM periods can be very stressful. So, my first advice on this would be to get more sleep. Then, if possible try not to dwell on it too much, it was a nasty set of circumstances, but it is fully within your power to stop going down this stressful spiral by not assigning this event as much importance. This is the best way to nip it in the bud. Hope that helps!

You're right I have always known I am much more jumpy when I am sleepy. Sleeping early also reduces the time I am alone at night which is basically "jumpy time", because my parents and brother sleep early. Yesterday I slept with the light of the hallway turned on and the door slightly opened and the rolling shutter open completely. Which made my room not light enough to read a book, but if I had pictures I would easily see the pictures. Usually my room is completely dark, door shut and after my eyes get used to the darkness it's still almost completely dark. I the tiniest bit of light when trying to sleep or waking up but last night I was just too scared to sleep in darkness. I knew that I would sleep at least 4-5 hours in full sunlight but I just couldn't shut the lights. I even kept the light on of my own room for about 30 minutes before I was calmed down enough to shut the light of my room. I did sleep for about 10-11 hours, though it didn't make up for the bad quality of the sleep. It's almost 2AM now and I am just going to listen to some music to calm me down (just because it's late and I am sleepy and alone I get pretty jumpy) and I'll go to sleep. I won't go easy on myself tonight and I will shut all lights and just endure the initial fear, it was acceptable (imo) yesterday but tonight I really need optimal sleep.

I read the website and it appears to be written by somebody who's profession is to deal with traumas or at least part of his profession. It basically boiled down to normalizing the expierience. I have to assure myself that the event in itself is not very special or extremely horrifying or scary, it was just surprising. An unfortunate combination of many surprising things at the same time. Every time I remember it I shouldn't say to myself "yeah that was really scary", because thinking that over and over again only confirms it and makes it worse and worse. I have to say "I was really surprised, the knocking on the door followed by her rushing towards me was a really amazing surprise". Not lying to myself, but thinking about it and describing it not as a scary event/memory but as a surprising and unfortunate one. I think that by giving it a softer, less emotional, more normal/rational narration every time I think about it, so telling myself it's not that scary, it's just an unfortunate event, I can make myself deeply believe it. I already know it on a superficial level, when I think about it, but by continuing this way of thinking and narrating I think I can get rid of the negative emotions completely. And getting more sleep (and earlier) are probably even more important and not dwelling on it is also important.

I slept in complete darkness. I was a little scared when I first got in bed, but then I took my phone and browsed sexy pictures with google images and I my libido completely overpowered my fear Eventually I relaxed and was able to sleep xD

Happy to hear you are doing better, Ginsan!

The advice from the website and your own conclusions are really good. I think this could be applied to a number of situtions too, so I find it very useful.

There is also one more important thing I forgot to mention and that is to create happy memories in my bedroom. That scare seemed to have overpowered previous memories of my room (which are positive) and I remember the scary moment every time I enter my room so in order to get rid of that I think I have to (continue to) create happy memories. By blasting classical music through my cd player while reading my favorite comic book, which I do quite often including this morning. Watching sexy pictures And playing on my violin. My bedroom is for me the most pleasant place in the world and I feel safer in my bedroom than probably anywhere else and it's ridiculous to feel otherwise. My beautiful violin is there, my safe and warm bed, my hilarious comic books and a few normal books, about 30 music cds filled with some of my most beloved recordings. If everything in my room were to be destroyed right now my soul would lose almost everything that makes it come alive.

I was wondering how old you are NyxCC because I can't tell from your posts. As far as I can tell you could be anything from a teenager to in your 40's

I´ve just found that white noise is really good for reducing my jumpiness at night. Normally when it´s completely silent, the tiniest sound obviously can make me jump and I set the volume of the headphones very low because even just talking loud somehow makes me feel uncomfortable. But this increases my sensitivity to sound even more but I just realized that if I just get some white noise I get rid of the silence. And rainymood.com is even better I think because it´s not just white noise, it also makes me feel more relaxed. I think it was a brilliant idea and it immediately reduced my jumpiness and as far as I can tell I feel as comfortable as during the day when my parents are in the same room watching tv = D

I got the idea by remembering a forum about violinists' neighbours complaining about noise and one of the suggestions was to put a fan in the house of the neighbour.

I've been doing RC's the last few days every time I am reminded to do one. I check my hands, write something and look away and back at the writing to see if it's changed, and I check gravity by throwing and catching stuff. When I'm done I tell myself "I am probably not dreaming right now but I don't know for sure and I will stay alert because I still might be dreaming."

I don't even know it this helps with inducing lucidity, but I like to do that because it helps keep a sense of wonder and scepticism. It makes me think just a little extra about the things I see. For example when I am chewing gum, why does it stick a little to my teeth for a fraction of a second and not more. Why does it not fall apart and leave a big sticky mess in my mouth? How the hell is a piece of plastic made? How can a clock work so nearly perfectly? It makes RCing more fun and perhaps that way it helps to become lucid more often.

I am still remembering an average of 2-3 small and fuzzy dreams a night and I am not really getting lucid. I'm also writing most of it in my journal. Maybe this new effort will get me lucid.

I like your new approach. It makes sense to focus on this state of not knowing for sure, rather than simply saying no. I think it calls for greater attention and being critical may help catch some details that are off.

I got semi-lucid today, but it wasn't much. I just knew in the back of my head that I was in a world where nothing has real consequences and I could take any girl I wanted. But I didn't have any awareness. But just getting lucid is already an amazing thing, most people don't even remember their dreams and get a glimpse of lucidity maybe once a month It also only lasted 5-10 minutes

Not bad! The girls must have distracted you.

Well you might call it distracted but my reason for lding is mainly girls...

In such a case, it may help to combine any girl related thoughts or visualizations with thoughts about dreaming.

I like the way dolphin approaches dream incubation in his new thread:

Originally Posted by dolphin

I'll start out by imagining, constantly in between breaths, a woman kissing me on the cheek and saying, "You're dreaming".

http://www.dreamviews.com/attaining-...30-nights.html

I'm going to do this

The big theme tonight was anxiety. There people chasing me and bullying me all night. I know why, but it's not big deal. No lucidity, that's too bad. But I am still being mindful and RCing so let's hope that tonight will be better.