Blue_Opossum

Night of July 19, 2018. Thursday.



Now I will move on to more specific patterns relating to the nature of the dream state. Having held such a keen interest since early childhood, and never losing that focus, I find it virtually impossible to make much sense out of most sources implying they are about dreams. Even much content on lucid dreaming does not correlate with anything I have ever experienced.

People who have never studied dreams (especially for a lifetime, as I have), or experienced them through every sleep cycle at various levels of liminality and lucidity, and continuously validated reactive representation in the dream state (thus being aware what dreams are actually doing), have no credibility in trying to convince people that their beliefs mean anything. They have no business even writing about them any more than if I knew nothing about cars (other than perhaps what I gleaned from “Archie” comic books) but wrote a book about them (and, since many people know a lot about cars, imagine their reaction). Still, the purpose of this series is not to address such fallacy but to review the nature of the waking process and the various forms of the emerging consciousness and to what extent it can be monitored and understood.

Lucidity, liminality, and subliminal focus vary from dream to dream. Ultimately, it is unlikely for someone to establish full control of ultradian rhythm, as it seems to be affected by diet and amount of exercise. (The WBTB or Wake Bake To Bed method results in disruption of ultradian rhythm but most people who practice it misunderstand this.) I always strive to make the best of what I have. What habits did I have regarding the dreaming process as I grew up?

A habit I have had since I was very young is the “lighting a candle” metaphor in coming out of an uncertain state of semi-consciousness. That eventually resulted in vivid semi-lucid dreams such as the one where I used lightning to set a tall church belfry afire. Some people like to talk about symbolism in dreams but fail to discern the incidental visual associations. I have always been fascinated by hypnagogia as well, where forms continuously transform based on visual similarity, even when I am at least partly monitoring the state. Hundreds of different unrelated images occur in only a short time.

What are some other metaphors (in addition to the “lighting a candle” focus) of the waking process that I deliberately established very early in life? The most obvious and consistent was the opening of a door. This intent always had two results, either vivifying my dream, sometimes exponentially in ways that defy belief, other times merely serving to wake me. These two potentials are always understood while in the dream state whether or not I am lucid, probably because they operate this way in real life. For example, if I want to “escape,” I create a door or doorway and use it as such. If I want to vivify my dream or create a different scenario, I create a door (though sometimes slide an entire wall as if it was a sliding door). It does not even have to be a typical door. For example, in my “Old Shack” dreams, I created and used the abandoned ruins of a rose trellis arched gateway as a doorway back into waking life (to escape from a pterodactyl, which simultaneously transformed into a falling sparrow - events such as this helped me understand more about reactive representation in the dream state).

Another form of reactive representation I created very early in my life was the bridge metaphor. That goes back so far that my mother used to tell me how I relayed this about dreams when I was a toddler. As with doors, I used bridges either to “escape” a dream scenario or to find my way to a different one. Sometimes such associations became mixed. For example, I would open a door inside my house and then see the ocean, as if the hallway was a bridge of sorts (which makes sense, as both represent routes of focus). I would jump from a bridge and land upon a stack of windows. The list goes on.

While there is not that much that can go wrong with a door, bridges can collapse or sink into the water. Staircases and elevators can serve as viable dream state mediation but can go wrong as well. As with cars, elevators are sometimes too small to get inside. They sometimes drop to the floors below before I can enter them. They are also more of a projection of illusory physicality (vestibular system correlation) than as with a bridge or door.

Ultimately, it is up to the dreamer to decide which reactive representation of RAS mediation and modulation serves them in the most viable way. Once the foundation is made and understood, it is unlikely to change. Some people choose to give themselves nightmares or erratic dreams. They may ignore beneficial transpersonal factors as if the interconsciousness does not exist to them. (As an analogy, they might not even have any grasp of why forest ecosystems work or why the food chain is at it is. They might invent a magical process to “interpret” such systems.) Others have learned what the dream state is and how to make the best of it.

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Readability score: 57.

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