The UFO Stimulus

[Soupie]

It just occurred to me that I can say with a large amount of certainty that i don't have what I would call bad dreams. I am fairly lucid and in control of them and when things are going south I either bail out or change the narrative BUT as I noted above when i am in a position to possible not control them, I get blindsided, its as if bad karma is not to be denied but why it is focused on sudden physical harm coming to me or someone else I am curious.

Not sure if applicable but thought I'd share:

Fear Dreams: What Are They Trying To Tell You?

Edit: Uh, actually may be very applicable mate...

 

[Burnt State]

On a somewhat related note one thing that does trouble me is what I call my drift off dreams. I've posted quite a few times about my dreams and my capacity for remembering them to a fairly decent degree. While this doesn't happen to me whenever I settle down for the night, at a rate of close to 100% if I unintentionally drift off while not ready to actually go to bed I'll have very disturbing dreams that involve tragic consequences/injury to no one in particular, sometimes me sometimes young innocents. They usually involves being struck by something large or falling to their death and it i immediately snaps me out and i am awake. I tried googling this "phenomenon" to see if others reported this and while I was stuck for a set of words to use it found a thread where others reported this.

Bottom Line, why does this occur to me only as I drop off reading or listening to a broadcast or podcast but is absent when I intentionally settle in for the night ?

I don't think what you are describing is that odd or uncommon at all. Well at least I can anecdotally confirm that I have very similar experiences, as well when I fall asleep accidentally with late night television going on there's no question that my dream narratives are invaded and impregnated by whatever chaos is coming through late night violent cop dramas or late night violent news. It's very unsettling. However, for about the last year or so I've been consciously falling asleep to YouTube television from my past: Star Trek TOS, the Night Stalker or Father Ted are all sleep aids. I find the familiar banter of certain voices to be a soothing knock out pill and it has zero effect on dreams as episodes turn off soon enough and my brain is not being bombarded with ongoing electronic audio.

 

[Burnt State]

Bottom Line, why does this occur to me only as I drop off reading or listening to a broadcast or podcast but is absent when I intentionally settle in for the night ?

What's also interesting about you is that you are a lucid dreamer. You might be even more sensitive to external, extraneous sensory information as a result and that could just be part of your make up. But from what I remember about lucid dream training, what you did just before bed to induce a lucid dream involved a very meditative focus that was about calm, quiet and very minimal inputs or one input at the most if anything, and the suggestion was that it should be olfactory i.e. sleeping with a flower nearby. You are sleeping with the noise of many voices and as a lucid dreamer you may be highly sensitive to such material.

 

[Wade]

I know what you mean and can report the same thing, that is I will incorporate some things into my dreams and other broadcasts will just lul me to sleep but I could be reading a Smithsonian magazine or the latest new yorker or Atlantic and drop off a bit only to be jolted awake because I just witnessed a sudden and unexpected out of nowhere death to someone and yet I very rarely have any problems actually going to sleep due to any kind of anxieties. I think I have a very healthy interactive dream state that is usually very compelling but I quite literally and figuratively cannot recall the last bad dream I had, more often than not they are non-linear, paradoxal (?) and the perspective is always changing but boy if I should accidentally fall asleep...I figure it has something to do with having my defenses ready!?

 

[Burnt State]

Something I've encountered lately is the coupling between valence of thoughts (positive or negative) and the valence of affect (positive or negative).

It seems to be somewhat of a chicken and egg scenario. That is, negative thoughts can lead to negative feelings; but it seems that negative feelings lead to negative thoughts as well.

So for example, someone who is clinically depressed is flooded with negative thoughts as result of the depression, as opposed to the negative thoughts being a cause of the depression.

It fascinates me that negative affect can lead to negative thoughts. For example, when my one year old is (apparently) mad, he sometimes hits, head butts, and bites. Quite the feisty one is he.

I know that when I am mad, I sometimes have a conscious impulse (thought) to hit (which I am usually able to inhibit). Why when we are mad do we not have an impulse to break into song?

Does my one year old have a similar impulse to hit? It seems so. However it may not (yet) manifest as a conscious, conceptual thought; and he is only slowly learning to inhibit these strong, emotion coupled impulses/urges.

Where am I going with this?

When people experience unusual visionary/hallucinatory experiences, they may experience fear; this fear may unleash a stream of mostly negative thoughts about the nature of the experience and what it may be.

Why do we seem to automatically react with fear and negative thoughts to unusual, unknown experiences?

My hypothesis is quite reductive, but an argument could be made that such a response is evolutionarily adaptive.

If you're attacked, get mad and strike back. If you encounter the unknown, get scared, assume it's a predator, and run.

The fact that fear and negative thoughts are associated with these events may have an indirect cause; they may not be directly related to the event itself as some have speculated.

Negative thinking is deadly. You live longer with positive thoughts as positivity is about positive chemistry. Negative thoughts leads to a flooding of stress hormones in our body which affects all of our regulatory princesses. Insulin does not work properly; our immune system fails us and if the heart starts to race, and blood pressure increases, then a whole chain reaction of internal chaos is set in motion. Increased blood pressure, fear, and new chemistry surges can begin the hallucination or the panic attack or both. Anyone who has ever found themselves in the middle of having a panic attack knows that despite years of cognitive behaviour therapy training the cascading effects of panic are very, very difficult to stop.

Fear, as a reptilian survival instinct, has to be the most powerful active process for humans, much bigger deal than the sex drive and sex hormones racing. Fear is literally about life or death and the impact on our sensory system should not be underestimated. Fear is a wonderful hallucination inducer. And you don't even need a stimulus to get the proverbial ball rolling, all you really need is the perception that there is a fearful stimulus present, and nothing more. Our imaginations are probably significantly more powerful than any other possible fear inducement.

Good article on negative thoughts below:

How Negative Thoughts Affect Everything in Our Life | Julie Chen, M.D.

 

[Burnt State]

I know what you mean and can report the same thing, that is I will incorporate some things into my dreams and other broadcasts will just lul me to sleep but I could be reading a Smithsonian magazine or the latest new yorker or Atlantic and drop off a bit only to be jolted awake because I just witnessed a sudden and unexpected out of nowhere death to someone and yet I very rarely have any problems actually going to sleep due to any kind of anxieties. I think I have a very healthy interactive dream state that is usually very compelling but I quite literally and figuratively cannot recall the last bad dream I had, more often than not they are non-linear, paradoxal (?) and the perspective is always changing but boy if I should accidentally fall asleep...I figure it has something to do with having my defenses ready!?

You would make a great lab rat for any dream/sleep research study. Consider this, as you may get to develop some super powers out of the deal.

 

[Wade]

Cool, I'll call myself REM.

But joking aside. I'm a stones throw from Ucla and have a number of faculty staff as my customers. From time to time I've asked them if they were aware of any sleep studies (or neurological as I am curious about the role of Dopamine in our sleep and awake states) going on and if they could throw in a good word for me. I don't give a crap about money. I just want to know what makes me tick

 

[Constance]

Isn't the only way to describe our sensory experience of reality as a virtual reality in our head?

No.

 

[Burnt State]

No.

Do you care to elaborate on that?

The statement I was making was in response to the chain of discussion on the thread with reagrds to how, from individual to individual, reality is a set of perceptions taking place virtually in one's mind and no two minds will be alike. Some will see the blue and black dress and others will see white and gold. Other people I know saw orange and gold so really, sensory reality is a very personal virtual experience.

Objective reality at the point of observation eludes us entirely. In terms of content we see what we believe we see and what we see is based on what we know. The majority of what we see is just the brain filling in the gaps. Those other interpretive aspects such as color, shape, texture etc. are filled in by our processing systems and then projected inside our minds as an interior image: each person has their own simultaneous recording, coloring and projection lab inside their heads. No two labs are identical. Similarities will occur.

 

[Heidi Lemmer]

Color of the blue and black dress science - Business Insider
In the article above they imply that the color is based on where you are when seeing it, dark room, light room, shadow effect, etc. It's basically the eye's adjusting to take in the color within individual parameters, which essentially comes up with the variations of color. Makes more sense to me, else why wouldn't we see green and white, purple and white, etc.

"People who see white and gold may be looking at the dress in a blue-lit room or near a window with a blue sky. It also depends on our own individual sensitivity to the bluish tinting in the photo. The brains of people who see white and gold are interpreting the photo as more shadowy. The brain compensates for the darker blue tinting and interprets the blue part as white and the black part as gold.

People who see the correct black and blue might be looking at the dress somewhere with artificial, yellow-lit lights. Or their brain is interpreting the photo as more illuminated and therefore it doesn't need to compensate for the shadows."

 

[Burnt State]

"People who see white and gold may be looking at the dress in a blue-lit room or near a window with a blue sky. It also depends on our own individual sensitivity to the bluish tinting in the photo. The brains of people who see white and gold are interpreting the photo as more shadowy. The brain compensates for the darker blue tinting and interprets the blue part as white and the black part as gold.

People who see the correct black and blue might be looking at the dress somewhere with artificial, yellow-lit lights. Or their brain is interpreting the photo as more illuminated and therefore it doesn't need to compensate for the shadows."

My favourite blue/black dress moment was sitting in a room together with a bunch of us looking at the screen. Four people saw three different color sets. It was such a startling moment, like reality was broken suddenly. This proved to me that reality is an individual sensory event experienced internally.

 

[Heidi Lemmer]

I'd have to think about the statement "Reality is an individual event experienced internally." Simply because the other equation is that we as humans have collectively decided what the color black is, what gold is, what a square is, a table, a fork. So where does that individual event go when I sit across from someone at the dinner table and we both use a fork in our green salad with red placemats?

 

[Burnt State]

I'd have to think about the statement "Reality is an individual event experienced internally." Simply because the other equation is that we as humans have collectively decided what the color black is, what gold is, what a square is, a table, a fork. So where does that individual event go when I sit across from someone at the dinner table and we both use a fork in our green salad with red placemats?

The first part seems to be about language which is an arbitrary representational system. But as far as your individual sensory experience of green, it will be tied to your descendant hunter genes and your ability to distinguish different shades of green while hunting prey in the forest. There will be similarities of course in your experience, but if your dinner partner is a man then you will be experiencing a much more rich color palette, and if he is a guest then his brain will be filling in his visual field with much less accurate detail as your brain has that many more pre-recorded samples of your space and will have to work much less to paint the scene. I won't bother going into sound, taste and smell etc. but all these will vary according to genetics, history, socialization and experience.

Getting back to language, your description of this shared reality will also be radically different based not just on your varying sensory processing systems, but all that went into creating your own linguistic capacities to give shape to the reality you saw inside your mind. "Did the salad have shades of chartreuse in it for you as well?"

That's why no two witness experiences will ever be identical. Throw some emotion into the situation and you can understand why two witnesses standing near each other will report a man charging at the police officer while the other saw someone with his hands up in the air surrendering.

 

[Constance]

Objective reality at the point of observation eludes us entirely.

What point of observation would you prefer? One outside the universe of which we are an organic part and an expression? How do you think we come to agree upon and function in the actual world we live in here? No, I don't "care to elaborate on" these and a thousand other questions concerning mind, matter, and the nature of reality that have taken 300 pages to explore so far in the C&P thread, but you will find some information you need in those pages.

 

[Burnt State]

What point of observation would you prefer? One outside the universe of which we are an organic part and an expression? How do you think we come to agree upon and function in the actual world we live in here? No, I don't "care to elaborate on" these and a thousand other questions concerning mind, matter, and the nature of reality that have taken 300 pages to explore so far in the C&P thread, but you will find some information you need in those pages.

At the point of observation, reality does alter for us mortals, for any two or more. We create language to share in a described reality and we can do this because of the similarities. Am I really engaging with the same person who was doubting it was a mummy? The details of reality from individual to individual do matter do they not. Specificity counts right?

 

[Constance]

Burnt, the theory you stated a few posts back and that I responded to with my one-word answer 'no' was this:

"Isn't the only way to describe our sensory experience of reality as a virtual reality in our head?"

I wasn't responding to the rest of that post in which you argue that our individually situated and colored perspectives on things signify that we do not see, otherwise sense, and share essentially the same local world, an actual world in which the conditions of our existence are the same.

Differences in individual color perception and in conscious and unconscious ideation do not mean that a majority of ufo reports can be reduced to hallucinations, or that most of us spend a lot of time dwelling in realities we project rather than encounter.

 

[Heidi Lemmer]

Well....I could only add a scenario, food for thought....lets take the dinner scenario again. I agree with you Burnt that when two people sit down to a dinner their perceptions of that dinner, conversation, food, colors and smells will be different. How different is an interesting conversation. But the actual reality is probably perceived the same. They will both agree they ate food, they used knives and forks, a plate, what they ate...etc. What will become more nuanced is what it tasted like, what they talked about, the colors, the smells. To bring this forward to a more direct statement, where I think we part, is that a UFO event can be properly recorded with enough detail to declare it a UFO. More specifically, again, where we might part, we don't know if the actual craft being witnessed, itself changes, causing multiple witness to describe different visions. So this unknown goes in the record book. Stanford describes this, that in his videos the craft changes presenting different colors and shapes. It's also been recorded for years to be this way. This may have nothing then to do with the witness and more to do with the craft. I get that "details" vary. So do emotions, perceptions and individual realities. But does the "event" vary? Mostly, I think not. The reason I hold strongly to that belief, at least the main reason, is that I don't think we as humans would evolve the way we have without being able to identify knowns versus unknowns. It would become to complex. In fact, dare I say, we practice constantly to exploit those unknowns and seek confidence in living within those unknowns. We see a train coming, we all see a train coming (if we're looking). We give these things names, we've formed a language around these things and we share and interact with these things every second.
To move one step beyond that, in creating our own realities...I have a hard time with that when I'm driving down a road I've never been on and my brain is busy laying out what's to come before I then see that road. That , in it's simplicity, doesn't jive for me. Which is why, when a person is standing outside, smoking a cig and suddenly notices a craft slowly moving past them, I question how that reality suddenly pops into this person's head. And if a neighbor down the street also see's this craft, how have they created a virtual same reality? Oi, I won't sleep tonight!!!

 

[Burnt State]

Differences in individual color perception and in conscious and unconscious ideation do not mean that a majority of ufo reports can be reduced to hallucinations, or that most of us spend a lot of time dwelling in realities we project rather than encounter.

Now here's a question. Did anyone actually say that? And why is it that you are locked into critiquing a reality that never actually happened. Is it something internally that you are holding onto that will not allow you to explore and acknowledge the nuances of the discussion? I think this is called Phillip Klass Syndrome where no matter what differences and subtleties are presented the response held to is always the same fixation. I think that's worth looking into.

 

[Soupie]

if he is a guest then his brain will be filling in his visual field with much less accurate detail as your brain has that many more pre-recorded samples of your space and will have to work much less to paint the scene.

Only indirectly related:

A mental phenomenon that I notice often regards time. For example, if I'm watching a movie and there is a scary part, I will "record" it in my memory; the next time I watch the scene, it is not uncommon for me to experience the scene as being "shorter" or perhaps going "faster" than it had the first time (or rather, how I had "recorded" it).

I'm going to speculate that during mundane events, people probably are more likely to have similar experiences. If your at the dinner table as you have been for years, then as events unfold as they have for years, experience (and expectation) will converge.

However, if two stranger witness an event that is not only novel but anomalous, then their brains will be tasked with making sense of the novel, anomalous event; the likelihood of convergent experience will markedly go down.

Here's a sighting/experience that Leslie Kean reported on this past May:

Exclusive: New Video of Unexplained Aerial Phenomenon From Chile | Leslie Kean

 

[Heidi Lemmer]

Only indirectly related:

A mental phenomenon that I notice often regards time. For example, if I'm watching a movie and there is a scary part, I will "record" it in my memory; the next time I watch the scene, it is not uncommon for me to experience the scene as being "shorter" or perhaps going "faster" than it had the first time (or rather, how I had "recorded" it).

I'm going to speculate that during mundane events, people probably are more likely to have similar experiences. If your at the dinner table as you have been for years, then as events unfold as they have for years, experience (and expectation) will converge.

However, if two stranger witness an event that is not only novel but anomalous, then their brains will be tasked with making sense of the novel, anomalous event; the likelihood of convergent experience will markedly go down.

Here's a sighting/experience that Leslie Kean reported on this past May:

Exclusive: New Video of Unexplained Aerial Phenomenon From Chile | Leslie Kean

It's a minor sidenote of being an individual. But to the effect of creating our own reality, rolling out our own movie, seductive, I'm sure, but doesn't stand up to scrutiny. In the event of creating a reality, such as a UFO sighting, would this then be comparible to say, the Malaysia flight crash with several hundred people agreeing in a collective reality, to die? Hardly. To which I would then ask, where does that "creating our reality" line get drawn. Will I know when a family member is about to slam his glass down at the dinner table and stream out a burst of complaints about his job while I'm busy thinking of how to get out of dishes? While it's true when we repeat patterns we relax our observation mode simply because it's less relied upon, what do we say when the bird smashes into the kitchen window and startles everyone? It wasn't in the program, but when and where did we collectively decide it would happen?
In the article you posted the three witnesses can agree they saw something unknown. They differ in what. This has always been tricky in deciphering what actually happened. The best that researchers can do is find the common theme between reports. And they find it. But I find it difficult to follow that three people would commit to seeing UFO's as a shared reality spontaneously as they did. I'm probably off track here, sorry.