Thread: Claude de Contrecoeur

This link goes to the full article. I posted this before the hack, here it is again. Below are some bits from it to pique your interest.


Conscious Dreaming and Controlled Hallucinations
Claude de Contrecoeur ([email protected])

Reality for all of us is what we consciously perceive. It does not matter where the incoming information flows from: from exoreality or endoreality. Evolution has put a mechanism which erases the consciousness of our dreams in our central nervous system (CNS). If the mechanism did not exist, all of us would have chosen to live in our respective endorealities and our species would just be extinct!

...oneiric people are hybrids between yourself and what you think you know about others.

Endoreal informational objects are often relatively stable as long as the dreamer maintains his attention focussed on them. Say if I have a watch on my wrist, this watch will tend to remain the same as long as I am looking at it. If I hide my oneiric arm with the oneiric watch for, say, 30 seconds of oneiric time and then look again at my wrist I will notice that a sudden MHV jump has occurred: my first watch would have transformed into another watch, different, but still a watch because in our memory all homologous informational objects are stored in a common place.

The idea of an MHV is extraordinarily powerful, as it then permits the scientist to begin to understand how the oneiric or schizophrenic consciousnesses are structured. A schizophrenic thinks in the same way as a normal dreamer: his consciousness just follows the way memory is organised: into MHVs. The difference between a schizophrenic and a normal waking person is that the MHVs in a schizophrenic mind are more active metabolically and so MHVs start to "radiate" meaning that discontinuity of thought is enhanced.

Why does dreaming exist?
Dreaming is a consequence of the existence of the attenuator! The purpose of the attenuator is to control the metabolism of memory during the waking state so as to block disattenuations and MHV radiation. As the attenuator consumes different neuromodulators, such as serotonin, during the waking state, it has to stop functionning periodically in order to replenish its reserves. So while it is "recharging", our brain metabolism becomes higher all of a sudden and we start to dream. The complex cycles of dream and non-dream periods during the night can also be understood within this basic framework.

The main characteristic of the dream and schizophrenic state of consciousness is discontinuity. When we are awake our consciousness is continuous and this is the reason why we can express ourselves in a verbally "logical" way. On the other hand the consciousness of the schizophrenic or the dreamer is made of continuous and discontinuous parts alternately. The nature of these discontinuities comes from the way our memory is organised and structured. Biological memories are not sequential memories: they store information both in a continuous and discontinuous way. Discontinuity comes from the fact that our memory classifies information through patterns. In fact, the brain has nothing to do with the computer analogy as a brain is, actually, a pattern analyser not a sequential analyser like computers.

For a psychopharmacologist there is no such thing as "free will", etc. This belief is only a prejudiced judeochristian cultural belief and a delusion. There are only states of consciousness expressing a particular CNS biochemistry. This is an extremely important scientific and philosophical observation as it teaches us that any human discourse is always suspect as someone will always just express, verbally, his particular CNS biochemistry.

and some of the salvia bit cause I like salvia
Salvinorin's hallucinations seem to come "only" in darkness and silence. First, some familiar serotoninergic-like hallucinations are observed then, all of a sudden, the experimenter is projected into a full transient endoreality while apparently preserving his normal waking state consciousness (Valdes,etc). Salvinorin may, thus, induce short REM episodes while awake and so, literally, suddenly "kick" the experimenter directly into a normal oneiric scene. This has to be explored in the lab yet!

If this hypothesis is correct then salvinorin may become an important tool in investigating more deeply how REM sleep is triggered.