Dream Time

[Michael McMahon]

When we don’t use an alarm clock we’re expressing a small bit of free will in leaving the dream world to wake up in bed at a certain time. In other words our circadian rhythm might not be fully deterministic where even if we generally wake up at a similar time we might still have a few minutes leeway for the exact moment we wake up. Likewise the faster we leave a dream to move onto the next dream reveals a sense of boredom in a way that could relate to free will.

 

[Michael McMahon]

Techno music can combine informal singing with formal music beats a bit like a lucid dream:

https://youtu.be/_B943OFlHVs?si=09LA3VFjSbLNjkkQ
Right Here Right Now - Fatboy Slim

Unlike the visions in the Matrix movie a lucid dream can often be slightly forgotten afterwards no matter how profound the lucid dream might have been simply because we can’t always be profound!

clubbed to death - Matrix soundtrack

The Matrix SoundtrackCredits: Rob Douganrobdougan.com

youtu.be

Clubbed to Death - Matrix Soundtrack

 

[Michael McMahon]

For last night’s dream I was playing mixed doubles only to be very sleepy during the match as if to poke fun at my idea that my tennis skills were unconsciously improving!

 

[Michael McMahon]

Perhaps one reason philosophy is a mystery is because evil people might have more free will than ethical people seeing as ethical people by definition try to reduce their free will to be evil. So to study free will scientifically we need to analyse not only our ability to be tempted by evil but also to study actual evil people and criminals as living experiments of their free will to reduce how evil they are. For example if I walked around with a gun then I might have extra free will to do good or bad but the limit is that I might not care enough about free will if either physically defending against evil or being addicted to the hedonism of evil becomes the overriding goal. So evil people might not care enough about lucid dreaming because their conscious mind is already evil where simulating evil in a dream simply isn’t as hedonistic as real life evil. Much like philosophy being obsessed about semantics so too can the definition of evil be very convoluted and vague. In other words evil people cannot agree on what the word evil actually means seeing as they commit evil against other evil people. Evil exists to oppose the ideal of ethics even though evil people would fail to be grateful to other evil people who victimise them in spite of it being done in the name of evil.

What is Love - Haddaway

 

[Michael McMahon]

A religious version of a shared dream would be that dream characters of real friends also have the same dream as you but are simply more unconscious than you in the dream such that they forget it. For example a shared dream doesn’t have to be simultaneous.

“Mutual dreaming, or group dreaming, as portrayed in fiction is highly unlikely, although people often report experiences that seem like shared dreams, the most common being known as "meshing dreams". These dreams feature different individuals having separate dreams that share certain elements. For example, you and a friend might both dream of being stranded on a desert island after watching Lost together.” world of lucid dreaming

 

[Michael McMahon]

I'd a vague dream last night in which I was eating brack and listening to a Michael Jackson song. It's possible the hedonism of the dance beat was mixed with a healthy slice of brack so as to reduce how many toasted cheese sandwiches I eat in real life. So a neuroscientist analysing my brain yesterday before I went to sleep might not have been able to predict my decision to go to the shop earlier today to buy a loaf of brack. Indeed the sweetness of the cherries and the raisons in the brack helped to counteract my cravings for cheesy toast!

 

[Michael McMahon]

As I walked through town I listened to the song “Pretty Young Things” as an example of a Michael Jackson song even though I don’t know if that was the specific song from Michael Jackson that I heard in the brack dream from the prior post. Yet I immediately became hooked on the concluding section of the music beat of a nonsensical background singer. The hedonism of the metropolitan song was almost too good to be true and it made the town look a tiny bit boring in comparison! If I’d to explain lucid dreaming to a cynical neuroscientist or physicist then I might not appear wild or shamanic enough to appear like an unconscious spirit! Yet lucid dreaming might make more sense to a neuroscientist or physicist if the country of Ireland that I live in might superficially appear evil even though it’s not evil when capitalism relies on competition. So if lucid dreaming appeared like an evil esoteric belief system then it might actually be the uncertainty of the collective that’s responsible for inciting lucid dreams and not just the individual lucid dreamer. For example I’m not God and so I don’t know how harshly God might view Ireland for being tolerant of other countries like America with a chequered war history. As such I don’t exactly know how ethical I am only relative to an international system. So lucid dreaming could relate to a religious faith system being internally inconsistent rather than me being slightly agnostic about the faith!

 

[Michael McMahon]

I’d a brief lucid dream last night soon after falling asleep of screeching white noise that shook me until I awoke in bed. The lucid dream might have been an attempt to distract me from mild tinnitus after having been exposed to loud noises in prior weeks. It’s possible that lucid dreaming relates to adult education in terms of extending critical periods for growth that would otherwise already have been hardwired. For example changing my sense of hearing might be possible only by further relating my sense of touch that connects the tactile vibrations from the object that emitted the sound.

 

[Michael McMahon]

The concept of reincarnation can incite blasphemous anger when I’m not always fond of other countries only for there to be a risk of reincarnation into such countries. In this morning’s dream I was sailing down a river only to admire how pristine the snow in the forests were where there wasn’t a risk of deforestation. In the dream I could admire the landscape without feeling cold as if there was a high threshold to ever tolerate such climates. So perhaps the freezing cold is a buffer against declarations of religious warfare!

 

[Michael McMahon]

Obesity might rarely be one version of an unconscious physique because they’re technically physically stronger than thin people but not always mentally stronger. Perhaps many obese people are self-depreciating and don’t take their physicality too seriously. Yet it’s possible that lucid dreaming could help overweight people appear more balanced in their posture for athletic manoeuvres. For example eating can make you feel sleepy sometimes.

Trademark Stan Wawrinka Backhand Stunner 😍

Join myWimbledon for a personalised Wimbledon experience, including information on Championships ticketing and the public ballot: http://wimbledon.com/mywimb...

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Trademark Stan Wawrinka backhand

 

[Michael McMahon]

When I self-studied full-time in my studio apartment when I was 18 I might have spent a lot of time studying in bed. So who knows if an excess of lying down during the day could make you more restless during the night resulting in more lucid dreams!

 

[Michael McMahon]

Lucid dreaming as an ability to understand a slightly irrational dream might be a type of sting operation by your brain to imply that your psyche might not fully make sense in other areas of your life even if such areas aren’t fully connected to the lucid dream. This rhymes with the notion that it takes one to know one as if an evil person can tell if someone is evil in a different way to them.

 

[Michael McMahon]

Slightly misremembering a lucid dream would allow your brain to understand how your mind formed a more positive or negative version of a lucid dream in a way that could help your brain extract free will from the lucid dream. Another version of lucid dreaming is as a form of euthanasia simulation for those who believe in a temporary afterlife so that each lucid dream reflects a spectrum of pain intensity vs duration for spiritual euthanasia after death. In other words you could meditate on a lucid dream you had in the past before your death to hope you’d get a similar outcome in an afterlife. Otherwise a lucid dream could be viewed as having ruled out a potential afterlife.

 

[Michael McMahon]

One version of time travel is that sleep would be neurologically activated rather than mentally activated. So when we close our eyes the onset of sleep would be involuntary. Likewise the way we wake up could also be physically activated by our brain rather than consciously activated. So it’d be as if our brain simply disappeared during sleep!

 

[Michael McMahon]

Perhaps the way so many people believe in free will without justifying it through dreaming raises the stakes where they could claim dreaming was highly irrelevant to free will. Yet lucid dreamers could retort that the way those who don’t care about dreaming still have free will only serves to really promote just how resilient dreaming is that remembering a dream without even caring about the memory of the dream is sufficient for free will.

https://youtu.be/KuVAeTHqijk?si=47PvglghUut8dQG2
Wiz Khalifa - No Sleep

 

[Michael McMahon]

(I posted this in another dream thread but had to use my middle name.)
An ethical defence of partial retaliation in the court system in the context of determinism would be that even if the perpetrator had no capacity to change their neurological decision making the stakes are still much higher because all other people who might be incited by the criminal to commit more evil would also all be deterministic in their decision making. As such a materialistic account of forgiveness forgets that materialism is an absolute system meaning that an epic response from ancient Christian history of Jesus would be required to satisfy why we're not completely forgiving as a form of ironic humility that we ourselves aren't Jesus!

 

[Michael McMahon]

Lucid dreaming could be compared to a lesser evil against the natural evil of determinism! A dilemma is that many materialists like capitalists and engineers might actually exceed science because the world is almost too materialistic where those who don’t care can be more compliant with the indifference of the natural world compared to those who do care about materialism but in a slightly insubordinate way! That’s one reason why it’s hard to change the political system!

Rihanna - We Found Love

 

[Michael McMahon]

One version of lucid dreaming is that amorality isn’t evil but can endanger people to evil if most people in history were evil where the balance of power between ethics and evil can be a bit of a mystery due to intergenerational forgiveness. So siding with amorality isn’t physically or mentally evil but might be at slight risk of spiritual evil if an ethical system were truly vulnerable. Lucid dreaming might be an incentive either for or against amorality.

Rihanna - Disturbia (Guy version)

 

[Michael McMahon]

Asking what the mind of a bat is as Thomas Nagel wondered might not go far enough to understand sleep where we could ask what precisely is the mind of a whale? So when I argued for time-travel as a symbolic form of sleep then perhaps a whale is literally time-travelling at light speed during sleep. After all a whale is non-rational and so they might be able to meditate instantaneously! Perhaps animal minds can time-travel during sleep way faster than humans.

“Whales’ and dolphins’ sleeping strategy probably sounds familiar to anyone who struggled through boring school classes or other sleep fests. The trick is to keep one eye open to stay slightly alert while being half-asleep. Cetaceans have mastered this skill quite impressively. They have the incredible ability to shut down one of their brain halves and use the other to remember to breathe at the surface.”
https://whalescientists.com/whales-sleep/

Really Close to a Humpback Whale in Antarctica

 

[Michael McMahon]

A macho version of lucid dreaming is to be more psychotic than a criminally psychotic person while remaining calm in order to deter others committing evil. So having a lucid dream of the uncanny valley might be temporarily more autistic than an autistic person where your self-control can deflect the risk of objectification or aggression away from an autistic person. Likewise dreaming about an accident could make you feel more anxious in a dissociative state than someone shirking their duties in a way that could calm them down. Perhaps a materialistic version of a religion would be how if you disbelieve in their God how their religion would then appear more psychotic than criminally psychotic people to prevent them glorifying evil. An exorcism would seem even creepier if the priests were actually more unstable from the context of science than the patient possessed in evil in order to impart more self-control onto them!

The Exorcism of Emily Rose - 6 names of demons