Two Ryans: the Phylogeny of Belief

17/12/2014: Two years later...
IMAGE: Heidi Alayne

I think it is time for another dark and scary dream entry. This is actually one I had some time back: alas while its contents were relatively short and simple; it's meaning did not occur to me until quite recently, as I happened to be reading the plot synopsis of a Phillip K Dick novel on Wikipedia. Yep, in this particular instance that was my muse.

I'm actually kind of grateful to have come this close to solving what has been something of a mystery in my dream narrative to date, so sit back and enjoy. Controversy guaranteed.

The dream itself involved me walking into the second bedroom of my apartment, where my cousin at the time happened to be staying. Various personality conflicts and some disagreements about recreational drug use had pushed me to the point where I was thinking of a diplomatic way of basically asking him to leave, and this had been weighing on my mind quite heavily for a number of days since I still quite liked him as a person, just not as a house-mate.

So back on subject: not at all surprisingly, this dream involved me walking into said bedroom and having an in-dream simulation of this dreaded discussion. It went surprisingly well, at first: I was both confident and astute. However he shortly into things he broke down crying, and I mean physically bawling his eyes out... and I felt terrible. I tried my best to reconcile him diplomatically without giving into his pity and extracted myself from the bedroom, when suddenly the front door opened and standing in the doorway, staring at me with hollow passive eyes was none other than this cousin Ryan. I quickly darted my attention back into the bedroom, where the sobbing Ryan remained, and then back again to the doorway, where he was walking in, groceries in each hand and asking me what the matter was. There were two of him: and if ever there was a sheer feeling that accompanies loosing ones sanity then this was undeniably it.

I panic swept over me: and the words formed in my mind "Help me Ryan!" and I was overcome with an intense desire to charge up to him (the original one, who had been crying) and hug him and beg him to never let me go. I felt so vulnerable and uncertain and confused that even the slightest amount of affection and care from another human soul was a very comforting idea. Alas the words stuck in my throat, for I was aware I was now in no position to ask any such thing from Ryan, having just evicted him and broken his heart.

With his big watery eyes, he just looked at me: confused, hurt, but ultimately sympathetic. It was as if he almost was begging me to break down and seek his comfort. I did not. The feeling of loosing my mind, in conjunction with the feeling of having nothing or no-one to turn to was boiling to a breaking point and yet I just stood there, resolved to ride it through. I woke up then, in a sheer state of terror with my heart exploding through my chest. I will never forget that feeling of complete helplessness and cognitive vulnerability that accompanied second Ryan mysteriously appearing through the doorway. It was among the most intrusive and unsettling emotions I have ever experienced.

๑

And now... you guessed it: It is time for some Dream Introspection.

As I earlier mentioned: it was reading up about Phillip K Dick, both his creative spark and subsequent battles with mental illness and uncertainty that ultimately caused these ideas to take form. For those who are not accustomed to his work: they centre very heavily on multiple concepts of reality that overlap and intersect (especially at the emotional level), about paranoia and delusion, about belief and fantasy. A theme that runs through one of his books, Ubik... is the idea that in such a distraught and tormented existence, all we have to cling to and keep us persisting is the concept of the divine, which in this particular book happens to take the form of a spray can advertisement that punctuates the chaos of reality and provides some crumb of hope and direction through the oblique grey fog of a confusing and unknowable world.

Well, this did it. I had long ago suspected that in an earlier version of the human mind, and by that I mean the one that clearly predates written and possibly even spoken language: we lived in a state of perpetual fear and religious anxiety. Before they were able to be hunted; large predators and mega-fauna were probably revered and feared as both demons and deities. All we had to pull us through life and keep us persisting was a hopeful light, a quiet inner voice, that was at once our own guardian angel as well as our own private religion. Of course, this was probably just a proto-conscious aspect of our rapidly emerging Default Mode Network... but before it was fully integrated into our cognitive sense of self it was very likely the greatest mystery and the greatest source of hope we had ever known.

And while it seems I was not the first to have this same idea, it nevertheless stuck with me through much of my earlier through experiments and daydreams that came to define the body of my neurophilosophical doctrine. The ultimate conclusion that I came to hold was that the very concept or notion of religion or worshipful godhead was reducible to a high faith we placed above our conscious awareness to guide us through our own floundering/emerging sanity. Bearing in mind that to exist as a prey animal and live in a constant state of anxiety and fear is qualitatively not that different to being insane; those brain regions that helped us establish ourself as apex predators did not simply do so through improved brain function... much of the battle was in helping us perceive ourselves differently and dispensing with our legacy fears and prey instincts.

As we eventually grew to fear no animal (even those that might kill us by statistical chance) a void was inevitably left: we could still go insane and we still had a legacy reflex to 'look upward' to the higher domains of our non-conscious self to descend from the clouds and make things right. Earlier in evolution: this might have been something so simple as the inhibition of the limbic system by the prefrontal cortex. Now days: it takes on a remarkably more complex pattern of activation and yet upwards we ever look, and so upwards lies the salvation from the chaos of our own selves. Indeed if you have followed any of my earlier entires: you will be well familiar with the in-dream subjective experience I have detailed about having my own functionally segregated prefrontal/temporoparietal networks come online to save me from my own dreaming delirium. I have every reason to believe that earlier configurations of the human mind had a lot more in common with the current dreaming brain than any other form we could currently conceptualise, and thus is may yet be a very old reflex in our historical cognitive phylogeny.

In the fear of insanity: which ultimately reduces to the fear the great dangerous uncategorisable, we seek the higher faculties of our own mind to bring peace, tranquillity and reason to an otherwise unbearably helpless situation. And so high do we look; we seek that which communicates with us but that we do not necessarily even perceive as an aspect of our own selves. It makes sense that what I have described in the context of this dream, is exactly paralleled by this feeling: the terror of the unknown and the complete lack of place to turn except to myself.

So why did I dream it? To this question I have a solution. In my hard-headed belief in my own beliefs, and my lifelong lack of desire or even need to rely on another person for the emotional comfort and support that we so often draw from to stabilise our own thinking and bring sanity into our lives: I (or rather my dreaming brain) saw fit to put this philosophy to the ultimate test by simulating such a terror. It is not even that I am such an atheist: I just don't rely on others for spiritual guidance, and this happens to rule out organised religion as an ipso facto. But when push comes to shove, do I rely on those around me, in their capacity as my friends when all else crumbles down, and I am left feeling alone and exposed?

...I suppose this is the ultimate point in all this. I probably do. I am only human after all. But I have developed some very clear boundaries about how and when, and to what extend, I do rely on others to derive my internal clarity and consolidate my sense of self. And when push comes to shove, it seems my dreaming brain will ultimately respect these boundaries, and not simply see false idols in every anthropomorphic shadow.

I dream of JulieAnne

25/11/2014: 12 hours (and one tea) later...
IMAGE: tommykane

This is a dream I had about a person who is very special to me. Unlike so many of my other entires, I will not attempt to explain the meaning of this dream. It may speak for itself; in fact I actually hope that for the individuals reading it does indeed say something. It is not a particularly complex dream; in fact I would say that it is refreshingly simple as far as my dreams go. It touched me deeply and this is why I now take the time to write it up.

In my experience: some things in life are just too precious and delicate to survive intellectual deconstruction, and the interactions with the ones around us are probably a very good example of this. So whoever you are, I hope that you enjoy this entry simply for what it is, and what it has to say from your eyes.

The dream started rather abruptly, with myself sitting on a circular raft or wooden board, floating in the middle of the ocean. The water was warm; and it would gently rise and fall but overall was calm and pleasant. Thought I could not see the bottom; I intuited that the entire ocean was no more than waist deep. It stretched on endlessly; and the horizon was bordered at all sides by a range of beautiful mountains emerging out of the water itself. Sitting there in front of me, straddling another floating wooden circle, was the person mentioned in the title of this entry.

JulieAnne and I were talking about life, ourselves and general random nonsense. The words themselves were not the focus, and only with effort could I sense they were there at all. I am not even sure it had any language attached; it was just an expression of emotion and human connection and the syllables were nothing more than subtle diagnostic beeps that indicated both organisms were functioning as normal. We talked and talked; but what we said did not matter. We were just there, as ourselves and that was all that existence was.

I turned my attention to the wondrous mountains that surrounded us. They seemed to just emerge out of the backdrop like icebergs, and though distant, towered over us from the impossible horizon. I imagined one collapsing: the tidal wave it would produce would surely reach us; with the water so shallow. It would wash us away. It could kill us. An intense anxiety ran through me and I became transfixed with the idea that we had to leave this place.

"Aaaaa  aaaa aaaaaa?" JulieAnne asked. It had no meaning, but it told me to come back to reality. I rejoined the conversation and the familiar relaxation and calm came over me. we continued talking. Before long my attention creeped back to the mountains, and once again I worried about what might happen if they started to crumble and fall into the surrounding ocean. And once again, I came back to the calming conversation and forgot all about it. After a time; I decided that the collapse was inevitable and we should really leave at some point. I told her this, and we agreed to swim back to the shore.

We paddled back on our boards slowly, arms and legs hanging over the sides, and continued our conversation, savouring it for every last second. As we headed back our dialogue had started to resemble language once more. It still bore that calming feeling; that representation of the interpersonal connection we both shared, but as the linguistic meaning came more and more into focus, the emotional magic of the exchange drifted ever into the background. We began talking about what we would do once we were back on shore. She had to work, and did not look forward to it. I had to work too; but not till much later. I did not dread it as much as her. We were now almost at the shore line, and people were standing around a wooden landing that was level with the rising and falling waterline.

Back on shore, there was a distance between us, and we both looked out into the ocean; realising we would rather be back out there, floating in peace. The collapsing mountains now seemed like a distant and empty concern, and I am not even sure we even believed it was going to happen any more. We talked about our stresses and our everyday lives, she had patients to treat and I had to sort out what I was doing with my elaborate plans. We parted ways, and I went about the rest of the dream. That anxiety of the mountains collapsing never quite left me: in fact it ghosted me for the remainder of this dream in a very subtle form, and I woke up feeling it too. It had nothing to do with impending doom, I think it was just the feeling of drifting away from another being, and it was the feeling of being alone.

๑

I hoped you enjoyed reading this. Some dreams are best left to intuition, and for once neuroscience has nothing it can tell me that I did not already know. And while that is becoming a rarer and rarer thing for me these days; it is something I continue to search for. Sometimes there is more to be said without an answer than with one.

Northcote Tip: exploration and exploitation

6/11/2014: Three days later...
IMAGE: caoimhghin

The following is a vivid dream I had some nights ago. It took me well back to my childhood, in the sense that I have not had a dream like this in quite some time. If I had to explain it: I would probably put it into the category of pure adventure.

The dream basically consists of me exploring a place that is familiar to me, and very much rooted in every day life. When some arbitrary boundary is crossed (such as a doorway or fence) and the dream takes a dramatic change, and reality goes out the window. This boundary bridges the dream world with the fantasy architecture and psychedelic form of the imagination itself. And the endless discovery of the unreal brings with it a kind of pure unadulterated excitement with every dreaming step that reliably evades description. I will now attempt a summary of the dreams events and what they mean to me.

I was in my back yard at my old childhood house in Northcote. This can be a very strange and almost dream-like suburb in its own right (anyone who grew up here in the 90's will know what I mean) but for the purposes of this dream, I was a child again in my childhood home, and everything was normal. I was exploring my back garden, when suddenly I walked out past my back fence into the bluestone laneway behind my house. These are another curiosity too: originally build so that horse-drawn carts could take away human waste by night; some Melbourne suburbs have simply preserved them and they serve no known human purpose that I know of except puncturing bicycle tires and scaring the hell out of young children. The laneway behind my house always served as a mystical curiosity to me, growing up... you never knew what out would find in one. They each had their own curious personality; and they allowed you access to the proverbial underbelly of the quiet suburban streets all around. A friend and I used to explore them on our BMX's on school holidays and probably increased our emotional intelligence by a decade in the process.

So back to my dream! I stepped into this laneway, and reality gave up on itself. It was a little like peering into the fridge in the original Ghostbusters; except that I did not scream but was overcome with an intense sense of curiosity, euphoria, and awe mixed in with a discrete foreboding and a creeping lucidity that this should really not be here. When I think on it: this dream is very much part and parcel a homology of a much older recurring dream I would have, involving zombies. This dream takes a very different flavour however; it is almost always set during daylight hours, and almost always involves either my own house or the house of a close relative. Otherwise, I suppose the two dreams are very much the same.

Instead of looking into my laneway: I found myself gazing into a sprawling post-apocalyptic / Mad Max-esque complex or compound. Some voiceless narrator told me "Aaah, so that is Northcote Tip. Too bad it burned down". Another brief piece of inner-north history: Nothcote once had a brickworks with accompanying clay quarry. By the time I was old enough to know any different; all the clay was gone and it was now used for landfill (non-colonial types might know a tip better as "rubbish dump"). If laneways scared you as a child: then the tip was probably Hades itself. I was never so brave to explore it myself, though I went to school with those that would. They were mostly refugees from the 91' invasion of Kuwait or Khmer Rouge holocaust survivors so I don't hold myself too harshly for this.

As I started to explore the fabled and forbidden Northcote Tip at the end of my back garden, I became immediately aware (in the sense that you can become aware, but not actually know it) that this was not the tip at all, but actually a sprawling thrift shop. At one end, people would deposit their junk, and at the other end, there was some sort of showroom for refurbished furniture, vintage collectables and all manner of things. In a sense then it was a tip. In the middle section, were a series of workshops where the owner would restore and categorise the junk for later sale. Sections were, true to in-dream cannon, burned down or otherwise destroyed. Various couches and motorbikes lay spread all over the workshop floor, in varying stages of deconstruction and repair. The narrators voice picked up once more: "The owner went crazy, and burned it all down. Such a shame" and a sadness it me. I had only just discovered this marvellous institution and already it was gone and never coming back. The speechless voice continued... "Then again, you would have to be half-crazy to run this place to begin with"  and my emotions shifted to a kind of easy come, easy go mentality. Indeed the voice (and by voice I mean some temporarily discrete agent of my own stream of consciousness) was entirely right. But this is a dream blog, not a sociology one so I will skip this thought for now.

Neuroscience time! I have had these dreams regularly enough; and so do other people. My brother has often recited the delight he has experienced in reoccurring dreams involving discovering hidden rooms in his apartment and the the subsequent joy and excitement of exploring them. I started having dreams like this when I was probably 6 years old: I would recurrently dream that there was a secret toy shop in the wall behind a strange mirror in my parents bedroom. Each morning I would run in and look behind it; and each morning I would be disappointed that the room was not there. It did not even matter that behind this wall was nothing more than a garden pathway and a thicket of bamboo; nor even that my primitive child-like spatial perception should and did know this to be true: the emotion of discovery was real enough (or had been real enough) in itself that my mandate to check went un-contested. It's not even like the secret room was all that great: it was simply the joy of discovering it against the odds that would send my dreaming brain into overdrive.

True enough; these later dreams are something of an advancement of these earlier ones in that my lucidity is aroused when discovering the in-dream anomaly, alas it pushes itself down (or is pushed down) to allow me to continue to explore, despite my better knowledge. And on this note, I do have a theory. Since the early battle taking place is between my curiosity and my better knowledge, this whole exercise could be nothing more than a case of my prefrontal cortex working out at what point curiosity kills the cat. And by this I mean: how euphoric an event can reliably be before judgement is suspended and emotion takes over. Useful training in real life for countering confidence men, sex workers, asshole supervisors and god knows who else. I probably never have fallen for the antics of any of the above precisely because my dreaming brain prepares me so rigorously. But is this why I have these dreams?

I think that rather than determining at what magical point emotional pleasure will drive me out of secondary consciousness, the purpose of these dreams is rather to train my curiosity and remind me of what it is like to explore and discover. Much has been publicised recently about the crucial role of curiosity in learning and positive cognitive function. I could always have told you this over beers but it's nice to see it in published science too. I conclude that such dreams are intended to keep curiosity alive, so that it is not forgotten. And this is achieved by engineering dreams with infinite pay-off sums that produce impossible and unfathomable rewards, with euphoria to match, through the act of exploring the ever day and the mundane. And thus an upper-bound in a homoeostatic range is defined and we can more realistically make spot judgements in regard to the exploration exploitation dilemma when ultra-high pay-offs with minimal risk are concerned.

We may not wake up the next day and literally expect a phantasmagorical realm to unfold before our very eyes, when we open that cupboard door or venture beyond the outgrowth of our gardens. We are awake, we are conscious and we simply know better. But at some deep, basal emotional level, we still retain the feeling of what it would be like. And that part of us gives us hope; and makes sure that we do not forget. And despite our pesky narrators voice: it keeps us searching for something we have yet to find, and probably never will.

★★★

Sleep paralysis and the Frontal Cortex

7/10/2014: Six months later...
IMAGE: MatthewMeyer

My previous entry (well one of them) was one of the most Euphoric dream I had ever had. I think it is appropriate that I now take the time to describe the most terrifying. I think this dream happens to particularly stand out in the sense that I was able to avoid the worst of what was in store for me, through a kind of hybrid in-dream lucidity. Until now, I simply could not have explained this: it was phenomenally unique but lacked a framework for further exploration. However, some recent research produced by an associate has thrown me just over the threshold of compression and I can now suspect what might have happened. Exciting stuff, for a dream researcher of any creed or colour.

Sleep Paralysis: a simple enough phenomenon. When coming out of a deep stage of NREM sleep, you sometimes find yourself experiencing a kind of false awakening, and confusing the resulting REM artefacts for waking reality. A menacing presence is then felt, usually as some form of monster or ghost. Sometimes it is a loved one who approaches; before turning sinister. Lying there awake in bed (though not actually awake) the urge to run and flee is met with sudden bodily paralysis, making the whole ordeal ineffably more terrifying still. The genuine belief that the dream stage is over, and that this experience is waking reality then lifts the terror to extreme levels. You finally wake up (this time for real) with a heart rate high enough to give an Olympic athlete a cardiac arrest. Or were you always awake, and just hallucinating? The whole question of whether it was a false awakening or just dream content (hypnagogic hallucination) creeping through into waking reality for a number of seconds is very much of a moot point here, believe it or not. In these cases, the normally sharp distinctions between waking and dreaming reality are blurred to become part of two overlapping systems. Welcome to sleep paralysis. Night terrors. Succubus. Kanashibari. Many names: one singular, perplexing phenomenon.  

Such cases are potentially unique in that you experience a kind of false positive lucidity. A false what? Well think on this if you will. When we are awake, we can reliably question ourselves "Am I awake?". If you can answer this (or indeed if you can even ask the question) the answer will probably be yes. Ask yourself right now... you will probably know the answer! As for why we cannot ask ourselves this very same question while we sleep; there is quite a delicate explanation that I will leave the hungry reader to follow in their own time. But it does involve the parts of our brain that allow us to stand back from ourselves (our frontal lobes) and their diminished state of activation during sleep. In the cases of night terrors; it is quite curious that one actually thinks one is awake but secretly is not. Not simply assuming wakefulness, but they can actually pause and can say "thank god that dream is over and my day has started. Wait, that's an interesting monster trying to disembowel me!". This is virtually unprecedented, and throws the whole notion of dream/wake logic on its head. It screams, of course, of a renegade frontal cortex. The following was my experience.

I was dreaming some forgettable dream about something; then woke to find myself lying in my own bed. I pondered with whether I should get up or go back to sleep, and lay there balancing the proposition. I relented, and decided to return to my slumber. To hell with productivity, I am a university student! As I slowly drifted off to sleep, I heard the wind blow through my kitchen window and rattle a bamboo strip mural of the Chinese kitchen God that normally hangs on the opposite side of a brick wall that borders my bedroom. This snapped me to attention, killing my slumber and started to I grow frustrated. But the wind had stopped now. So, once again I let myself drift back into sleep, and alas, once again the wind picked up and rattled the wall hanging. This time, however there was a quaint whispering noise that accompanied the wind and I came to attention violently. This was weird. Fuck, that was scary whatever that was!! I thought as I lay there on edge. Was this all in my mind? I had no idea. I paused for a moment. Aaah, to hell with it. And back to sleep I went. It's not like I even believe in ghosts anyway.

This time, as I drifted off to sleep, I was pulled into a relaxed slumber quicker than I had imagined. It was like rolling down a hill on some kind of wheeled device and not entirely appreciating the magnitude of the gravitational acceleration. I resisted falling into it, pulled out, then allowed myself to fall back in... existing on the edge of this event horizon like riding a strange sine wave. It was quite fun, like suppressing a sneeze and then encouraging it again; the thrill of control mixed with the pleasure of relinquishing it, well the best of both of them really. And though I could control it, there was an ineffable lag to how this control operated, and whatever my volition produced was a few seconds late in its effect. Yet the siren call of the slumber operated on my willpower in real time; making the whole exercise uncannily dangerous: I could ride the sine wave down with enough leeway to pull it back up, except might find myself wanting to change my mind when the time came to escape. And all the while, the deeper into the relaxed comatose I drifted, the louder and more lifelike the haunting whisper and rattling wind became. And it scared me in a way I cannot describe, but so long as I was master of this game there was just too much enjoyment to be had in surfing the uncanny valley between these stages of the unknown.

After a while curiosity won me over. I decided I didn't really believe in ghosts anyway, so I might as well just fall asleep and see what happens. Or perhaps I simply just loss of control over the physics involved (in whatever I was indeed manipulating) and simply crashed the whole thing through the very diminished state of cognition I had put myself in. Either way; I let the feeling carry me over a little too far and the haunting chattering whisper grew to a loud curdling breath. And it was unmistakably horrible. Think of that fog horn sound in Inception; this sound could have launched an A grade Christopher Nolan film (and a dozen counterfeits) had I actually had the means to record it. Then again I was dreaming; so who actually knows how good it was and how much the Amygdala was simply pitching in. I could hear the sound radiating from somewhere inside my kitchen, and as it grew louder it would simultaneously move laterally along the kitchen wall towards my doorway, always halting before coming into view (as I pulled back from the edge).

Now, it was coming through my doorway and approaching me. And it was black. Formless. It was pure evil. In a state of sheer terror, and with every bit of willpower I could muster, I tried to force myself back awake. And yet the lag was now so profound I could not make the ghostly entity back off, it kept advancing as my brain struggled to accelerate back to life like a 10 ton truck. And then I finally experienced it: I was lying there completely paralysed! And the ghost was upon me. And I was now past the threshold of awareness and falling fast asleep while on the surface of reality, the ghost was free to do as it pleased. It felt like what dying must feel like. With one last effort, I forced myself back to attention and the black ghost did finally back off, the wind died down and I woke up. I was lying there with my heart racing, in a pool of my own cold sweat. Somehow I had won.

And so I got up, got dressed and went about my day. Some time later (after what felt like hours) I seemingly woke up again. Yes, readers... just like my I dream of Anima entry, I had actually experienced a false awakening the first time and did not know it. The ghost approaching me was synchronous with my entry into a dream within a dream though thinking I was awake, I did not know this. Which possibly explains why it was so dangerous and terrifying: my brain did not know how to handle such a paradox without taking some very sensitive and delicate physiological information partitions and essentially smashing them. So what was going on? Emergence delirium and sleep paralysis alike would seem to both involve functional connectivity changes in the frontal cortex during reorganisation of the brain's self-reference networks. Both can involve a kind of intense fear or paranoid delusion however in the case of sleep paralysis; the negative emotions are granted visual manifestation too, making matters considerably worse for the recipient. Given it is is the job of the frontal cortex and associated posterior parietal regions to produce visual images out of virtually nothing in the dream stage (and some would argue: during waking life too) this is entirely understandable. However what strikes me very clearly with both cases is that the frontal lobes have a lot of explaining to do.

What and why they should explain, is a question that I keep asking myself. Over-active brain regions, bordering on seizure threshold can produce some very interesting cognitive changes indeed: Temporal lobe epilepsy would have to be the gold standard. The research by my associate has linked these phenomenon to something that certainly appears to resemble a frontal lobe seizure. Beyond that, I could only speculate. But it does tempt me to ask if the functionally separated frontal networks (experienced during REM sleep) could be failing to properly re-integrate on wakeful emergence, and in the process, to excuse my language... freaking the fuck out. Of course, the brain is actually very good at this (freaking out). Phantom limb syndrome, amphetamine psychosis and PTSD are all prime example of what the brain can do when its afferent inputs do not make for a congruent experience.

And what would a primary consciousness, rooted in the hard integration of Limbic system and Thalamus, make of a frontal cortex that was quite literally loosing its cool? I expect something along the lines of this. As these two divided entities of our dreaming consciousness self re-enter a state of mutual information sufficient to be recognisable as the waking thought, the reciprocal nature of feedback between the two would reliably ensure that the emotional centre was bombarded with confusing and manipulative signalling from a frontal cortex that had utterly lost control of itself. For this is what the frontal cortex does best: micromanage and inhibit our emotions, and these seizure like impulses would have to be interpreted by the limbic system at least in some kind of sense. I suspect the intense fear and emotional association of approaching supernatural entity is exactly how an awakened primary consciousness would interpret a minor seizure emanating from the frontal region.

This network would in turn produce negative recurrent signalling back to the frontal cortex, that might very well (in its over-active state) interpret these emotions to bring about a hallucinatory visual reality to match. Which of course would make plenty of sense: for again, this is exactly what the frontal cortex does so well in waking reality. I admit I know little enough about seizure and the EEG measurements that quantify them to proceed further; but watch this space. I'll be coming back to this subject soon.

Unlike my other dream entries to date, I have little in the way of soft philosophical ramblings to end this piece. I know I am dealing with things I do not fully understand and yet have experienced myself in their full phenomenal intensity, making the problem a frustrating one. This simply drives me to understand, and bring my comprehension to new heights. And this is what I will now do. If there is one thing I draw from all this: do not mess with the frontal lobes; for whatever it is they are doing, they mean serious business. And while I still don't fear ghosts; I may just grow to fear the brain parcellations that so effortlessly creates them in my dreams. Because those really can scare me if they want to.

Images and the sense we give them: the search for the psychadelic

24/10/2014: 12 hours later...
IMAGE: Charlize Cape

This was a simple enough dream, but I have been thinking about it the the most part of the day. It has really hit me where it hurts: like the best dreams that I have, it has left me with something completely indescribable. This time it was not a steel-string guitar piece or an emotion or even a romantic encounter, it was simply a moving image.

And it was at once so personal and so powerfully alive, it remains alive in my memory even now. I have no idea what this dream means to me: all I can do is try to describe it.

The dream was very basic and short. It consisted of me and two friends, Dexter and Andrew. We were sitting in a steel room, possibly compatible with the set of a science fiction movie or even just a university laboratory. The room contained a screen or monitor, mounted on the wall, and we were watching it and talking.

The screen started to display an image: and this is where words will probably fail me. It was simple enough, a red and blue cycling gradient of background colour with an orange ring that grew and rotated in the centre, sprouted hubs, begun spinning on its axis while parts would break off and change then rejoin the centre once again. An vocal exchange between the three of us went approximately like this: 

Hereditary: "See the genesis of the human imagination, expressed in visual form. What we are watching is the psychedelic experience. Such compounds cause human ideas to become experienced as mental images."

Dexter: "But with such intense emotions, and understanding. It is not just images, but the raw feeling that the idea gives too"

Andrew: "......"

Hereditary: "Yes, but the feeling of comprehension and the perception of the image are two aspects of the same thing. You cannot separate them"

Dexter: "So they lack specific causality?"

Hereditary: "Precisely"

Dexter: "And yet the image is there. It is tangible. Why do ideas have so much function but so little form? Even music can be expressed symbolically"

Hereditary: "They can be expressed symbolically too. That is what we are now studying"

Dexter: "Interesting..."

  

Andrew: "I still don't get it"

I continued to watch the image, expand and grow and resemble the life form that it did. I then went through some other dreams and woke up shortly after. I drank my coffee and jumped into the shower. That is when it hit me: I was still thinking about that damned image! It was just there inside of me, evolving through itself over and over, bringing my focus back to itself from whatever else I had been doing, or indeed trying to. I begun to think not about the exchange about the image itself. It was haunting my thoughts as I prepared for my journey to work, and it would not stop.

At work, I decided there was simply not much too it. I had seen the image a thousand times before, from many examples in my life: A Simpsons episode, where homer eats a chilli. Beetles music videos. That "Sick, sad world" TV program that seems to be the only thing on when a television is featured during Daria episodes. These are proverbial tropes of the psychedelic experience are so common in our popular culture they could not have had to work hard to embed themselves in my subconscious for future recall. And yet, on arriving home after work my curiosity got the better of me, and I endeavoured to find this image, or one like it. I had to know from where it has actually come. Three and a half rather painful hours later, and I did not so much as come close. There was nothing on the whole internet that I could derive this image from. Nothing!!! And even worse: the images I could so easily recall that bore its resemblance turned out to look nothing even like it. It was as if those memories themselves had been overwritten and falsely associated by this recent creation from my dreaming imagination. This image was indeed my own and that begun to scare me.

So where had I seen it before? Probably nowhere. For all I know it actually was my own "endogenous idea generation process" (as referenced in the dream conversation) breaking through into my dream reality; and the guise of studying the psychedelic experience had simply thrown me of the trail, with the image eventuating to be a lot less psychedelic than I thought. I have, of course long suspected that the generation of internal imagery played a crucial role in how the cerebral hemispheres integrate information. The thalamus is simply too crowded to represent an entire cerebral hemispheres worth of computations while the limbic system is uniquely ill-suited to convey much at all except for basal evolutionary emotions super-serving the fight/flight responses from the hypothalamus. The corpus callosum, meanwhile has scarcely little to do with information exchange at all; and exists predominantly to enable one cerebral hemisphere to facilitate dominance over the other during the selection of cognitive strategies.

However the psychedelic experience reliably does cause these images to break through into the sensorium. That does not mean that these images are innately psychedelic; as evidenced by this dream and my whole experience in writing this entry. Perhaps the network changes brought about by the psilocybin ligand simply allow the contents of the thalamus to accept internally-generated information from the occipital cortex, that would otherwise be gated from waking experience (in addition to whatever other qualitative changes they produce in one's though process) and in our haste to classify we simply confuse the two. I have suspected this much in the past as well.

All I do know is that in focusing on this image, that has burned itself into my mind ever since, I am overcome with a kind of intense pull into my own visual thinking, and before long I find myself using my own visual thinking to think about visual thinking. From there (as I experienced in the shower) I am free to visually think about just anything I want, and I happened use the occasion at that time to decode a particularly complicated interpersonal relationship I had been rather uncertain what to do with. It worked quite well, then again my visual thinking always does: It is how can think in systems, and in large part how I have picked up so much on the theoretical neuroscience that I have.

Of course, shockingly little has been published (in contemporary times) about the neuroscience let alone the psychology of visual thinking: if you read my bio, you may well suspect that I intend to be one of the first. I had long suspected the power of visual thinking, but I was proverbially made a convert a little earlier this year at a friends wedding. Waiting for the formalities to commence, a particularly sprightly Google programmer was challenging an immunology professor to solve the Sleeping Beauty paradox. The programmer had read some number of books on the subject and was quite eager to leave us all in a state of 'benign bewilderment', as he himself had been for some time. And as he continued on, quoting mathematical arguments for and against I just shut my eyes and let the images take over. 

A web of coloured balls, connected by strings. Strings branch off from the balls, and new balls, with new colours emerge. The set of balls of a single colour combine and collapse. New strings. They have colour now too. Aha.  

...Opening my eyes again, I came to my conclusion:

Hereditary: "It all comes down to whether you believe we exist in a single universe, or as distinct entities in the multiverse doesn't it?"

The expression had virtually deserted the programmers face. All he said was "Yes, that's right". It was especially validating, as I had absolutely no idea what I had just said. Image and emotion: the language we use can only hope to interpret. In a way it was not even that difficult, it was just a neat hack to quickly put intuition into words. Of course I do not always slip into visual thinking so easily, it takes enormous concentration and it rarely comes to my rescue even when I call for it. It thinks with a mind of its own, and it's intrusive interruptions to my field of consciousness are necessarily limited, for countless aeons of evolution have effectively gated this presence in the great evolutionary battle against insanity. This cognitive maginot line is not breached for any old thing (unlike the real maginot line) for the protections are just too strong: It takes a truly powerful idea indeed, or perhaps a little psychoactive substance. Or even just a very interesting dream.

So was this dream of mine simply a vehicle to deliver me this self-referencing totem of my own visual thinking, that I may enter that wondrous trance of inter-hemispheric meditation that little bit smoother? Or was the dream itself essentially self-referential: in that the image was literally a visual analogue for the verbal discussion simultaneously taking place (about the nature of the image) suggesting the validity of image, exchange and dream in one great open system? I wish I could say. But the image I saw still speaks to me. It has a sound and a voice of its own, and it talks to my emotions and my mind's eye in equal measure. And if I had to put its strange message into words, as the exchange it generates refracts within my head, I would probably put it like this:

Image: "Think about what I am"

Hereditary: "...but you make me so curious"

Image: "And that is the secret"

 ★★★

Dogs of War: The Emotions and the Self

7/10/2014: Three months later...
IMAGE: House of Orpheus

A short story. Some time during and around World War 1, a talented young female scientist meets a male journalist and the two become drawn into the vortex of the anti-war movement. One of these people was so far along the Asperger Spectrum it brought the term 'high functioning' into a class of its own; while the other was a turbulent and impassioned soul that fell somewhere between Alexis Zorba and Randle McMurphy in both character and spirit. The complementary dispositions of the pair turned out to be well suited, and they soon fell in love. Three children were born.

Meanwhile; another part of the world, and a very different story. The seventh son of a religious scholar rages against his faith and his family, and is all but disowned. He takes to the cold streets of Warsaw, where he floats about in an existential void before finding his meaning in a distant, demure but elegant young woman. The two dispositions are again, well matched; and the two fall in love. After much European adventure attempting to escape the Nazi dragnet and the disoportunity of the war itself; they settle down... and two children are born.

Some time later, a far away place. One of each of these offspring meet, and if the pattern of this tale is anything to draw predictions from: yes, they too fall in love. The child of the first pair had turned out to be a peculiar mix of autonomous, uncontrolled and unconstrained emotions, that were paradoxically quite mild and subtle in their intensity (having the scientist's genetic contribution to thank for this). He makes of course, a very good jazz musician and finds his unpredictable but ultimately harmless emotional compass a big draw card for the people he meets. The child of the second pair; meanwhile inherits another complimentary pattern and balances extreme emotional intensity with an uncanny sense of pre-frontal emotional control. She finds her formidable emotional restraint, when synergised with her near-limitless emotional energy, a real asset in her own purists likewise. And yes, they raised two children, and yes (once again) it is one of them who sits here typing this blog entry.

My relationship with my own emotions is as such, a complex one. I would say somewhere between Senkaku Islands complex and Israel/Palestine complex. The quadripartite split between control and disinhibition on one axis, along with intensity and emptiness on another, has left me orbiting in a somewhat perplexing figure of eight. For the grass is always greener when you have a limitless spread of role models to emulate, the meta-cognitive control to pick your proverbial poison, and the genetic influences to weight you down into whatever basin of equilibrium your environment has seen to imprint. The following is a dream I had, only some months prior, that (if my impressions hold true) may have heralded a reasonably profound state transition in my own personality. It draws precisely from much of this confusion, and I will do my best to attempt an explanation.

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This dream would rank as the single most euphoric I have ever had. And unlike the simple euphoria of other dreams gone past; it left me with such a feeling that I sensed my entire personalty wanting to change in the months that ensured. While that may sound like a bold enough statement, it is by no means a new phenomenon: dreams always seem to do this to me one way or the other. I can recall once, after having a particular euphoria-infused down hill skiing dream; I resolved to become a skier myself and picked up and became competent at the sport in a remarkably short period of time. With the memory of the euphoria, it seems, along came the drive to perfect. Incidentally, only the night before last; I dreamed of eating a bowl of Cocoa Krispies (or coco pops as they are known to us colonial types) and despite having eaten nothing of the sort for at least the last decade; have since found myself eating approximately 4 servings a day of the regrettable foodstuff. Indeed I am snacking on a generous serving of them right now, even as I type this. So dreams, for better or worse, seem to just do this to me. They are my brain's own in build multi-purpose indoctrination device, and they have always had their way in the end. I suppose euphoria would probably just be their default currency of choice.

This is how the dream went. I was walking through a forest, which was encircled by a large oval-shaped stone perimeter. It had the overall feel of an overgrown European private garden. Everything in the dream was in a highly unconventional gray-scale; with perhaps just a hint of sepia tone or maybe green filter to offset the colourless shading. I was walking through slowly, and suddenly I noticed a person walking in the distant growth. He was a close friend of mine but in spite of this; a kind of intense predatory instinct took over and I proceeded to follow him with intentions that were neither violent nor gentle. As I paced through the thick undergrowth and sharp branches, I closed in on a wooden board-walk and decided this was my time to make my move. And close in for what? By this point I was aware the I was simply playing a game of some description; and the goal was to reach him undetected and unseen though he was still my friend and no harm was to ultimately come to him. As soon as this thought ran through my mind, and I made the attempt to muffle my footsteps and close in both quickly and silently, my mind shifted and my consciousness became at once disembodied and fragmented. It jumped somewhere else.

Some other place: Same garden. There were two Rottweilers sleeping comfortably over each other, and my Qualia or sense of experience became distributed between my own body and their own ephemeral states of existence. They were now waking up, and immediately their attention was drawn to something distant. As I continued to stalk my friend, and slowly closed in on him... they were now beginning to fully arouse from their sleep, and were joining in on the hunt too. I felt an existence that was now completely split between myself and the two other entities that shared my goal, and yet I was acutely aware that my connection to these animals was driven by nothing more than that quaint feeling of purpose that comes with the pursuit of a collective action. And it was euphoric in a way I could never hope to describe. The sense that my control over these animals was finite; and yet their loyalty to me so absolute that I need only intuit a volitional state and it was enough to bring them out of dormancy and into full action. It was like controlling an F-22 fighter jet with nothing but ones own mind, but even better: for they were still autonomous and free of will, but shared one thing with me that was more pure and special to them than it ever had been to me. They contained my own emotions; and to these dogs, this was consciousness itself. I woke up then and there; for the wave of euphoria that accompanied this idea was enough to force me well and truly out of the dream state. And as I lay there in the middle of the night, in the blackness of the bedroom, I felt a mixed sense of companionship and closeness overlaid with distance and melancholy in that I did not know who or what these dogs were, except that they were a part of me I had never completely appreciated. And I now missed the feeling of having this closeness more than I missed anything else in the world.

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If you have read any of my previous entires; you will be quite familiar with my ideas of dreaming; my perspectives on the top down cognitive control states that allows us to dream, and the mechanisms that give these control states the power they have to do redesign our beliefs at the most fundamental, subconscious level. In the words of Douglas Hofstadter, regarding his question of "who pushes who around" in the hierarchy of agency in the brain; I have often suspected the dreaming process as fundamentally nothing more than our own beliefs and deeply nested precept complexes pushing each-other around, with the REM stage the open beta to assess how the organism responds to these changes, and the NREM stage the slow process of encoding / cementing them in as the new political reality. Hofstadter heralds ideas and concepts as the prime mover of the brain, but I would personally contend that even these cognitive powerhouses subserve something deeper.

My conclusion: as with my other euphoric dream experiences, the purpose of this dream was ultimately to engineer in me a profound intensity of feeling; and to then bring me dwell on this feeling in waking life. And in doing so, I am drawn to discover the very thing that replicates it, be it a literal interpretation or an entirely abstract one. I had pondered for some time whether this would turn out to be a living person, some fundamental component of my inner self, the ascendancy to greater responsibility in my workplace or even the simple joy of owning a dog of my own. Which is all a little simplistic when I think about it, for the answer has come to resemble a very different category indeed.

In my own life, my emotions had never been so strong that I could not override them when I had wanted; while they had equally never been so mild that I could ignore them when they were rising up, as rare as that actually was. What I have ultimately come to decide about this dream was that though this experience, and the euphoria that accompanied it; I was being made aware of an entirely different way of using my emotions that I had in the past neglected. And that is neither to micromanage them with an endless series of commands, nor coax them into a frenzy and let them off their leash like a dog of war, but to grant them a kind of limited autonomy and enjoy the process by which they act in my greater interest by interpreting my volitional states, and then proceeding to pursue these states through their own logical means. This philosophy of mind strikes an uncanny resemblance to the one of Walter J Freeman in his book, How Brains Make up Their Mind's, which potentially rates as one of the more intensely complex and indecipherable neuroscientific philosophies of mind at least in my experience. I am surprised I even can draw that much of a link; so much did I struggle to understand the text myself. But perhaps that was all part of the larger point here. Incidentally, I think I might have described a very similar topology of agency in a previous post, the way my own pre-frontal cortex turns back time through an empathic link it voluntarily retains with the limbic system. I had little understanding of what I was exactly trying to articulate back then; but it certainly seems to have been a common trend in my dreaming, if not my thinking too.

If I was to articulate that euphoria again: and yes, I have been searching for it in just about every waking day since; it is the feeling I might have if I were to focus on an idea or goal, and without having to either pre-frontally coax my emotions into a strategic place in state-space to achieve this goal at the meta-cognative level (feigning mild disinterest in a job interview in order to benefit the salary negotiation stage would qualify as example of this)... nor inhibiting them completely, nor even determining their contents and letting them off their proverbial leash at whim; it is the feeling of letting my emotions be my emotions and trusting that they know what the hell they are doing, even when I do not. It is the empathic bond I would ultimately hope to share with my own limbic system; reliably flogged from decades of subserviation and pre-frontal discipline, to not only think for itself but to act with its own sense of agency in the greater good of the self that I constitute. And yes; I have come closer and closer to this exact relationship since the time of this dream, and yes I feel it may even have changed me as a person through the process. Though I am far from complete in this prospective state transition, for if the theories of Walter J are any foundation from which to base my own; such discretisation of the self may be the key not only to emotional intelligence but to meta-intelligence in its own right.

In the cognitive ecosystem of the brain: does true power of choice come not from the hierarchical dominance of one particular agent over another, but from the discrete multitude voluntarily combining to form a collaborative whole? And if so, what potential attractor state could ever guide such consolidation without also being a product of it? Perhaps it is simply the case that the greater the power that we distribute outside our direct sphere of self; the more robust that self actually becomes. It is a counter-intuitive conclusion to be drawn for sure, but it is one I am gradually coming to accept. Perhaps it is similarly the case that the only true freedom of will we posses exists within the very freedom we are first willing to abandon. In any case I continue to remember this euphoria, and I continue to search for it in my waking life. When all is said and done: maybe I will just find myself the proud owner of an adorable new Rottweiler and consider the matter closed.

Music in my Dreams

6/10/2014: Three days later...

 IMAGE: Oh My Dear

The following dreams are accounts I have had (and one I have not) where profound creativity was an apparent epiphenomenon of the auto-creative dreaming process. I say 'epiphenomenon' because far from relying on the dreamers bag of tricks (emotional synthesis and memory association) to get the proverbial point across; the subjective experience and value of these dreams has seemed to survive the apparent waking process and continue on in living, breathing waking memory. In this context I focus on the two most profound displays of human creativity I can personally relate to: music and laughter.

The dream in question (because of which I chose to write this entry) was a strange one for many reasons. I had drifted happily off to sleep listening to Abbey Road, in a strange apartment, next to an even stranger girl. She was in my dreams too... probably from the moment they started. While we get along very well (in real life), her mind has always been a puzzling place, and in this dream world we explored the surreality together; providing each other a valuable feeling of kindredness and companionship to offset the otherwise cold, emotionally distant reality that we were two beings perceiving two very different worlds. I have never entered a sleep stage and taken my real-life companion with me. It was something quite special.

We explored some dirty streets of my subconscious mind, passing dishevelled, boarded up store fronts and broken windows. We settled at something approaching a vagrant's street residence; a collection of wooden crates and make-shift furniture that at once enveloped and colonised the side-walk to form a kind of open-walled house. It contained a surprisingly aesthetically pleasing collection of house plants, pin-ups, semi-functioning electrical equipment and of course the vagrant himself, who was friendly enough and seemed to resemble in personality and in presence, the beach hermit from Local Hero (a film I had viewed some days earlier). Among his possessions, was a radio.

As we stopped and played with it; we managed to produce a song so distinct and melodic it froze me and brought the entire dream-world into sharp focus. It was a haunting, bitter-sweet acoustic guitar track that at once had all the emotional and characteristic timbre and energy of Mark Knopfler, Chett Atkins and Brian May. It sang to me in chords progressions and and delicate licks that have embedded themselves so deeply inside of me I woke up with a near pain in my chest and I have that pain still. Were I any good at composing music (which I certainly am not) I would have transcribed it while I had the chance. I hear that music still and it was at once my favourite song on earth; and yet I will never hear it again.

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Alas, on to brighter examples. My brother, an aspiring advertiser and artistic director, has many dreams involving creativity and he most certainly does put them to work in the way I never did in this instance. He has regularly told me of going to sleep with a complex brief on his mind; and having the answer come to him in his dreams... either quite abstractly, or bone-numbingly concrete to the point. He has likewise told me of dreams he has had involving comedic events, music, or interplays there of; with slow motion cinematic sequencing and a kind of creative quality that has likewise, transferred itself into waking reality and intersubjectivity with remarkable ease. But he was always the creative one between the two of us. He has likewise told me of dreams that have entirely consisted of him watching comedic sketches playing over and over, with himself a passive observer or formless, featureless ghost who's only in-dream ability consisted of being able to laugh manically at the situations his dreaming brain was concocting for his sheer amusement.

Often he has woken himself up with such laughter, and continued laughing there in bed, wide awake, at the ongoing brilliance of the joke. Other times his girlfriend has simply commented the next morning "you were laughing in your sleep again" to which he would suitably reply "yeah, I had another one of those dreams where I laugh". I suppose it is fitting that his success in advertising school came largely from his ability to produce visual images that would make his instructors laugh too.

I mention this; because I had just such a dream only a few days ago myself. It was in the same apartment, overlooking the same tennis court and next to the same cryptic girl. We had drifted off to sleep listening to psybient netradio streamed from my iphone and the next thing I knew I was talking to some old high-school friends/bullies, who were once a proverbial node of my great oscillating identity; (at various times a member of their clique, and others a victim of their excesses). This dichotomy carried itself through into the dream emotional atlas; as it were... and I talked to them in a familiar way only to experience their whispering an behind-the-back gossip no sooner as my back was turned.

As I made casual conversation, and felt the eerie tension of knowing I was neither an insider nor an outsider (the most precarious and dangerous place to be in any social hierarchy). As I gathered my wits to anticipate the impending social dangers contained therein; a splitting sound interrupted the conversation the de-facto group leader fell through the wooden floor he was lying down on, before complaining and recomposing himself and moving to a new section of ground space. In retrospect all the members of the group were in various positions of sitting, lounging and lying on what looked like a wooden stage or perhaps table-top skating ramp.

I turned around to talk to an unnamed dream character and heard the whispers again '...Do we really like him anyway?' ... 'We should make our move' ... 'Who does he think he is? Is he even one of us?' ... 'Nah he is ok' ... 'Leave him alone' ... 'No. Let's get him' ... and so on it went. My tensions were really up now. I turned back to talk to them in the casual manner once more. The ensuring conversation was thick with tension you could cut with a knife. I could identify by voice, as well as by body language, who had sided with me and who against me. I asked a question. Everybody froze: it was not intended to be symbolic but somehow, everybody now knew it's answer would decide my fate. It was just one of those questions that has meaning you did not intend to give it. The leader leaned up on one elbow to give his answer, and everybody was on edge for his response...

CRACK. The leader fell through the broken flooring again and tumbled head over feet into an inclined abyss bellow, and everybody started laughing with an energy I cannot describe. I was laughing too. I ran over to look down into the hole he had descended into; and he was collapsed in a heap of sawdust and broken wood in a rag-doll position and my laughter picked up further. And that is when I woke up; laughing to myself with hideous satisfaction. "What the hell are you laughing at?" The girl next to me inquired, waking up herself. It was quite hard to describe. I continued laughing there for some time, just as I laugh now as I write this. The image, context and the timing were utterly indescribable. I at once understood and envied my brother a great deal. He was certainly lucky to have this.

๑๑

So what does all this tell me? Seeing that this latest entry has been remarkably neuroscience free for a change. Nothing that I did not already know (or at least suspect). And that is that our dreams are likely to be mediated and modulated by the highest stages of our neurocognitive networks; if not the commanding echelons of our consciousness itself. That rare gift of human creativity; the ability to evoke an intense emotion through a mathematical arrangement of sound frequencies, or the capacity to strip all anger and aggression from a situation by pointing out its utter ridiculousness with nothing more than an unconventional selection of adjectives and good sense of timing, it comes to us when we sleep just as readily as it may when we are awake. Sometimes even more so. And we may never turn these creative insights into anything of value unless we are similarly creative in waking breathing actual life; for something of the gift becomes stripped away when our brain requires itself for our daily survival. Musically, I know I am not capable of transferring this into everyday life. Alas my brother sees no clear distinction between the creative arrangements he sees in his dreams and the ones he produces through his chosen vocation. I in turn make some effort to interpret my dreams creatively through this blog; but that is where my in-dream creativity starts and stops.

Are we all profoundly creative beings, hampered only by our own brain topology as cerebral pre-frontal blood flow returns to basal homoeostatic levels; our Serotonin and Norepinehrine rise to prepare us for our days journeys and our biparte states of consciousness re-integrate for the eternal game of trying to out-whit outsmart of foes? I have wrestled with this question often: why diminished states of consciousness can so reliably be conducive to some of the pinnacle achievements of consciousness itself, and all we call human. It is actually one of the many curious subjects of my project right now (human thought processes under Xenon induced disassociation) and I have no answer, though I feel I am increasingly close, at least theoretically.

All I know is that the blurred-lines between the boundaries of our own awareness and that which we give over to our blind reflex arcs and instinctive urges and muscle memory can be more than a proverbial treasure trove for the highest faculties of our minds; they can in cases be an oasis too. The fragmentation of the self yields many dividends, if done correctly... but the question of what does the fragmenting and what 'done correctly' exactly entails evades me quite reliably. Well, maybe not for much longer. My creativity might be dream bound but my curiosity is a free. For that I am thankful.

Faster than Light: The Origins of the Imagination

19/09/2014: Greylead notes, one month later...

IMAGE: nojoさん

This is the first dream I have written for quite some time. Funny how travel and study gets in the way of creativity, when its not otherwise serving to directly cultivate it.

As such, this is possibly the most intense and meaningful dream I have in quite some time; I think it is fitting that I re-enter my analytical adventure through another dream introspection entry. The dream begins with me piloting a spaceship through the universe. What has since struck me (with a remarkable interest) is that the entire dream was rendered in a kind of cel-shaded cartoon vision. As far as dreams and visual imagination go: only the most intense I have get this level of detail and they haunt me with their beauty every single time. This dream was equally unusual in that it took place in several spatial scales at once, and my perception as equally split between several different elements of the dream world in parallel. You really have to experience it to understand it.

As both the captain of the space ship, the crew and the collective ship itself, I was exploring alternate universes and sub-dimensions of existence. The purpose of the mission was to tunnel into the substrates of our own reality and communicate with transaware/subconscious entities that inhabited these worlds. As I would go deeper and deeper into these sub-realities, the beings and general environment would grow ever more cartoon like and primitive. Where, at the surface, reality was a crisp representation bordering on and approaching a fine work of animated art or classical Japanese woodprint; the further, the deeper I would travel from my own layer of existence the more the quality would decay in its exquisiteness and its beauty.

I would perceive these layers of reality I ventured through in a kind of simultaneous/parallel visual experience where nothing overlapped but everything was immediately perceptible. It was like having 360° vision but more complex and nuanced still. It is very difficult to describe exactly how this felt, but in the context of the dream it was intuitive. The beings I encountered along the way were of an intelligence or awareness that mostly rivalled their complexity of animation. Deeper and deeper we went through the cartoon worlds until we reached a layer seemingly inhabited by stick figures on a matte pastel background. They were organised in a society and they were looking at us with intent curiosity.

In this layer of reality, we were all perceived as gods (myself, the crew and the ship collectively). And indeed we were. We had forced our way into their existence from an ethereal upper realm that entirely super-served their own. It was apparent to me that our mission was to educate these beings; to teach them the wisdom we knew from our own world and allow them to prosper in peace, so that higher forms of reality could function more fluidly or even just function at all. Like a radio frequency pulse that causes the magnetisation vector of subatomic nuclei to align in an fMRI, producing a coherent image; we were interacting with these minute beings as a way of modifying the very substrates of our own reality, at the level we in turn could experience it.

We taught them how to exist as a society. We gave them rules based on our own. We showed them how to live better lives; with the promise that if they did so, they may eventually exist in our world too. What they did not know was that they already existed in this afterlife we promised them, they just didn't know it. They would follow our instructions in the hope that one day they may exist some place better, but all we really taught them to do was to perceive themselves in the way we ourselves were capable. We showed them to live in peace and how to cooperate. We taught them not to fight, we taught them not to be ambitious or to lie. We taught them to avoid magic.

Magic: for that was what we had. A technology sufficiently sophisticated, it could be mistaken for nothing else. And we told them to avoid finding it and using it for themselves. We wanted to smooth our own reality, and all the layers in between, not fill it with noise. They might discover it and find their own way our of their world, but this was simply not how we wanted it, as the ultimately selfish beings were. There were ways they could find their path to our level of perception, but we only sanctioned a single way. We tried to act in their interest but only really acted in our own.

And yet, one of the beings rebelled. He would not cooperate; neither with the other entities in the society nor with us and our guidance. "Fuck you, I have magic" he would say. And he certainly did. For the rules of his reality did not apply to him. He had found out how to bend them, how to break them. And he did what he wanted. And while there were those that tried to stop him; in equal part there were those he inspired and put at odds with the lessons we carefully and painfully delivered. Nothing could stop him except for us, for the powers he found were the very ones we had always had. And yet he was no heretic, we knew this. He was simply too advanced for this sub-world and he was breaking through its simple rules. He had found his way to the next level of at a faster pace than our prescriptive formula could ever have allowed. And what could we do? There was nothing we really could do. So we brought him up to our reality, as much to reward him as to remove him from from the environment where he was the most dangerous.

Together, we all came back to our own reality, alas our world had its own contradictions. We too had magic beings proclaiming to represent higher worlds; and others who called them heretic. We had no idea what the truth of it was and largely had to decide for ourselves. We too were divided about how special they actually were; whether they were the key to our transcendence or serious offenders to the good will and intention of invisible beings from realities yet above our own. We diplomatically had to explain to these sub-world beings we spirited to our own level, as they found their own transcendence through their skill and through their adherence to our lessons; that we were actually far from the gods we proclaimed to be, and just a species from a higher version of reality with our own dubious concepts of god to contend with. And so our heats would sink as we watched the idea dawn on the recently liberated sub-world entities... that far from transcending their existence, they had largely ended up exactly where they had started off... Somewhere bellow a place they could not and indeed may never reach; and some place above a world they had once controlled but would now find no comfort in returning to. We brought them up to our own world, only to deny them the happiness they may have enjoyed in mastering their own. Because we were ultimately selfish beings. And our reality was more important than their happiness. I woke up.

๑

I think this dream ultimately speaks for itself. At once, a critique of society and human social organisation, and similarly an unfolding and exposition of the paradoxical nature of religious order. But that is too easy. This dream was also about me, and my own mind. I know this because in reading over these very words, a familiarity runs through me and I am aware that this process I describe is ultimately something sacred; from deep within. I would probably say that it represents how my ideas form and how they come into existence. I know this because I am a visual thinker; and being a visual thinker, the images that form in my mind underpin my own reality, and will always be more real to me than anything from the external world can ever be. Those are just representations; what I see when I gaze inward is indistinguishable from my own self and extends well beyond it. And in these beautiful images, in all these cell shaded works of art I saw in this dream; indeed I did see myself reflected back.

I suppose I have to accept that ultimately; my thoughts and my ideas are selfish entities too. They cooperate to ascend from the chaos of my subconscious and be noticed for just long enough to enter into my thought process for a fleeting second; only to be overwritten and undone by some other thing from some other place and fade back into oblivion. On the night of this dream: an entire cohort of my ideas seemingly combined to give me a whole dream sequence, and even then... this barely made its way into the hurried scribbles of a grey-lead pencil on an A4 page. Had I not been trying to impress a girl (...that's you J) at this time I may never have done even that much. I now take the time to put these thoughts into a medium of some permanence... being, this very blog entry... but this may so easily never have happened either. And this is why the ideas fight hard for relevance: they know the world they invariably occupy and understand its pain and its difficulty and, like the humans they both sub and super-serve, cry only for transcendence from it. We are thankfully there to help them do this, but they have every reason not to trust us, for we are not the gods we claim to be.

...and like these ideas; we humans are not so dissimilar in our own strategy, in our own layer of existence. We must ultimately decide for ourselves whether to conform with our surroundings and transcend our limitations by following the rules, and rising as one collective whole... or to rebel and achieve this as ourselves, for ourselves, using the very magic we discover along the way. It may not be popular but it may just work for us. And so my attention goes; and so my imagination flourishes. I reward neither piety nor heresy to my own intentions and instructions when giving the gift of my mind over to the thoughts that arise within me. Because at the end of the day; all I care about is another good idea.

Rewinding my Dreams

6/05/2014: One week later...
IMAGE: violscraper

As mentioned in my post entry: I seldom feel any anxiety or emotion in my dreams, though there are exceptions to this. The following entry will seek to understand how it is that I am seemingly able to suppress my negative in-dream emotions, and discuss a novel way this process appears to play itself out in my phenomenological experience. It involves an unusual in-dream lucid skill: the ability to turn the flow of time backwards.

There was once a time where, quite reliably, I would have nightmares where very bad things would happen. Not violent things, not surreal things... just bad things. Falling down and loosing a tooth, having a favourite object break. Things that would really upset me in real life, that in the context of the dream world became amplified with such an intense emotion and sense of loss and broken attachment that it was quite reliably above and beyond what waking consciousness could produce. In a sense, the coping mechanisms of real life were suppressed and I would experience such a raw sense of defeat and regret that even the relief of waking would not entirely make up for it. These are dreams I still have, but with one recent innovation that seems to ameliorates the suffering considerably.

It probably started happening about 6 months ago, and they go a little something like this: something terrible happens, a tell-tale dread, anxiety and feeling of loss would start to rise within me, but then a creeping lucidity would enter my thoughts and a resonant feeling or intuition would speak to me from a level of awareness above and beyond the dream world itself. It has no voice per se; though it does seem to speak with one. It feels like integrated sense of understanding; raw unstructured thought, and it has no sound but it talks none the less. It could even be the volition to communicate that precedes the phenomenon of spoken voice by the most infinitesimal fraction of time, but this is all. The proto-voice essentially says to me "calm down, this is not so bad. This is not even real" and for a faint second, without having my dream delusion broken; I feel calm and in control. A happiness and sense of relaxation then flows over me, and for a moment there is nothing in the physical world that can not stop me experiencing this happiness. Alas I am still dreaming; and as far a I can tell, the object of my loss is very much real, and so this emerging cognitive dissonance brings my focus sharply to the problem at hand:I am unhappy, and I do not want to be. Emotion becomes reality and reality changes in my dreaming-mind from the role of hunter to the hunted.

With a feeling of complete control, and no tangible lucidity beyond the realisation that my loss is within the power of my own perception, I start to rewind time. Yes, literally turn it backwards. The dream world spins back, at slightly faster a pace than it has proceeded, and all my emotions are sequentially experienced in reverse. Slowly the unhappiness and loss gets 'sucked up' until the happiness I experienced at the moment of creeping lucidity is all I can now feel. And I am standing somewhere back at the start of the dream event, now perfectly able to avoid the choice that leads to that disdainful consequence.

So, questions: How do I rewind a dream without being lucid? This is something I could only ever only hope to articulate. In many ways it feels like flying (in dream) in the sense that it becomes the most intuitive action possible; like something you could replicate after waking if only you tried hard enough. I have actually lost count of the number of times in childhood that I would learn to fly in dreams by harnessing this exact feeling of control and then wake up wondering if I might fly in real life, if only I could remember that feeling. In the dream world: going against known physics does not come cheaply, mind... you pay for it with raw determination, power of mind, and a strange esoteric memory of how it was done the last time. In a way, rewinding time in a dream feels like the second stage of learning how to fly, in that it is much harder and takes much more of the same substance to achieve but remains quintessentially the same kind of control using the same cognitive process.

So what is actually happening here? I will reserve my analysis of flying in dreams for a future post, I feel it has a lot more depth to it than I can make space for here. But the rewinding aspect I feel is an representation for what might actually be taking place in my brain. An outbreak of emotion, erupting from my limbic system, and my pre-frontal cortex activating and dismantling these emotions one by one, probably in the sequence they were created. In waking reality: this would of course be an entirely conscious process... using mindfulness, deductive reasoning, objective awareness and experience to dissemble ones unpleasant moods in particular sequence, like a puzzle box. Knowing this sequence is thus knowing the emotional state's vulnerability and allows us, through our own pre-frontal wisdom, to overcome our base emotional volition on a daily basis. Except that in the dream world; our pre-frontal cortex is both actively suppressed and also potentially functionally segregated from us. In short: it is not even ours to do with as we like.

I hypothesise that the voice of reason, this whisper from the angels that descends in my dreams to assure me all is well is my own pre-frontal cortex taking some degree of pity on me, trying to survive as best I can without its magnanimous computations to make all right in the end. To fully restore integration with the pre-frontal cortex and its emergent secondary consciousness might end the dream state all together, however it seems simple communication is well within the safety margins. I conclude it thus reasonable that my particular feeling of willpower and control that allows me to both rewinding my dreams/unwind my emotional sequences, and to defy the physical laws of the dream world itself, is simply the act my my integrated consciousness communicating with and taking some degree of control over my disintegrated, and parallely conscious frontal networks. All the relevant theory holds that it may be entirely possible for a brain region to be extremely powerful, and yet not be the object of central conscious awareness or control due to intricacies in how network topology is layered. In summary, I feel that despite such design (at least according to the Hobson model) rendering primary and secondary consciousness functionally discrete; such segregation or integration exists on a 'necessary spectrum' and thus each element can potentially modulate the parameters of this spectrum on which they sit to a very limited extent. This has been my own experience and holds strongly to my own theory of consciousness.

So what does it feel like? being able to call ones pre-frontal regions onto negative emotional states like a proverbial attack dog, instead of having to man the controls personally using raw integrative conscious experience? Pretty nice, wouldn't you believe. It really makes me respect what the pre-frontal cortex does in waking life (or more to the point: what I do with it myself) though I am in the end quite glad that is always there and always a part of me, for I would hate to call for it only to have it fail to come to my rescue. Perhaps this is why I micromanage it; and always keep it a proverbial synaptic hop away from whatever centrally coherent nexus of information integration I call my sense of self. When all is said and done though, I am eternally grateful that when I enter the dream state, and my secondary consciousness gets let off its proverbial leash; it still thinks enough of what is left that instead of bounding off into the sunset and making its escape; it opts instead to have its fun but never so far from its owner that it cannot intervene and assist when the beloved master cries for help. When I think on it like this; the ontological implications questions raised are just about endless.

In a previous post I made the suggestion that 'I am my complexes' and yet I enable these very complexes by accepting and observing their existence in the first place. A slightly more chilling analogy might be that my 'complexes are me' but only so long as they wish to sub-serve themselves to a higher integrated whole. If dreaming constitutes both the planned disintegration of that whole, and the opportunity to experience re-integration in a voluntarily capacity, then sanity is truly an emergent property of protoconscious dynamics. Nothing more, and nothing less, and the agency for producing and maintaining sanity is as much in our own minds as it is in the hands of elements unseen and unknown.

...perhaps this is why I do love the philosophy of neuroscience so deeply. There would simply appear to be no good answers; only good questions.