For reasons not exactly important; I have been studying all too hard this last 12 months and promised myself I would spend a good few weeks lost in a videogame. Well, I could not think of a single better game to do this with than Skyrim.
So third day in a row of hypnotic gaming sessions; the kind where you tell yourself you will play for an hour or two, eat dinner, practice some guitar, do bit of work and go for a run and if you can squeeze all that in, maybe an hour before sleep... but next thing you know the sun has risen and you have not turned your head away from the monitor in over 12 hours.
...so not wanting to get into a snowball of going to sleep later and later, as would normally happen in such situations; I set my alarm for 10:30am. 5 hours sleep? It's a novice mistake. Jerry Seinfeld summed it up fairly succinctly with his "Day guy" and "Night guy" routine... that despite your best intentions; the moment that alarm goes off you are essentially a 'whole other you' that could care less about the intentions of the night before.
...however this past few days has not all been play with no work. I have been working my way through a book about glucocorticods (a stress hormone and neurotransmitter). These typically rise half an hour before the time a person was told they would be woken; and thus easing the waking process. The brain (which phenomenally enough can actually record and track time during unconscious and semi-conscious states) rationalises this, I think the theory goes; as "well if I'm going to be woken anyway; may as well be as stressless as possible by gradually pre-empting the stress state". I remember thinking "So why can't my brain do that?". See, I can never seem to wake up peacefully, let alone easily. I always feel overslept, and often create the most absurd rationalisations for why I should sleep past my alarm in the twilight of my consciousness that follow that damned buzzer.
This morning was different. Scary different. 10:25am I was awake, eyes wide open, to the sound of murderous argument. Screaming, blood curdling, thumping and banging. Swearing in and out of English and in and out of some other language I could only assume as Mediterranean, possibly Maltese. I happen to have a neighbour who fits this approximate description and has episodes like this with some regularity, so I sat and listened with voyeuristic horror. It was far too awkward to be conducive to going back to sleep. As I listened on, I could almost make out what she was saying... it was almost in between english and some other, etherial or eleven language out of a fantasy universe. This made me feel a little uneasy but I did not attend to it... I was too focused on trying to understand the words. It was almost on the very edge of comprehension, slippery in my cognitive sketchpad but addictively so.
After some time I got up to get a closer listen. Curiosity got the better of principle it seems. As I stepped outside, I felt a distinct wash of feeling come over me. It was hot. It was sunny and windy. I felt uneasy and vulnerable. It felt almost as if I were just waking up, and after this eerie sensation passed, I noticed that I could not hear a single thing. Several laps of my buildings exterior confirmed that there was no shouting and certainly no smashing, banging, or otherwise spontaneous projection of household items that I had heard to vividly only seconds ago. I could not even see a car in the driveway. So I walked back up the stairs and back into my apartment; and here it was eerily silent too. The sound of a hammer tapping away, several houses down. A small bird tweeting. The sound of the wind. Nothing. I lay back down on my bed but could not even entertain the notion of re-entering sleep. Then it dawned on me... was this one gigantic auditory halucination?
Auditory hallucinations scare me. They should scare you too. They are somewhat unique to psychotic episodes and Schizophrenia in general, and among one of the most intrusive and disruptive kinds of hallucination one can expect to encounter. Visual hallucinations, they are easy business. People will even pay good money to have those. Auditory ones, well lets just say if you start having those after a little tomfoolery with certain exogenous ligands on the 5-HT2A receptor then you are pretty damned unlucky. They are scary for a reason; perhaps its just a degrees-of-synaptic distance thing.
...If this is what I experienced; it is something that I brought this on myself. I have been following the work of another Stanford anthropologist, who managed to infiltrated various religious and occult organisations and found a common phenotype the meditation, prayer and trance states they all share. I won't go into this so much now; but from my scientific lens it appeared quite clearly that such practices are designed to train the brain's Default Mode Network to have a greater capacity to interface with the Primary Consciousness. In theory, imagination and decision through intuition should both be strengthened. The brain could revert to a REM dreaming paradigm in waking states and force decision making onto a pliable and predictable limbic system and boost productivity in god knows how many novel and exciting ways.
Likewise, (in theory): the occasional hallucination might break through into conscious perception. Lurhman characterised this double edge, and thus characterised religion as a whole; as the ability to boost one cognitive domain whilst creating a mythology or coping mechanism to deal with or ameliorate the fallout simultaneously generated by it. By itself, prayer is zero sum brain training. You get something, you loose something. In the context of a mythology-laden faith; it is essentially zero-sum plus. She briefly alluded to one such technique she was instructed on by (I believe some wiccans) by that made so much intuitive sense to me I could reverse engineer it from what I already know of the systems involved (and my own lucid dreaming) and begun experimenting. Last night was about the fifth day of this experiment.
...perhaps I should not feel too bad. Luhrman experienced hallucinations too, after about a month, but also enjoyed the changes taking place in her. She did not have to rationalise what in any mind should be an enormously invasive and violating experience though a filter of spirituality in order to cope with it. For her, she could avoid the onset of terror though her own mechanisms, which I largely suspect were scientific in nature. And in my own way, this is what I have done.
I wanted to wake up at 10:30am. In the dream state, this would involve (at least in my brain) the DMN mediated aspects of the Secondary Consciousness changing the dream environment so drastically that lucidity was gained by the Primary Consciousness as the incongruencies reach a critical mass; brain activation as a whole rises, network topology dynamically restructures to increase awareness by merging the shared information of the Secondary into that of the Primary, and the resulting feedback-loops ensure all of the above, stage by stage, perpetuate us into waking reality. However, if the DMN does not want to wake up, well are you pretty much screwed? Could it simply refuse to change things at all, leaving the Primary Consciousness stuck like a rat on a wheel? I do not suspect mine ever wants to wake up. Even while awake I still tend to spend 2-3 hours a day voluntarily engaged in structured daydreaming, which probably says a lot.
So, what had changed? This is where stuff really gets interesting. I had originally envisaged the meditation/prayer cognitive enhancements as a way of boosting the raw computational output of the DMN. But I think its quite different. I feel, that without actually weakening the DMN in any significant way; the purpose of these exercises is rather to allow the Primary Consciousness (characterised by some topological shared-information state between the corticothalamic and limbic circuits) to gain further control of the Secondary Consciousness. Which would pretty much turn my theoretical model for waking up a little on its head. A dominant Primary Consciousness would always know it was dreaming... it would be the Secondary that would, for lack of better words, lack lucidity by being compelled to form the very reality that the Primary Consciousness orchestrated was by observing in the first place. Causality gets a little awkward here, because in practice it could easily turn out to be both models at once. Douglas Hofstadter addresses this paradox in his book quite intelligently.I guess it is possible that this esoteric training has simply reversed this power balance: in waking up when I intended, my Primacy Consciousness was able to perceive anxiety and stress (which was nothing more than a timely upsurge in glucocorticoid molecules) and was thus able to coerce my Secondary Consciousness to follow suit, which it did by filling in the proverbial gaps and finding something stressful to concoct for my senses. Thus, in waking at the time I had intended I had potentially gone so far as to entertain lucid dreaming of a sense in the moments following actual waking. Except there was not much lucid about it; for the lucidity was entirely in the wrong place.
It does make sense that any religion or spiritual practice would promote a cognitive training regime that promoted the primacy of sensation and perception, and thus allow this domain of cognition to pressure the much more powerful and creative parts of our brain to construct this reality from the top down. For one, it keeps social systems in perfect order. Secondly, it allows one to quite literally observe the supernatural by actually believing/intuiting it in the first place. And I guess all in all, it keeps the whole memeplex of religion in healthy working shape, which is probably commendable if you happen to be a metaphysical entity wanting to survive in a competitive world with many other belief systems.It does me to wonder, however, whether such a cognitive rebalance actually makes you happy in a meaningful and lasting way. All I can say is; it woke me up this morning, and for that I am certainly thankful. I have no doubt that my body secretes glucocorticods every morning to give "day guy" his marching orders... it is sad in my case that such a hierarchically dominant DMN is able to veto the control I attempt to exercise over my own body. I am no fan of religious practice and nobody is more passionate about qualities of cognition and consciousness that emerge from the DMN than I; however when it comes time to wake up in the morning... all things considered.... the Default Mode Network can seriously go and fuck itself.
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