Tuesday 1 July 2014

Communications between my waking and dreaming self - and with angels and the pre-mortal self

*

It is as if the dreaming self is a different self - a different person; but one whose experiences I can dip-in and sample.

But the dreaming self is operating in a different time speeds - a minute of my time is many minutes, perhaps hours, of his time. relative to my experience, he seems to cram in a lot more.

And his experiences seldom seem to make sense to me or be memorable to me - but this is inevitable given that we operate at different time speeds. I simply cannot observe, take-in or remember all the stuff that happens to him.

*

So my understanding of a dream is just a sample of what the dreamer experiences - like a set of snapshots of his reality, one taken every few seconds or so... therefore I have to puzzle-out what is going on; and sometimes there are what-look-like abrupt transitions, when my camera has not taken a picture of what actually happened and I can't understand what is going-on.

And my memory of dreams are unreliable, weak and incoherent for the same reason. All I can recall are a few snapshot-like pictures, feelings, events; and my waking self has to reconstruct what happened in the dream from these clues.

*

Also, there is zero possibility of my waking memory being able to absorb dreams, because the dreams are so fast. My waking memory could not possible take in so much stuff, so rapidly.

It is physically impossible.

So - on the whole - communications between my waking and dreaming self are very partial, and highly subject to misunderstanding - simply due to the physical barriers - the temporal barriers - which separate us.

*

Probably, much the same applies to my relationship with angels, and with memories of my pre-mortal self.

These relationships are not blocked, the channels are open - but the physical/ temporal mismatch makes communications unreliable, weak and incoherent; very partial, and highly subject to misunderstanding.

*

4 comments:

Seijio Arakawa said...

In this theory, what do you make of the phenomenon of lucid dreaming?

Bruce Charlton said...

@Ara - This isn't a theory - it is phenomenology - a report of subjective experience.

So, the way of including lucid dreaming is to describe accurately what it feels like in terms of the waking self communicating with the dreaming self.

I have only had one real lucid dream, and the way it worked for me was that the waking self made certain key decisions about the 'plot' of the dream, then observed the dream unfold autonomously from that point - then made another intervention. It seemed very unreal/ dreamlike.

My hunch would be that lucid dreaming felt like an abnormally slowed-down dream; a dream going at only about the same speed as the waking self - therefore the dream was both comprehensible and memorable, and could be influenced in a 'real time' sort of way.

Seijio Arakawa said...

This raises some interesting ideas. About dreaming, I have two conflicting understandings, that I am always dreaming (the loss of consciousness during deep-sleep is an illusion), vs. that 'dreaming' occurs during a short REM phase of the night, and is energy-intensive. Obviously, I am more aware of REM dreams than non-REM ones, and more aware of lucid dreams than of ordinary REM dreams. Lucid dreams are also more energy-intensive to have than ordinary dreams, such that one feels less well-rested after a lucid dream.

However, if one thinks of it in terms of synchronizing two frames of reference (as an intrinsically difficult thing to accomplish), then the hierarchy of 'effort' in terms of the various types of dreams makes more sense.

Bruce Charlton said...

@Ara - Yes, I have a hunch that the unremembered dreams of deep sleep - which I imagine to be as slow and simple as REM-sleep dreams are the opposite - are probably the most important - did we but remember them!

When dropping off to REM-dreaming sleep then waking up - the dropping off to sleep is like stepping onto a fast moving conveyor belt - or into a fast moving stream - or whisked into a whirl of happenings... except that when you wake up a moment later almost no time has passed.

Obviously, this was the basis of fairy time (as Narnia) - as Tolkien remarked in his Fairy Stories essay. Lothlorien was the opposite.