Originally Posted by
Draydin
I've read over the section regarding dream control and it is indeed very informative and extremely interesting. As such I would like to discuss my own mind, how it operates, and possibly get input from other people about this.
Governing Force
Governing Force is the main ideology, process, and/or mechanism the mind uses in its daily operation to deal with, sort, store, and react to the stimuli that it encounters on a day to day basis. It can be caution, fear, assertiveness, or a number of other things, regardless this is the default setting in which people operate. This is not an attempt to 'toot my own horn' but I have in the past taken several IQ test and in all of them I rank above average, bordering on genius in some. As a result the governing force in my mind is logic. I deal with daily stimuli in a logical manner often sorting it mentally as it is processed.
How My Mind Operates
My mind also has a preset concept that though everything may not be understood, everything follows governing logic. Everything operates by a set of laws and that these laws and their function must be known of and understood if someone ever wants to work with them, around them, or outright change them. Logic governs everything, there is no such thing as magic. Magic is simply a term applied to a process or operation that has as of yet not been explained logically. Any sufficiently advanced civilization encountering someone of a primitive civilization will seem magical because of a lack of understanding about the process and operation of advanced logic. I will give an example, mind you this isn't an incredibly accurate example designed to withstand scientific scrutiny, it's simply something intended to show how I process things. A man waves his hands, mumbles some words and a bowl of fruit appears, it's magic! Not... By learning a specific technique, a series of carefully mapped out steps, this man was able to absorb and harness energy, then focus it through his mind and thus convert energy into a state of matter and achieve his goal, it's logic.
Control
Though logic governs my mind and the process of sorting and storing the various stimuli I encounter during daily activity it is not the controlling force, I am. I am capable of overriding this mindset to accept things that are outside my understanding or ability to explain, this is a result largely or growing up in a religious home. I'm not going to go into incredible detail as religious and philosophical debate are not my aims here, but never the less I am able to accept, because of these beliefs, the existence of God, Satan, angels, demons, heaven, and everything else mentioned in the bible despite having no logical stimuli to confirm their existence throughout daily life.
Another thing that fits into this category are emotions. After a fairly bad childhood (leave it at that), my teenage years were spent mostly bent to the will of uncontrolled emotions, as a result my later post-teenage years were spent binding these emotions and bringing them under control as my mind began to solidify and more heavily develop it's logical groundings. I am however not arrogant enough to think I can simply control my emotions and ignore them, that only results is creating a repressed emotional time bomb looking for a place to happen. My current process of emotional control consists of not allowing my emotional responses to dictate how I conduct myself, my conduct is dictated by the logical portion of my mind (most of the time, even I lose it even now and then). Any unresolved or powerful reactionary emotions that are inappropriate are simply repressed, then allowed to surface in a private setting where such is acceptable to avoid having to deal with a build-up of emotional repression. In short I do react emotionally and allow my emotions to express themselves, I just dictate when and where.
Mental Partitioning
My mind sorts itself into various categories I access according to what I'm doing at the time. For the most part the primary sections are reality (a loose term for visual data), fiction (movies, video games, ect), emotion, raw data (math, english, science, ect), and misc. bullshit (yes that's the actual label). Though I'm sure there are more areas these are the ones that I'm am most consciously aware of and use on a daily basis. When I encounter stimuli through my various senses, these objects are processed, decompiled, sorted, stored, and reacted to.
Background Processing
My mind constantly operates and performs so many various tasks even during my waking hours that it at times detracts from my awareness of my surroundings and what's going on around me. This results in several things, a considerable absent-mindedness, keys, pens, grocery lists. I'll put something down and a few seconds later forget where I put it because my mind never cataloged the fact it left my hand, or leave the house and forget a grocery list because I was so absorbed in thinking about something else I never bothered to remember needing to pick it up. My mind is a real maelstrom of processing that at times can be a pest, because I have to slow it down in order to shift some of this immense processing power towards short term memory and the current world and what's going on outside my own mind. Even now as I'm writing this my brain is doing a lot of things in the background, though working on this isn't so hard because it is a subject of immense interest and thus a good degree of processing has been allocated to it. If my mental comparisons seem to equate to computer terminology, it's because I'm a net junkie.
Information Acquisition
I get easily bored when not doing something that involves mental stimulation are/or acquiring new information because my mind is always looking for more data to handle in my seemingly never ending quest for knowledge and the continuing development of my own mind, or at least something that can draw the attention of my conscious mind while my sub-conscious goes through its never ending processing cycles. (Yay video games!)
Mental Perception
When my mind or my conscious self deems to focus on something I have this tendency to be extremely perceptive of my object of interest, often times taking in everything about it or them, my wife being a primary example. Through extensive observation and notation of things such as facial expression, body language, vocal tone, and other cues I can often time know exactly what she is thinking about. Though many would term this as simply being around someone long enough (which is a valid point in itself), my perception of her has come to the point I can often ask her why she's thinking something (mostly references to states of mind, not specific thoughts themselves) and she'll look over and ask me how I knew what she was thinking. On a side note this level of perception often has the nasty side effect of tunnel vision as I tend to ignore most everything else aside from the object of my interest unless I make an effort not to let that happen.
Mental Programming
I do possess, through the study of the mind and other mental techniques, a degree of control over my mind and body that the average person does not. This is not to say that I'm super human, because I'm not, but I have been able to achieve the ability to program my mind and restructure the foundation of my sub-conscious mind to certain degrees. I will provide two such examples, one involving myself, and other involving my wife.
1. As a child I was small and sickly. If there was a bug going around, I got it, if a bug wasn't going around, I usually got it too. In later years I learned this was because of the condition of my mind and that I thought I was constantly getting sick which often led to such. I eventually got sick and tired of being sick and tired and altered my mindset. I began telling myself I won't get sick, when I did I refused to accept it (on a reasonable level) and told my body to get in gear and kill this crap. As a result of both mindset and mental suggestion I now possess an immune system of immense proportion and rarely get sick at all. When I do get sick my down time is often cut drastically short of the established norm because my immune system goes absolutely apesh*t trying to kill the illness knowing that my mind itself refuses to tolerate its presence.
2. This involves two things actually, though they are closely interlinked. The first the fact I sleep three steps sort of dead. I've slept though gravel being dumped in my driveway and a road crew jack hammering the pavement outside my house roughly 100 yards from my bedroom, in both instances with my window open. I can about go to sleep when I feel like it regardless of outside stimuli. The other is my former habit of cursing at people who tried to wake me up.
The reason I say these are interlinked is because of how heavily I sleep and the fact it was hard for my wife to wake me up, often resulting in me cursing at, and upsetting her. Near the start of our relationship as couple that was a prevalent problem for me. She (always waking up before me) would at times need to wake me up to help her (due to some medical problems) and as one might imagine, being cursed at tended to piss her off. The problem this presented for me though it that I had no waking recollection of said event and often wondered why she was mad at me. Not only did I, through determination, nix this problem in the butt, it also resulted in another unintentional side effect. I somehow programmed a mental cue that, while I still sleep three step short of dead, will often jerk out of a dead sleep into full awareness if she calls my name. This can admittedly be a little disorienting at first and it takes me a few seconds to collect myself.
The Big Head vs The Little Head
What can I say, I'm 28, male, and end up spending some days as a walking hard on. The difference is though I can assert my mind over my sex drive... if I want to. I often look at woman, and if I find them attractive, usually end up picturing them naked at least once, but I can force my mind to overtake my thoughts and suppress my sexual desires. This I believe is a result of growing up in a single parent home, having never met my biological father, and my step-father not a factor in my life prior to age 12. This is in my mind to another degree also results from my mother teaching me to think of people beyond my own desires and about how my actions and treatment of those people can make them feel. As a result of this moral coding I can, 99% of the time, force my mind into dominance when I need to and apply the golden rule to people if I feel my actions have offended them, or made them feel like i'm treating them poorly. I will admit though it's not easy.
The Mindscape
My mind is an endless universe in and unto itself full of things, worlds, and places I've yet to even explore. Though governed by logic, one of the most active portions of my mind is, and has been since childhood, my imagination. I have spent close to the sum total of my 28 years of life creating fictional characters who are, sometimes extensions of myself to one degree or another, vividly detailed and seem to almost live a life of their own. I often feel like I am not 'writing' about them at all, I am in fact merely the person telling the tale they themselves dictate. It came to mind recently that perhaps a good degree of the sub-conscious mental processing I go through was in fact dedicated to them because my creations are very dear to me, and in a way almost like a small family of mine. I suspect its almost like a computer program running in the background that your not actively aware of unless intentionally searching for it.
I find it interesting how these characters have taken on a life of their own because at times I will discover new things about them I didn't know, or even consciously develop often resulting in a mental comment of "I didn't know that." or "Interesting." There are even times where I watch them moving about their lives just to see what they're up to. At times they also tend to comment on my actions or thoughts which can be annoying, though also seem to actually offer good (or bad) advice about things moving around in my mental super highway. The reason I've mentioned this is because I've often been curious about why a mind so heavily governed by logical, law, and the process of action/reaction, would have such a vivid and active imagination/fantasy life.
