UKH

I'm interested to know what they are, how significant or insignificant they are to us and why because they appear very real when you are in one.

A wee dream anecdote from a month or two ago when I was woken up during the day by a phone call when I was on nights. Being right in a dream I could immediately tell the caller (a pal) what I was just doing in my dream before I forgot and that was lying in a bed describing to someone(I don't recognise) in my dream what I had just been dreaming when i awoke.

So I was sleeping and dreaming about being asleep and dreaming. And I vividly remember the dream I was dreaming in my dream because before I woke up in my dream I was in a castle looking at a glass less window and a huge bird with its back to me was looking out but a big blue bird was sitting on its shoulder annoying it and then it's head turned right around 180 deg and looked at me (it was a blue owl) and that woke me up from my dream whilst I was still asleep and dreaming. 

Also do you ever wake up in the middle of the night when dreaming, go for a wee and then go straight back into the same dream? I did it last night and I think it is probably quite common. 

In reply to Pefa:

It's got to be said, a lot of your posts have a dream-like quality.

In reply to Pefa:

R.E.M.  Know

In reply to Pefa:

Dave's not here.

In reply to Pefa:

Dreams are reality. Life is not.

In reply to Pefa:

I think a lot of the time it's the brain rearranging its "filing cabinets".  Sorting out memories and worries and so on.  

In reply to Removed Userena sharples:

Is that a Cheech and Chong reference?

In reply to Pefa:

Dreams I've always thought are just what it feels like when your brain is electrically and chemically washing itself (too bad that word was taken for something else). This is basically like what marsbar is saying. This 'washing' process is actually how we forget things - things that aren't important enough to survive the wash aren't worth remembering. Learning would be impossible without being able to forget, because we'd never be able to erase previously learned bad information or behaviours. I've since come to appreciate that being able to forget is a key component of what enables us to learn and improve.

In reply to Pefa:

Mostly hypoxia.

In reply to Pefa:

From what I've read in New Scientist and things, dreams are meant to be our way of processing emotions and life's events, to keep our minds 'unscrambled' essentially.  

They can sometimes seem quite random, I once dreamed about a green lizard crawling up the cistern of my bathroom toilet, which was rather odd, and not long after losing my Mum I had a dream where my parents kept standing at different parts of the family home and rubbing noses like Inuit people while holding hands, which was lovely.

In reply to all above:

I think there is a crucial and very important hidden reason for the dream state that I can't quite put my finger on.They appear to have a random quality- as Tim stated - in the same way thoughts have in the waking state which makes me wonder where they come from and why.Yet often the complete opposite is true as they seem full of specific and relevant meaning which is hidden in symbolism. There is also usually a big emotional element in the dreams I wake up in- so can remember- which makes me think why would that be and if it has a deeper function at an emotional level then why do we forget them soon after waking and only recall ones we wake up in the middle of?

It's a bit of a mystery yet we spend a huge proportion of our lives in this other twilight world without knowing that much about it.

Is this emotional world of symbolism and collective unconsciousness that we live out in a dream showing us what we are not facing up to in our waking state a la Junganian dream interpretation via symbolism and archetypes from a shared collective unconscious, in which the symbolic messages we encounter in dreams involve the things we don't want to face or don't have a solution for in the waking state? And the dreamed world can provide an answer to and this is its purpose to help us in deeper emotional or moral matters that we generally avoid.

Is this dream state of consciousness therefore more real by being more in touch with deeper meaning, raw morality and emotion and crucially the consequences of actions than the waking state? Does it keep us in check in a way by acting out little morality plays to guide us morally in our current waking situations?To push us in the right direction. Are we nearer our true essence whilst asleep and further from it in a normal everyday waking state; which can be very unconscious of being conscious the more wrapped up we get in the objective world?

In reply to Pefa:

No.

In reply to NERD:

Yeah right. Dream on.

I've been dreaming that I've done my physio - I believe this is so I don't have to do it IRL - dreamt physio must count as the real thing eh, perhaps even more so?

In reply to gravy:

Is your physio hot?

In reply to DaveHK:

• From my experience alone I can see that the same dream situation can be manifest after an interruption which wakes you up.
• The character you create in your dream can fall asleep and have a vivid dream.
• Moral decisions are worked out in dreams via different moral scenarios that present to you the consequences of these actions. 

So what are you saying no to exactly? 

In reply to Pefa:

Dreams are essential, if you deprive people of dreaming then they quickly become ill.

There are studies which support this. But AFAIK no one knows WHY we dream or what it actually achieves.

In reply to krikoman:

How do you deprive someone from dreaming? Without restricting something else - like sleep - which is more likely to be the cause of the illness?

In reply to Pefa:

There are some great podcasts by a guy called Matthew Walker, an expert on everything sleep and dream related.

Well worth a listen, fascinating and scary when you realise how import sleep is.

In reply to Ben_Climber:

Can you post some links?

I found these:

- https://peterattiamd.com/matthewwalker1/
- https://drchatterjee.com/episode-26-sleep-matthew-walker-part-1/

... but, perhaps, these aren't the podcasts you -- specifically -- are referring to. There seem to be a LOT of podcasts by different people with the same name.

In reply to Pefa:

Dreams and sleep are nothing exclusively human. Deprive fruit flies of sleep and they die within days. Stress them by exercise (e.g. by lifting them off the ground with a wire glued to their back, which will trigger a flying reflex) and they will eventually adopt a sleeping posture with reduced excitability (i.e., sleep). So there is something essential to sleeping.

Evidence from other animals, e.g. whales, who sleep with half their brains while their bodies keep swimming suggests that in mammals whatever sleeping does for us is especially needed in the brain.

As for dreaming, back to the fruit flies: You can use the flight reflex / exhaustion trick to force the flies to sleep while suspended in a wind tunnel. You can also couple this with electric recordings from the antennae (with which flies smell) and the mushroom bodies (the parts of the brain involved in memory formation and long term storage). Experiments from way back in the 1990s already show that it is possible to trigger certain spike patterns in the antennae by briefly exposing the flies to different smelly substances (ether and bananas, IIRC), and then record the same patterns from the MBs hours later when the suspended flies are exhausted and sleep.

So do these flies dream of bananas? I would answer yes, and conclude that sleep is either required for (or the phase of reduced input used for) sorting, erasing, and rewriting our memories*. Dreams are just the noise and waste from that process.

For animals with a complex brain, abstract thinking, emotion, and theories of mind that input being noisily processed of course contains lots of internal and self referential information.

No need for Jungian charlatanery.

CB

*there is good evidence that without remodeling connections and integrating new born neurons in the hippocampus you cannot "unlearn" memories and are thus much worse at learning new things (at least if you are a mouse in a Morris water maze).

In reply to Xharlie:

I listened to the Joe Rogan one which was the best.

youtube.com/watch?v=pwaWilO_Pig&

It will be available on all the usual podcast sites as well.

In reply to Nempnett Thrubwell:

Surprisingly enough they wake them up, but then you can fall beck to sleep rather quickly and yet still not enter dreaming (REM) states. So you can get plenty of sleep, but without the dreaming bit.

You can also make people sleep "deeper" with drugs, this also bypasses the REM stage.

You can also wake two groups up, one while REM sleep and the other when not REM sleeping and compare the two, they both get woken up just at different stages of sleep.

In reply to Pefa:

I often have dreams where I am talking so someone who looks like someone I know, but somehow in my dream I know they are someone else, for example I might be talking to someone who looks like my Dad, but somehow I know it is actually my sister. Very confusing!

I also once had a dream where I was walking around doing normal every day stuff with a lobster clamped onto my toe.  No idea what that one was about!

In reply to kathrync:

Freud will tell you.

It'll be something to do with poo, probably.

In reply to paul_in_cumbria:

The very same, Sketch of that name is one of their better efforts.

In reply to cb294:

I understand what you are saying which is similar to Tim's comment about processing memories and emotions which is a scientific way of saying what i am but I am saying so much more. Using another recent example the other night I had a dream where I was in a situation with a group of people and in a place that I had never seen before and they had a problem with birds so they set snappy mousetraps for them all around the place and after a while one was caught in the trap, a little yellow bird. The bird was suffering so I volunteered to put it out of its misery and proceeded to snap its neck. Then I woke up and felt really terrible about what I did as I could still feel what it physically felt like to do that to the bird in the dream, went to the loo came back checked the time and went into the same dream again where from then on in I started campaigning to tell all the strangers not to kill the yellow birds and by the time I woke up again roughly 2 hours later (alarm for work) I had converted the strangers in my dream to stop using the traps and was on a stage discussing this with them.

Now if my dream lasts for at least 2hrs  and is structured like real life is and just as real then how can it just be random by products of a bunch of memories that are getting processed in the background?

The meaning I take from it which makes much more sense is that of late I have vowed to be vegetarian recently but I've struggled and succumbed to some chicken occasionally, oh and a black pudding supper. I have not consciously dealt with this situation and avoided it like the plague but It makes perfect sense that in my dream I was being confronted with this avoidance in the shape of a little scenario that forced me to kill an animal and see and feel the actions of what happens by eating meat.

Now I know which makes much more sense to me and it isn't the model of the mechanical super processor throwing away a lot of unwanted memory and the dreams we get are just random meaningless disjointed mish mashes in fact it is the opposite as dreams push to the fore matters we don't want to face and then forces you to. Do you see what I mean?

We all have a back catalogue of really powerful dreams as examples about things we don't face in the waking state. 

In reply to Pefa: It isn't an either/or scenario, though, or it doesn't need to be, in that it can be a way of addressing things we're not addressing in real life, as well as a way for the brain/super processor to get rid of the unrequired fragments of memory to do with lobsters, people who look like other people, and tunes we hear on the radio etc. It can be both at once.

In reply to Pefa:

Interesting topic. I have a different understanding of dream occurence which conflicts with the way you speak of it. This: Dreams occur as you awaken, and though perceived as lengthy are packed into milliseconds of real time. So, if you go back to bed, you can't resume your dream - until you next wake up; but this could occur in light sleep as you re-surface recurrently.

Dreams are not just a result of mental stimulation - but also digestive. On hearing recount of certain dreams in the family, a dream of scattered and nonsensical elements was quickly labelled a cheese-dream - further confirmed by waking-freshness of the dreamer - ie. relating to the depth and quality of sleep.

On their own, I don't believe dreams achieve anything, but only as you interact with them - will you benefit; eg. in consultation with your dreams you might see a relationship problem from a different perspective and consciously come to a point of forgiveness for another - or yourself. 

I further find that moments of hyper-intensive conscious<-->subconscious dialogue occur when I'm out running, and believe that these are similarly valuable if acknowledged and consulted correctly. 

In reply to Timmd:

Yep that's exactly what I said.

Edit--To Katheryn there is a famous case study by Jung of a woman who dreamed of crossing a river and a crab attaching I self to her foot in which he deciphered the meaning of it all. Unfortunately I can't remember the outcome. 

In reply to LeeWood:

Interesting theory but what makes you think that and why would that happen? And how just prior to waking up do you know you are about to waken and therefore start up the same dream situation as if you had been dreaming it for ages and since you fell asleep hours ago? 

I don't know anything about that tbh but could it may be that after eating a big meal prior to bed etc that you are just more prone to be woken up and therefor remember your dream rather than it affecting your dream? 

Could be ordinary thoughts or could be that you are in a kind of meditative state ie. 100% in the present moment; the now, when you are running where there are no thoughts and you get fed deep insights because you are not thinking? 

In reply to Pefa:

Is it possible that most or all dreams in themselves serve no useful purpose and have no significance? They may just be the unavoidable byproduct of brain activity while asleep. Studying the dreams themselves might be rather like gaining knowledge on nutrition by investigating excretion and defaecation).  

In reply to Pefa:

In addition to the cleansing/sorting/etc processes already mentioned, I like to think of dreams as being a chance to mentally let loose and go wild, without the constraints of reality. I'm amazed at what my brain can generate without conscious input from me*, and I'm often sad that there's no way of recording dreams to relive. But it could well be that they'd make even less sense out of context, and could be crap anyway - I just thought they were good because my brain said they were

*Though I'm also often underwhelmed by the mundanity of proceedings. And I still get late-for-school dreams, twenty years since I left

In reply to oldie:

Yes it could be but why then are they so real and structured? And how can you go back into the same dream after awaking and why do they deal with lots of things that we don't like to deal with? It's almost as if they are more than by products. 

In reply to Pefa:

Your dream never lasted 2h. Perceived time, sure. Actual time, seconds or shorter. This is known since at least the 18th century, when some French scientist had this dream about being caught up in the French Revolution, being tried (which he experienced in great detail), sentenced to death, and put under guillotine. He woke up when the blade fell.

What happened in real life was that his pavillion bed had collapsed and a curtain rod had fallen on his neck. The entire back story leasding to the idea of being guillotined was made up by his brain in the process of waking up. The guy later wrote about this episode at length, coming to exactly that conclusion.

That your dreams recycle your experiences, emotions, and even ethical or abstract ideas is almost trivial given what we know about the physiology of sleep. Nothing spiritual or supernatural about it.

Anything that charlatans like Freud or Jung made up about the organization of our psyche, and how dreams could be used to access "deeper layers", has no basis at all and can be safely ignored.

CB

In reply to Pefa:

That dreams have specific or relevant meaning.

That there is such a thing as a collective unconscious that is accessed through dreaming.

That dreams are more real than waking life in some way.

That there is such a thing as the 'true essence' of an individual.

and that even if there were it would be accessed through the medium of dreams.

In reply to cb294:

So at first you wrote-

would answer yes, and conclude that sleep is either required for (or the phase of reduced input used for) sorting, erasing, and rewriting our memories*. Dreams are just the noise and waste from that process.

For animals with a complex brain, abstract thinking, emotion, and theories of mind that input being noisily processed of course contains lots of internal and self referential information.

Then you write-

If dreams are just "sorting, recycling, erasing and rewriting" then there should come a time when they don't need "sorting, recycling, erasing and rewriting" anymore as the work is done,complete,as with any process, so what then? Or is this a perpetual process even without any significant new inputs in any particular day? And how do you know it is only what you say it is? I'm curious. 

Everything is spiritual 🙂

How does he know it was and if his bed collapsed then how can his brain work out an entire story in milli seconds when a bed collapse would take a second? 

That sounds far more unbelievable than anything I have stated no? 

You seem a bit quick to dismiss anything outwith materialism which gets my interest and you are the first person I have ever come across to call Jung a con man which is quite laughable tbh as it is such a ridiculous statement to make. 

In reply to Pefa:

Maybe I'm being rather literal, but I guess the 'why' is because it's helpful and healthy, and needed for being at peace, for dreams to deal with things which are uncomfortable and things, and they seem as real as they need to be for us to get the message?  Maybe the why is because the people who didn't dream went mad, and we're with our minds like they are as a result of evolution.

In reply to Pefa:

I had dreams that had episodes (virtually) lasting weeks at least, but I am sure I did not sleep that long...

The recall of "long" episodes during short episodes of brain activity has been demonstrated again and again in sleep physiology labs using modern equipment, the account by the French guy is just a famous early example.

And yes, I would expect some specific memory content that has no current relevance, has been stably commited to long term memory to feature less and less in dreams over time.

And yes again, Jung, Freud, and their ilk were conmen. Their psychological concepts have no experimental or empirical underpinning at all, and no basis in or correlation with established neurobiological facts, and Freud at least knew this.

Their "teachings" are pure esoteric pseudoscience, conceptually no better than Reich's orgone "theory" (please don't tell me that you believe THAT crap as well).

Anyway, no self respecting psychology department teaches Freud or Jung anymore, except maybe in historical lectures and as a warning for how wrong you can get things when you discard scientific approaches. Obvioulsy I am no psychologist, but this was confirmed by some other poster who is in a similar thread a few years ago.

CB

In reply to Timmd:

You seem to have missed out the reason why I asked the reason why to the person I asked Tim. The reason I asked him is because he stated dreams are just a waste produced by some filing process.

I agree with what you say in your last post apart from the evolution bit. 

In reply to cb294: I'm inclined to think that Jung was intuitively right about certain things, rather more than Freud was who seemed rather obsessed with sex. 

In reply to Pefa:

Ah, I see. I was being tongue in cheek re the evolution bit. 

In reply to Timmd:

That and a raging cokehead.

CB

In reply to Pefa:

Death is the point at which the work is done

I can often attribute things happening in my dreams to events that happened before sleep, or more commonly, things that have been preying on my mind. I think the brain often embellishes and creates a narrative because it can - maybe even must, if one considers the arguments supporting how narrative thinking is fundamental to our conscious, higher intelligence. 

The problem with studying all this is that there's no way of objectively recording what someone has dreamt. Scanners can detect activity in specific regions of the brain, so identifying the occurrence of dream-associated thoughts, but for the specifics of what the dream was about the dreamer has to be asked. Often it's difficult to remember what happened, and even if someone does there's no guarantee they won't embellish or edit, deliberately or otherwise.

To make things even more complicated, since everyone's brains work slightly differently, there surely isn't any way of specifying what activity in a certain area specifically translates to in the dream as it's being experienced by the individual - what might be 'forgot-to-wear-clothes-to-work-again' thoughts for me might be zebra-flavoured ice-cream for someone else. 

Hence the doubts expressed by other posters about Jungian symbolism

In reply to cb294:

Your thoughts spurred me to actually go and look on wiki for general info on dreams and found this-

During a typical lifespan, a person spends a total of about six years dreaming[43] (which is about two hours each night).[44] Most dreams only last 5 to 20 minutes.[43] It is unknown where in the brain dreams originate, if there is a single origin for dreams or if multiple portions of the brain are involved, or what the purpose of dreaming is for the body or mind. 

When REM sleep episodes were timed for their duration and subjects were awakened to make reports before major editing or forgetting of their dreams could take place, subjects accurately reported the length of time they had been dreaming in an REM sleep state. Some researchers have speculated that "time dilation" effects only seem to be taking place upon reflection and do not truly occur within dreams.[48] This close correlation of REM sleep and dream experience was the basis of the first series of reports describing the nature of dreaming: that it is a regular nightly rather than occasional phenomenon, and is correlated with high-frequency activity within each sleep period occurring at predictable intervals of approximately every 60–90 minutes in all humans throughout the lifespan.

REM sleep episodes and the dreams that accompany them lengthen progressively through the night, with the first episode being the shortest, of approximately 10–12 minutes duration, and the second and third episodes increasing to 15–20 minutes. Dreams at the end of the night may last as long as 15 minutes, although these may be experienced as several distinct episodes due to momentary arousals interrupting sleep as the night ends. Dream reports can be reported from normal subjects 50% of the time when they are awakened prior to the end of the first REM period. This rate of retrieval is increased to about 99% when awakenings are made from the last REM period of the night. The increase in the ability to recall dreams appears related to intensification across the night in the vividness of dream imagery, colors, and emotions.[49]

In reply to cb294:

How do you measure or experiment with what goes on in people's dreams? 

Your description of Jung as a con man says much about you CB because not only does that imply he was wrong but it implies he knew he was wrong and was deliberately conning people and I have never heard anyone say that before.Now with utmost respect if I am honest your abusive dismissal of anything not materialist tells me you have a problem with trust or you are so steeped in materialism that anything outwith it is a threat to your Weltanschauung. 

The Jungian community, both within the UK and internationally, is thriving and vibrant. Today there are over 3,000 Jungian analysts throughout the world and 53 societies who are members of the International Association of Analytical Psychology (IAAP). Jung’s original ideas continue to be developed and expanded to form a robust, lively and growing tradition of theoretical and clinical concepts. 

In reply to Pefa:

Yes, but so are faith healers, acupuncturists, dowsers and flat earthers. I am sure quite a few people would love to burn witches and are depressed because they are not allowed to do so anymore. How unfair.

Eat more shit, billions of flies cannot be wrong, is not a particularly convincing argument.

Internal consistency, theoretical integration into a larger intellectual framework that also applies to related disciplines, adherence to a scientific approach, etc. all seem better suited to judge the validity of some scientific or academic field.

Sure, there is no chance I could practically track the phenomena I study in biology back to the underlying chemistry and then physics, but conceptually I could. Anything I study obeyes standard physical principles, some quantum weirdness included. No need to invent stuff like souls etc..

Classic psychology and psychoanalysis fails spectacularly with respect to such criteria *, unlike, say, clinical psychiatry or neurobiology (which are conceptually well linked to biology, pharmacology, ...).

Now what about Reich?

CB

* so did e.g. the old Konrad Lorenz style ethology, which was not more than a collection of just-so stories and lacked experimental rigour, and has thus been superseded modern behavioural biology. We are not immune from falling into such traps!

In reply to Pefa:

Yes I can also copy/paste from wikipedia.

I liked the bit from the paragraph you skipped:

Opinions about the meaning of dreams have varied and shifted through time and culture. Many endorse the Freudian theory of dreams – that dreams reveal insight into hidden desires and emotions.[qualify evidence] (sic!)

That the latter is lacking for a reaosn is precisely my complaint!

CB

In reply to cb294:

Your input is excellent btw and I hope I didn't psychoanalyse you to much earlier 🙂.

At the football for the rest of the night so reply properly tomorrow.

Ps. Reich? Never heard of him

In reply to Pefa:

I have some unpleasant reoccurring dreams that happen quite often and wake me up. I know better than to just go back to sleep as I know it will just repeat. Smoking weed seems to stop them and (apparently) stops me thrashing around in bed. Talking to others who smoke they agree that when they have smoked they either don’t dream or don’t remember them. Typically I only smoke it about 2 or 3 times a year but for the few weeks I have some weed I also manage to have a decent sleep.

As I am now retired I can take naps whenever I want to, as opposed to trying to do it unnoticed at work. When I nap I dance between the line of consciousness and unconsciousness. Sometimes I slip into the unconscious phase. I can experience a dream that seems to take hours/days but in reality only takes a few minutes but until I check the clock I really don’t know.

I think dreams are a result of the brain switching from the restorative to the conscious phases. Even in a totally dark room, when you close your eyes there are differences in the dark. I think that dreams are the semiconscious brain trying to find patterns in the little visual information available.

In reply to Pefa:

Our sensory inputs are presumably processed in the brain and that, plus our interpretation and thoughts, is our reality. There is probably no new sensory input when we dream and from brain activity patterns we know there is little time to make a realistic picture (plus we're unconscious) so dreams are often unlikely or impossible scenarios. I don't remember having abstract dreams (as in abstract paintings ie not based on reality) so dreams could contain elements of "real" memory jumbled together.
Dreams do deal with things we like too, maybe the bad things wake us up more eg fright reaction (I've heard somewhere we only remember dreams if we wake up immediately after). I'm not aware of any evidence that dreams themselves play a really useful function.We know that dreamless sleep is damaging but presumably that may be more directly due to the absence of the brain activity that causes them.
 If we don't remember dreams unless we actually wake up immediately then for all we know they might not even happen if we don't wake up, even when the brain exhibits activity known to be associated with dreams. 
 

In reply to oldie:

A couple of relatives have spoken about having very rare occasions of sleeping without dreaming, and it feeling like they've just closed their eyes and instantly opened them again, and being surprised to find it is morning.  They're both eccentric in the same kinds of ways, so who knows if it's as they describe, or they both have the same interpretation of something else which takes place.

On another tangent to do with dreams, I've sometimes woken up early, and felt like my mind 'isn't quite right', and gone back to sleep and had a dream, and woken up again feeling more straightened out mentally. 

In reply to Timmd:

But how do they know they haven't been dreaming, because we only remember dreams dreams if we wake up? As I mused previously we may not actually have a dream but still experience the associated brain activity which is thought to be invaluable.

In reply to Pefa:

Lying awake in early hours and remembered I hadn't tried to answer above point. Might be that the brain activity didn't complete as normal due to waking up (waking being necessary to remember or possibly to even form a dream) so this is carried on until next period of brain activity/waking, perhaps reinforced by thoughts from the previous period awake. Awful explanation on my part but I'm still not convinced why dreams in themselves should be regarded as particularly significant and are not just byproducts.  Freud etc would probably disagree.  
 

In reply to Pefa:

Wilhelm Reich is just another post Freud psycho charlatan who interacted quite a bit with Jung. Amongst other things he invented the "orgone accumulator"*, as later immortalized by Hawkwind**. He also strongly influenced other fields of psychoanalysis. I threw his name in there because his orgone idea is so blatantly idiotic that everyone can spot it. My point is that the other flavours of that field are just as unscientific and baseless, even if they are slightly more cleverly packaded to hide that fact!

Have a good weekend, I am off home, 5 hours on the motorway for me...

CB

*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orgone

** youtube.com/watch?v=x4Ve4rrnfz0&

In reply to Pefa:

maybe, when we are awake, our mind makes up stories based on whatever is going through our mind (caused by memory, thought etc) as well as whatever external stimuli occur to affect that. we call this reality although it is just our mind's version of reality.

when we are asleep and dreaming, the same happens, but without the external stimuli.

when we are in deep sleep, our mind has finally stopped jabbering? 

In reply to Pefa:

Wet!

In reply:

When we dream we are convinced it is real insomuch as we behave accordingly in every way to what happens in the dream in exactly the same way we do in the waking state and we definately experience our dream. 

Dreams are a constant clue in fact a constant repeat every night that provides us with an insight into our very being that we overlook. Our ultimate true nature can be revealed by this process since when we sleep and enter our dream we are there, in a world of things and people, interacting, being affected and affecting, sensing touching,caring, hurting, feeling physical pain, desire, fear, feeling joy, weeping real tears of sorrow yet when we wake up we realise 'it was only a dream', yet what we don't look at is the clue: that intense experience we just had that was completely believed at the time to be happening to us and at the time was 100% real and made out of things out with me was in fact completely created from mind,not things and a world outwith mind. 

In our waking state we see we are again in a world of things that are outside of ourselves which is as real as any dream and completely believable. Yet the clue shows us that everything is not what it appears to be, so instead of constantly concentrating on these things during the wakened reality that during our dream fooled us as being real yet were made entirely of mind, you look not at the things but at what experiences these things and what it is made of then you can awaken once again just like you do from your dreams every night but this time you awaken to the end point : the final truth of our being. 

In reply to cb294:

Well that's the kind of wacky stuff you get from materialists who won't face up to the experiences of countless thousands who go beyond the material. Although this Reich guy was perhaps genuine in that maybe he believed his theory and fought against those who didn't in the same way some materialists won't face the completely overwhelming reported evidence of people who die and end up looking at what is going on from outside their bodies before being jolted right back in. And afterwards being able to describe what they seen whilst dead right down to which relatives were outside the theatre, who gave cpr and tons of other details about what happened when they were dead. 

But any post that links to a track from the greatest live album ever made has got to get a fist bump. 👊

In reply to Pefa:

​​​​​​There's no such thing as an ultimate true nature in the sense I think you mean. An individual is an ever changing collection of perceptions, feelings, memories and such like. That's all. It is enough.

In reply to Pefa:

They weren't dead. No one has ever come back from the dead. Not even Jebus.

In reply to DaveHK:

Your essence is that unchanging part that experiences all the things you list yet is not all the things you list.

Thousands tell of being outside of their body and looking at what is going on in fact describing what is going on after flatlining etc. You can have an out of body experience without dying of course if you take enough high doses of psychedelics. 

You need to define dead then as these people in clinical death situations that are resuscitated see the scene from outside their body which is restricted to certain extreme situations only. 

I'm not saying he did. 

In reply to Pefa:

I don't but doctors and neuroscientists do. I believe they define death as brain death and no one to my knowledge has ever been resuscitated following brain death. Death is a process not a point or instant.

In reply to Pefa:

That's an illusion.

In reply to DaveHK:

If you have a 'perception feeling or memory', then you are aware of that 'perception feeling or memory'. Yet a perception, thought or sensation is a fleeting event that arises in that which is never fleeting and is always present which is your awareness, the knowing I that is your essence.

All the rest arise and fall but the knowing awareness never rises or falls and is unaffected by any of the transitory  manifestations of a seemingly objective world.

Edit--your essence is the knower behind all that can be known. 

In reply to Pefa:

An edit/add on to my post above that ends thus-

Edit/add on-

From the seemingly material waking world of things supposedly outside consciousness that dictates what we are boils down to nothing more than a fearful material body seperated, alone, destined to oblivion and terrified of it. We waken up once more and say 'Ah it was only a dream'.

Because in reality as a part of everyone I am eternal, true peace, stainless, infinite, pure love and happiness. 

In reply to Pefa:

remember that matter is only a particular behaviour of "vacuum".  Something is nothing behaving badly!

In reply to Pefa:

The problem with this is: it is a taught experience, ie. handed on by generations of still-mind practitioners. What you're seeing is what you want to see in order to make sense of the world and your life.

Sadly I fear it is just as much an illusion as the fear of separateness, though it may be a happier one.

In reply to LeeWood:

There is a story of the Zen master who is approached after a long while by one of his students who tells him ' I have experienced Satori!!!'To which the Zen master replies' No you haven't, go back and keep meditating'.Then a day later the same student says to the same master ' look I have experienced it and I am experiencing it now'. To which the master says ' look that cannot be true go back and meditate', So the student goes away to return 3 weeks later and says once more ' I have experienced Satori you must know' and the master says ' No this is untrue you have not, so go away and keep trying'. 

Which prompts the student to say ' it is true I have experienced Satori and if you say it is not then you can have your Satori and I will happily have my non-Satori', to which the master said ' YES!! You have Satori after all'. 

The point being that the experience cannot be taught, it can only be experienced and that is an experience you have directly as ultimately there is no path or teacher. 

In reply to Pefa:

Good illustration of this aspect of the same problem. It remind me of my son claiming he enjoys his food more than I do !

And this is where the scientifics have a problem - how to verify experiences which cannot be measured. If you climb an 8a then someone can witness the event; if you speak of your feelings while doing it -then I may be unable to verify them.

This is of special interest in respect of harder climbing - you tell me there is greater elation in topping out on an 8a, but I am a 6a climber who can never access this.

So acknowledged the experience cannot be taught - just like that of climbing - I mean emotions felt in doing, but the expectation of knowledge gained is, I re-assert taught.

In reply:

I should add that when I say mind in this paragraph - 

I mean a consciousness that is more expanded, closer to the big unified consciousness than our localised waking consciousness that thinks and sees itself as a separate subject and the world as objects. 

In reply to Pefa:

Dreams is influenced by our waking life. The things we wish, see, or want the brain rearrange those images.

In reply to Pefa:

Noone doubts these experiences, these are as real (or not) as the regular of being inside our bodies. Even our normal visual experience, i.e. what we think we see, is not what hits our eyes at any given moment. Rather, it is  a model of reality created by our brain to match, contextualize, and interpret the input from our eyes. In particular, perspective (where is everything with respect to me as observer) is created artificially. It is our brain placing our consciousness into a model of space around us that includes our body. Out of body experiences are when that process goes wrong, due to drugs, hypoxia, electric shock, being near death, or whatever else.

There is no reason to invoke some part of ourselves physically (or better spatially) actually being outside the body.

There are great experiments designed to fool this modelling as well, e.g. using prosthetic arms in weird positions that the proband can see while their own arm controlling the prosthesis is hidden. The brain will match input from proprioreception in the arm to the visual information about the prosthesis to comical effects. Probands will e.g. feel pain in their hand when the prosthesis is hit with a stick.

CB

In reply to LeeWood:

There is something satisfying when people use climbing analogies.If I pull off any 3 star classic climb at my limit and it has been a challenge but a memorable experience that has made me feel happy then surely it doesn't matter what the grade is since the experience of happiness is happiness no matter the person or grade. 

I would like to counter that by saying when it comes to matters of consciousness/ultimate reality then expectation doesn't need to be taught. For example as people get older and they have sought out lasting peace, happiness and love in all manner of activities, relationships, substances or ownership of material objects throughout their entire lives yet each is found to provide only momentary or fleeting happiness so we quickly move on to the next in successive loops.There is an intuitive knowing or if not then through constant seeking through repeated experience that all the seemingly outside objects that we look to for complete oneness, peace and happiness cannot give us that happiness and the only thing that can is by looking inward.

So I would say people don't get taught to expect as the expectation is in-built and a consequence of life already because to manifest in this world we feel something is missing from our lives because we see ourselves as alone, longing, mortal therefor limited and fundamentally seperated and unhappy and we want to return to our seemingly unmanifested essence which is true completeness (love), total peace and unending happiness and the only way to do that is to turn your attention away from the objects and toward the subject. 

In reply to Pefa:

Fleeting happiness. But you don't do meditation just once do you ? Or climbing ? I don't see why mediattion should be more valuable than climbing. The former might make you peaceful ... until tomorrow, but its false because it dissociates you with the world around - takes you back into the cave. A good day out climbing keeps you in touch - enforces human relations, makes you fitter, gives you adventure etc

NB. I have greater respect for methods which don't consume !

Lastnight I had a bothersome recurrent dream; I am in some school / university exam which I can't complete. Not exactly a nightmare but kind of stressé

In reply to LeeWood:

But its not either or is it? I mean you can do work each or every other day on looking at the nature of conscious experience and what that shows us with respect to life and still go out for a few sets of tennis or to the football or whatever with pals. When you realise or question that ' the world around', the seemingly material world that we are taught from a young age is all that exists is maybe not all it seems to be so you devote time to looking deeply. Or you have a spiritual experience out of the blue it transforms everything,especially if you investigate it thoroughly by continuing to study it by say long regular periods of meditation and a little guidance. You then know reality as it is which gives you better perspective going back to the everyday outward world. For example you become more self aware of what is going on in your body in all situations which means you see old repetitive negative reactions arise early and do not go with them. The more you meditate the calmer you become and these old patterns and reactions diminish-they don't vanish altogether though-you also have no need for anything ego related or when some old ego related reaction arises in you you see it for what it is. It also helps you focus more on the present moment and not let your monkey mind run away into thoughts of the future or past,so it has a ton of practical as well as spiritual benefits. 

There is a misconception I suppose about meditation because people instantly associate it with an old Lama devoting his life in deep meditation in a cave in Tibet for years when it's not like that at all because that is just one particular religious tradition in one particular location of the world and doesn't apply everywhere, especially in the modern West. 

I'm 100% certain there will be a specific meaning for you behind your dream. I particularly wonder sometimes when you have say a really stressed out day in work and you bring it home as you are worried about something or other and you go to sleep that night to experience a really stressful dream as well! And you end up thinking bloody hell give it a rest will you I can't even get some peace from stress when I'm asleep lol. 

I once remember about 10 years ago being in a dream and consciously thinking ' This dream is a bit boring, I'm going to spice it up a bit because I can' . So I did, by making it more exciting somehow, I suppose that was a bit of what they call lucid dreaming where you know you are dreaming. 

In reply to Pefa:

Partly the future , partly the past, partly things never to be. 

Part astral realm , Heavens , Hell's, all the fine gradients in between.

TWS

In reply to Chive Talkin\':

What are the chances of this happening.  

Something small (knitting needle size) of black plastic lost on the high moorland between Orton and Appleby.

Next day I go looking for something else (wasn't there when item was lost.)  I give up and remember I'm supposed to look for this other plastic thng.  But I've only got 5 minutes left before I have to go.

In desperation I decide I can't look rationally so I decide to close eyes and turn around and around till I feel like walking that way.

I walk perhaps 150m in a line then say out loud without conscious thought "now turn right and take a couple of steps and there it will be!.

This I did and nestling half in the heather , with dead ground between this place and my starting point, there it was, a small blcak plastiic rod.

My wife gasped when I walked in with it.  And it was about 100m from the area where it was thought to have been lost.

I could tell of other experiences as well but that would be tedious.

All I will say is " that there are more things in heaven and earth ..."

Stichtplate can compute the number of possible points that I could have walked to and looked within 100m or so from my start point.  It could have been 150m as I walked for a few minutes from my starting point including going over a rise in the heather.   also combining that woth hearing my voice announcing the dorection change and that I was about to find it, far far from where I'd have consciously looked.

We still have the piece of plastic (from a kite).

In reply to wercat:

Excellent 

Me too, but they would also be ridiculed by many so I no longer try to explain

Agreed .

In reply to Chive Talkin\':

That is very poetic Wild Scallion. 

In reply to Pefa:

Thanks.

May I recommend this book 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Astral-Dynamics-Out-Body-Experience-ebook/dp/B009S...

I think you might like it.

In reply to Pefa:

Called it [that the brain is washing itself]: https://directorsblog.nih.gov/2020/03/05/discovering-the-brains-nightly-rin...?

Getting plenty of deep, restful sleep is essential for our physical and mental health. Now comes word of yet another way that sleep is good for us: it triggers rhythmic waves of blood and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) that appear to function much like a washing machine’s rinse cycle, which may help to clear the brain of toxic waste on a regular basis.

In reply to Pefa:

Spot-on. The day before my wife was nagging me about a a much procrastinated building project which I don't quite know how to tackle