Dreaming of Life
So if we are spotlighting our way through life, focusing on only the smallest but most immediate part of the flood of perceptions available to us, do we simply discard the rest? Does only what comes through the spotlight get through to be recorded and associated into our sensorium and experience?
Personally I think, and there is quite an amount of evidence that agrees, that everything is recorded. The floodlight senses are working all the time, placing us in our world, filtering the mundane from the focus, filing away extra information as local colour, as extra layers of sense that get attached to the events on which we focus.
I think that is what at least some of our dreaming is about. The Conscious mind runs through the input it has received and the extras, the large part of our world that got missed out of the immediate conscious awareness, gets runs as well. In this way I think the input from the external world gets associated and stored, altering either grandly or minorly, the shape of us, the terrain of Mind in which we live.
But I don’t think this is all the dreaming we do. For a start it is well known that in normal circumstances, we have two REM (Rapid Eye Movement) periods of sleep – this is when research tells us we a re dreaming most actively. It seems a little strange for us to have two such periods – surely the processing of the day could be done in one?
Then there’re the other types of dreams, the ones where problems get solved, or where we learn things, or even the Lucid Dreams where we are aware we are dreaming.
Hands up all those who have had a lucid dream? Keep your hand up if you’ve managed to make use of it? When you became aware that you were dreaming, did you try to do things? Go places? Find God?
It seems to me a Lucid Dream is an opportunity to try almost anything you can think of.
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