Dreams

| Cosmic Consciousness | Dreams | Karma & Nirvana 1895-6 | Manipulating consciousness | Reincarnation & Karma | Taylor Swift's Karma | Time & the specious present |

Contents

1. Introduction
2. My Dreams
3. A theory of dreams
4. References

---------------------

We sleep in order to dream (Jandial 2024b)

1. Introduction

We all dream, with a third of our life spent in the dreaming state as we sleep. Most people have difficulty remembering dreams (well, the present writer does) but then sometimes we do, if only briefly and not completely. Strange that.... There are little dreams and big dreams, some that are brief, random incidents; others that are stories, events which feel very real. Feelings can also be associated with dreams - happiness, sadness, indifferance, distain, anger, wonder, etc. And sometimes the memory of the dream is so strong that it stays with the dreamer, or it appears out of the blue during their waking state, causing them to wonder if it actually happened or not. In rare instances dreams are recorded and might even be published, or refkected in works of art. This was the case with J.R.R. Tolkien and his 1945 short story Leaf by Niggle, wherein he had a dream, woke up, wrote it down, and issued it shortly thereafter (Organ 2015). That story had autobiographical elements, like so many dreams, though these are not always easy to identify, as the individual having the dream is not usually seen in the dream, though the dreamer may realise or feel that it is them observing the events. Most dreams have a surreal or phantasmagorical aspect, and are not merely replications of real events, but unique, phantasmagorical creations. They can be wild and crazy, inexplicable, profound or disturbing. How and why does that happen? What are dreams?

The study of dreams is an area of both academic and esoteric research, with the former involving scientists, philosophers, psychologists and psychiatrists around the world, many of whom work off the findings of Sigmund Freud during the early 1900s. A recent book by brain surgeon Rahul Jandial brings all of this together, though with an innovative focus drawn from the anecdotal and empirical evidence to attempt to link them up with the science of the brain (Jandial 2024a). Personally, not coming from any of the aforementioned backgrounds, and not having read about, or researched the subject in any depth, the present author has nevertheless developed a theory about dreams during the immediate past (June 2024), and it is outlined below. But first, a record of recent dreams is presented, with the initial dream having triggered the 67 year old male's leap into into this theoretical realm, where consciousness resides and unconscious dreams arise, if only temporarily.

---------------------

2. Dreams

#1 - table & car

3:05 a.m., Thursday, 20 June 2024. I wake up. It is totally dark, apart from moonlight and stars, and the temperature outside near freezing. In the half hour or so before 'waking' I had been aware that I was thinking, worrying about something. It was not a good feeling, and was more of a semi-conscious state rather than a dream state. But I was awake now. So I got up for an hour or so, did some blogging, made a cup of tea, and then around 4:15am I went back to sleep. And I dreamt. I dreamt that I got up, walked into the rear section of the house (I am assuming it was my house, but not necessarily so) to go to the inside toilet. After that, as I was leaving that area, I looked out through a large, square back window. It was daytime outside, or at least bright, though I could not see much as it was raining heavily and the big widow was drenched in water. I therefore could not distinguish any objects beyond the glass. Then I walked away and suddenly heard a noise. So I walked back out to near the back door, next to the large window. As I stood near the door, I then looked down on the floor and saw a small flat table, made of light brown wood. It was about 2 foot by 2 foot square and only about 6 inches high. The table had not been there before, and was not mine. I thought "That's strange. I don't need that." Then I walked through the door and out the back. It was not raining anymore, but just a normal day. The back yard was not my back yard, but is was similar in part, flatish, with a shed on the right, some low fences and a path. There was colour in the dream, but muted as is normally the way. Nothing bright stood out. As I walked out the back I saw two people there, a man and his young son, and a car parked. They were looking at the car. The man was about 5' 8'', in his forties, a bit plump and probably Middle Eastern, with a bit of a beard. The boy was small, only about 8 years old. The man turned and looked to me and said, "Don't worry about it." Then he went over towards his car. As he touched it, it took off, away from him. There was no sound in this dream, apart from the words spoken. There was nobody driving the car. It just went, out through the back gate and across a small lane towards a white house. It smashed into the house. This all happened very quickly. The man and boy rushed up towards it, while I stood there wondering what was going on. And there the dream ended. But it didn't actually end, because I realized I was still asleep, and that this period of realisation was also part of the dream. Therefore I was in a dream within a dream, a doorway to lucid dream. I drifted back into the semi-conscious sleeping state, and woke up a couple of hours later, or it could have been a couple of minutes later. As I woke I remembered the dream and thought to myself, "I am going to remember this dream, and write it down. I am not going to let it fade....." I do not dream often, and where I have dreamt I know that no matter how vivid the dream, they disappear quickly from the mind. So, as I write this, I cannot recall any of my past dreams, whether they be big or small. I have no explanation for this.

#2 - political desire

2.30am, Sunday, 7 July 2024. I am in Canberra, walking around. I want to be a federal politician again, having been one during 2002-2004. I feel lost. There is a large apartment tower where all the politicians stay during parliamentary sittings. I am in the foyer and I see a couple of them looking towards me and wondering "What is he doing here?" It is not a good feeling. I ponder what I can do as I really want to be them, or involved, once again. Perhaps I could write a TV series about somebody who is in this situation, about life after being a politician and trying to maintain a connection with that. I wake up, realising that it cannot be.

#3 - a non-existent blog

6.35am, Wednesday, 10 July 2024. I had a dream - or was it a waking thought? - about a blog of mine which consisted of random quotes by men and extracts from texts. I felt the need to edit the blog. I could not identify who any of the quotes were by, or what the quotes were about exactly, although I could see them - I could not "read" them. When I started to wake up it was still there and I could read through it without comprehending any of it, but as I began to record this note, and become fully awake, it faded. The blog did not exist, but seemed so real in my dream. As I was waking I saw a pot boiling on a stove, with a cloud of steam and white material on top of it. The word Webscience popped up. More text from the blog scrolled through my mind. Then it all faded.

---------------------

The dreaming brain fires up the imagination network and logic is dampened; the waking brain has more executive network function ... though the electrical activity can be similar, if not identical. (Jandial 2024b)

3. A theory of dreams

So what is going on here? What are dreams? What was I doing in experiencing those dreams? Once awake, I began to think that maybe I could construct an answer to what had happened. I had been doing a lot of research into consciousness lately and felt I could formulate a connection between it and dreams, even though that research was quite superficial and mainly comprised watching and listening to relevant YouTube videos during the previous month, and actually creating one on the topic, on the personal journey to understand cosmicconsciousness (Organ 2024). I had taken in numerous such videos and podcast presentations wherein scientists and philosophers almost invariably told me that consciousness - our individual consciousness - is related to dreams and both remain problematic (to them). The 'science' of both consciousness and dreams had not as yet been solved but, in our arrogance, we proclaimed that they without doubt would be (Kuhn 2020, Theise 2024). In regard to consciousness, they termed its revelation the mind-body problem, or the hard problem of consciousness. But they assured me of two things: (1) that they (human beings) will eventually solve it, and of this they were 100% certain; and (2) that consciousness derives from the brain and is purely physical or material. They proclaim that our consciousness evolves as the embryo evolves after the egg and the sperm come together. We are born and our consciousness lives until our body dies, when it dies. I did not believe any of that. 

I believe that our consciousness is non-material, corporeal, and that it is eternal. It is not subservient to, or constrained by, our physical body or the brain. Consciousness is our psyche, our soul, our life, our spirit, our unique essence. As Jewish Rabbi Friedman said recently, "Life doesn't die" and by that he is referring to our individual consciousness (Friedman 2023). I was raised a Catholic and believe in reincarnation, though the Church banned it as heresy in 433 AD, even though it was a belief of the Jewish people at the time of Christ, and Christ was a manifestation of eternal life. I had also taken up Buddhism in recent years, and it has a strong foundation in karma and reincarnation as a path leading towards Nirvana. I am also a child of Sixties sci-fi and shows such as Star Trek, where non-physical intelligent entities were a thing. As dreams are derived from our consciousness, these thoughts and beliefs were very relevant to my understanding of dreams.

I think of consciousness as like a supercomputer, an invisible super computer about the size of an orange or without form or limitation, but distinct and unique, floating freely in the universe and not bound to Earth. It is completely non-physical, but nevertheless there is a reality to it - a reality which those very same scientists and philosophers refuse to accept or seek to understand. This consciousness supercomputer has capabilities beyond any possible equivalent machine of human origin. Why? Because we are very much Earth-bound human beings and just one element of life in the universe. And our consciousness is a fractal element of the cosmic consciousness of the original Creator, or God. Only God can create life and individual consciousness. We can create computers and supercomputers. But we cannot create life. So what is consciousness and what is the connection with dreams?

On planet Earth my consciousness is connected with my physical body, primarily through my physical brain, but in a non-physical sense as well. Prior to my present life, it may have connected with another human being on planet Earth, or some other sentient being on Earth or in another part of the universe. It might have been something that Buddhism talks about, where you were a human in a previous life, or, like the Australian Aborigines believe, you might have been a whale or a porpoise or dolphin or an animal, and depending on your karma you might come back in one of those animalistic forms or as a higher dimensional being, with no physical body at all, but just spirit.

So with that in mind we have the purely non-physical consciousness which engages with the physical body like radio waves do with a radio, or Wi-Fi does with a smartphone. The electromagnetic radio waves are non-physical, invisible, but they interact with the physical radio machine to make sound, if you tune in properly. When my consciousness enters my body, I can now see, I can hear, I can continue to think and feel, I can move and do things. I can operate in both conscious and unconscious or semi-conscious states at the same time. For example, I can ride a bike without thinking about all the movements required to do that; I can present a speech without thinking about how my hands move to enable expression and emphasis. However, my body is simply a physical, biological 'machine' that is operated by a non-physical thing called a consciousness, just as a computer is operated by electricity, or a radio by a combination of electricity and electromagnetic waves. So where do dreams fit into all this?

It is my theory that when we go to sleep, our level of consciousness steps down to a level of semi-consciousness. Part of our eveeyday, practical consciousness is now just not operating because it is not needed. It is at rest. But there are still conscious elements at play as our physical body remains alive. We still breathe and do other things such as repair cells, and dream. We are now in what Jundial refers to as the Dreaming State.

I believe dreams are created when the brain and consciousness interact on a purely physical level. Some have equated it to a computer defrag, where redundant information is brought together and deleted to clear up space and improve the physical efficiency of the brain and body. During dreams, the brain therefore creates images, visualisations and stories which are often based on recent events in our life, just as in an artificial intelligent (AI) ChatGPT construction. But what the brain and consciousness are doing whilst we are asleep is creating those dream-disjointed narrative episodes in the temporary memory space of the physical brain. And when we wake up they can disappear in a flash, and be forgotten, as in when one empty's the trash. They can also be remembered sometimes if we, for example, write them down as Tolkien did, or think them through in the immediate aftermath waking state, or do something which implants them in the non-physical, permanent memory of our consciousness. 

It is much the same as if you are working on your computer and writing a story in a Word document. If you just turn the computer off (i.e., wake up) that document is gone, because it hasn't been saved into the memory. Our dreams are like that, like that document and the story we wrote, because practically everything we create in our dreams simply disappears upon waking, unless it is saved in some way. Why does this happen?

As ever, there appears to be a plan, a reasonable explanation, namely, that the brain is the automatic Recycle Bin of the human supercomputer, deleting fantastical and ephemeral thoughts and feelings as brought together and expressed in dreams, perhaps on a daily basis. We need sleep to enable that process. 

But that explanation requires a planner, a Creator, a cosmic consciousness behind all things which are part of the universe, and the scientists and philosophers cannot allow that as it tears apart their paper-thin scientific construction of reality - a reality that at its very core refuses to acknowledge the non-physical realm in all its infinite variety and dimensions and importance. Why? Because consciousness cannot be put in a flask, or a physical container, and proven in a laboratory experiment, or through some sort of mathematical computation, physical theorem, or quantum physical warping of reality. If they do not believe in God, and other dimensions, and higher states of consciousness, and non-physical life, then they will never understand the truth about consciousness, despite it being the thing that we all know precisely, having lived with it every moment of our lives. We are conscious. We do not need anybody to tell us what it is, for we know it. Consciousness is life, and dreams are a part of that. Unreal but real.

---------------------

4. The Science

The above theoretical analysis of dreams was constructed prior to bacomg aware of the work of Jundial. However it largely ties in with many of his findings. The following are elements raised, and study outcomes revealed, by Rahul Jandial in his June 2024 YouTube interview (Jandial 2024a) relating to his groundbreaking scientific analysis of dreams:

• We have two brain states: (1) the waking brain, and (2) the dreaming brain. 
• The brain never sleeps, and can be just as busy during the sleep / dreaming stage as it is during the waking state. 
• We can measure dream activity and dream states with the following: (a) FMRI (Functional MRI) measures metabolic (blood flow) changes in the brain; (b) EEG measures electrical changes in the brain; and (c) patient stories. 
• Dreams are hyper emotional and hypervisual, with dampened logic.
• When colour TV was introduced in the 1950s, it became more common for people to dream in colour rather than in black and white.
• Dreams rarely have maths. This is because the Dorsal Lateral Prefrontal Cortex is dampened in dreaming, and this is the maths part of the brain.
• We have no Nore Adrenalin during REM sleep, and this is the most common point at which we dream. Therefore the brain is freed up to expand its scope, and is not restricted, or as focussed, as when subject to adrenalin.

Jundial brings together a lot of anecdotal and observational data in revealing aspects of the dreaming state. Some of this may never be subject to scientific verification, but that is fine. It is all very real, nevertheless.

---------------------

5. Reference

Friedman, Manis, Life Can't Die, Rabbi Manis Friedman, YouTube, 26 April 2023, duration: 57.49 minutes.

Jandial, Rahul (a), This is why we dream: What your sleeping brain reveals about your waking life, Penguin Life, 2024, 272p.

----- (b), #1 Brain Surgeon: What your dreams are trying to tell you, Dr Rangan Chatterjee, YouTube, 5 June 2024, duration: 123.14 minutes.

Kuhn, Robert, Why is consciousness baffling?, Closer to the Truth, episode 401, 29 December 2020, YouTube, duration: 26.46 minutes.

Organ, Michael, Tolkien's Surrealistic Pillow: Leaf by Niggle, Journal of Tolkien Research, 5(1), 2018.

Theise, Neil, Is Consciousness Ultimate Reality?, Closer to Truth, 6 April 2024, YouTube, duration: 7.07 minutes.

---------------------

| Cosmic Consciousness | Dreams | Karma & Nirvana 1895-6 | Manipulating consciousness | Reincarnation & Karma | Taylor Swift's Karma | Time & the specious present |

Last updated: 10 July 2024

Michael Organ, Australia (Home)