This was a dream I had while on holiday in New Zealand. I would probably have to say, this is the best dream I have ever had in terms of its ability to seed my curiosity. If ever I felt that dreams could be not only auto-creative, but creative to an extent that it equals waking experience, it is after a dream like this.The dream begins with myself and a good friend Liam exploring the suburb of my birth, Northcote. In this dream (as in real life) there is a rather large and strange radio antenna, that as a child I had always contemplated the purpose of (seen here from street view) and we were advancing upon it in the dream with some notion that it held military or secret intelligence significance. The next few moments of the dream escaped my usually sharp dream-recollection abilities, for reasons that will soon become extremely apparent. However several minutes later I found myself alone, in a strange Church at the base of this antenna, walking through the darkness.
I walked up to a group of people kneeling and chanting, with their eyes closed. They were repeating mantras in another language, and I felt myself appalled at their religiosity and dedication to such pointless ritual. In real life, despite my atheism I am deliberately understanding of religions practices such as these, as I can typically rationalise them on their sociological or psychological merits. However in this dream, I was full of arrogance for what I witnessed.
I listened to what one of the chanting women was saying. It was in another language and yet, no sooner had I turned my attention to it, it was suddenly within my comprehension. And they were saying something that went like this:
Acolyte: "All life exists in the purpose of transcending its organisational structure and its hierarchy, not via ascension through competition but through an ability to form higher structures that subersume these hierarchies"
...
Acolyte: "As biological life forms we are just a single pattern consisting of other patterns under our control. As we identify higher order patterns from which we are, in turn subject to influence... we may assume this influence for ourselves and ever closer we become to the source of all things"
It was fairly non-controversial new age content, typical of Spiral Dynamics, some branches of Buddhism and possibly all religious doctrines once you dig into their theology. This is not to say that it is wrong, or even contrary to scientific knowledge... however I would argue that such ideas are a little too abstract to base ones ethical compass on, or even to take too seriously... and that's more or less the extent of my criticisms.
I remember thinking at this point "all these words might make sense, but are so much richer and more meaningful when accessed through a scientific/rational perspective". And interestingly enough, a multitude of emerging scientific fields are actually producing ideas consistent with these. It was probably my post-hoc knowledge of them that allowed me to so quickly reverse engineer the language of this dream in the first place. Since dreams are so deeply emotional, in waking life it was simply a matter of searching for the sentence that produced the same emotional valence, which I found by applying a particularly sensationalist filter to some of the more common ideas to emerge from complex systems. This is my favoured technique for detailed dream recollection. So there I was, accepting of the message but critical of the way it was being delivered and the significance with which it was being interpreted. I immediately felt sorry for the kneeling acolytes, for they were essentially being seduced by scientific concepts and lacked the self-reflection to know it.
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Sanity Lost...
It was about this point that the dream changed and revealed its major surprise. As I stood back, quite aware of the conflicting interpretations of the contents of the chanting voices yet resolute to take my hard-headed view of things, something inside compelled me to join the chanting to experience it for myself. I did this, and as I let my scepticism go for the slightest moment, a gripping feeling emerged from deep inside and I felt something that was almost half way between the feeling of laughing, crying and having an orgasm. And as I chanted the words, the feeling grew and grew. It was not that the words held any more significance or that I understood them with any more depth: it was simply that their detached meaning seemed to reach right inside and take effect at a truly emotional level. The affinity I felt for the ideas contained were almost like the affinity one has for a close relative, and I felt personally attached to the meaning behind the words.
It was about this time that something truly broke through, and the words turned to music. I had grown so detached and non-conscious of the chanting that it has become automatic, and now that automatic sound production had shifted into an entirely different form, and the music started to grow louder and louder. It was the second time my brain has produced truly notable in-dream music and this time it was humbling in its clarity. It produced the same emotion to the chanting of the mantra, and by that I mean the emotion did not change, but it was now mapping directly onto a musical sequence and not spoken word. It was at this point that I kind of lost myself, and started to open my eyes. All the people in the room who were previously chanting were now staring at me: I had been screaming in a kind of zeal and realised that I had made quite a commotion. I was momentarily unsure if they held me to be a crackpot or an messiah or how they could even tell the difference (a criticism continue to hold regarding religious belief derived from prophetic sources). This curiosity gave way and it was not long before the internally generated music burst through, leaving me in a state of hysterical laughter and without self control. The emotions were just that strong.
The acolytes dispersed and shortly after that, my mother entered the room. I was prone on the floor, struggling to stand up, with the music still projecting loudly from inside my own skull. I tried explaining to her what was happening to me from a scientific perspective, to restore my credulity and alleviate the shame of my state of being. But as if a hysterical child; all I could convey was more hysteria and all words and logic evaded my grasp. She looked down on me with disappointment and pity and I knew at that point, I was truly lost. The music kept on playing and I was paralysed by its beauty, and destroyed by this loss of control. I was unsure if I even cared, but part of me certainly did.
UPDATE
I have produced this song from memory, with great assistance from 'Marcelles' :)
Feel free to listen while you read!
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Psychodynamic Neurology
Can you ascertain the physiological dynamics of this dream might have come down to? I certainly can't, but I still enjoy the challenge. In my view, this dream more or less reduces to my own brain wrestling for the interpretation of a single idea (metaphysical transcendence). The perspective of rational/scientific interpretation would most certainly have emanated from various sections of my Orbitofrontal Cortex (Specifically BA11 and BA10) and perhaps the Left Hemisphere more generally. I say this because the sheer act of 'standing back' and manipulating an concept in its abstract representation seems to be a preferred cognitive style of the Left hemisphere, while detached reasoning and logical analysis, both conscious and unconscious, appear to emanate from BA11 and BA10 respectively. It is also a reasonable assumption that my Superior Temporal Gyrus, specifically BA22 was also heavily involved as part of this network, given that it is primarily responsible for the 'output' of internally generated language.
From the perspective of the religious ecstasy, I have a lot more fun trying to decipher what might have taken place. Plenty of evidence to date points to the Right Temporal Lobe being at the epicentre of religiosity in the brain, however have come to consider a more detailed picture involving feedback between the Amygdala, the Insula and Visual Cortex as holding more intricate clues. This especially comes into focus when one joins together the role of the Precuneus in Religiosity, and the role of the Visual Cortex more generally. Factoring heavily into this is also the role of interoception and the Insula, as well as the veridicity of internally generated experiences.
Taken together, I have come to conclude that brain ultimately seeks to generate a cohesive reality from a substrates of interdependently competitive brain regions/networks, and will generally settle on some compromise between what is internally most coherent, and most externally (socially) sanctioned. In my own case: the entire dream was an attempt to see things from the other side of my own tribal theological outlook, and this I did with great success. Despite the euphoria of experiencing my own scientific world view through in such a profound and intense way: my own shame at being drawn into religious tradition left me with mixed feelings. As much as an indictment as this entire piece may be on ritualised religious practice, in the end the dream was just as much an indictment on the atheistic convention of striping away emotion from the pursuit of knowledge.
I do not think these feelings are in of themselves harmful, just as I do not see the Amygdala or the Insula as in of themselves 'worthless appendages' in the phylogeny of the human brain. However it is clear that, as a society we may need to have a deeper conversation about what exactly constitutes 'human experience' and critically analyse such experience before rejecting them out of hand.
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