Lucid Dreaming

https://onlinephilosophyclub.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=15514

(Caveat to tangential speech at very bottom section of this page. If you're at risk of mental illness then this blog might not be for you. This is an open-ended metaphorical or literal phenomenon where you could just as easily say that the appearance of time travel is about relating a sequence of thought-lines during dreams back into physical time during the day. How the unconscious mind works is a mystery such that you don't want to risk circular "epicyles" in your perception of the world. People are free to interpret my interpretations of lucid dreaming differently. Any spiritual belief like time-travel could be seen as megalomaniacal except that if more people identified with it then no one would have to take full responsibility for it! There'd be herd immunity from psychosis if everyone followed a standard set of beliefs. It'd seem strange to talk about dreams when you meet a friend for small talk yet if you fail to do so you might think that others don't even have unconscious minds! Perhaps people can only go to dream groups when each dream is re-interpreted in a dirty way! I think lucid dreaming is a valid area of research but it might not always be suitable for young people. Delusional thoughts are difficult in that you're dissociated and forced to disagree with your own thinking style! Most people have probably had half-lucid dreams except that they focus more on the content of the experiences rather than the mere awe of self-awareness. Thus to lucid dream you need to be very sincere to yourself in intending to lucid dream. It's up to you how you view the function of your own unconscious!)

This is a workshop about how lucid dreaming could help the philosophy of consciousness. Dreaming challenges our ability to be adaptable and to think on our feet. The future doesn't exist yet and so to travel to the future would be like you were heading into nothingness. Then during sleep we fill this future nothingness with dreams. This is a subjective theory and you're free to view it poetically or philosophically. Our unconscious can take liberties with the laws of physics. Dreaming can further our understanding of free will compatibilism. A lucid dream is a meta-dream. It’s a dream where the dream character thinks about dreaming and consequently gains insight into their experience. We become rationally aware of its irrationality. Expect the unexpected! To say dreams are meaningless presupposes you already have free will. The question we need to ask is how would a deterministic, artificially intelligent robot respond to the experience of dreams? What if we were born without much free will and slowly acquired it during childhood? No matter how large your unconscious mind might be, you or your fears have to resonate with the dream to make it vivid. Free will is like science fiction in the sense that fiction allows you to escape the physical world. What does it mean to say an infinite universe is deterministic? For example an accidental glance at an internet website for an adventure holiday could change the course of your near future:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOO8z34vsN8

The Beach Opening Scene

Metaphorically speaking we put our representative dream characters under a spell of our own choosing! To become conscious in a dream we've to view the unconsciousness as separate to ourselves with thoughts of its own. Perhaps to have a lucid dream we'd simply need to believe in lucid dreaming in case the phenomenon is self-referential. We could almost form a faith system of dream interpretation as a source of free will in order to limit the endlessness of mysticism. Interpreting dreams as a passage through time would add to the free will debate something irreducibly complex that isn't just random or deterministic. While lucid dreaming we don't feel our head and so we can feel weightless. So a lucid dream is like an out-of-head experience as much as an out-of-body experience! A dream no longer exists when we awake and some of it will remain unknowable to everyone else since we can't describe dreams with perfect accuracy. We can only describe the magic of dreams through analogies and anecdotes. A lucid dream is like you were encountering some turbulence along your flight path through sleep. Usually we don't notice the motion of the outside world while we're asleep just like we wouldn't notice the absolute motion of an airplane when we're looking at the seats ahead of us from the inside. No one will study this thread and so I might as well sex it up! This is a highly specialised blog for those who dabble in inappropriate eroticism without ever acting on it, while also knowing a lot of science and ignoring it, and then taking a faith system and applying it to sleep instead of religion! Seek (free will) and you shall find! I've no way to prove my dreams so I'll try to be self-deprecating to prove my honesty! The mere fact I've bothered to write so much about lucid dreaming is indirect proof of my experiences! At the very least lucid dreaming can be an incentive to study other forms of spirituality and religion simply by reminding you of expanded states of mind.

The aftereffects of a lucid dream might linger for a few days or weeks but the time dilation in a lucid dream won't consume days out of your life to give you a shorter lifespan!

Lucid Dreaming Experiences - Stefan

Even a misinterpreted or misremembered dream can help free will seeing as a dream is visually non-real. There are eye experiments to verify lucid dreaming though we can’t fully explain the phenomenon seeing as we don’t even know where consciousness is on the brain waves when we’re awake. When we speak of time travel we must also view it the other way round where a lucid dream for a few seconds could appear to last a few minutes. We don’t really need external verification anyway: the more psychotic the story is then the more likely the storyteller is telling the truth! I was so caught up in other daily issues that I was never overly distressed by lucid dreaming and grew accustomed to having a weird experience once every few nights.

Word on the street is that the brain is like a supercomputer. But such a device can work 24/7 while we’re asleep for a third of the day. Somehow there’s a conscious being who appears to be trapped inside the brain. If consciousness itself were epiphenomenal it’d never actually need to rest because it wouldn’t serve a function or use up energy. I mentioned in the 4th post page 8 in the thread how I woke up from a lucid dream when I was age 18 and it felt like my sense of perspective was different. Another brief sensation I experienced during that same episode was that it felt like I didn’t control the thoughts entering into my mind. As I said I recovered after 30 minutes but it suggested to me that where our thoughts come from and sleep might be somehow related.

A mentally stronger person with great temporal focus and self-awareness can always be better than others at something chaotic like sport or music no matter how irrelevant their physicality or intelligence might appear to be to the task. Hence no matter how random the beat below is it's clear by the sheer purity and expansiveness that Kelly Rowland has a better appreciation of an unconscious mind than a lot of people:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwfKZ-1jyiw

Kelly Rowland - Commander

Sleep can be relaxing because it decouples us from our daily lives. The data of dreams allows the mind to be reflective or rueful. It could be the case that sleep can improve not only our memory but even our decision-making skills and intuition. Can our unconscious mind be larger than the conscious mind; as if what we’re seeing when we’re awake is holistically carved out of the unconscious to reflect reality? Dreams allow us to escape “collectivised” physical reality. We can perform an action without being hindered by fear. One night I was casually thinking about climbing off a building site on top of a skyscraper by sliding down on a rope without any gear much like an invincible action movie. Thankfully I wasn’t lucid in that dream!

They interrupt a continuous chain of causality in our lives. It disconnects us from the previous day. In fact that very idea was just derived from one of my own dreams. It wasn’t a lucid dream. My dream character was walking around a wooded trail. He was speaking to himself about his idea of reincarnation that death is not just disconnected in time but also causally separate from this life. I don’t know what made him think of that. Afterwards I put two and two together. In the midst of a dream about walking around a forest and seeing a child running and falling I found it incredible that the dream character could have the sustained focus to think about reincarnation in that way.

I view dreaming as being introspective. Dreams are solipsistic. So any flimsy dream characters we meet are ultimately projections of your own unconscious. To state the obvious no one else is conscious in a dream. We can easily identify consciousness by sheer contrast when we wake up. Otherwise they’d find it quite boring living inside one of your dreams! The subconscious must interpret and empathise with the behaviour of those actual people they’re based on. Our theory of mind improves with age. A dream could try to analyse our understanding of others and not just ourselves. In order to simulate them the unconscious would be forced to wonder how I think this particular person would respond if I were to do this or that. I might have woken up feeling a bit stressed or frustrated at someone’s behaviour in a dream only to realise it had no relevance to the current situation. If someone is annoying us in a dream, how expected would this be? If we're surprised by their dreamful hostility then maybe it's a sign that the dream is wrong and that they're much nicer than we're giving them credit for. This might inspire us to be more grateful. By contrast if their antagonism in the dream seems quite normal to us when we awaken, then it reinforces our caution towards them. Perhaps a nightmare can help remove a negative feeling by allowing you to fully express it and get it out of your system. We’re in a more gullible state inside a dream.

Maybe a dream character has a “copy and pasted” replica of our volition and intentionality but they’ve to work with different memories and strange beliefs. There are different stages to sleep. So perhaps sometimes it’s vice-versa where our memories are “cut” to be the same but with a changed volition. If our motivation and intentionality was modified then our dream character would think differently. That could help give rise to the random appearance of dreams. The misfortune of a dream character can reassure us by making us feel lucky in comparison. They're like a split personality.

One way of viewing it is where we lose most of our consciousness because our dream character is almost a different person to us with an altered set of beliefs. Whatever amount of consciousness we don’t lose is remembered and used by the dream character. They’re like us but with a selectively forgotten memory. In a dream we forget both knowledge about ourselves as well as the time in previous dream content. A dream ponders how would we act if we were in a situation with this set of circumstances? A particular dream doesn’t appear to have much long-term memory of our previous dreams while we’re sleeping. Thus every dream is distinct. They’re so diverse that one dream might feel like the complete opposite of the previous dream. I often have dreams about transport; I’d be getting on trains and missing the following train where I’d have to change my destination. In real life we frequently have to change our own objectives and destinations.

Dreams can be so mystifying that we’re left to wonder how we could have made them up on the spot. We’re usually oblivious throughout sleep and even a lucid dream can only ever take up a small fraction of it. That oblivion can be interpreted as a simulation of forward motion through time. Absolute nothingness is pure time! Sleep feels like it takes a few minutes even though it looks like hours on a clock. If we’re struggling to derive free will from determinism than a shortcut is to start from the polar opposite of determinism; anarchy.

The danger of self-design and robots that can dream(!):

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nShgPJpdocQ

Sonny's Interrogation - I Robot

What is a dream made of? To say it’s just a memory only serves to pass on the problem to neurons. When we sleep we don’t think in terms of neurons. I feel it’s more natural to say a dream is made of light in the same way your current vision is composed of light. Although a dream is different to our waking vision because they’re like patterns of light. Why can’t we remember a dream? If light is our consciousness then maybe neurons consitute our memory. So if our neurons are offline then we’re not remembering the patterns of light. Therefore it’d be more accurate to say a dream is the lack of memory rather than memory itself.

Dreams can convey the absurdness of our immediate goals in the whole scheme of things. They can affect us as much as want them to. If we don’t like the message of a dream we can ignore it. We’re not conscious in a dream because time is flowing too fast. The more vivid a dream, the slower time passes. When time compresses to normal speed we can have a lucid dream. So sleep is like a longitudinal wave of compressions and rarefactions of time.

I’ve become an expert on my own interpretations so unfortunately that won’t mean anything if you’re not agreeing with the initial arguments! That’s fine and we can go our separate ways. I’m not trying to be a sleep evangelist. If however you do think that sleep is an encryption and were wondering what physics you might need to violate; I’m the guy you need! Sleep is nature’s natural drug supply. The difference is that only you can observe the effects.

If free will can change the direction of our body movements then it must be a force. Acceleration can be either a change in velocity (initiating or ending an action) or direction (perhaps similar to free won’t). Moreover our mindset changes as we age so whatever is causing free will would have to be continuously updated rather than it being endowed once at birth.

Are dreams an altered memory which is being revisited in the past tense? Or can they also be an unfiltered purge that’s being actively created by your current thoughts in the present tense? There must be trace amounts of the conscious mind remaining within the unconscious. They’re not completely separate. Are dream characters remembering “this is what happened and then what I did next was...”. Or are they thinking to themselves “this is what’s happening to me and so how will I act now”?

I usually have an intense memory of the dream during the following day. But an unexpected feature of my lucid dreams is that the visual experience can eventually become incomprehensible. This means that I often only have a very hazy memory of it after just a week or two. It’s like the experience is too different from the rest of my daily mindset and sense perception such that it doesn’t fully register in my long-term memory. The plot of the lucid dream is often too complicated and it can get lost over time. So some of it is simply ignored and involuntarily forgotten. Although I can usually remember how I felt after waking up and my subsequent thoughts of the experience.

By definition dreams are personal and anecdotal. I can’t fully describe the content of my own lucid dreams to you. This would be in the same way that I can’t accurately explain my qualia of yellow. But obviously you yourself can repeat the experiment in your sleep. Therefore you don’t have to take my word for it if you become interested. For me it started off by seeing coloured imagery such as brightly lit halls or fireworks and momentary sleep paralysis the odd time for many months before the lucid dreams became much more intricate. Do our emotions change passively during sleep as if we’re just watching an emotive movie? Or might it be that our own emotions are been involuntarily stimulated in a dream to forcefully make us feel a certain way? Studying dreams is a convenient profession as your work begins when you go to sleep! Sleeping is one of my unique talents!

From my experience of lucid conscious dreaming I’m truly convinced that dreams aren’t solely poetic or metaphoricaI. I don’t think sleep is just for rest. Could there be a process occurring during sleep which is being hidden from view? I guess that were knocked unconscious because there’s actually too much happening during sleep. So it’s not just out of lackadaisical boredom. When I first started having these strange dreams I went online to a “consult a physicist” website but they didn’t even reply to my suggestions! Some people I asked were skeptical of the existence of such websites and asked if I was sure they were legitimate!

The whims of dreams are mental experiments which are being evaluated by the unconscious mind. I contend that dreaming is an inbuilt, systematic process that’s central to how we come to have free will. The you that goes to sleep and the you that wakes up in the morning are discontinuous in time. As soon as I became self-aware in my first few lucid dreams I then started becoming lucid without even intending to. I think that my subconscious learned the general patterns in a way that I become lucid in a sporadic manner. By way of illustration I could ask someone their name in a dream and when I get no response my mind is alerted to the discrepancy and becomes more aware.

When I become conscious in a dream it’s viscerally, palpably apparent to me that I’m physically in an unreal reality that’s in a different location to where I first went to sleep. By that I mean outside of my usual location which is looking forwards in my head. It’s almost as if a dream is being viewed looking backwards behind your eye. The visual content is exceptionally intricate, though in a bizarre way. In fact it’s as bizarre as the narrative. Perhaps it’s sometimes the weird scenes that are actually guiding the narrative. The thought patterns of the unconscious disembodied dream are often intensely strange upon becoming lucid. I then eventually wake up back in my bed. I understand the anarchy only takes place during sleep. Waking reality is normal.

I don’t have lucid dreams on most nights. I just have carefree normal dreams or sometimes perhaps I merely have a good recall of the dream. And even when I become lucid it usually only lasts for under a minute. I just see pleasantly strange psychedelic shapes or a frenzied scene like seeing a lot of balloons flying in the air. I don't use the term psychedelic in solely a trippy sense because I might see actual objects. For example it might feel like I was hovering in a room and seeing toys on the floor. Subsequently I experience a sensation of going at an immense speed before I open my eyes to see my room again. Now when I think more about that sensation it’s not like I’m “flying” per se but that I’m somehow in the same spatial position but flying through time in order to close the dream. One way of describing it is where you're rotating really fast and you get dizzy. If it occurs when I first drift into sleep then it might feel like everything is slowing down and I’m falling downwards instead of forwards. My thoughts can be disjointed when lucidity begins. By way of example I was asleep on the beach and saw my phone freezing and hearing other people talking about it before full alertness when I spun around rapidly and darted around these transparent rooms to wake up.

Other times the content is plain random and trivial like seeing scattered furniture in a bedroom. I might have seen a few strange rooms as if I were at haunted house! I experienced a single dream where I momentarily saw people travelling numbly in a bus as if I were looking at a photograph. I felt my dream character removing restraints, climbing out of his bed and escaping over a fence out of perceived confinement by others like it were a movie. Perhaps the dream parodied a medical operation or a session with a dental hygienist as a torture chamber! On several occasions I'd the impression a sequence of events were being replayed in a manner of a countdown to draw my attention to different features. For example I saw a car travelling towards a flashlight again and again in the pitch darkness of the night. There was an instance where it felt like I was in my kitchen about to grab a cereal when I sensed these rats running behind me and I woke up instantly. In one vivid, non-lucid dream I was walking around a shopping market and saw human meat on sale! There was a short lucid dream where I was looking out at the sea from a fishing boat and became more conscious inside the cabin. I'd a brief lucid dream where I was chased around a bedroom by a smokey plume. Or one time I saw cats mindlessly playing with wool interspersed with images of strangers. My point of view was rotating sideways and upside-down. Such an experience is almost a kind of self-hatred.

Men can turn themselves into wizards by seeing queen cats in our dreams(!):

(Women who see tomcats in their dreams can also opt to become witches; fair is fair!)

It seems as if I can kind of rotate or be pulled around until I can feel my hands and eyelids again. Even ordinary dreams are intrinsically psychotic. So it follows that the more lucid you become the more bizarre an experience you’ll have. In one of my earliest lucid dreaming experiences I tripped over a dishwasher's door and hit my chest before waking up. Another early lucid dream was where I was climbing a ladder and the person above me pushed me off. I appeared to be motionless as I looked at the street from the ground and woke up after 20 seconds of blankness. A lucid reverberation with a mystical theme was where I was running up and down a sand dune inside a cave. I looked around and I wasn't sure if they were statues like a temple or just a rocky protrusion. I tried to escape the dream by crashing into the sand dune again and again. A creepy lucid dream was where I was running around a room looking for something when for some reason I thought there was a flying spider. I froze in fear and began to evaporate. I saw a parody of the Little Red Riding Hood nursery rhyme where my dream character was at a hotel and observed both the girl and the wolf escaping under the outer fence. They were both hunted down as they tried to flee up the hill. One non-lucid dream was where I went on a date and later realised that her hair had become grey. Another time I was falsely accused of sexual assault. I paradoxically tried to prove my honesty to the security guard by voyeuristically recording the accuser who was voluntarily walking down the public street in the nude afterwards! Our behaviour during dreams can appear very presumptuous! The next dream was where I tried to speak to a potential date only to realise it was a case of mistaken identity of a long-haired man. Our brief "hello" implied that whoever I had been looking for was as distant as the aquaintance I had just spoken to. An analytical dream was where my dormitory was converted into a riverboat. When it capsized I was forced to look for my luggage relative to the previous dormitory outline of drawers and wardrobes. For example the kitchen presses had been rearranged to be at another end of the boat. Just as the water entered the room I awoke. Beat that when it comes to the frame problem of how a robot can respond to simple changes in their environment! I wasn't too scared because the scenes in the boat were pictographic rather than 3D. Who knows if the more immersively 3D a dream is the more lucid you'd become! A lucid state of awareness soon after I fell asleep was where I heard an extremely loud, screeching white noise that muffled all of my previous thoughts.

There's a correlation between lucidity and dream recall so having the odd lucid dream will improve your memory for ordinary dreams. An airplane spontaneously did an emergency landing in water during a non-lucid dream. I hid from the rescuers in the back of the plane because apparently I didn't have a ticket! As you can see our worries in such dreams aren't always in proportion to each other! A vivid dream doesn't contain as much perception as a lucid dream but it can compensate for it through a more excitable storyline. By way of example it doesn't require much effort for a vivid dream to concoct themes of nose-diving airplanes and getaway submarines. A vivid dream is more thought-driven whereas a lucid dream is far more visually based. In other words our thoughts can precede the imagery in a vivid dream whereas our sensory input tends to come before our semantic responses in a lucid dream. We are surprised by our erratic perception in a lucid dream whereas the unusual imagery in a vivid dream is a follow-on of the bizarre linguistic thoughts beforehand. The more vivid the dream the more simultaneous the imagery will latch onto the dreaming thoughts. There's a discrepancy between our thoughts and subsequent perception in a lucid dream.

(Does a lion sleep 16 hours a day to think of new zebra-chasing strategies or perhaps is it to slow down their perception of time in order to increase their reaction speeds against those agile zebras?)

In spite of the nonsensical thoughts it could still be perceived as valid by the dreaming mind. It’s taken at face value. An instance of this would be where I was looking at shadowy boulder and for some reason imagining to myself that the rock was actually a huge landmass being dragged out to sea. Next thing I’d a sensation of accelerating under its depths. The blackness of the background resembled a bottomless ocean. Fortunately it was fleeting and I woke up soon after. But the outlandish memory and apparent enormity of the perceived physical environment was quite nerve-wracking. This is all the more so when we expect to be relaxed and rested during sleep. A lucid dream can be scary in the way it catches you off guard. I experienced an exceptionally vivid dream where I was driving away from a dinner party and stopped at a beach. Then I couldn't see anything and my unconscious mind interpreted this blankness as if I were drifting out to sea. My dream character focused on his breathing and felt that a current would push him back to shore. Soon my dream fluctuated and I was running to a building by the shore where cloaked people appeared to be chasing me. In retrospect the darkness was merely the back of my eyelid but it's amazing the way the dream character can re-envisage his sensory input.

I started lucid dreaming many years ago during my late teens. Things were just heading in that direction! So in that time there’ve been rare instances where I’d very long-lasting nightmarish lucid dreams. I’d get into bed and go asleep. A short while later I’d be awoken inside the dream. Awkward silence! The scenes would often be very morbid. I’m not sure what a suitable verb would be! But I was once floating bodilessly and seeing creepy objects scattered as far as the eye can see against a black or dark blue background. Perhaps my vision "blue-shifted" as the dream approached me! I felt trapped but after several failed attempts it felt like I was able to turn around to be behind my eyelids again. If it was just one object then it'd be easier for me to believe that it was only my immediate thoughts in a dazed state of mind that visualised it. But the way there appeared to be hundreds of dolls and chairs made me suspect that the image arose from deep in my unconscious rather than my conscious mind. It was an image of sheer apathy. Before I went to bed and had that dream I'd come to this conclusion that I was travelling at light speed when I went to sleep. I'd several lucid dreams before this point but once I experimented with a different metaphysical outlook of time travel my lucid dreams became much stranger and often creepier. This is why lucid dreaming runs the risk of spiralling out of control when it feeds back into your own worldview. In other words your unconscious mind is on your side and won't prevent you altering your interpretation of your own perception. Therefore you've to be attentive to your own faith system of reality as it were.

(I've seen a lot of weird things lucid dreaming but I draw the line when it comes to pulsating rabbit-people. I'm afraid this is just the preserve of heavy metal! Although I love his knocking gesture at 0:13 as if he were trying to shake you awake in a telepathic dream to the dark side!)

(Marilyn Manson - Tainted Love)

In one lucid dream my unconscious mind somehow hallucinated what appeared to be a series of vivid explosions. It was painless and mute but the timed detonations served to jolt me out of the dream like an alarm clock. What was uncanny about it was that I had a premonition of what was about to happen seeing as it was my very own unconscious that created the scene. My point of view was alternating between a rigged platform that I could see outside of myself and then my dream character on an incoming carriage. Everyone around me looked unresponsive and motionless while my dream character was becoming increasingly self-aware. There was a "Chucky-like" doll in the corner of my eye who appeared to have fired a gun at the explosives. This is a character from a horror movie that I never watched and was barely familiar with. It was like my mind worked backwards to attribute the carnage to any possible sinister entity that existed in my long-term memory. Before long my fellow passengers were in smithereens. It resembled a clinical assassination attempt or perhaps a mock execution! All I could hear myself thinking was a jumbled and inane version of the ideas I had over a day or two previously. My dream character passively sat up and walked onto the platform as if nothing had happened. I also have a faint recollection that the other people I saw on the platform were acquaintances. Perhaps seeing familiar faces and locations in a dream can lull you into staying unconscious by creating a false sense of safety. The scene collapsed and I then woke up as usual. Thankfully I never have too many nightmares. I’m obviously very self-aware that it’s only a dream and not the real world! Perhaps there are good reasons why we're meant to be unconscious while dreaming! The way the imaginary victims disappeared into the blast evokes the mind-body problem in that the spirit of a gunshot victim can be said to have slowly passed on whereas an evaporated body makes it feel like their mind was never directly tethered onto their brain. There's almost nothing left of the brain from which the mind could leave from. It's like the religious notion of ashes to ashes except the decomposition is instantaneous. The psychopathic element of the dream unsettled me where the apparent blast victims were dream characters who never had minds to begin with. The graphics appeared more convincing than a video game but less so than a movie with conscious actors. I don't feel sorry for characters dying in a video game but I feel more empathy for real actors pretending to die in movies. As such our emotional investment in dreams can be midway between video games and movies. I don't seem to have such violent content in normal dreams and perhaps the explosion was like a mine that detected if I was conscious. An alternative explanation of the dream is as a warning about gun rights where shooting at oil canisters can cause instant death. A dream of mass death can still be desensitising even if it doesn't transpire in real life. Yet if we were 100% empathetic then we'd literally feel the fear of those on the news who got killed:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ftg9BcUkbM4

Final Destination - The Plane Crash

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8nhEXGaVL5U

Final Destination - Flight 180 Explosion

In movies they tend to spare us the vivid details of certain forms of death even if it has an 18's cert. For example a spear throw in an ancient battle scene might impale someone's torso and produce blood but very rarely would we actually see a spear that goes deep into someone's head. It wasn't so much a lucid movie but rather two related lucid images in the early stages of sleep. In other words I didn't actually see the spear being thrown but inferred it from the first scene of a person holding it and the second picture of someone about to collapse. It might lead to questions like the depth into the brain at which the spear produces death. This is unlike a bullet headshot that instantaneously punctures the brain. What if an ancient Greek soldier saw an incoming arrow and instead of raising their shield to stop the projectile, they paused to think about the arrow paradox of how an arrow can occupy every single point in its path? Then temporal motion of an arrow will very quickly be quite literally "in their head"! Violent dreams like these don't care about our sensitivities and censorship guidelines. The fact that our dreaming spirit doesn't feel physical pain can lead to overconfidence in what we can imagine. The real life equivalent would be far more excruciating which would prevent us prolonging such mental imagery. I'm not trying to present myself as a closeted psychopath! I don't spend my days thinking about violence and so I can only speculate that some of the unconscious mind is very primordial in where it sources the content. Maybe to beat a taller player at tennis I'd need to treat each of my serves like a javelin throw!

Just imagine if you were able to alter the flow of time in a battle. Then you could speed up time for when you need to check the direction of your enemy's charge and slow it down again to control your defensive reflexes!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCfdyroV7kc

300 - Slow Motion Fight Scene (This wasn't the recorder! I think Leonidas must have slowed time down himself in order to have killed so many warriors!)

Despite the occasionally gross content I kept pursuing lucid dreaming out of curiosity and novelty. The unbelievably messed-up beliefs that a dream character often holds has served to alert me to a strange divide between the conscious and unconscious mind. I found out that the unconscious was far more mysterious in nature than I’d ever suspected before I first had lucid dreams. I read about lucid dreaming in a magazine article when I was around age 18. I was intrigued but initially I assumed it was just something like having a vague perception of the dream contents. Yet for me lucid dreams turned out to be opposite of what I expected where it wasn’t muffled colours but actually exceedingly bright hues and inordinately complex imagery.

What shocked me is that the scenes were beyond the capacity of what my own mind could have made up. This is all the more true when the resting mind is usually viewed as merely lethargic. From my point of view it was far too illogical for it to be made only out of the apathy of my mind. Dreams are like our own version of an entropy-defying Boltzmann brain that you created out of the chaos of your unconscious. If you were a self-aware Boltzmann brain, you couldn’t falsify it because the hallucinations within your consciousness are circular. Super-determinism is where your thoughts along with your actions are deterministic. Thus how can you prove your reality is genuine when the very arguments you use to check it out and your emotional responses to those questions are themselves deterministically created by the dream?

Some dreams seemed methodical in how it was set up even though the resultant thoughts became indecipherable and chaotic. In fact one or two lucid dreams appeared so flagrantly violent in their themes that I was sometimes left baffled as to the origin of dreams. Then again I suspect a process that could possibly give rise to free will by “adjusting” certain laws of physics probably could turn violent on occasion! Free will is an inherently rebellious concept where we're independent and don't always do as we're told. After all we're free to reject our previous thoughts and the commands of others. Religions' answer to the problem of evil is that freedom to do good means that some people must be free to do evil. But we can reduce that down even further to say that freedom to perform good deeds for us mortal beings necessitates an ability to understand evil thoughts so we can identify evil people and then to reject such thoughts in order to empathise with others. I could momentarily visualise an internal image of dropping a nuclear bomb and there's nothing in my brain that prevents me entertaining that thought even though I'm not evil. That literally means in one second I've imagined killing up to one million people. The image would quickly fade not because there's anything external to me that hides it or out of moral coercion but simply because of its practical irrelevance to my life. Our dreams can force us to emotionally engage in plot lines that we might otherwise only superficially gloss over in our waking thoughts. A dream can simply be amoral like hijacking a police motorbike and being chased by police cars down the opposing traffic lane as you would in a video game. Stressful dreams can help our anger management.

We must understand the repercussions of evil in our imagination so that we can then refrain from pressing the evil red neuronal button in our brain:

Father Ted - Flight into Terror 2/3

Weird nightmare: “If their dead bodies are in the wardrobe then who the hell were those imposters that I was just speaking to in the kitchen?”! The dream character answered that question by saying the figures in a painting had got out and taken their place. It obviously wasn’t what I was thinking but that was my memory of the dream when I woke up straight afterwards. That’s how psychotic a lucid dream could become. Well it’s so bizarre I couldn’t have made it up myself! It’s hard to think the simple passivity of my unconscious would be able to concoct such an unimaginable sequence of events. Dreams are effortless to create but they somehow become extremely complicated very fast. I think the convoluted essence of dreams helps to knock us unconscious. It’s like a movie where we can’t keep up with what’s happening. We lose track and then we zone out. My descriptions can’t really do justice to how horrifyingly bizarre the dream character’s experience descended into during two or three dreams. Thankfully a consolation is that it was so delusional it was manifestly fake.

It's always good to mock your own nightmares!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiikIyodOAk

Scary Movie - The Wrong TV

I might as well mention another nightmare now that I’m at it. It’s important to state that I hardly ever have nightmares and many dreams I have are unintelligible and forgettable. Some are very pleasant and even meditative or spiritual in their calmness. I’m not trying begin a list of macho dreams but when you’ve been paying attention to your sleep for many years then you’re bound to find a few oddballs. We sometimes learn more from bad experiences than positive ones and there’s no stakes in a dream so maybe that’s why we might experience some nightmares. Also note that we’re never responsible for the actions of a dream character. We’ve no control over it. Anyway it will be of no consequence as no one literally gets hurt inside your own dream! Another point is that there’s a wide spectrum of lucidity where it might feel like you’re able to memorise some of what’s happening but not fully self-aware; more than a vivid dream but not fully conscious. It’d be like you’re 60% conscious. Another way to describe a semi-lucid dream is where you’re not fully aware but you almost have a photographic memory of it. In this particular dream I was at a cinema complex. There were many screens. My dream character went to one showing a violent movie. I saw very few people around and they laughed away at the aggressive scenes. My character stayed for a while before getting upset and leaving. Then he'd gleefully visit a few other screens afterwards in search of more horror. He’d stay in each one very briefly until he became distressed and then moved on to another cinema. The movies would begin deceptively mild but then end in gore. Conveniently enough I can’t remember what the exact content was. But what was strange about it was that it seemed like his reward system was altered. It was as if it was fun to watch it as fiction but when the dream character became confused about whether the scenes were actually a real life recording that he then fretted. It began to look more like a stage than a screen. I was nervous about anyone in the cinema recognising me but I told myself it's a dream where I can do as I wish. Nonetheless the thought of possible perversions in my imagination being broadcast to the audience petrified me. I’d never seek out these scary movies but the dream character was emotionally different to me. That’s what caught my attention about that dream which I had several years ago. If a dream is very unique we can have a memory of it long afterwards. It reminded me that scariest events can be those caused by the mindless and selfish whims of mundane evil people rather than of any hellish supernatural agents. It was as if the dream was determining my threshold for fear and empathy in the way I rotated between venues. A risk of finding small amounts of anger to be in any way pleasurable is that the temptation will be to increase the excitement by increasing the intensity of the anger to an unexpected degree. Happiness and anger are meant to be separate emotions. This is why anger is usually interpreted as negative stress to be overcome rather than as recreation or an empowering state of mind. Some people pursue evil as a form of novelty-seeking but if you've already dreamt about it and rejected it then you've hopefully removed an evil incentive. If you're not perfectly clear in your morals then trying to remove evil curiosities from your mindset by visual re-enactments would be quite a gamble. To prove evil is wrong by finding multiple absurdities its logic requires you to first analyse the evil logic and therein lies the dilemma. Ideally we could say evil is wrong as a brute fact. Evil fiction would never actually be a problem if you'd unlimited self-control but mortals are never omnibenevolent to an infinite degree!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4TqcErv9aA

Taxi Driver 1976 - Training Scene (Cinema)

Finding a dream embarrassing afterwards is a way to inform the unconscious that you disagree with its message. We are not guilty of malevolent thoughts and actions in a dream by reason of duress. We are under coercion from the subconscious throughout sleep. Nightmares stress test our moral reflexes. There was a non-lucid dream where it was some kind of shoot-out in a hotel room. I'm not sure what it was about. The dream character laughed and tried to sneak away. But after the room cleaner was about to open the door my dream character had no choice but to attack him and avoid witnesses. I must have watched too many mafia movies! If it's any consolation I felt guilty when I awoke! That sensation of regret is a deterrent for bad behaviour. Some nightmares can contain themes of evil. My dream ended once where someone was batted in the back and thrown away on the ground where he thought he'd be safe. He thanked his attacker for leaving him only for the attacker to reply that he was going to rest him there for the rats to feast on his scapula. I don't know why such a precise anatomical word was used other than to convey a sense of paranormal intelligence. My dream character was an onlooker who turned around to avoid looking at the hideous scene but then the view of rats running from afar made me wake up in disgust. The deceitful nature of what happened underscored the dangers of anyone enjoying revenge. A problem with enjoying evil fiction is that it's consciously moral to do so but unconsciously reminds us that it's loosely based on the crimes of multiple real criminals blended into one character.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCBUOVJ0YLc

The Sopranos - Tony's Revenge - "Do you know a guy named Coco?"

I’ve noticed that an ordinary dream that isn’t lucid can still potentially be unsettling. It can be disorienting if you’ve an intense memory of it after you wake up. Luckily this is very rare for me. But an example of such a dream would be where I got lost in a forest at dusk. I never became lucid. It felt like my dream character was a young child where I could hear my family on the path. I suppose a dream doesn’t have to be your current age. But when I woke up the recollection of the unnatural contrast between the colour of the vivid green leaves and the dark trunks of the trees left me feeling a bit disconcerted. Even though the dream was completely innocuous, the eerie peculiarity of the sensations could nonetheless throw you off balance. The memory of the dream character feeling worried can be intense despite the fact it wasn’t you and you’d no control over it. The way your representative dream character doesn’t always seem to be where your center of vision is located could be unnerving. Even the complicated backstory of the dream character which you didn’t create can lead to dissonance between the conscious and unconscious you. With that specific dream I vaguely remembered falling behind from a group and hearing people call me before I had veered into the forest. Those people were relatives from the dream character's point of view who were continuing on with their walk and trying to convince me that I wasn't dreaming. It was only then inside the woods where I become more self-aware. But as I mentioned I’d already that past memory of being on the path with the group before I first gained some awareness. Therefore the uneven memory when I woke up in bed almost made it feel like I’d been in a separate place. It was like the dream character was nearly a different person to me. The dream clearly underestimated my innate distrust of a few relatives! When I felt my bed again it initially felt like an entire forest was inside me as if I'd been gobbled up by a vast nature spirit. We don’t realise we’re in a dream because we don’t have full control of our memory. The odd time in the past I might have gotten a headache after waking up if the dream was very vivid. Imagining yourself in the third person as if you were a disembodied or reincarnated spirit can feel creepy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mg1A7fB9nrk

Harry Potter Time Travel Scene (Azkaban)

A lucid dream can make you feel stressed by a feeling of an implied threat without there actually being a threat. Thankfully that stress can help to get you out of the dream. I can recount a conscious dream where I was in my kitchen at night and saw a large dark dog out the window only to realise it wasn’t my dog. It looked angry. I went running towards the front door and struggled with the keys. I looked behind me and saw the hellish dog staring at me from behind the French doors. I managed to escape outside when the fear of it froze me. I was then shocked into waking up for real. I'd an unconscious dream where I was walking up a mountain with my dog behind me but I heard my dream character say it was actually my old dog Scottie who had died. I felt creeped out and woke up before I could become lucid.

Sometimes a lucid dream would only produce a mishmash of stationary images rather than a flowing dream. Within the jitter of deep sleep I once concocted what seemed to be the outline of a mystical-looking animal mid-leap. We can fabricate an image by freezing the phosphenes against our eyelids. That particular image quickly faded and from what appeared to be the same phosphenes somehow rearranged itself into a new image. I’ve had many of these brief hectic dreams where perhaps I’d be in my sitting room and seeing a flood outside before the image disappears into nothingness and I wake up. I was on holiday once where we’d to drive up a mountain to a village. It was a bit hairy because there was a steep slope beside the windy road. It was a few months later where I’d a semi-lucid dream about a car repeatedly toppling over. So our long-term memory could also inform a dream’s contents.

An eternity of time could solve every emotional problem from grief to uncertainty. Thus visualising natural phenomena and fictional creatures in dreams might have a soothing effect:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuCx1Horis4

The Tree of Life - Meteor Scene

(I better not give any romantic jokes to explain that scene! We must avoid activating the reptilian part of the brain!)

Nightmares can be scary. But they can be counterintuitively enlightening. The sinister content of a nightmare is outside of our control and utterly random. The creepy sequence of events might have absolutely nothing to do with our thoughts and emotions during the past few days. A nightmare will never repeat itself in a new dream the same way. Every dream is unique. The details of the nightmare won’t pan out in future real life. Nonetheless the sheer contrast between dreams and reality underscores just how genuinely real the waking world is! So lucid dreams can paradoxically strengthen your resilience to feelings of anxiety. A lucid dream can highlight the fakeness of dreams. If you’re a skeptic who doubts the reality of the world, all you have to do is juxtapose your experience with the surrealness of dreams. It emphasises how much more complex information is in the real world compared to what your unconscious dream can muster.

In this thread I try to reconcile my experience with scientific speculations. I’m not sure how accurate or inaccurate my explanations might turn out to be. But there’s definitely far more to sleep than meets the eye. I think we’re so used to daily routines and getting organised that some people essentially become cognitively closed to the mysterious and psychotic realm of sleep.

Consciousness takes a different form in a lucid dream. I can’t control any of the content of what I’m seeing and even the thoughts that occur to me inside the dream are sometimes outside of my control. It’s like we don’t have free will in a dream. Twice I’ve had to ignore gibberish thoughts entering into my consciousness until I’m able to wake up. A dream character is like a soliloquy. I remember watching a Macbeth movie where the class always burst out laughing at the soliloquys because it looked like the other characters could see them talking to themselves! Our paralysed bodies spares us the embarrassment of verbalising our dream’s thoughts.

The nightmarish, hallucinatory ghosts of the uncanny valley stare at you as if to say: “Go back to sleep; you’ve woken up at the wrong time!” Are your dream characters deterministic? Can the unconscious mind leave identifiers and indicators of unreality as a warning sign that you’re in a dream? The unconscious mind seems to know what will happen in a dream even though our conscious mind is left in the dark. I can recall a lucid dream in 2017 where my point of view started in a downwards direction from the ceiling. I observed a miniature version of myself running across a colourful room as if it had been decorated with wallpaper. I climbed through a hidden passage in a wall and said hello to a figure who my dream character interpreted to be my cousin. My point of view crept behind my dream character and almost embodied it. I passed by people going down a stairs in what seemed like a shopping centre. A thought popped into my head that these people weren’t conscious but I didn’t think about it and kept walking on in a blasé manner. I could only see their legs as my childish head was only at their waist-level. It felt like I wasn't meant to be here. The distrust between your conscious and unconscious mind can feel creepy when the dream seems to possess more knowledge than you. I gradually started to feel fear and walked out into the street. I soon felt a stinging pain in my back as if I'd been stabbed and I woke up. I'd been thinking a lot about free will in the weeks beforehand so maybe the dream used my subconscious knowledge to simulate what a world without free will might resemble. Of all my weird lucid dreams that one was probably the strangest.

Many months later I’d a lucid dream with a similar theme though in a completely different spatial and temporal realm. The colours of this dream were different; everything seemed to be black and white. I became conscious in a state of prayer about my belief in a benevolent God. This confused me because the scene was so scary that I couldn't feel that I was witnessing any part of God but nonetheless felt relaxed. Around me were these pale figures (or else they were just wearing too much makeup!). They initially looked motionless as if they were frozen in time. It was like they were perfectly still where their lack of motion means you'd fail to notice them if you weren't fully lucid. I don’t know how exactly to describe it. Perhaps they were like smokey, effervescent silhouettes. I desperately started trying to rotate my vision in order to leave the dream. It felt different from a photograph in that I was able to change my point of view to look forwards and sideways. Or perhaps it was like a 360 degree 3D photo stored in my brain! I don't really know why my unconscious is obsessed about furniture but it looked like I was in an actual room; as if there were tables and lamps around me. The larger ones were looking away from me and I could only see their backs. Or perhaps the taller ones were blank illusions that refracted light in a shimmering way as if to represent ominous external beings. I wasn't able to see far into the distance and at the time I fearfully assumed there must have been loads of ghosts even though I could only see one adult ghost at first. I turned around and saw a small blurry figure that seemed to be staring at me. It was almost like Casper! I just remember being baffled and saying hello in my mind’s eye. I got no reply! I can't remember its exact outline but only these really black eyes. I came closer to the little entity and so who knows if this ghost was created by a magnification problem!

The ghost was neither conscious nor purely physical. Yet its outline had enough self-consistency to appear half-physical; as if it were in a hybrid state between an unconscious and physical layer of reality. This might confuse you because ascribing consciousness to their chaotic glimmer could be really exhausting through their irreducible complexity. It's illogical to describe a ghost as semi-conscious and you might have to view the paranormal as very interesting fiction. For example if you were in a dangerous situation in real life then such a lucid dream could be a relevant reminder to stay calm. So if you can deal with a potent ghost then you'll be better at dealing with mere human threats! They must not have realised I was conscious! It's hard for me to ascribe the experience solely to my imagination because the image didn't fade; I saw them continuously for brief periods. Or perhaps it was like a sequence of photographs that left a longer imprint to appear continuous. It felt like my mind was being flung upwards and I navigated my way past some false awakenings in order to climb back into reality. It appeared as if there were a cascade of dolls thrown in front of me before each false awakening as if it were a restart of time. In one false awakening the room looked old-fashioned; as if it were one of those canopy beds with a dark curtain around it. When I awoke I should have said “open time-like curve has just been closed; two monsters down”! If dreams are biological and our nervous system is genetically built, then maybe the symbols used in a dream have overlap with previous generations. Our minds aren’t inside our feet but we can feel them by nerve connections. Our visual perception of our very own body is inside the brain. Therefore can the mind use our subjective sense of vision to move our body? You wouldn’t see my vision moving my body because we’ve separate internal visions. We never directly see our own head and so we've to use a mirror. Then it'd be like our bodily perception of ourselves begins with our necks where we can twist it around. To move our head we use our neck muscles more than our involuntary head muscles. I suspect that many people have come across the uncanny valley but few have survived to tell the tale! The uncanny valley could be euphemistically dubbed "The Land That Shall Not Be Named" much like Voldemort in Harry Potter!

I eventually decided to do the right thing and tell my father while we were out walking that I was becoming conscious in my sleep and seeing these skeleton-like ghosts. He looked confused and advised me to mention it to the doctor. He commented that they may have had me up watching horror movies each night when I was a young child! We continued on for the walk and moved onto the next subject! Our skeletons are always hidden from view by skin. Bones are deadened, unfeeling entities whereas muscles are more biological in texture. We never think of their skull when we look at someone's face because our first response is to think of their mentality and our second instinct is to think of their eyes and brain. We don't have x-ray vision! Even though we use bones for every movement including talking we tend to ignore it and attribute it more to the muscles we tense and the joints we pivot against. Imagining speaking to a skull much like the person was in a Halloween costume would exaggerate our physical and deterministic nature because their motion would be more repetitive compared to the antagonistic pairs of muscles. It's possible that my lucid dreams of the uncanny valley were an allusion to my experience of shin splints and lower leg stiffness. Perhaps the uncanny valley was a reminder that I can approximate my lower leg muscle stride as a bone swing even if I can't feel my bones directly. In other words muscles can be irregularly sized where my brain can translate my intention to move my bones through muscle activation without my mind having to move the muscles individually. Perhaps a pitfall of anti-realism is to feel like you don't even have a skeloton when you care too much about sensory perception!

If you spend too much time looking at ghosts then you might just turn into a ghost yourself!

Harry Potter and Dudley get attacked by Dementors

Dreaming is the physical reification of sarcasm itself. They can serve as a parody of ourselves. The oneiric self-effacing jokes are always on us. It's like the wit of the staircase where we think of a clever manoeuvre too late. The silliness of some dreams can merely be the unconscious telling us what not to do. Taking silly events very seriously in a dream can expose the ridiculousness of obsessive thinking. A playful nocturnal and dreamy fencing game with dual-wielding swords informs the conscious mind that the outcome of social or physical fights can be so complex as to be random and subconscious. The fatigue of sleep acts just like an anaesthetic to dull our awareness during the operation of dreams. Some people develop a funny personality over a lifetime’s appreciation of the ironies of life. That’s why we’ll seldom be as humorous as a comedian. Likewise honing our fondness for dreams can require a slow and dedicated effort to acknowledge the absurdities in our daily lives. Not only are there differences in each of our conscious minds and emotional make-ups; but everyone's brain is also wired uniquely for achieving diverse experiences.

The hard data is that there’s approximately 8 hours between sleep onset and morning that’s utterly unaccounted for. We desert the laws of physics and go AWOL while we’re asleep. Our imagination is liberating. The experience is then erased from memory each morning. Afterwards we’re left to ponder where free will comes from.

In the hyperlinked thread I draw parallels between dreaming and encrypting. The visual content of the dream such as dream characters, objects and surroundings all behave like decoys. They can be distracting. The strangeness of it confuses, overwhelms and overrides our customary logical reasoning. Dreams actively faze us into remaining unconscious. The unrealistic dream storyline functions as a deceptive diversion to prevent meta-awareness in the dream.

In some semi-lucid dreams it seems to me as if the dream character is being tricked into remaining unconscious. To give an instance of this my dream character became confused by the inconsistencies and started trying to record the changing scenes on an imagined phone or computer and failed to realise he was in a dream. The dreamer failed to record a video with the phone and began trying to ring people until the dream ended. With the computer dream I appeared to be in library or class and there were different images on the computer of a grisly nature. My character tried to download the scene before him on the screen to report it to the staff. He failed and gradually became distressed until I opened my eyes. In a small few dreams there was a theme of bodily disgust as if to deter my interest in the dream content and to move me on to the next dream. This might also relate to dualism where we don't want our consciousness to be located in unhygienic elements of our body. That is to say we're often fine with identifying ourselves with neurons and lungs but not our stomachs or skin which appears more peripheral. For example I can feel my stomach when I'm sick but I don't want to view my conscious perception of the stomach as being in my central nervous system. In other words the excretion based organs are inside my body but outside my inner psyche. Much has been made of Freud’s sexual analysis of dreams and on some recreational lucid dreaming sites they even mention “dream sex”. I can only speak for myself but if there was ever any romantic content in my dreams it was only displayed in a very confused and extremely incoherent manner. If anything I got the impression that hedonistic impulses in a dream can be there to distract you by lulling you back unconscious. Besides there's also an issue of consent where you've no way of suing a dream character for an unwanted approach! In a sense we are being lied to in a dream where what we are told by others and ourselves aren’t always accurate.

You never know the relevance of a "rough" dream. I'm not haggling here; I tell the most extreme jokes right away(!):

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mSC20FIQ6PU

Shrek Drinks A Potion

On realising we lack memory of an event we quickly forget that very realisation and continue on; we forget we’re forgetting! It’s like a multi-layer encryption! That’s one reason why vivid dreams don’t always become lucid dreams; we’re not alert for long enough. In one dream I was with a group where we had thought of a plan to steal money. I’d to go to an interview of some kind and take the money box while the interviewer wasn’t looking. The problem was that after I met them again I was too distracted and couldn’t remember what happened in the interview. The other two informed me that I failed to take it and we’d have to try again. The dream ended and that’s all I could recall. Even though it’s bereft of details it illustrated to me the weird narrative of semi-lucid dreams. Occasionally my reality checks would utterly fail whereby I’d somehow conclude I’ve too much knowledge and self-awareness in a reality that’s too self-consistent for it to be a dream. Admittedly it was a mundane dream about packing late and moving to another hotel room after other people arrived for the room I was in. Yet I never double-checked my erroneous conclusions. In another night's dream I looked over a series of family photographs where all of the people were blurred and blanked out. I momentarily rechecked a photo where I could see that everyone looked rigid and cartoonish. I realised something was off and I felt myself evaporating until I woke back up. You could interpret lucid imagery as paintings rather than photos to remind you that it's fictional.

Could the brain be a type of time machine? The irony is that if cold determinism is true, then there’s nothing scientifically contradictory about jumping into the future. Consequently our feeling of free will would be caused by temporal factors rather than material or spatial coordinate planes. The physical future and the actions of other people would be the same regardless of your location in time. Causal loops would only happen if one in turn travels back in time after already having traveled to the future. It wouldn’t affect the logical consistency of one-way time travel. Other minds exist in timelines that are causally unconnected to your own. If some of our thoughts are deterministic, then could those same thought patterns be computationally accelerated during sleep?

I think sleep is instantaneous in time from the perspective of your own consciousness. Vivid dreaming subjectively slows down this leap through time. So we’re sleeping into the future! These “open dreamlike curves” create some disorder which can help us be more uninhibited. Physical objects have an eternal past, present and future whereas consciousness only exists in the present moment. During sleep we lose our feeling of the present. Thus pure presentism implies an increased rate of time during sleep. Dreams are like traces of Cherenkov radiation behind the darkness of our eyelids. We can’t physically travel at light speed but if colours only exist in our brain then consciousness could travel at the same speed as those internal colours and phosphenes. The paralysis of sleep means we don’t physically feel the stress of time and our focus is on the mental passage of time. The mind might disappear during sleep but your brain remains tethered to the world. Other people can still see your head while you sleep!

Although a limitation is it leaves no physical evidence of ever having happened. Perhaps a completely free process wouldn’t leave deterministic evidence as that could be used to predict future decisions thereby negating its freedom. Another caveat is that a dream might not be able to precognitively simulate your future in the entire universe. But it can hopefully predict your how your own mood and emotional state of mind will respond when any similar events reoccur in the future. Apologies to anyone who thinks I’m scapegoating precognition just to promote my own theories! To fully understand dreams we’d need to know the solution to the mind body problem. We’re not telekinetic over real-world objects but as dreams are internal then it stands to reason that our subconscious can move their phantom contents. Lucid dreaming might occasionally be able to prevent over-sleeping by energising you. Sleep is part of life and so it's not always anti-social to prefer sleep to waking awareness! I'm not sure how common lucid dreaming will be in the far future. Perhaps mental illness, lifelong hermitage, dark wizardry or criminality could induce lucid dreaming! Being fanatical about rest is a core contradiction with lucid dreaming meaning it might always be a rare phenomenon.

In conclusion, the personal value of any dream in particular can be open-ended and subjective. It won’t tell you what the intended meaning and significance of the content is. A dream is like modern art where the onus is on you to interpret it as best you can and learn what you can from it. Just like art some dreams will appeal to you and others won’t. So long as you’ve taken the time to analyse it then it doesn’t have to be true for others but only yourself and your own motivation. If a dream isn’t physically real then it follows that thinking about a dream after you wake up no matter how little you remember will still contribute to your free will. It’s not just the dream itself but also your response to it during the day that also counts. Dreams can be psychotic but equally your feeling of freely opening and closing your own hand could be deemed a psychotic illusion! I suspect the reason lucid dreaming isn’t more common is that sleep can still achieve its function without lucidity. The more important you view dreaming to be then the more likely it is that you'll be to have many lucid dreams. I view dreams as fundamental in being a natural state of awareness! For me I’d a lot of time on my hands when I first explored lucid dreaming. I was also in a small rented studio apartment for 8 months when I was age 20 doing distance courses so I’d a lot of time to myself. My day could be all over the place where I'd be awake for much of the night and going to bed in the morning. I've always been a night-owl and seeing the nightscape can be good for introspection but it can be lonely if it's done in excess. There may have been a few weeks where I was like a hermit save for tennis sessions and hot chocolates in cafes! Therefore I could concentrate a lot on my nightly dreams. Perhaps having a chaotic circadian rhythm means your brain doesn't know whether to wake you inside a dream. When I wake up in the morning I regain full control of my mental faculties so the lucid imagery is caused by mere dreams rather than pathological hallucinations. People will reject my ideas until such a time when they run out of alternatives! Whenever future generations finally solve consciousness and dreams, it will have probably required drastic ideas. I'm honest about my experiences but I'm guessing about the physical or abstract phenomena that cause lucid dreams. If consciousness is invisible then so to can the mechanism of free will. Saying that free will changes with age forgets that neuronal growth is deterministic.

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

-Mark Twain

Postmodern conspiratorial music to get you in the right mindset:

Sasha Global Underground 009: San Francisco CD2 - 47:30

Maybe dreams are electric!

Together in Electric Dreams

What do animals dream about? What even is animal consciousness for that matter? Maybe a fox doesn’t dream because the life of a fox is itself a dream of disreality and nonrationality from which they never wake. The evolutionary pain of us humans have shocked us into becoming lucid and self-aware.

A dream is like a song. The visual dissonance of the dream resembles an instrumental beat. The lyrics mirrors our character’s thoughts going along with the rhythm. Our feelings are superimposed on the background image. The liberating dance moves reminds you of our motion between dreams. The chorus reflects the recurrent theme of a dream.

Chase and Status - Count on Me

(This song gives me a bit too much energy. I often feel a pirate afterwards!)

Summary of latest ideas:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/10572/do-human-beings-possess-free-will/p4 Bottom of page 4

I’ll take that as a compliment!

https://www.actualized.org/forum/topic/46884-lucid-dreaming-experiences-and-discussion/?page=4

(16th, 17th and 18th post on pg 4)

The inspiration we use to make free decisions can come from diverse places:

Eoin McLove Comes for Tea - Father Ted S3 E7 - Dead Parrot

Music becomes weird and hectic though not random when it’s played in reverse:

I am blue - reverse

A nightmare is physically harmless because it’s not real. Yet its lack of solid structure means there’s no physical limit on how absurd it could become. I suppose if you took a nightmare too literally then it could become a bit scary and ambiguous. Otherwise they’re just amusing and educational in how to control our emotions. Creepiness might be a way of telling us that what we’re perceiving is imaginary. The stress could be an incentive to refocus. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PEikGKDVsCc

Vsauce - Why are things creepy?

It's not only the monsters that we find scary in horror movies. We also find events that unexpectedly defy causality and inert objects opting to disobey physics to be all very disconcerting. This can be seen when we observe the empty rocking chair that seems to move of its own volition in the scene below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUa5zKi-9Gg

"The scariest part in the Woman In Black"

“Eye of newt, and toe of frog,

Wool of bat, and tongue of dog,

Adder's fork, and blind-worm's sting,

Lizard's leg, and owlet's wing,—

For a charm of powerful trouble,

Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.

Double, double toil and trouble;

Fire burn, and caldron bubble.”

- Witches in Macbeth

You never know when these school quotes might come in handy! The confusion of dreams is like a “hurly burly” potion to concoct free will! Hopefully the ingredients in our dreams won’t be so unpalatable as the above incantation! Maybe the way that pre-scientific generations in the medieval period often believed in supernatural ghosts and witches may have been related to their own subjective understanding of dream characters. For instance if they weren't as familiar with the workings of the materialistic world and also ignored the transcendent religious realms of prayer then all they would've had left was the machinations of their unconscious.

Green is the colour of flora so seeing an abundance of it is weird and otherworldly in an unconscious dream.

Wasn't there some kind of T-Rex running around my house? No that dream didn't just happen!:

Our brains "neuralyze" and erase our memory of fictional dream monsters!

We can move each of our fingers individually but we tend to move all of our little toes together. Maybe there's an anatomical reason or perhaps our toes have less free will.

"Part of Margaret Thatcher's fearsome reputation came from how little she slept. She could get by on four hours a night, it has often been said." (BBC)

- Is society developing a right-wing attitude towards sleep? How much free will do we need to work 9-5 each day? Perhaps we need to automate ourselves for commercial interests. Our expendable consciousness will be made redundant so our brain can take charge.

I read that solutions to quantum mechanics have to leave out either causality, time, materialism or else locality. If I was ever asked to choose between free will or the existence of other minds, then I'd have no choice but to tolerate everyone's loss from the world and embrace my free will exclusively. Sorry!

I don't want to start an argument. Some people say they don't have free will and that's perfectly fine. Maybe it's true that you really don't have free will. But other extreme qualia like love are objectively open-ended where love for one person feels different from another's experience of love. Sometimes we've to speak only for ourself on subjective matters. Perhaps I'm in a different human species with free will! Homo-michaelus!

I'm not sure about your dreams but my dreams are of intense metaphysical and societal importance!

I think my unconscious is thinking about something. I'll let you know later.

If you feel as if your life is finally making sense, then there's a high chance it's a dream and the stress of the day awaits you!

The administrators are wary of my blasé innuendo. You'll have to be over 18 to read my blog:

They gave me a fake email with an unusable password and hardly replied for months:

(The 24th post p13 of antirealism thread is about open timelike curves. You can search "dreams" in the search engine of the antirealism thread for more content related to sleep.)

There are risks with watching too many erotic movies. Try (not!) to form really dissociated 3rd or 2nd person thoughtlines during arousal. Don't ask yourself questions recursively in order to blame your unconscious replies instead of yourself! Things get tricky if you attribute different rates of thinking to altered subvocal tones in your inner voice. Don't shake your legs in random directions as if you were somehow evoking memories by retracing your steps! Don't play with yourself as if it were a gear stick! Don't make arrangememts through telepathy to meet people later in a café to discuss your new ability only to then distrust them and insist on meeting in a police station instead. You'd soon find out that if you went ahead you'd have to reveal your secrets to their undercover agents in the police instead! That sounds like a suspicious sting operation undertaken by your unconscious! If you think your unconscious can read your thoughts then corrupt the thoughtline by saying you're so deluded you don't even know just how extremely deluded you are! "Step-" titles are no excuse:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eGVC0ljl1o4

Insidious - Eliz Talks About Astral Projection

(That video was a litmus test. Anyone who laughed or in any manner understood the sense of humour being implied, will be doomed!)

Don't overuse the "magic stick"! Romantic dreams can come with a twist! Never pray to yourself during romance or else you can justify anything! Fictional sadism can make you feel "connected" such that it could only be rationalised by another higher being. If your deepened mind can't give you pop quiz answers to justify a connection in a critical way then don't excuse it by saying your thoughts need to automate into a higher character beforehand. So if you asked about the highest mountain in a random South American country only to check you'd the wrong answer, then don't say a higher being has to use your limited knowledge to form new statements or foreign words! It'd be a self-fulfilling prophecy because your sexuality will increase in proportion to your self-belief. The characters are imaginary where endless evil can be reinterpreted as being defensive in spite of the threat of losing control! Initially these things seem fun because your past self ensures the sensation is redeemable. The trouble is when both the build up and ending are expressed through expletive-laden rage. Then you can only achieve relief by getting angrier and angrier. If you stop yourself regularly to ask whether you deserve such a high then you'd deterministically ingrain a really self-critical mindset! I once concocted such a hedonistic and terrible thoughtline that my mind almost spasmed immediately afterwards. Whatever happened the imaginary hatred I felt reversed afterwards into self-hatred. Every single belief or ambition I had was ridiculed beyond comprehension by a hum that I interpreted as a voice. It felt like I was speaking to a deeper version of my voice that pre-empted everything I was going to say. It'd appear like a headache because my mind would speak in paradoxes. For example if I asked myself about historical crimes then my subconscious would say that I'm from a small country and that's why I don't understand. For the sake of discretion I won't go into details. But I knew afterwards the experience was a glitch in my own psyche that caused the outburst because everything I was told could have been derived by myself if I gave it more time. I think when you initiate aggressive mindsets typical of previous eras then this might genetically activate emotions that surpass you to some extent. I feel as if I should go to schools to give the second chapter of "the talk" about paranormal sexualities! Don't hallucinate nudity or you don't know what chaos your unconscious could concoct! Don't excite yourself with hallucinated nudity or you'd end up with ingrained, unremovable hallucinations of long-term nude imaginary women around you! Be wary of forming a photographic memory of porn or you'd struggle to remember anything else! Don't rhyme your momentary visual thoughts with similar length hallucinatory 2-second porn GIF videos or you'd have to keep pausing your internal conversations and refocus on audio! If you ever feel inclined to hit your wife then pray out loud and slap her instead! Overuse of sex doll torsos or nude massage videos might mimic necrophilia! Don't be deceived in a lucid dream by enjoying a young woman's dead body only to realise she was an elderly dark purple ghost! Perversion exploits the limits of your metaphysical system where a true dualist would never be attracted to a dead body knowing that the soul had disintegrated. Objectifying women might sound socially dominating except that it's a metaphysical contradiction when a man's perception is equally invisible to another man. Hence an atheistic monist has to take seriously the milliseconds of dissociated awareness post-bodily death where the soul corrupts in order to comprehend that death isn't just physical and has a temporal component.

Ex Machina part 2 - Unconscious - Grant Booth

A risk of vicarious point of view pornography is that your unconscious mind might think you're "bigger" than you actually are(!):

(Kimberly Gates - Maybe I'm dreaming far too much! I'm convinced they upload this content for me personally!)

The dilemma of pornography is that the ethics of the actors isn't apparent. By contrast dating someone ensures that your personalities are compatible. As such watching pornography risks you being exposed to immoral or amoral personalities even if the content is moral. That is to say both good and evil people can be romantic and respectful to the opposite gender. This is aggravated by how some actresses that uniquely stand out in their appearance just so happen to have no qualms about symbolically incestuous titles! As such your ethical system could be unconsciously challenged! I once fantasised about having an affair with my future son's wife without even having a son as if I were warned about the ease of such a scenario if I gave myself 30 or so years preparation time!

Emily Willis

This would be a risqué chat-up line to a potential partner: I can teach you how to lucid dream if we sleep together!

Be careful changing your subjective sense of time (chronoception)(!):

Future hyper-sexual generations might remember this as a great thread; either as a discovery of novel phenomena or as a great description of the classic symptoms of a nervous breakdown! Somehow I anticipated lucid dreaming being derided by a few as a sexual phenomenon. So I decided to pre-empt them and make it as sexual as possible! Critics be warned if you decide to up the ante then I'll have to respond even more explicitly! Lucid dreaming doesn't exactly require extreme sexual thoughts. Really any thoughtline during the day that's extreme in some fashion but in a reserved way and contradicts with your past self might lead to lucid dreams. The trouble is that no matter how much you try to limit megalomania there's still a trace of megalomania by the initial premises!

Lucid dreaming might sound immoral but no matter how erotic a dream might be I've never once had a wet dream! I better not speak too soon even though I'm nearly aged 28! Maybe lucid dreaming is a punishment for those who are already too sexed-put by night-time!

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSoIlS4LQiI

Scary Movie 2 (6/11) Movie CLIP - Paranormal Sexual Activity (2001)

One version of free will is where both time and space and also your thoughts are deterministic where the paradoxical emotions of the mind offer some degree of probability. Then you could say God or your soul offers you a moderate amount of free will even if it mightn't be quite as liberating as temporal anarchy during sleep! However if emotions are that vital to free will then emotional processing during sleep would be extra important even if you viewed sleep deterministically. Perhaps the freer you want to be the more loopholes in determinism you'd come across!

(They'll really have to stop making the demons look brown in the paintings for the sake of political correctness!)

Be careful of doing too much flying during astral projection or you might just fly to your doom! Dreams are harmless and lucid dreaming is usually a safe hobby. To view dreams as dangerous runs the risk of creating an artificial nocebo effect and so I don't want to exaggerate the risks of lucid dreaming. Little children have nightmares and yet they can overcome them easily enough. At the same time I do suspect that excessive lucid dreaming might carry a minuscule risk of physical harm. The mind requires anchors to latch it onto the body and I do fear that extremely overdoing lucid dreaming could mimic an overdose. This is why the odd time I might try to leave a lucid dream ASAP if I feel that I've had too many in previous nights. I'm not saying I don't try to pursue lucidity and I think it's a very healthy phenomenon in moderation. For example I had a brief moment of lucidity soon after falling asleep where I wasn't quite dreaming but everything was black and it felt like my body was numb. My mind was accelerating as if it were attempting to re-enter my body. I began praying and then saw the outline of an altar. It wasn't a near death experience simply because I didn't see any details and my prayerful mind would've tried to imagine holy imagery. That is to say my prayers preceded the image rather than it being more objectively the other way round. I woke up soon after and I was completely unscathed. However if you were much more exhausted from lucid dreaming then it's easy to see how you could fall for these traps that an alert person could easily notice.

Finding your dream character dying in a lucid dream might very rarely simulate a near-death experience of your afterlife. In the 12th post p. 40 I mention how I appeared to be flying through the clouds and being sent to hell before praying my way out. The sequence of the dream appeared supernatural in how the flow of time was very fast. I interpreted it as religiously themed given the subdued colours typical of holy paintings. I don't think a God would meet me given His lack of intervention in past wars yet He might have His angels and demons on standby! Somehow I felt by vague imagery behind my point of view that good and bad figures were fighting with each other over who would control my soul. I appeared to be captured by different people flying behind me. I didn't actually see angels or demons but in the darkness of my version of hell I emotionally sensed that bad spirits were trying to capture me before being rescued. In other words I sensed that if I were to remain here that I was going to become evil and that God would abandon me. My mind went into shock where I instinctively felt I'd rather kill my own dreaming self than stay in this dark realm. I wasn't judged but tested so to speak. The prayers going through my mind seemed deterministic though I probably had an ability to ignore and reject them through "free won't". I chose to go along with the prayers my unconscious mind had come up with. An analogy would be listening to a loud group prayer except you can't see where the prayer is coming from. I'd the impression that the prayers were almost like a benevolent "possession" in contrast to fictional stories of demonic possession. It'd be strange to think of a prayer not only as a defence but also as a verbal weapon! Perhaps prayers can rhyme with bodily processes! After I left hell I was forced to attend a gravitational experiment! In later months I sometimes mused whether the gravitational experiment was actually performed in hell where only afterwards did the prayers work for me to escape hell! Maybe my theory of gravity as a Euler force was unfalsifiable and deserving of divine punishment! Perhaps to survive the lucid dream I'd to rationalise a fall to the ground as being planetary rather than atmospheric in a way that could have been disorienting.

I used to give my version of my own creator internal ultimatums on what would happen to me in the afterlife as a false flag attack. This might be one reason I had such an important dream. It wasn't a prayer and rather the monologues were a reminder to myself for future reconsideration given that I don't expect that God can hear my thoughts in real time. I was somewhat worried that if there actually was an afterlife that it'd appear more deterministic. Then there'd be a risk that I'd be pressured to accept certain views after death without a clear sense of self. God apparently allows evil in the name of free will though it's not clear how you'd have an all-good afterlife if everyone still had unlimited free will. So the idea that good people should enjoy an afterlife creates a paradox in conceding some of your precious free will. I expand more on other aspects of the dream in the thread but I left out a shameful detail. The night before I was looking at a normal photo of a woman and momentarily felt a nonverbal sexual stimulus towards her neck. Maybe the dream was an assessment of my behaviour. I once uploaded a joke in my justice thread where a female newsreader sarcastically talked about a death penalty beheading machine. Yet I changed the pun and joked how the attractiveness of the newsreader made her believable. From one angle I extremely sexualised a death penalty of decapitation. Yet I felt justified in doing so because my ultimate aim was to disprove it reductio ad absurdum. Do the ends justify the means? Was I playing God by tempting the devil? So maybe the dream forced me to see whether I was sincerely well-intentioned on telling such a dangerous joke. We hear so much about men receiving the death penalty while there are perhaps only a few elderly women that received the same punishment. By delaying the death penalty they end up concealing the loss of youthful attraction. How would society respond if lots of young women started killing innocent people in America to which they all got an immediate death penalty? Wouldn't that make the slippery slope very obvious? Or what if society actually encouraged young people to kill others just so everyone could watch them being executed after getting caught? Then you'd run into corruption problems where pay per view networks might tempt more criminals into committing murder for MMA-style death penalty coverage! As such the joke remains in the justice thread despite the paranormal intervention that night! I wasn't trying to sound like Jimmy Carr and his Holocaust joke of the invisible gypsies where we'd be a bit skeptical of his "educational purposes" justification! Perhaps God doesn't understand my sense of humour or maybe God was just playing a practical joke on me! Science requires evidence for supernatural claims. As such I find myself in a paradoxical situation where the only way I can convince people that my dream in hell is real will be to tell them credible sins! I probably shouldn't say this but for the sake of honesty I'm not sure if my discussion with bad thoughts at night-time in Portugal many months prior had somehow influenced the dream. I was taking liberties by pleasuring myself when a bad voice that appeared half-external and half-internal impacted my thinking. l was influenced by an increase in hedonistic sensations to accept a fictional proposal to have a sexy daughter. I was continuously bombarded with prompts. I should never have veered off the forest path so many times in prior days! I thought to myself that as I don't have a wife that the entire sequence of events was completely imaginary and breakable. I'd hardly describe it if I was going to act on it! I never heard the strange voice again but somehow I know that I must never entertain such a slippery slope. Incest is different from all other perversions in that it can be pre-empted when you don't actually have children. Perhaps the relationship between incest and free will is that it takes a couple to design a child where parental traits are forced to counterbalance themselves to prevent undue attractiveness! I decided to offload the perversion for readers to deal with so that I'll never be tempted again! I blame myself but I muse whether it was unhelpful to have travelled to multiple beautiful countries. After all they all have opposing takes on masculinity where each are extreme! You'd almost need month a long adaptation period at your home country each time before you travel to the next Mediterranean country! It's possible that my experience of breathlessness in 2016 for over a month as per my psychology thread might have been a simulation of a bodiless afterlife. That way the prayers I said while breathless might have been a supernatural version of cryogenics! After all a month-long afterlife would be worth hundreds millions of dollars if we couldn't rely on science! Who knows if my experience of breathlessness years earlier allowed me to both avoid physical pain in my lucid dream of hell and also to withstand the dissociation of the lucid dream of hell to have survived!

People might not realise that from a logical perspective they can imbue God with ambiguous qualities. For example we say that God is omnipotent and that blasphemy is wrong. Yet technically being omnipotent is defined as being infinitely resilient. As such an omnipotent God could withstand an unlimited amount of blasphemy without being hurt. Blasphemy is condemned by religion but people who weren't raised piously could get confused by these tiny subtleties. There are problems when we mix physicalism with theism without committing ourselves to either viewpoint. For example cursing at a mountain is silly because mountains are insentient. Yet we define God as the creator of mountains and so it seems trivial to be just as antagonistic to a hypothetical God under this logic. The obvious flaw is that in the afterlife we don't expect to be confronted with God's mountains but our own religious figures. Hating God would almost be a form of racism if we took pantheism to its logical conclusion. Being blasphemous might only make sense to a devout person if you weren't certain of an afterlife and the threat of oblivion after death meant you'd to try and get the most efficient version of your faith to deter evil. Sometimes when you're up against an entire nation's political system you've no choice but to assume a more "masculine" demeanour(!):

www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNyDsgZ7odw

(Black Hawk Down-Pakistani Soldiers helped US soldiers)

This will be my own interpretation but many days after the dream I was walking late at night. Whatever happened my mind started to shake and my emotions went bizarre. It was really only a bit of anxiety but I got into a habit of mixing passive thoughts. My own thoughts started attacking me. Somehow or another I continuously challenged myself fearfully. It appeared as if I was just in dread. I felt indifferent to my own well-being as if it were a bout of mental masochism. I used questions on myself where some of my thoughts would recycle themselves. Eventually I started saying that when I do good I do it for bad reasons. I don't really comprehend it. I felt as if I continuously put myself in a dissociated trance state. It was such a simple phrase that it kept reverberating in my mind until I elaborated on it. Perhaps the thoughts were telling me that some of how I do good is accidental. But my mind started going into freefall where I felt that I'd be going into hell whenever I died in the future. I felt shaken at the prospect that despite all of the pain and hurt I experienced that I'd still be tortured in hell. Then I trembled and repeated mantras that when I go to hell I will say sorry for whatever I did wrong. After that I could only hope that I was forgiven. Then I convinced myself that my internal conversation was over. It shook me to the core and I don't really know what to think of it. Perhaps it's the fact that I myself have deterministic elements in my behaviour that I should be wary of angrily cementing a bad thoughtline that could repeat in the afterlife. I shouldn't "stress test" my own faith beliefs. Investigating the logical consistency of hell by thinking of sins that would send you to hell is a dangerous and reckless attitude. God allows evil in this Earthly life but that doesn't mean that I can act like an animal to God. The problem for me is that I continuously have to deal with problems that have completely different scale and orders of magnitude. I'd get angry about personal problems but then I also multitask so many of my thoughts on communal problems in a cultural context. So I just end up extremely confused sometimes when I regulate my emotions. I'm not the size of a country! Nor am I God! Sometimes I even feel like I'm a bit below-average such that I don't even think that anyone would care if I offended them. The problem is we don't always know how people will recognise us. I don't know if I'm redeeming myself by warning people how I went wrong only to inadvertently tell them new ways that you could use to make you worse! After all they do say ignorance is bliss. This thinking style can be a bit of a paradox for me. I need to err on the side of caution. You could also say you need to be cruel to be kind I attempt to provide my lucid theory as a "vaccine" for certain mystical phenomena. Perhaps I could accidentally prove a nightmare for religion because I've combined science and the paranormal into one bizarre super theory! One way to think of near death experiences among spiritual people is that if they don't have any clear incentives to lie then maybe it's like a trace of a potential afterlife. So if you experience an emotion in a near-death experience that relates to a faith belief or an ethical system then would you feel confident that you could repeat that same emotion after death? If you could maintain your ethics then perhaps the near-death experience would operate like a temporal trace that expands deep in your unconsciousness for whenever you truly die. A problem is that spiritual people are often disbelieved by both science and religion! Unless spiritual people are looking for money or worshippers then the temptations to lie are reduced relative to all the other spiritual people willing to recount similar experiences. Perhaps we could view an account of an afterlife as being somewhat objective if they were to get their own personal afterlife in the context of perceptual anti-realism post-death. Although it's likely many Christians won't believe in my lucid dream account of an afterlife simply because I'm not very Christian in my belief system! Perhaps it's the very fact my own faith in anti-realism challenged my prior faith in materialism so severely that it over-rode elements of my unconscious Christian inheritance.

Anyway the following night I was lying in bed when I felt extreme levels of apathy. My stress level was virtually 0. I soon understood my perception in a different light. I recognised that everything around me seemed 3D and physical. Somehow my thoughts allowed me to see that I had misread my theory of perception as being non-physical. Beforehand I was thinking about how our senses can be deterministic even if our thoughts might have indeterministic features. Then when I relaxed I thought about how 7 years earlier in 2015 I had awoken from a lucid dream in which my home seemed unreal. I was suicidal and came up with a thoughtline that the world is real because other minds exist. This thoughtline kept me alive and so I was incapable of ever questioning it in the years since. As such every thought pattern in the intervening period was continously being built upon layers of an ambiguous premise. My stress levels would heighten because my emotions forced me to work backwards to reconcile my beliefs. What I now appreciated was that my initial belief that the world was immaterial would be reinterpreted in a metaphysical rather than perceptual way. I never noticed the increase in stress levels simply because it was a continuous sensation rather than through sudden bursts of anxiety. Somehow I'd have to interpret my anti-realism theory more in a metaphorical way. What happened is that I was always unable to differentiate myself from my surroundings in a fully absolute way. Eventually I was forced to concede that not only could my mind not concieve the information of other minds as in my original premise but that my unconscious perception was incapable of absorbing the sheer complexity of the physical world in an even partial way. I was always under the impression that there was a minuscule connection between my perception and the physical world by the continuity of dreams and reality. When the lines become blurred God will eventually catch you out! At least such an extreme reference point helped me to unpack a few dilemmas around the paradoxes of consciousness. I'm forced to absorb the theories into my personal beliefs simply to academically analyse it better. I can't backtrack on the initial premise because that's what got me out of the anxiety. Yet I can come up with different interpretations to suit the environment and culture we live in!

https://dreamforum.net/threads/dream-time.599/#post-1766

https://dreamforum.net/threads/the-problem-with-lucid-dreaming.666/

4, 6, 8 and 9

https://dreamforum.net/threads/dream-interpretations.700/

3, 5 and 6

https://dreamforum.net/threads/interviews-for-dream-discussion.723/

2

https://dreamforum.net/threads/dream-interpretation-request.710/#post-2357

5

I don't mind intimidating my readers with rampages! Pantheism might connect you to an infinite unconscious post-death but your lucid unconscious is finite!

Lucid Dreams - Be Careful - LucidDreamPortal