In which Wade's phone tells him "There is no spoon".

[Wade]

I would like to relate an incident that happened to me a couple of days ago. I’m not quite sure one could call it a personal experience but to me it was quite striking, and even as I write this I have a feeling it’s going to set me on a course in which I will probably immerse myself into a new way of thinking. I went through something similar when I wrote about the multiple occurrences I had a few years back with a mantis and that episode is probably the biggest reason why I am here, but first a little bit back story :

About a month to a month half ago I experienced what I initially thought was some kind of schizophrenic episode or some kind of general disassociation episode. I’ve mentioned before that I have a fairly active dream life. As nerdish as it sounds I very much look forward to going to bed at night , I haven’t had a bad dream or nightmare in years…possible correlating to when I stopped having all those unpleasant hypnopompic attacks and now I pretty much call the shots. In many cases I have a real hands-on approach, not all cases but much of the time what I do is end up validating the reality of a certain sequence, what I mean is when I have one of those dreams where I am at school and I have a final exam and I am not prepared because I “was sick” or just didn’t show up for weeks I’ll tell myself within the dream “ it’s not real Wade, you’re an adult” “You finished high school over 30 years not ago” You live in LA and you have a job”. Another one involves when I’m out driving. in many cases I’m driving either my old FJ-40 or CJ-5 (jeeps) and I end up telling myself that “ No wade, you drive a ford ranger now, your jeep days are long gone.” Things like that. The one thing I have never gotten worked out is all those M.C. Escher landscapes or all those stairways, escalators, ramps, elevators that never, never, never take me to the floor or level I need to get to.

Well, one night I got carried away and micro-managed almost everything to where I was contradicting my choice of clothing even “ You do NOT own a pair of brown corduroys”, I was so active that night it pretty much taxed me, I probably didn’t get any sleep because I was as active sleeping as I was waking. I should mention that this is not something I strive for, it just happened. I am aware there are books and courses that supposedly helps you harness all this energy and take it a step forward , to the point where before you retire for the night you can set your agenda and let you determine how far to take something. I am not interested in pursuing this and I am happy where I am now. I am given to think it is this activity that led me to having all those hypnopompic attacks’ few years back but eventually I finally got a handle on these attacks and now as in my dreams I just go with the flow. The thing is in this case I think I was so overboard that I carried the dream aspects over into my waking life. What I mean is as I woke up I was trying to work out my morning schedule to see a friend who was sick and to see him before I went to work then I realized my friend wasn’t sick, actually I lost touch with him some time ago, there was no plans to contact him but I now remembered I had dreamt it. My next thought was that I had to pick up my truck before I went to work because it was in the shop when I realized it was not in the shop I had dreamt that as well. This was of course after altering the fact that it wasn’t a jeep that was being repaired it was a pickup .Lastly I was about to go out and get some coffee and bagels for breakfast when I realized I didn’t need to do so because I went grocery shopping the night before THEN I thought I had probably dreamed it and I did need to go out to the bagel shop. I got halfway there… a short two block walk… when I told myself “Wade you really DID get groceries last night, it was not a dream.” True enough I did, so I turned around and went back , I had just started measuring the coffee when I realized I couldn’t determine if I THOUGHT I went out to get coffee and bagels or I had dreamt it the evening before, this was merely minutes after I had actually done it

I then had a panic attack, my very first ever. I literally slumped down in a chair, held my head in my hands and thought these very words (no joking) “Wade, what DID you DO?” “You’re broken, you broke yourself” I pretty much spent the next couple of hours going online and trying to find out, what I was experiencing. I don’t have a particularly stressful life and there is no history of mental instability in my family, after a bit I calmed down decided what I needed was some distractions and there was nothing as distracting as going to work so I did and the rest of the day was uneventful and as of this date I have yet to experience anything remotely like this episode.
END PROLOGUE on to a couple of days ago

it may not surprise you guys that I record and log my dreams , as to be expected some are much, much more detailed than others. I’ve mentioned before I concentrate and focus more on the various aspects of some sequences more so than what the dream is about or maybe I should say what it seems to be about. Most notable are those previously mentioned stairs, Quonset huts, catwalks, construction sites, scaffolding, large sailing vessels with what should be deep drafts going down the middle of a city transiting a very small canal, you know the normal stuff and what not.., strangely enough I never really go back through the journals themselves but then I don’t need to , I have enough experience with the so called details my “themes” as it were , I don’t even think it would be necessary to re-read them. I can pretty much rattle off any pertinent details as there are so common. And to be truthful I can hardly read them anyways as most of them were written in the immediate moments of wakefulness and for that reason many of the entries are indecipherable.
Back at the beginning of the year I got an app for my phone that you record your dreams in. I can then upload them to my google drive as well but what I most like is that I can search for these themes without having to go through each and every entry. I can just type ship , or vessel in case I used a different word that day, and any sequence where I recorded that comes up

This past Monday I had just uploaded my entry…which was a pretty mundane entry...when for some reason my mind flashed back to that event from a couple of months back. I didn’t dwell on it but it did cause me to ponder briefly on the boundary between reality and dreams and what is real and what is not. At any rate I just saved the document and uploaded it when I was looking at the display and I got a notification. This is what it said:
“there is no spoon”
Now, my first reaction to this was “WTF does that mean”? My first thought was along the lines of it having to do with the bluetooth connection. I should say at this point that when it comes to entering my journals I have my apple BT keyboard married to my phone ( a sony z3) you can imagine with the details I tend to log it would be quite onerous to tap tap tap my log entries in on the phone keyboard. When I got my first android phone I was never able to pair the keyboard with the phone, even though it was bluetooth enabled. I soon found out it had something to do with th build of the BT software ( the stack I believe it was called) and though that has not been an issue in some time I thought he notification I got had something to do with that. I then googled my phone model and “there is no spoon” to find out, what if any was the issue/problem that I was experiencing. I only got a few hits and as it turned out, it seemed to have nothing to do with my phone. The reason why I was getting any returns at all was because the hits resulted in android themed forums and somebody (whose name I forgot) was using "there is no spoon" as his/hers signature.
I then thought that maybe it was an easter egg of some sort, it probably meant something to someone as it inspired somebody to use it as a signature so then I googled there is no spoon just as is. Immediately I got this:
About 48,300,000 results (0.37 seconds)

As many of you guys may realize it is a quote from the movie the Matrix and it concerns about what we perceive as real isn’t necessarily it is only what we perceive it to be, unless we know better Well, I guess it means something like that , it seems Buddhist in nature and I really don’t have any knowledge in Buddhist philosophy . I do know this though , My phone told me that there is no spoon. for the record I have seen the Matrix but only once or twice and even then I hadn’t watched it in years, well before I immersed myself into this forum and paranormal subjects and arguably became more aware …I did rent it from my local library and will watch it again this weekend. I had no recall of that line or even scene until after I had googled it.

I am struck to say the least that mere seconds after I had fleetingly questioned to myself about the nature of our reality, a little piece of electronic circuitry was telling me there was no spoon. I am not making this up, or joking or hoaxing, I have no reason to , it was not my imagination. I do have to consider again that it was an easter egg of some sort programmed by an impish developer but I have not been able to replicate whatever it was that I did to get that message. The fact is there was nothing to replicate, it’s not like I missed a keystroke or anything. The only thing that is involved is to turn off the BT on the phone, then turn off the BT on the keyboard. I do seem to recall turning off the keyboard first in this instance instead of turning off the BT on the phone first but as I said, I have connected and turned on and off my phone and keyboard in the attempt to get that message again, but so far nada..At any rate you have to admit is a hell of a coincidence even if you are not given to that sort of thing.

Your various inputs are welcomed.

 

[Polterwurst]

Nothing to worry about, just coincidence.
If you think that corny movie line means anything, you might end up like this guy.

...and yes, I'm being sarcastic.

 

[Constance]

Wade, I find what you've written to be very interesting. My first thought was that, because you have remembered so many of your dreams and actively pursued their meaning, you might have somehow alerted and trained your waking consciousness to remain in a kind of 'stand by' position even while you are asleep. If I can find my notes from reading a neuroscientist pursuing dreams several years ago I'll post them and the link. Among other projects, he had recorded the brain activity of patients falling and remaining asleep and discovered that when one transitions from waking to sleeping the language centers of the brain shut down. And yet it appears that we use language and hear it while dreaming. {?} At least I do. What does this indicate? I think it points to the part (or one of the parts or levels) of human consciousness that we know almost nothing about -- the subconscious mind. Psychical research in general has increasingly recognized that there is a structure and coherence in the subconscious mind, as there is in other states of consciousness. One longtime psychical researcher associated with the SPR drew a diagram of 'mind' (for lack of a better word) in which our normal waking consciousness is suspended within other regions of consciousness including the subconscious, the unconscious, and the supraconsciousness. All of the latter are available to some extent to waking consciousness, according to this theory. That is, these regions of consciousness are permeable to one another. Your particular skill at remaining aware of, conscious of, what goes on in your dreams might make you a very productive participant in dream studies.

I'll do some searching for papers that might be interesting to you as you explore all this. I don't think you should worry about it. Though I have no idea whatever the odd message or link dredged up by your I-phone might mean, if anything beyond coincidence. I believe, but don't know, that computers do not have, and are unlikely ever to develop, intentional minds within their structures. I haven't seen The Matrix yet. It must be a persuasive film to have led so many people to think that the whole of our reality is or even might be a virtual projection from a massive supercomputer producing the physical world we live in and also our perceptions in and responses to it.

 

[Constance]

This Encyclopedia Britannica article provides a good short overview of the questions and issues raised in the investigation and interpretation of dreams and dreaming:

dream | sleep experience | Britannica.com

 

[Constance]

I spent some time reading samples from the book linked below and am as a result realizing for the first time how significant dream research is for obtaining insight into what consciousness is. The insights coming from research into lucid dreaming are fascinating. This book is very high-priced but I'm going to get a copy from the library:

Amazon.com: Conscious Mind, Sleeping Brain: Perspectives on Lucid Dreaming (9781475704259): J. Gackenbach, Stephen LaBarge: Books

Evan Thompson, a major consciousness researcher developing the new discipline of neurophenomenology, has recently published a book on dreams that is likely to be significant. Here's a link to it:

 

[Constance]

Here's a not very penetrating, but very interesting, article from The Guardian a year ago concerning lucid dreaming:

"One of our most mysterious and intriguing states of consciousness is the dream. We lose consciousness when we enter the deep waters of sleep, only to regain it as we emerge into a series of uncanny private realities. These air pockets of inner experience have been difficult for psychologists to study scientifically and, as a result, researchers have mostly resorted to measuring brain activity as the sleeper lies passive. But interest has recently returned to a technique that allows real-time communication from within the dream world.

The rabbit hole between these worlds of consciousness turns out to be the lucid dream, where people become aware that they are dreaming and can influence what happens within their self-generated world. Studies suggest that the majority of people have had a lucid dream at some point in their life but that the experience is not common. As a result, there is now a minor industry in technologies and training techniques that claim to increase your chance of having a lucid dream although a recent scientific review estimated that the effect of any particular strategy is moderate at best. Some people, however, can reliably induce lucid dreams and it's these people who are allowing us to conduct experiments inside dreams.

When trying to study an experience or behaviour, cognitive scientists usually combine subjective reports, what people describe about their experience, with behavioural experiments, to see what effect a particular state has on how people reason, act or remember. But both are difficult in dreamers, because they can't tell you much until they wake up and active participation in experiments is difficult when you are separated from the world by a blanket of sleep-induced paralysis.

This paralysis is caused by neurons in the brainstem that block signals from the action-generating areas in the brain to the spinal nerves and muscles. The shutdown happens when Rapid Eye Movement or REM sleep starts, meaning that dreaming of even the most energetic actions results in no more than a slight twitch. One of the few actions that are not paralysed, however, is eye movement. This is where REM sleep gets its name from and this window of free action provides the lucid dreamer a way of signalling to the outside world.

Using a procedure discovered by Keith Hearne and later verified by sleep researcher Stephen LaBerge, the sleeper can signal to researchers when they have begun their lucid dream by using pre-arranged eye movements. The person moves their eyes in the agreed way in the dream, which occur as genuine eye movements, which are recorded and verified by electrodes that are placed around the eye sockets.

This simple but ingenious technique has allowed a series of experiments on the properties of the dream world and how they are reflected in brain function. These neuroscientific studies have been important for overcoming an initial objection to the concept of lucid dreaming: that lucid dreamers were awake but just relaxed, or perhaps even fraudulent, claiming to be experiencing a dream world when they were not. Studies led by neuropsychologists Ursula Voss and Martin Dresler have shown that the brain activity during lucid dreaming bears the core features of REM sleep but is distinct from both non-lucid dreaming and the awake state, suggesting that it is not just a case of wishful thinking on the part of either the participants or the researchers.

Some of the most interesting studies involve in-dream experiments, where participants are asked to complete pre-arranged actions in their lucid dreams while using eye movements to signal the beginning and end of their behavioural sequences. A recent study by neuroscientist Daniel Erlacher and his colleagues at the University of Bern compared how long it took to complete different tasks while lucid dreaming and while awake. These included counting, walking a specified number of steps, and a simple gymnastics-like routine. They found that the "mental action" of counting happened at the same speed regardless of whether volunteers were dreaming or awake, but the "physical actions" took longer in dreams than in real life. The research team suggested that this might be due to not having the normal sensory feedback from the body to help the brain work out the most efficient way of coordinating itself.

There is also an amateur community of lucid dream enthusiasts keen to explore this unique form of virtual reality. This stretches from the fringes of the New Age movement who want to use lucid dreams to access other planes of existence (best of luck with that), to a more technologically oriented community of dream hackers who sample scientific research to try to find reliable methods for triggering lucidity. The connection with established studies can be a little haphazard and methods veer between the verified and the barely tested. In some online discussion boards, there have been reports of people using medications intended for Alzheimer's sufferers, which have the side-effect of causing vivid dreams, based on little more than hearsay and data reported in a patent application.

Some researchers have highlighted the potential of lucid dreaming to advance the science of consciousness but it's a difficult area to study. The currents of consciousness run unpredictably through the tides of sleep and the science of dreaming is still very much in the age of exploration. It's also a conceptual problem that some feel unequipped to tackle. After all, what can we make of consciousness when it creates a new world and our experience of it?"

The mysteries of 'lucid' dreaming | Science | The Guardian


The last sentence asks "what can we make of consciousness when it creates a new world and our experience of it?" I think the answer is: a great deal more than has been imagined by reductively objectivist science, which is only now beginning to investigate consciousness in some disciplines. This newer dream research is blowing my mind. I'm so glad you posted at length about it, Wade.

 

[Burnt State]

Wade - heavy stuff, brother.

First, the panic attack is a concern. But what you've described is the construction of a feedback loop concerned specifically with reality breaking, which, as I've experienced in the distant past, can be so arresting for one's mind that the panic attack must follow. At the time we break from reality, like the entrance into the entheogenic trip that smashes the ego and eliminates control & the confidence that control brings, the severing can be intense. That's why it's called trippy and I think you tripped over your DMN.

If you have not yet done so, I would encourage you to process the days, weeks and months leading up to this event, just to insure that your stress levels are cool. Some self-reflection is good, but you put yourself into a hall of mirrors and carried over your evening dream loop (have you had those destabilizing circular dream loops before where you are chasing your ass and each thought process?) into your waking consciousness. That's quite a feat actually.

Constance is bringing up some interesting ideas here in terms of just what state of mind are you in when you are dreaming and how do certain evening dream spaces carry into your waking life. I've seen some dream effects and after images come out of dreams, mild hallucinations, but very short lived. And then there's the dream within a dream scenario, dreaming that we have awakened and yet the dream continues. Those often preceeded my night terrors in the past - the dream cousin of the panic sttack. It sounds like you're describing this kind of dream within a dream scenario except your reality began to sustain the dream. There is no spoon - what a terrifying thing to confront.

Because of your ability to lucid dream and start to work on your dreams in the day, it's not a wonder his hasn't happened to you before. Sounds to me like you seriously messed with your Default Mode Network. I think you might be interested in exploring this system and how it works in conjunction with tasks, dreams, emotions and integration.
http://psych.colorado.edu/~hannaje/Publications_&_CV_files/Buckner_et_al_ANYAS_2008.pdf
Personally I follow the strain of thinking that the purpose of dreams is to help us learn. It's a survival skill function that focuses the brain to help us work on at night whatever it is we are working on learning during the day. Anyone trying to intensely learn a new skill, play a new game, or take on a new language knows how this plays out in the dream world very quickly. You, who study your dreams and take take control in your dreams, then dreams about controlling the dream - you buit the groundwork for suh a feedback loop IMHO. That his pattern carried forward makes me wonder if in fact you were in standby mode upon waking and still subject to the whims of the default brain network that took day dreaming, introspection, emotion and integration to very strained spaces - all features and concerns of the Default Mode Network.
On the relationship between the “default mode network” and the “social brain”
The other consideration I want to throw your way is the movie, Until the End of the World to look at what happens when we start to intersect our dreams with our new technologies. If you haven't seen Wings of Desire, whose iconic image of the angel on the precipice is seen in Duensing's blog, it also says something to us about dreams, our life stories and intangible reality and is somewhat connected to Wim Wenders' later movie about dreams. I think you would find both movies illuminating and possibly very connected to your own ideas about, dreams, the paranormal, synchronicities and our internal dialogues.

How much time a day were you spending on dream studies in the weeks leading up to your mind breaking incident? Any sleep lost time prior to the incident?

Try not to break yourself again, ok, Wade.

As for the display message - I vote that the glitch in the matrix was just a part of the program, and nothing to be too concerned about.

 

[Constance]

A really ramifying paragraph from the introduction to the new Thompson book I linked above:

"At times, however, something else happens. We realize we’re dreaming, but instead of waking up, we keep right on dreaming with the knowledge that we’re dreaming. We enter what’s called a lucid dream. Here we experience a different kind of awareness, one that witnesses the dream state. No matter what dream contents come and go, including the forms the dream ego takes, we can tell they’re not the same as our awareness of being in the dream state. We no longer identify only with our dream ego – the “I” as dreamed – for our sense of self now includes our dreaming self – the “I” as dreamer.”

 

[Constance]

Burnt, I don't think Wade is in any danger of 'breaking himself' or breaking down his sense of reality in the kind of research he's been accumulating about his own lucid dreams. I do think the Matrix meme can have negative consequences for our thinking about our brains and our consciousnesses. What I'm seeing in the recent research into lucid dreaming by scientists such as those whose books are linked above is verification of the interconnections of consciousness in its various levels, centered in the integral reality of the self that seeks integration with the world in which we know we exist but which we only ever partially comprehend.

That consciousness remains to some degree active even in nondreaming sleep [as Thompson informs us in his new book] indicates its integration with the body and the mind even when the neural nets of the neocortex's executive functions are 'down'. 'Reality' is not some objective machine-like thing outside us that generates only 'virtual realities' in which we think that we live and think and dream. 'Reality' is, for conscious beings such as we are, always compounded of consciousness/mind and the palpable world -- the complexities of nature and the limitations of culture -- that we find ourselves living within.

The lucid dreamer that Wade exemplifies seems to me to be a conscious explorer of his dreams because they provide additional knowledge of the activities of his own mind in the struggle we all share to make sense of the world and our relation to it.

 

[mike]

If its any consolation..........

Google's AI Can Dream, and Here's What it Looks Like | IFLScience

 

[Wade]

@Constance thanks for all the book advice, the evan thompson book is at my local library. I have added that to my list but I want to be careful here. I *think* I want to avoid reading anything that would encourage me to experiment any further because as I mentioned I'm okay with my position now. I'm afraid if I try to take anything furthur I'll may get carried away and I'll end up back in hypnopompia-land or experience another event like the aforementioned reality glitch

@Burnt State as far as i can recall I have only had a couple of dream within a dream experiences. One was i was back in my childhood home and i was in the bathroom looking in my mirror and about to shave...or maybe comb my hair...and I noticed my right hand was missing. I told myself "That's funny it was there this morning, I must be dreaming" at which point I woke up or I should say I thought I woke up as the first time I was still dreaming. I don't recall for sure but I don't think I was in any undue stress at the time at least nothing out of the ordinary. The vast majority of the time I fall asleep within minutes, in years past I tossed and turned for hours mostly because I couldn't turn my brain off it would be filled with random thoughts and concerns and only a few times were they actually pressing concerns.. This could have created a vicious cycle where this could have created an atmosphere for a hypnopompic attacks but here's the weird thing, as best as I can remember whenever I did have an attack I never had any problems going back to immediately sleep even after an attack.

On the other hand I find myself thinking that perhaps the reason I had those attacks in the past may have been because I was still trying to earn my wings and i want ready yet but it has never escaped my attention that i never experienced a frightful attack after one episode where I was so pissed off i swore at "it" and told "it" i was getting f***ing sick of this crap, I know who you are and i know you're there". I still get these episodes but they are not the least bit frightful and are even interesting , to wit :
a very unusual hypnopompic event | The Paracast Community Forums

 

[Constance]

. . . I want to be careful here. I *think* I want to avoid reading anything that would encourage me to experiment any further because as I mentioned I'm okay with my position now. I'm afraid if I try to take anything furthur I'll maybe get carried away and I'll end up back in hypnopompia-land or experience another event like the aforementioned reality glitch.

I actually do think it's a very good idea for you not to encourage further experiences in and around the transition to sleep and in lucid dreaming that become frightening, especially after reading your post (and the others) in the thread you linked at the end of your post today. Had I experienced much of what you've experienced I would have asked for an Rx for tranquilizers.


In fact I was given a prescription for tranquilizers after the spontaneous OBE I had some months after the car accident I've described in one or two other threads here. I remember now that at the time of that OBE I'd been experiencing an intense pain in my left jaw on awakening, accompanied by the sense of an siren sounding and rapidly increasing in volume as the pain increased. I remember telling the neurologist I was sent to within an hour after the OBE about this pain/siren as I was awakening and the continuation of the intense pain all day and he prescribed a tranquilizer, which did gradually work to reduce and eliminate whatever the problem was. (My injuries in the accident had been to my forehead from impacting and breaking the windshield and the neurologist could not find a physical reason for the pain in my jaw, nor provide an explanation for the OBE. I think I was suffering from PTSD after the accident, perhaps clenching my left jaw while asleep, out of residual stress. Anyway, my point is that something similar to that stress could be involved in your repeated lucid dreams and their sometimes frightening effects. Stress in general makes us hypervigilant, disturbs rest and sleep, which we need to restore our physical energy and the equanimity of our minds.


That same year (I think several months before the car accident) I also had for a few weeks a strange recurring experience in the minutes after awakening -- what seemed to be a vivid recollection of hearing two voices speaking above me in a language I could not understand. The voices were somewhat distant, not human, and accompanied by a kind of static. This felt like a memory left over from my sleeping or dreaming. My impression was that they had been discussing me or my condition, exchanging points of view in the style of scientific or medical professionals unemotionally discussing a case, and that I was not meant to have overheard them. After several weeks this stopped. The experiences described in that other thread you linked reminded me of this episode.


Who knows what any of this means? But in any case I do think it's personally risky to attempt to experiment with lucid dreaming or other altered states of consciousness, though I respect the courage it takes to do so and I'm grateful for what's being learned about consciousness in sleep or quasi-sleep and dreaming as a result of the experiments described in that first book I linked yesterday. Consciousness is a great and compelling mystery, a major development of physical evolution and we want to know how it works, what it seeks and enables even when we are asleep. But for the individual explorer attempting to witness all that is experienced in sleep, I think it's bound to be unsettling and perhaps significantly destabilizing. Nature or God (they might be the same) has produced the structure of our being, and I think there are limits to how far we should individually take our curiosity concerning the deeper levels of consciousness that feed into our perception and conceptualization of 'reality'. You also wrote:

On the other hand I find myself thinking that perhaps the reason I had those attacks in the past may have been because I was still trying to earn my wings and i wasn’t ready yet but it has never escaped my attention that i never experienced a frightful attack after one episode where I was so pissed off i swore at "it" and told "it" i was getting f***ing sick of this crap, I know who you are and i know you're there". I still get these episodes but they are not the least bit frightful and are even interesting , to wit :

a very unusual hypnopompic event | The Paracast Community Forums

By 'earn your wings' did you mean that you were attempting to achieve what is called 'astral flight' or 'astral travel'? Somewhere in the last 24 hours, here in the threads or elsewhere, someone referred to the possibility of asking to have certain dreams, dreams about particular people or things. At some point after the car accident that took my daughter out of this local world I asked before falling asleep to have a dream that would show me where she was, what it was like there. That night I had a vivid dream in which I was flying over a lushly green planet or place, over a long valley set in among hills covered with trees. It seemed to be a bigger place than this planet, for the horizons of what was visible to me traveling through the air above it seemed to be further away than they would be were I flying in a light plane at the same elevation over earth. The flight was magnificent and liberating. I felt that I was flying, and everything I saw was beautiful. Perhaps you could try asking to dream about situations of a similar nature?


I've noted what you've written in the past about frequent dreams of a chaotic earthworld in which you can't find a way out of Escher-like structures in which you seem to be prevented from escaping. The thought crossed my mind that you had seen some of those paintings and drawings at a point of personal vulnerability and that you'd been trying repeatedly in your dreams to come to terms with the situation they suggest as metaphorically our situation in this world. Escher's disorienting representations are probably discussed in a book I cited in the C&P thread a few days ago titled Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought. Its thesis is that the horrendous, out of scale events and appalling human destructiveness beginning with WWI and the growth of urban, mechanized environments in which individuals feel overwhelmed have triggered frightening representations in art and widespread feelings of fear and helplessness in humans. For all the extraordinary power of our minds intellectually, we are fragile beings aware of our fragility. I think that in these circumstances we need as a culture and as individuals to balance our fascination, or our struggle, as the case may be, with our worst imaginings with at least an equal amount of attention to what is and has been sustaining in our species' history, before the modern period's displacements and traumas and this world’s blind rush toward self-annihilation.

 

[Heidi Lemmer]

Great discussion by all of you.

 

[Wade]

@Constance, I wish I could say what emotional state i was in when I saw the familiar work of M.C. Escher...I don't remember where it was or in what context it was in...but it did stop me in my tracks (metaphorically speaking) some of his work very much resonated with me,and it seemed strangely familiar.

I can't honestly say I remember being in those dream landscapes before I was familar with such work as waterfall and ascending and descending but after I did see those I can certainly say I added that landscape to my repertoire.

By 'earn your wings' did you mean that you were attempting to achieve what is called 'astral flight' or 'astral travel'?

No that was a poor choice of words. From what I've read about the experiences of people who write of astral travel I've never experienced anything like that, and I'm not sure I would want to. My dreams take place in the world as we experience it except it's full of paradoxes and warped perspectives( like a fun house ) and that's what I meant by not really desiring to go any further, I'm content with where I am now, but I can and do change things around a bit if I get frustrated with the way things are playing out but I can only access things that are known to us (I am struggling to make sense here) and fwiw, my problems with stairs doesn't just involve me trying to escape they also prevent me from achieving a goal like getting to the right platform to catch a train or bus or making it to the correct floor to pay a bill, that's the bigger issue, not so much trying to escape but achieving a certain goal.

Hey I think we made a breakthrough here! I'm acting as my own lab rat for my own entertainment...or study...

What did floor me a bit was a couple of weeks ago when a documentary called the nightmare was showing. It told the experiences of eight people who have had, and in some cases still have, problems with sleep paralysis . What really caught my attention was one guy who related a dream in which he was propped upright on a operating table like I had...Although apparently this is a fairly common dream...straight out of Frankenstein castle and another guy (it may have been the same one) whose wording indicated that he was also having issues with landscapes whose buildings had stairs that didn't conform to reality. I wish I could remember remember his exact wording but I forgot, I do believe the video is available as a video on demand download. It's on Google play.

As far as setting a agenda before you go to sleep, I have heard of this, I've heard of people doing it quite successfully and no I've never attempted it but I think it would be in my capacity to do so.

 

[Constance]

@Constance, I wish I could say what emotional state i was in when I saw the familiar work of M.C. Escher...I don't remember where it was or in what context it was in...but it did stop me in my tracks (metaphorically speaking) some of his work very much resonated with me,and it seemed strangely familiar.

I can't say it resonated with me, but I found it intriguing and compelling: an unsolvable puzzle in many cases.

I can't honestly say I remember being in those dream landscapes before I was familar with such work as waterfall and ascending and descending but after I did see those I can certainly say I added that landscape to my repertoire.

I'd bet that you had much more patience in analyzing those works than I did, and so engaged them in more detail as structures. As rationally unsolvable, they might have stayed in the back of your mind or stepped down into your subconscious mind where part of your consciousness continued to work on them.

No that was a poor choice of words. From what I've read about the experiences of people who write of astral travel I've never experienced anything like that, and I'm not sure I would want to. My dreams take place in the world as we experience it except it's full of paradoxes and warped perspectives( like a fun house ) and that's what I meant by not really desiring to go any further, I'm content with where I am now, but I can and do change things around a bit if I get frustrated with the way things are playing out but I can only access things that are known to us (I am struggling to make sense here) and fwiw, my problems with stairs doesn't just involve me trying to escape they also prevent me from achieving a goal like getting to the right platform to catch a train or bus or making it to the correct floor to pay a bill, that's the bigger issue, not so much trying to escape but achieving a certain goal.

That's clarifying, both about your not having been interested in astral flight and about the frustrations with stairs not just in situations where they don't enable escape but because they don't lead where you want to get. I think it's possible that these dreams recur because they've become a habit of your dreaming minds. I've had some recurring dreams concerning two large elaborate and complex houses, not dreamt at the same time. In each of them I find myself discovering additional floors/levels, hallways, and rooms, closets, attics, immense collections of things someone else has collected in the past. There's sometimes a sense in the dream that I've inherited responsibility for these places and the furnishings and artifacts in them. These dreams are never vivid, but because I remember in the dream that I've been in that place before I seem to recall those dreams after waking up.

What did floor me a bit was a couple of weeks ago when a documentary called the nightmare was showing. It told the experiences of eight people who have had, and in some cases still have, problems with sleep paralysis . What really caught my attention was one guy who related a dream in which he was propped upright on a operating table like I had...Although apparently this is a fairly common dream...straight out of Frankenstein castle and another guy (it may have been the same one) whose wording indicated that he was also having issues with landscapes whose buildings had stairs that didn't conform to reality. I wish I could remember remember his exact wording but I forgot, I do believe the video is available as a video on demand download. It's on Google play.

We might both be talking about classic dreams that are experienced by many people and that have been interpreted by dream researchers and Jungian psychologists.

As far as setting a agenda before you go to sleep, I have heard of this, I've heard of people doing it quite successfully and no I've never attempted it but I think it would be in my capacity to do so.

I think so too. Why don't you ask for some dreams located in places you love, maybe natural environments you enjoy exploring? Places far away from enclosed structures, staircases, escalators, ladders, etc? Report back.

 

[boomerang]

I just finished reading "Hallucinations" by Oliver Sacks. It's an amazing account of incredibly strange and very "real" sights, sounds other sensations functional individuals may experience by virtue of minor anomalies in very small and extremely specific regions of the brain. The nature of these experience can be likewise eerily specific to the individual. Or sometimes the surreal may occur on a one-time basis when a "perfect storm" brews within the interplay of interactions of the brain's neuronal connections. Many of the cases Sacks cites are related to the mystery of sleep.

I'm not saying this is necessarily the cause of your intense encounter with the numinous. Nor am I suggesting you discount these experiences' spiritual meaning to you. But I was amazed in reading Sack's book how many people experience unworldly things spontaneously generated (apparently) within their own brains.

 

[Wade]

, but because I remember in the dream that I've been in that place before I seem to recall those dreams after waking up.

When you say " I've been in that place before, do you mean in reality or within the dream state?

A few times i told myself within a dream upon arriving at a destination that was otherwise unknown to me i told myself "I've been here before" when there was no reason to think i had...and i'm quite certain i had not in real life.

One of them i remember quite well even though i had it nearly three years ago. I was back east visiting my sister and brother in law and we were on a day trip to a small town kown for quiant musuems and arts and crafts shops it was a small village just a few miles off I-81 not too far from Syracuse.

As soon as we got there, i told myself within the dream i had been there before when i hadn't, either in real life or dream life and instead of my sister leading us to our intended stop, i led us, it was down a wholly unremarkable alley to an unmarked door with an old fashioned door bell, the curator/proprietress welcomed us and said "I've been expecting you " (us/me?) it was a very small place, colonial like, for lack of a better word and full of curios, like as if someone was having an estate sale or emptied their attic, desks filled with what would otherwise be keepsakes or possessions. At one point she was telling us about the owner, when i picked up a photo which "seemed" to date from earliest 20th century or maybe very late 19th century , it was an old tintype looking picture of a women and her young son whom i think she was holding on her lap. I said this was her wasn't it ? The curator replied " yes, what can you tell me about her"? I told her that the mother and child later on had an incestuous relationship and were run out of town, to which the curator replied "Very good Wade".

Now this was not a dream in which i was active in, but after i woke up, i just sort of obsessed about it, i couldn't stop wondering "what the hell was that about, how did i manage to put that one together ? " Notice there was absolutely nothing fantastical about it at all, the details were of earthly concerns and there was not a single aspect that was anywhere relevent in my real life as far as past events or concerns. but still on occasion i will dwell on it as it doesn't seem to apply towards any emotional state i was in at the time. I'd like to have known what Freud would have said about this one and heaven help him if he tried going down that repressed feelings about my mom route , i'd show him where to put that cigar.

What i did want to mention here though is that i really really appreciate all the comments , (especially Constance and her suggestions) but i have to be honest and mention that the thread went in a different way that what i had intended.

It wasn't really my intent to open up my head to all, we all have interesting dreams that mean more to ourselves and are probably less intriguing to those that don't expereince them. It's like trying to get people interested in your collections of something. I hadn't really intended to even mention my "breakdown" or whatever one wants to call it, i'm glad i did i guess as the feedback has been quite helpful but the reason why i posted it at all was because it may have been relevant in the context of things when it came to the message on the phone, that was my focal point.

When i started off the thread i said that this "experience" was bound to dwell on my mind and push me towards something, i can feel it. I've mentioned before that mantis meme that kept popping up over a period of a few days some years back and it's effect on me. Much of the things i have written about, i can say were a part of my existence since my youth BUT i never really delved into to them. i was more concerned about more earthly, real life experiences...can't disregard those after all..and while i reveled in my experiences they didn't compell me to dig any deeper or join a forum, that all changed when that darned mantis kept showing up.

I mentioned elsewhere, that while i very much do "believe" in the concept of synchronicity, i do acknowledge that there could be other things at work such as enhanced (?) pattern recognition, that has to be a factor, i remember taking an I.Q. test some years back and to my surprise i fell just a handful of points below genuis ( wink, wink) level for my age although i'm quite certain i've dropped off more than a few points over the years. But the main thing to point out is that while i rated quite well in many categories it was pattern recogintion that propelled me higher. i recall nailing that part of it.

Two things to note here while in grade school my grades were definitely not almost "near genius" level and i remembered telling my mom i could predict the future, because to my young mind, thinking of a object and/or person then getting that visual/audio feedback was prediciting the future. As far as my school grades report cards again and again , it was something on the level of " i feel he has much potential and could do should do much much better but needs to pay attention, always daydreaming , needs to focus" all of which were true.

My point here is there are other things at work, although i'm not a proponent of the law of numbers explaniation...at least such as it is used in this area...i mean it seems to me that the defintion or explaination is too broad, i don't think it can be used in that broad of a context, i.e. " consider all the events that can occur and all the people that exist and someone is bound to take note of some kind of input that experience multiple phenomena. "

i do acknowledge that living in a large city as i do and receiving a lot of visual and audio input somewhere along the line one will get that old familiar think of a song, or a person and you will hear it or hear from them memo, albeit it happens to me again and again during certain periods. I do strive to distinguish between coincidences, numbers law and such and as i mentioned maybe we are just dismissing too much the coincidence part, what is meaningful to me isn't meaningful to many others unless perhaps they are in the same frame of mind BUT if the hallmark of a synchronicty is that it stops one and makes them go "whoa" then just like my mantis friend, this one is going to weigh on my mind for some time because guys, my phone really DID say there is no spoon and that was my focal point here. This didn't really get touched upon much here, maybe because no one else experienced it and therefore it's "meaningfullness" it couldn't register, or maybe you thought i was losing it and were too polite to say it, but my phone really did say there is no spoon.

Everyone here is probably familiar with their phones to the point where if an email didn't go through, or their battery is very low or the wifi is not in range they will get a notification that informs them of this and after a few seconds vanishes, this is what my phone did and even though i am hesitant to toss away any explaiantion i will immediately dismiss two things

A. I imagined it
B. or that it was an imprint or artifact of sub-conscious memory from viewing the movie the Matrix i don't want to come off as a former *almost-genius*know it all but there was nothing that i had remembered about that movie except for all the effects and the general plot because when i had originally seen the movie i was not in the frame of mind that i am in now so i didn't appreciate the message of what the movie was about in the context of us questioning our reality. Dark City got my attention way way more and would be in a position to weigh on my mind a lot more, but fwiw i went out and rented both again.It was nice to see Jennifer Connelly again.

 

[Wade]

Solved, and now I feel stupid.
This app I use does indeed kick this message out but it's not consistent. I should have figured this out as the message ties in with what the app is supposed to be about, so the fact I did get this message while thinking about dreaming is a natural situation.

In my defense though the timing was off as well, what I mean is that this message didn't come for some time after I uploaded my dream. Indeed immediately after uploading it i would upload the same thing to a folder on my google drive account and THATS when i got the message.

Oh well. In the end this little non-issue got me clued in to some interesting dream titles, (which may have stayed unfamiliar to me) courtesy of Constance so maybe there was a bigger picture thing after all, as it is it started me off on broadening my reading so there you are.

awoken app there is no spoon - Google Search

 

[Constance]

I'm relieved to hear that you are not caught in the Matrix, because if you are we all are, and we're better off out here.

 

[Constance]

When you say " I've been in that place before, do you mean in reality or within the dream state?

A few times i told myself within a dream upon arriving at a destination that was otherwise unknown to me i told myself "I've been here before" when there was no reason to think i had...and i'm quite certain i had not in real life.

Hi Wade. I forgot to answer that question. The several complex houses I've had recurring dreams in have not been places known to me in actual life. What I meant to say is that when I've re-dreamed them I have recognized them from previous dreams and seem to have so commented to myself while in the dream. I did not have a sense of deja vu like that which occurs when people travel to a place they've haven't visited before and have the sense that they have indeed been there before.

Also, the primary many-storied, many-winged house is at least a century old and filled with considerable accumulations of interesting period furnishings and attic rooms in which are stored historical and even archaeological items (as if a collector has lived there in the past). In one dream in that house I discovered a new hallway leading to an immense room with a grand piano in it. I think also in that particular house I discovered that it had an escape tunnel opening out in a nearby field.

Another large house I've dreamt of several times is a magnificent one with an enormous and lavish bedroom occupying the entire second floor (I think one has to cross a bridge above the first floor of the house to get to it). The main floor has a kitchen fit for a castle and numerous rooms opening out to the center of the house. In my dreams I've refurnished those rooms many times. That's also true of the other houses I've dreamt into existence. Am I a frustrated architect, or do I watch too many House & Garden programs? I do love those dreams.

Also, I followed your link to a google forum on your app and skimmed the comments. Are you the one who posted the question asking what "there is no spoon" means, or did someone else get the same message?