Dream Time

[Michael McMahon]

One reason we forget our dreams might be to do with humility because if we dreamt about a usual event in our real life only to wake up with no memory of it then it might be sarcastic that you yourself are a bit irrelevant, boring and forgettable! In last night’s dream I was walking around a city at night with a desert climate as if to give me clues to where I’d like to live when so many desert cities aren’t English-speaking.

 

[Michael McMahon]

In my [www radicalcentristmichael.com/post/lucid-dreaming] website I mentioned a lucid dream I had a few years ago in which I was in a black-and-white room with the appearance of a skull beside me. It’s likely the longest lucid dream I’ve had seeing as it deterred me prolonging subsequent lucid dreams. In retrospect it might be possible that the dream parodied time-travel by insisting that time-travel during sleep would be the scientific equivalent of x-ray vision. Yet the lucid dream of the uncanny valley with skulls and bedroom closets might be an allusion to how death anxiety can itself imbue free will when death is a mystery. So from a neuroscience perspective the brain is unconsciously linked with neurons to the heart such that the brain with long-term planning in the neo-cortex is self-aware that the heart will eventually die from ageing of a heart attack. So the more a dream can remind you of your mortality the more you can extract free will from the mystery of death. To some extent we have internal x-rays in how our spinal chord contains neurons unlike other bones in our body such that the brain could infer the motion of our backbone in prior hours. Perhaps nightly x-ray vision with a rested backbone could allow you to move your bones better during the day to gain extra free will! Lucid dreaming can be so extreme that some lucid dreams might be designed by the unconscious mind to counteract the unstable effects of other lucid dreams in case they become too possessive. Simulating x-ray vision might not mean you could look at other people’s skeletons back in time but could still be used to moderate a belief in time travel to be more symbolic than literal! A belief in having x-ray vision might mimic a belief in God such that your decision-making might make less sense to others in a way that could increase your sense of free-will. A problem with the philosophy of God is that God is often multitasking multiple distinct beliefs from an afterlife belief to a creator belief. Yet it’s also possible to believe in a deistic God just for the sake of free will without any afterlife belief.

https://youtu.be/2feEc5wg__0?si=IVfQ3BgYZn8-oVPr
What if you had x-ray vision

 

[Michael McMahon]

Time-travelling forward during sleep might slow down physical sound-waves into long-wavelength mental radio waves or speed up visual light into short-wave x-rays! A digital games console can store so much information on a disc that the brain might have enough storage space for the equivalent of hundreds of “PS4” or “X-box” games for dreaming and lucid dreaming. It’d simply be too possessive if our waking mind had full access to our unconscious mind. After all it’d be easier for an unconscious mind to remember fiction than fact when it comes to emotional processing seeing as fiction doesn’t have to be validated as much as fact. In other words a games console isn’t as burdensome as a DVD for memory space. Our conscious mind has to expend a lot of energy making fiction more consistent for others to understand at English class whereas our unconscious mind can take shortcuts making personal fiction in a dream just for ourselves.

 

[Michael McMahon]

A dream is almost like a misspelled and informal phone text message with poor punctuation and grammar so as to type faster and appear more relaxed.

“Researchers from Coventry University set out to investigate whether there is any correlation between the use of what they call “textisms” and poor spelling and reading skills.”
https://amp.theguardian.com/media/mind-your-language/2014/nov/07/mind-your-language-textisms

Typing with 10 fingers can be error prone and faster when it comes to an unconscious mind formulating a dream compared to typing only with each index finger.

“The 10 finger method is a very established technique to efficiently use your computer keyboard.” typingacademy

 

[Michael McMahon]

One version of lucid dreaming is that during slow wave sleep we can freeze our imagination and our timeline such that when re-enter REM sleep or re-awake back in bed our timeline has fast-forwarded. For example the opposing eye movements during REM sleep might make it too difficult to be conscious in REM sleep seeing as I never felt my eyes darting too fast in a lucid dream where many lucid dreams might occur in slow-wave sleep. There are repeating stages of slow-wave sleep after each REM period such that we're not immediately fast-forwarded to waking life. Under this interpretation waking life would be more of a recording than a dream because slow-wave sleep is too intermittent to be mapped into one waking day-long period. Then it'd be like REM sleep were physically bracing us for our next time-freezing period in slow-wave sleep where the the unconsciousness of REM sleep would accelerate us faster through time.

"In the tale, Oisín (a human hero) and Niamh (a woman of the Otherworld) fall in love. She brings him to Tír na nÓg on a magical horse that can travel over water. After spending what seems to be three years there, Oisín becomes homesick and wants to return to Ireland. Niamh reluctantly lets him return on the magical horse, but warns him never to touch the ground. When he returns, he finds that 300 years have passed in Ireland. Oisín falls from the horse. He instantly becomes elderly, as the years catch up with him, and he quickly dies of old age."

 

[Michael McMahon]

A humble way to think of lucid dreaming is that a dice is merely a little cube where a lucid dream merely has to give you two options like a dice throw to gain a small bit of free will. So some lucid dreams can be very complicated or scary in their themes even if the visual content is easy in comparison to a Hollywood movie! Lucid dreams can be open-ended but a violent lucid dream might be all-or-nothing:

(Rush Hour) Carter Negotiates Soo Yung’s Release

 

[Michael McMahon]

Lucid dreaming could be both a cause and a cure for sleep deprivation where lucid dreaming might help you sleep more efficiently in less time only that you’d still be sleep deprived.

 

[Michael McMahon]

One way to view dreaming as a time capsule like a message in a bottle floating across the ocean is that to learn a page of a textbook you’ve to look away from the textbook to test yourself. So a dream can temporarily repress your memory until days later you can remember the past life events more vividly than before the dream. For example in prior years I’d a riveting dream where I was driving all around a ski village and the mountain below at night as if I were back on holidays in the Pyrenees in southern France. My unconscious mind felt vast to accommodate mountain scenery! Perhaps the dream advertised how adventurous scenic drives could be were I to buy a car or travel more often. Or who knows whether the dream could’ve alerted me to how relaxing it’d be to live in a ski resort in southern France to make use of my French language skills from school seeing as Paris or coastal regions might feel a bit repetitive from other Mediterranean nations.

 

[Michael McMahon]

I’d a dream last night in which I appeared to be watching a Matthew McConaughy casting in which he was in a car and trying to resist arrest from a police car chase. Matthew shot a handgun out the rear windscreen as covering fire before swerving into a forest and drove off-road trying to avoid hitting the trees. A police car in pursuit had crashed behind him into the trees. Matthew was fired upon from the police who got out of their crashed vehicle where Matthew eventually had to abandon his car and run. However as he ran over a hill he didn’t see the cliff face on the other side before leaping off. Luckily he managed to find a branch midway down the cliff to cling onto only for a police helicopter to suddenly appear. He let go of the branch and fell where he luckily found another branch closer to the ground to hang onto temporarily to break up his fall. He than ran away with a triumphalist orchestra song from the Lord of the Rings the Return of the King playing in the background. The heroic dream collided with my tinnitus when I awoke such that no matter how heroic I could be in real life I might still have tinnitus even if I can still learn to manage it better from such inspirational dreams! Slowed down breathing upon awakening can be a reminder of mortality. Dreaming can serve as a contrast for how real waking life can be even if you view your waking vision as two-dimensional such that there’d still be a strong illusion of the world being three-dimensional. For example in an earlier dream I was walking through a primary school only to come across an amusement park in Galway city with much higher apartments on either side of the harbour than there is in real life.

 

[Michael McMahon]

If the brain isn’t conscious then it can use natural evil to predict the mind without the brain being very evil if the brain itself wasn’t self-aware. In a dream two nights ago I was listening to a diver team search and rescue for my father who appeared to have been missing on the beach only for him to be found and I said how I loved him. Yet the prior day I briefly mused how I’d treat my parents if they died in accident because dying of old age could lead to complacency in how nice I could be to them. So the dream appeared to experiment with that concept. In last night’s dream there were a family of small frogs in my bedroom where I’d to catch them in vases only to come across a jumping spider that I’d also to catch where I appeared more calm than expected. My younger sister had already caught the spider on the back of her hand where I’d to cover the spider on her hand with the vase and slide the vase towards the wall as if to parody how easy it was! The dream referenced my visit to a Dublin pet shop a week earlier where I’d commented on a YouTube video on how observing innocent frogs beforehand could tame your fear of similar sized tarantulas they had in the next section.