I am my own complexes

18/03/2014 On Waking... (after coffee)

I had an interesting dream last night. I call it interesting precisely because it was so enjoyable when it should have been anything but. It has been a common dream motif to date.

I believe it involves a breakdown of my core being into several interlocking dynamic elements, and the frustration and chaos of experiencing myself not as a cooperating whole but a as a feuding multitude. Of course, in reality it is and will always be both, at least according to some philosophies of the mind. Am I then an emergent property of these competing dynamic agents? I suppose, if so... then to venture down among these agents would be by definition an exciting and overwhelming experience. This is where this dream theory begins.

The stage of the dream was a sprawling multi-level building, no doubt a wealthy persons apartment. I cannot recall how I came here but that narrative had very little to do with the dream anyway. On waking I immediately identified it as the Museum of Old and New Art: the sprawling industrial museum of a billionaire recluse, the grand temple for intellectual atheism and science inspired art, and one of my favourite places on earth. I was there for my birthday earlier in the year.

The dream involved a variety of individuals, caricaturesque in their form... and perhaps on some deeply metaphysical level: eigenvectors of my own psyche. Old men in vintage suits bearing weathered firearms, narcotics addicts with long mains of perfect hair, models, corrupt politicians, the wealthy and the dangerous and the brilliant and the half-insane, all together as one. They appeared to be involved in a dynamic power struggle that assembled and dispersed networks of alliances in style very reminiscent of the TV drama House of Cards, which I was (little coincidence) watching  around at the time.

Throughout this dream I was a nameless central protagonist, an empty form; a ghost that could communicate with the assembly of elements but play no physical part in what was taking place. I was an observer; albeit a dynamic one who was present but at once immune to and detached from the consequences of all around me. As I would drift around the sprawling complex, the artwork and furniture would update itself, a phenomenon that bore the internal dream narrative of "they are so wealthy they can afford to change their decorations every few hours" but was probably just standard-form dream incongruencies being rationalised to maintain the suspension of disbelief.

As I wandered around, I encountered the characters attempting to murder each other with mixed success. In equal proportions; I witnessed scenes of impromptu, manic lovemaking in hidden corners and discrete locations of the building by many of the same characters supposedly committed in political warfare. The dream continued for an extremely long time, as far as vivid dreams normally do... I lost track of how many times characters would form, align, betray, reform and so on... it just seemed to go forever. The mountain of corpses that accumulated were ever resupplied by new characters, at once completely new and individual personalities and at the same time, dynamic constructs from aspects of all previous characters too. Nothing every truly died: and nothing new was ever really born.

However; this was a dream I thoroughly enjoyed. It bore some semblances to the 'dream trap' descried at the beginning of this blog, but without any of the same anxiety, terror or urgency, claustrophobia or desire to exit the dream. It was an interesting and fluid performance, and the whole way through I was fully aware of how corrupt and comedic it all was. Likewise I seemed to enjoy it for what it had to offer, and derived no serious emotional attachment or empathy for the plight of the strange characters. At some intrinsic level, I believe I recognised it as what it was: an analogue of my internal cognitive processes.

The dream came to an end with a profound divide between the dream world characters. They had seemed to form to two stable sides and were at the precipice of an all out final battle for supremacy. For the first time in the dream, I was then transported into control of one of these constructs. It was an old man in a white suit, for reason I cannot attest to it was, at a deeply emotional level, the character seen in this production cell. I might have seen image this once in my life, several years ago but not long after the dream was able to track it back to where I found it. An old eBay listing.

As I took over this character, suddenly I had a name. I had a narrative, I had a perspective (albeit a very limited one) and I had a place in this world. I knew my entire story, I knew my entire spectrum of political affiliations with all the other characters and I knew the changing histories of the shifting political sands too. There was an old colt 45 on the table, it was mottled with oxidation, like a child's toy gun that has been left outside and forgotten; but it seemed to work. Upstairs a commotion was starting to break out. In this old man's form, I hobbled up the winding staircases to the top floor where the political titans were all congregating. Before I could get there, something dramatic happened and the entire complex was being vacated by running and screaming characters. It was like a fire alarm had gone off. Without exercising any volition, but simply observing my actions in the distant third person: I withdrew the Colt from my jacket pocket and begun selectively executing the fleeing characters one by one, according to some old covariance matrix that put a weight value on who was my enemy and who was not. Nobody seemed to care; they fled and fell to their deaths with equal indifference.

By the end of the dream, I was talking with some of the other surviving characters. We were discussing ourselves, out world, and what it all meant. We talked about the divided nature of our social systems, the way we would generate states of warfare just for the complexity it created only to go and fornicate with out worst enemies for the irony it would create too. We discussed the immortal nature of out existence, the way we could never truly die, as out information and our presence would come up in some form or some combination in a fresh cohort of archetypes no sooner than it was eliminated. By now the dream world was almost empty; it had a the distinct feeling of a cinema corridor at the end of nights sessions. And I was no longer the strange old man from the animation cell; I was myself. I knew I was dreaming. And I awoke.

What do I take from all this? I feel this was potentially a first hand observation of the very processes by which my consciousness and my cognition dynamically emerge from their many substrates. No one character or archetype was of any significance or value; not a timeless archetype in the Jungian sense but a mere container for a complex that would form and disperse as seamlessly as waves over a rock pool. The old man had a story, had a narrative, but this only survived as long as I gave it the gift of my attention. Otherwise, he would have been as obscure and abstractly random as the place he held in my real-life memory and real-life visual history.... which was essentially close to nothing.

Is this all we are, as living breathing and thinking humans? Those aspects of ourselves that would seemingly form by chance, and survive an elaborate political jungle among other transient archetypes just long enough to be noticed by the very entity they sub-serve? Do their dynamics emergent produce us, or does our observation and focus in turn produce them? This is an old idea, certainly and one not at all new to this blog. Just something to think about.

And think about it I certainly have. Perhaps, after all, that was all this dream was supposed to do.

Zombies and Mortality

14/03/2014 1 Day after waking...

 IMAGE: AbstractLuva
Much has been speculated recently about the zombie fascination in contemporary culture. I for one have cause to suspect an almost Jungian level of meaning behind such themes but thankfully my speculations carry no weight. Otherwise I might have to back up my ideas with a lot more than a blog entry.

This is one of the more common themes in my dreams... and probably among the most vivid that I have. The dreams themselves are stunningly similar. Always, I am exploring a familiar place, usually from my childhood. A park or a suburb. Always, I stumble across some incredibly impressive architecture; a Gothic building, an abandoned piece of infrastructure, a water station or a sewer entry. I pause for a second, and with a sliver of lucidity think 'well that is not supposed to be there' however awe and curiosity reliably take over and I venture forth regardless.

Always, I can recall entering the structure with a sense of foreboding fear, unease, wonderment and exploratory curiosity. The positive emotions win out, but just. Always, I venture deeper and deeper into the chasmic structures, finally entering into a sprawling subterranean network of tunnels and pipes. I know I should be terrified but I never am, not by this point.

At this point some form of zombie will come. Usually a horde of them. I will experience a fleeting moment of panic, a sense of impending doom, and then the voice of an accompanying companion will announce the nature of the danger with as if the narrator of a film. All fear subsides, and I wait and observe as what should be among the most terrifying experiences in the dream state unfolds and yet I am passive and relaxed; enjoying the spectacle. I do not know that I am dreaming, but somehow I do not suspect I am experiencing reality either.

The horde passes, or sometimes just stays around. I decide enough is enough and proceed to leave the sewer, avoiding the death and pain that always should I step awry and into the perceptive field of these dream-world monsters. I never feel I am at any risk of this happening, I feel somewhat in control of things. No sooner is the choice made to make my exit than the dream reliably changes. On waking, I recall everything.

Now... deconstruction time. Jung feels that water in the dream world usually represents the unconscious mind. I cannot for certain say if this is what I experience, but I do happen to include among my more ridiculous hobbies a very old human art called free-diving. This basically involves overriding the mind's "drowning instinct" and swimming underwater for much longer than one sensibly should. My record is 3:25 at 18 meters depth. Anyway, curiously enough the precise emotion I have in these dreams, exploring cavernous waterways under the earth, feels remarkably like freediving.

Am I indeed exploring my own unconscious mind? I suppose the simple act of dreaming could be characterised as doing exactly this. Or to be more precise; exploring ones Secondary Consciousness once it has been taken off-line and 'rendered unconscious' by what, through a leap of scientific intuition, I would attribute to functional network changes that conform to my own definition of consciousness.

The zombies themselves I do not fear, just as I do not fear drowning when I am underwater and my diaphragm is having convulsions due to the building levels of my carbon dioxide. I suspect it is largely about control; I am confident when I freedive as I am confident when I dream. The zombies are only a danger if I let them be; and so long as I am smart they are a spectical to observe and not an existential threat.

Which brings me to the central question here: why do I bother freediving, and why do I have such vivid dreams that take on its features? To answer this I can only bring to the table what practical conclusions I can find. I happened spent many months building up the psychological discipline to switch off my drowning reflex, and seemingly lost it no sooner than I stopped trying to build it further. It was an extremely arduous task and one that I would struggle to endure again.

Having been far far away from any environment where I can continue to practice it for some time, I surprise myself when occasionally finding myself in a deep body that I can still maintain my breath underwater remarkably well. The catch is: only when I can enjoy it, only when I can get into the mind space. In times past it was automatic. Now I have to remember what it felt like, why I enjoyed it so much, before I am back in that place where the characteristic thumping in my chest, my bodies final attempt to indicate to me that I am about to die; is nothing more than a handy alarm clock to return to the surface.

I can only presume I have these dreams so that I do not forget what it feels like to enjoy diving whilst similarly to remember what it feels like to be in control of of my own impending demise. Without the memory of these emotions; without these as a proverbial treasure map to this long forgotten state of mind; I can not hope to dive the way I did. I must train again from the beginning.

Which brings me invariably back to the second question: why on earth do you enjoy freediving? I have often asked myself exactly this. And I do not have a clear answer. However, when Jung describes the qualities of water in dreams; when he describes the voyage into the unconscious, the existential challenge, and the return to reality bearing divine insight.... he comes pretty damn close.

Hearing voices and Glucocorticoids...

It has been a while since I have dreamed anything worth reporting. So here I go.

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-HT_2A 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.

Back in Post-Synaptic Black

Well.. it has certainly been a long time since I wrote anything here. Why the long face? Or long delay as it were... I had started this blog as a way of exploring my own qualitative experience of a lifetime of lucid dreams with the express purpose of breaking out of the nexus of Freudian psychoanalysis, by looking at dreams through their neural underpinnings.

....and there in lied the problem. I knew scantily little about neuroscience, so this (excuse the pun) dream of mine was quite short lived. More so: In my express desire to break from Freudian 'fortune cookie' interpretation I felt I was dooming myself to simply reinvent the wheel and repeat Freud's mistakes. Well, time has a way of showing us all what we always wanted to know. Three years on, a hell of a lot more Neuroscience later, this project of mine may actually work.

I also happened to stumble upon the works of one Allan Hobson and one Kenji Doya, who form the most crucial basis for my current neuroscientific thinking. Both have taught me to address the complexities of neural basis of cognition, to appropriate the timeless battle-cry of the ethologists; by thinking of the brain 'using its own language'. And what language is that? None that I can speak, but some of the symbols are starting to look familiar and I think I am working out a little basic syntax here and there.

Thus, I can with some misplaced confidence actually try make a guess or two about what is going on in these dreams, and my mission comes full circle. Stay tuned, much more to come!!

the ‘Irrational Design Artefact’

4/08/2010 On Waking...

Last night, I dreamed I was staying in a large beach house. I am only vaguely aware of how I got there and why it came to resemble a beach house, but that’s all quite irrelevant anyway. When this dream came into phase, it was a beach house located in what felt like the Port Phillip Bay area.

I was at the beach house with a group of high school friends, but the fact that I can’t remember any of them specifically nor recall any of their faces tells me this was just a carriage to rationalise why I was there in the first place. As the dream progressed, it took focus around the other inhabitants there: Some members of my family, and a large group of my younger brothers friends who I now realise were an analogue for a group of Apollo Bay locals I had befriended in a trip there earlier in the year. They were all in the 17-21 age group and all drank to excess nightly, harbouring an odd fusion of surfie culture and country bogan culture that I must have stuck with me in my thoughts; it was the predominant emotional component of this dream.

This was quite a long dream, pleasant though mundane, it did bear at least one interesting point. Most of the dream involved making endless circular conversation to the other people in the house, helping my brother remove an ink-run from his favourite T-shirt, organising the distribution of alcohol, hitting on my brothers friends or guessing their age-appropriateness or both, and so on and so forth. While none of my brothers friends are anywhere near age inappropriate, for some reason in this dream we were both age shifted back to a period where this was more likely... at a guess he was about 17 and I was about 20. Everything about this dream had been fairly standard, nothing even slightly counterintuitive had given me cause to snap into lucidity until I decided to take a shower, and I observed the most interesting point of the dream: the Irrational Design Artefact.

An ‘Irrational Design Artefact’ is my term for an in-dream phenomenon where one encounters a ludicrously designed every-day object or device that tests the boundaries of the in-dream delusional state though never quite enough to seed self-awareness in its own right. An example could be a vending machine requiring you to play a game of Tetris on its keypad before it dispensed your can of soda, a couch requiring an electrician connection to prevent it from collapsing or even a broken stop sign that had been repaired with Lego. Anything that perpetually breaks when trying to use it, is overly complex for what it does or is just plain curious, that you ought to indicate you are dreaming but fails to.

In my case, this occurred when I went to take a shower. I went to turn on the hot water, and noticed a torrent of steaming hot water coming from a PVC down pipe out of the wall and straight into the toilet bowl. It was as if somebody had gone to do some DIY plumbing but had simply given up; the water came out of the wall and straight down the toilet in a seemingly closed loop. I noticed a handle, which seemed to divert the water to a small plastic overhead shower rose... I had to stand on a milk crate to be underneath it but had my head touching the ceiling when I did so. It also had me with my face right in front of a small window looking out into the lounge room, and so I took my shower, standing on a milk crate next to the toilet, head touching the ceiling and looking out at all the drinking games going on in the lounge. The shower head would periodically re-adjust itself, always against my best interest, by virtue of some kind of electronic motor on its main hinge; it appeared to be a salvaged hair-dryer motor.

Ordinarily I am quite good at reaching lucidity in-dream from even minor irregularities but for some reason this perplexing shower design arose none of my suspicions. What ultimately did bring me to self-awareness was going back to help my brother with his t-shirt stain, the bleach I was using was making his black t-shirt turn orange when bleaching black cotton is supposed to make a pale red colour instead... yep that’s all it took and I knew I was dreaming. My first though: Why the hell didn’t I notice the shower?

I have been thinking about this quite a lot, and clearly there is a hell of a lot more going on than meets the eye. It is accepted speculative theory that in the dream state, certain parts of the brain pertaining to logic and rationalisation are purposely switched off to allow the continuity of the dream uninterrupted; I myself have observed that as the ability to maintain a dream in a state of lucidity grows, so does the ability to reason and rationalise in-dream. It certainly feels like this ‘switch off’ of logic is a defensive mechanism owing to the fact that lucidity for most people will terminate the dream and any quality REM along with it, so it would make sense that the logic would return when the risk of breaking a dream is reduced to a minimum. My question remains: How does this Irrational Design Artefact get into a dream in the first place?

One idea I have been toying with is that the brain deliberately puts it there, infusing it with a pre-emptive dose of acceptability and comfortability so that the healthily functioning logic does not pick it up. I do not believe the brain can simply turn logic on and off over a few seconds for selective in-dream objects, so this would have to be how its done. I also speculate that the brain does this to test the limits of the dream/delusion state and the logic confliction; it wants to know exactly how obscure it can build the dream without having lucidity become a threat, so it proceeds to create a dream-breaking design artefact that it pre-emptively masks or conditions to be acceptable then looks at your thoughts to see how dangerous it “could have been” under ordinary circumstances.

Sound complicated? I agree, but I cannot for the life of me think why my brain would dump this completely obscure and perplexing design into an otherwise very believable and very long-running dream, pull enough strings that it does not arouse suspicion, then send me on my merry way. As soon as I reached lucidity I just about slapped myself at how ridiculous it was, I went back to look at it again but it was a completely normal shower and a chill went down my in-dream spine. I shrugged the experience off and went back to hitting on my brothers friends... it’s a hell of a lot easier once you know they are figments of your own psyche.

The Circular Dream Trap

3/08/2010 On Waking...

Lots of dreams, non descript. A Deadwood dream: I was going back to The Gem, an aged Al Swearengen (who looked a lot more like Wild Bill Hickok) with small round face, long white hair. He was very pleased to see me in a concealed way, like the return of an old but grown-to-love nemesis. He said I still had plenty of funds left in his holding (4000 gold units) and implied it was slightly more than I was able to carry, case and all. I went upstairs to meet an old lover of some sort, probably an amalgam of Lady Garrett and that woman who plays Mr. Whites wife in Breaking Bad, as I went upstairs I could read her dreams, I was briefly juxtaposed into her 2nd person perspective and she was dreaming of the protagonist, who at this point I realise was nobody from the actual series. Upon returning to 1st person protagonist viewpoint, I go upstairs to meet her, find her sleeping or in some form of induced coma, and an altercation breaks out between Al Swearengen, myself and the owner of the other hotel (wikipedia tells me E.B. Farnum). And a mathematical debate breaks out about my chances of beating both to the draw and surviving, or more to the point; Al’s chances of loosing. EB explained how the initial 10:1 of an overskilled gunfighter in close quarters with a slightly lesser skilled (Al) and unskilled fighter (EB) was to be revised down to 8:1 due to some further set of circumstances and that it was not a risk worth taking for Al, given I would draw for him first. This is all I remember of the dream, I was getting bored, even by the scenery and settings and by this point and the creeping lucidity that I was being stuck in yet another ‘circular dream trap’ was becoming real to me. I broke out of delusion-state and changed the dream before abandoning lucidity and hoping I would enjoy the next one more.
 

Circular Dream Trap: this is a very common form of unpleasant dream I am well used to having. I believe it to be the result of oversleep, latent anxiety, REM failure, or any of the above. It essentially works, or I believe it to work, by having certain parts of the brain normally repressed in order to maintain a quality dream state become awakened, while possibly having other parts of the brain drop in their activity, perhaps from overuse or fatigue. This would support the oversleep idea, I tend to only get stuck in a dream trap after having dreamed for too long or too intensely in a single nights sleep.
 

As for the trap itself: Imagine that Greek concept of hell where you push a boulder to the top of a hill, taking an entire days labour, only to find it at the very bottom of the hill the next waking morning. The trap is characterised by a stressful and anxiety laden series of circular tasks or goals that can never quite be accomplished, the more you try to achieve them the more that goes wrong and gets in your way. The more you canvass all options and push the boundaries of the dream, the more the dream changes and morphs into a second dream without you realising... all memory of the puzzle forgotten for at least another series of minutes, leaving you again temporarily fresh and eager to escape before realising in the dying seconds of the dream you have had the same one 11 times in a row now and are about to have your memory wiped and go for number 12.
 

The quintessential circular dream trap, I will describe, is one I had in late high school. I was stuck in Melbourne Central Station, platform 1, desperate to go home. Every time a train was close to coming, it would be cancelled. Every time a train actually came, I had become momentarily distracted by getting my money jammed in a vending machine, being held up at the bathroom, going to find a non-existent friend to remind them they were about to miss the train, and so on. All that matters was that I never got on the train: something would always get in the way. Dream-time, this would continue for hours, and usually at every stage of failure I would remember how many times I had failed previously for only a brief few seconds before the world shifted and I once again became absorbed in the dream world, saying ‘Aha, next train in 5 minutes, I’m out of here’. Finally I would break out of the confines of the dream world, going up to street level to find a bus for example, trying to call my mum for a lift on my phone, even attempting to walk it. This would only ever make things worse by expanding the trap, and I would waste at least another 5 dream stages missing busses, getting lost in the CBD at night, or having my phone conversation cut out due to lack of credit or low battery.
 

As time would go on, the stages would become narrower and narrower, collapsing in on themselves, changing every 5 seconds. At every corner, at every turn, every time I opened a door, the dream would reset and enter a new stage, and I would be reminded of the hell I was stuck in with machine gun repetitively but never long enough to find a way to exit it. Exiting dreams has never been hard for me, but it does require at least a good 15 seconds of in-dream time to realise you are in a dream and remember a good exit technique. Eventually the dream would collapse completely, and I would find myself swimming in a sea of grey, distant sounds filtering through the haze and wondering where I was and what was happening. At this point I would wake up, usually in a cold sweat, pounding headache, and realising I had overslept by a good 3 hours. The Dream trap had prevented my circadian rhythm from waking me up naturally; I had dreamed every last drop that I could until my brain could not sustain the dream state any longer and the dream state failed. Under a sedative, or in a coma, I truly fear how bad a Circular Dream Trap could get. It scares me to this day.
 

Luckily, I have become very good at killing Circular Dream Traps before they start, as happened last night. Somehow I could feel the back and forth mathematical arguments between the three of us would only get deeper and more complex until my dream shifted and became dominated by an unsolvable puzzle or paradoxical labyrinth or impossible task. I am not sure why I realised it or what happened when I prevented it this time, I guess that the dream state shifted, ended and I slept out the rest of my night in a state of non-REM sleep. Maybe I got a small and tidy second dream out of it, I am not sure... either way I woke up feeling quite good so clearly it did work. It has been years since I had a truly horrible dream trap experience, but I have no doubt that the right (or wrong) environmental triggers could pull me into another at any time.

'Mirror Encounters' and Technological progression...

08/2010 On Waking...

Last night I went to sleep in a state of near terror that I would have a “mirror encounter”. A mirror encounter is my term of the phenomenon of seeing oneself in a mirror inside a dream, and viewing the reflection as not a distortion of ones physical image but something much more powerful: a doppelganger, a contorted and twisted representation of oneself so similar yet corrupted to ones likeliness that the immediate emotion of “pure evil” is felt from its presence. I am not even close to a religious person, but some of these “mirror encounters” had me, upon waking, convinced I had met an otherworldly sentient entity, as close as my atheistic mind can approach to the devil himself. I reasoned this on two fronts: The emotion was so powerful and so pervasive I could literally not imagine being able to feel it in waking reality, not even when viewing the most vile static images that the most depraved corners of the internet can provide (and that's saying something). Secondly, I understand my dreams and the dream state moderately well, and I am thoroughly convinced that my brain could never be creatively responsible for an image so expertly and professionally contorted into such a disturbing resemblance.

However, my abstract intuition tells me that this is more a case of mathematics than mystical, that with certain parts of my brain shut down or under-powered in a dream state, the attempt to process my own self image in-dream results in a state of data or file corruption so specific to these conditions that the result is unsurprisingly terrifying: an image no man could consciously imagine in the same likeliness as a number no human could calculate. The image was the biological equivalent of a computer malfunction, artefacts from an overheating GPU or a characteristic ‘popping’ or ‘white noise static’ from a malfunctioning sound card; annoyingly common but probably fiendishly difficult to reproduce in a healthily functioning chip. The very reason this self image is terrifying is because it exists outside of normal brain function and process, it is alien in every sense of the term because it has never been experienced in waking life, even when intentionally attempting to simulate terror.

The doppelganger is characterised by facial features bordering on normal but just outside of it; proportions, distances between eyes, nose position departing from the threshold of acceptability, combined with a kind of facial expression only comparable to electrocution or mental retardation: an angry, yet ecstatic grimace of pure contempt and anticipation or excitement combined. I have had many of these encounters before, mostly during lucid dreaming and almost always during dream re-entry. I had been so disturbed by these that I decided to stop practising lucid dreaming about 3 years ago, after a particularly bad encounter.

In any case, my actual dream last night thankfully did not involve any mirror encounters and was largely forgettable but, did involve a time-travel back to an ancient state of my home city Melbourne (I would guess 1920-1940). The main thing I can remember from it was standing outside of some kind of large building: a paper mill, a power plant, a hospital, a tram depot or perhaps even a metropolitan police headquarters. I remember being outside a discrete back entrance, there was a sign indicating rear entry or discrete entry, and something about “mule entrance” or "mule departure zone" or something that told me that this was where smaller horse drawn carts (or in this case, mule or donkey drawn) came in and out, possibly to dispose or deliver dead bodies, remove noxious biological waste or something undesirable or unpleasant in this vein. The predominant emotion was of how the world worked in this era in contrast to now, of how all these bad things could not be simply concealed, zipped up in industrial polyurethane black bags, or piped away in subterranean metallic pipes but had to be physically carted around using biological, non mechanical labour, and that building structure had to reflect this inconvenient reality. I remember wondering (or perhaps remembering) what this building or entrance was used for in the contemporary era, and deciding that it bore no immediate clue as to its prior function and feeling that its current use almost deceptively and sneakily denied its past.

It was both fascinating but strangely disconcerting, I felt a kind of painful empathy for the inconvenience and hostility of the situation combined with a kind of helplessness and inevitability in that it had already been and gone and nothing I could do, or even anyone of the era could do, would have made a damn difference. None the less, it was an emotionally painful sight to behold; the way the old world functioned and went about the arduous task of life using the best resources available and without looking backwards. I am unsure why I did not derive inspiration from this, as would seem logical, to me the image above all empowered in me a definite sense of nihilism and antipathy towards the progression of the human existence, a painful reminder as to the relativity and subjectivity of the notion of “comfort”, “convenience” and “technological advantage” while simultaneously highlighting the fact that any convenience or technology we enjoy now was only a few living memories away from having to be (painfully) done without. This was additionally distressing. Unsurprisingly I consciously slept through my alarm in hope of happier dreams that morning.