Spotlight and Dreaming
During our normal waking times, we miss a lot of what is going on around us. It’s estimated that, if you were to take a picture the size of your computer screen, then what we consciously perceive of our experiences would be about the size of one pixel on that screen. That’s smaller than the dot at the end of this sentence.
It may seem strange to think of it that way, but our bodies record many things of which we have no awareness. Just sitting in your room, reading this screen, there are sounds, smells and sights from your peripheral vision of which you have no ongoing awareness. If you focus you might become aware of them but as soon as you focus on the screen again, they’re gone, lost in the background glow of incoming perceptions.
I spoke some time back on here about Spotlight and Floodlight awareness, how we are taught from birth to be firmly in the spotlight world of focus on the passing moments. Floodlight awareness is like when you go for a drive with friends – conversation flows back and forth, and it is an enjoyable trip. Usually you don’t stop and think at the end of the trip how much you recall of the actual travel and driving, but when you do you will be surprised at how little there is to remember.
Your ‘spotlight’ mind has been involved in the conversation, and the job of driving was handed over, without notice, to your ‘floodlight’ awareness. We pay for the immediacy and clarity of a Spotlight’ life with a loss (mostly) of the full scope of the world we live in.
I’d be interested to know how many readers here have had the experience of getting to the end of a trip and realizing most of it had passed without conscious notice being paid to it?
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