So perhaps a thought in parting… Your habitual dream now, that thing they would detect as they watched the patterns that show up in an fMRI while you look at stimuli, does it put you fully in touch with reality? Is it as useful as you might need it to be?

It’s more of a habit? Feel like you want to “mod” it at all?

Yes. If we don’t, we’re in trouble.

Yes. I would like to modify my reactions to things based on negative experiences long, long ago.

Then understand that you went to sleep then, and the same process that made that reaction set up can take it down. You didn’t have to make an effort to see it that way did you? Convince yourself to feel that way? But you were ready to include that experience.

There are a lot of those moments from childhood. Perhaps the “sleep” was a necessary emotional response at the time, enabling survival, etc. Indeed, just as organic sleep is, and really the sleep is not a criticism. It’s realizing the dream, rediscovering your lucidity.

Ever have a lucid dream? It doesn’t even have to be lucid. What happens when you encounter dream imagery that you can’t make sense of? If you dreamed of a flying nose, how long could your attention remain on that?

It would shift away quickly. That same process is going on with your memories. Your brain doesn’t know the difference between memory and dream, short of degree of focus, that’s all. Memories have the traces of your waking state of focus. That focus is yours to assign and reassign as you choose, and you can choose to dream again what you remember but dream it differently.

Ever notice your mind has regular bouts of what seems like random behavior? It’s not random, it’s a rhythm like a heartbeat in your brain. Seen from one point of view it’s just convulsions in your brain retriggering memories and observations that have nothing to do with anything real.

Seeking balance? Homeostasis? Exactly, but you can voluntarily control these “convulsions” like you can your respiration and heart rate, and it might take focus. That’s all hypnosis is, a relaxed state of focus, and what are people capable of while under hypnotic trance?

Reprogramming themselves. The things they really want to do if they weren’t inhibited. Yes. With the suggestion that one will not bleed, a needle can pierce the skin without the person bleeding, all kinds of things are possible, reviving the immune response to cancer cells… Who really knows the limit.

Installing new ways of constructing “reality…” Indeed. As you relax and tune into that pulse in your mind, you will notice like blood that it seems to go to specific places.

I have a hypnotist friend who does “virtual bariatric surgery” for her over-weight patients. Fascinating stuff that, eh?

I find it quite scary, actually. Perhaps that’s a natural reaction to really understanding reality at least in those moments. You really understand reality when it seems to break down, but does your blood flow randomly? Willy nilly?

No. Well, that flow of “irrational” energy is not random either. It moves to places that need awakening, or reabsorption. It seeks to replace damaged perceptual patterns. This is why it by itself seems “irrational.”

So our wounds can become windows. Yes. It tried to drop old patterns and experiences, like your body sheds skin from a severe wound, unless of course you keep preserving the wound, remembering it because it “might be important.” We are motivated to do that out of survival instinct, but this irrational force I have been describing is also a survival instinct. Wouldn’t we be better off learning to accept and direct it?

Don’t touch a hot stove again or go near the person who hurt you. Yes, better to learn redirection of that fear-impulse. Is there a reason it shouldn’t be allowed primacy? At least from time to time?

If it controls you, then something is out of whack. Stoves hurt becomes ignore stoves, or stoves hurt becomes stoves are hot and that is useful. Is rationality really necessary for these processes to take place? Does your dog have to rationalize to learn?

Awareness is necessary, whether it is “rationality” or not, I don’t know. The reason I am focusing on rationality is that it’s usually what comes to mind when someone takes notice of a psychic force. They automatically check the “reasonableness” of it, but the mind itself operates on nothing other than unreasonable flows of energy and information, and well, in general, we wind up being used by not only these “irrational” impulses, but by our habitual thinking as well.

Microsoft Word has no idea what my documents “mean.” Exactly, but it does know what its operating status is.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~