I had one unambiguous dream of the very near future, an event that came to pass two or three days after my dream of it. The matter was rather ordinary in a way, and the only reason I became aware of the dream, and able to check that it had come true, was because, at that time, I’d just read J.W. Dunne’s book, An Experiment with Time. Dunne, who published this work in 1947, is probably the best-known expositor of precognitive dreaming. Having read the book, I set myself the task of recording dreams when I remembered them on waking. I wanted to test Dunne’s assertion that most everybody occasionally dreams the future. But just because the future is pretty much like the past, we don’t notice the fact. Record your dreams, Dunne had urged. Compare them to later events. You’ll convince yourself. I took up the challenge. This was in the early 1960s. I had my proof within about a week. As soon as I did I stopped my experiment because recording dreams was tedious. The intention to do so kept waking me up.
The dream itself developed as follows. I dreamt that I was in my office with my door closed so that I could concentrate on writing a final report on what had been a long and painful research project for the Department of Housing and Urban Development. My office happened to be next to the conference room. As I was laboring at my typewriter, this is still in the dream, noises penetrated through the wall and gave me the impression that people were arguing. After a while the argument ceased. Someone then knocked on my door. I rose and opened it. Outside stood the head of our Washington office. He was in the company of a tall black and rather distinguished-looking gentleman. With that the dream ended.
I noted this dream and went back to sleep. I promptly forgot it again—until, some days later, I actually lived the actuality. Events in reality developed almost exactly the same way. The only difference was that, instead of an argument next door, I heard muffled conversation and the persistent clicking of chalk on the blackboard. The noise disturbed my concentration enough so that I grew quite incensed. And, yes. My door was closed. Then the dream-event actually happened. A knock sounded on the door, I opened it. The head of our office stood there with a tall, black gentlemen. He wanted to introduce me to his visitor. The man was the president of the National Bar Association, then a body of black lawyers. The American Bar Association, at that time, had only white members. This was the 1960s, after all. The gentleman was the only black person I ever remember seeing in that office as a visitor in the course of the year I then spent in Washington, D.C.; thus it was an unusual and memorable event. After a few words of conversation, my chief took the gentleman to lunch. I sort of staggered back to my chair, sat down and shook my head: I’d actually dreamt the future. The dream had come rushing back the moment I’d opened the door. And my notes, still there at home, confirmed it with a date.
As Dunne pointed out, precognitive dreams are still dreams; they use symbolical representations of future events. They’re not always as boringly literal as my dream had been. Brigitte had a precognitive dream of Kennedy’s assassination two days before it happened. We lived in a second-storey apartment at the time. She dreamt that she was upstairs looking down at the street below. I came driving by in a convertible. We didn’t own a convertible then; we drove a VW beetle. Then she heard a shot and saw, in horror, that my head was rolling on the pavement down below… In her dream-vocabulary, the President was symbolized by a stand-in, someone who had the role of “head of household” in her own immediate life.
The literature on precognitive dreaming is extensive, some of it recent. Nine-eleven produced a rash of these that some people have collected and made available on the Internet. Mere laziness prevents me from giving links here. But they’re available. Great public events always seem to ease such dreams out of hiding; people recognize, from the news of the events, that they’d actually dreamt them. Thus there were also people who dreamt of the Titanic’s sinking before it actually took place. Denial of this sort of thing is literally impossible if they happen to you or to immediate members of your family. This then lends credence to more distant reports because we are sensible and rational in knowing what we know. Here I refer back to an earlier entry on epistemology.
Precognitive dreams, therefore, represent a dimension of dreaming which goes far, far beyond the more ordinary explanation, which I’ve presented already, namely that dreams are (and most certainly are) the automatic presentation of memories by the awakening brain. What precognitive dreams indicate, at minimum, is that our conceptualizations of time and space, however useful they are in everyday life, do not exhaust the possibilities available to a transcendent function that I call consciousness or mind.
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Significant Dreams
Next I want to present a dream of unusual character and then compare such dreams to the usual product of the night.
Content. In this dream I stood on a grassy plain. Ahead of me in the near distance was a wide river, smooth as glass; it curved to my left; a single mansion stood on its far shore. A boatman across the way was preparing to cross; he was an older fellow but had a young boy helping him. I ignored the boatman, he was to my far right, and headed through grass toward the river’s curve. On my way I came across two long beams or sticks that resembled a broken ladder. I used these sticks to float across the river to the far shore where the mansion stood.
The river was very full but peaceful, reaching right to the edge of the bank. My mother met me at the entrance to the mansion. She was young and wore one of her favorite dresses of that time, blue with white polka dots.
I understood, without communication, that the mansion was her house, still under construction. We passed through a dark passage where workmen had left various tools and supplies. We entered a strikingly bright, radiant, sun-filled sort of living or central room. Its windows were shaded, but very warm sunlight lit them and came in on the edges of the shades. The room faced some inner courtyard or garden, but, I understood, we couldn’t see out until the house was finished and the shades had been removed. Then I woke up.
Meaning and Symbolism. The dream had a peaceful, radiant mood. It had no discontinuities. I felt the water as I laid down on the beams to float across, and the water was warm. I decided to decode this dream to get at its numinous quality.
My mother lay dying in those days. She would die within a month of this dream. I knew right away that a mansion in heaven was being prepared for her; the still hidden garden in the center of the house was Paradise. The river, of course, was the river Styx. I saw that the moment when I attempted to explain the rods I’d seen laying there. My mind kept wanting to call them “sticks” even though they were much sturdier beams and, indeed, resembled the uprights of a ladder. The word ladder, then, in turn, reminded me of Jacob’s ladder, the means by which Jacob had managed to reach heaven. Next I realized that the boatman across the way, preparing to get me, had to be Charon, he who ferries the dead across the Styx. But I crossed lying on Jacob’s ladder, instead, perhaps because I was just visiting.
The dream implied—by the still, warm water of the river and my mother’s youth—that I had made this trip before, but going the other way, the warm water being amniotic fluid…and also in a happier time: “The sea of faith was once, too, at the full and round earth’s shores lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled” (Matthew Arnold, "Dover Beach").
This dream illustrates some aspects of the Unconscious as Carl Jung saw it; it is also a very good instance of the manner in which dreams use images to signal abstract concepts. During the dream itself I had not the slightest understanding of it. Had I had, I would have woken up. The name of the river was symbolized by objects, the two rods which lay pointing in an A-shape toward the water. In the manner of poetry, the image made by the rods had a double meaning, an overlaid meaning. The “sticks” were also a discarded ladder by means of which I crossed over to “the other shore.” The river’s ample curve was my mother’s belly filled with amniotic fluid, and so on. Death’s ferryman was just an ordinary man, not in any way antique in appearance. The symbolism was very sophisticated, the reference to Arnold’s poem, one of my favorites, rendered by nothing more than the unusual “fullness” of the river which I noted as an oddity in the dream itself.
Comment. While this dream was very neatly constructed, coherent, and very vivid, it can still be understood as simply a thought. The thought here could be rendered as: “Mother will soon be in heaven. I hope they’re making a place for her. ‘In my house there are many mansions.’” Something like that. It seems to me that dreams are almost always the “unpacking” of such a thought into symbolism, and as the presentation unfolds, we feel as if we were in the dream and taking part in it although, in actuality, we are a passive observer.
What I saw in this dream—I call it the Styx Dream—was a presentation rather than an actual physical, tangible place.
Some people, reading the dream account itself, will consider my interpretation of it—especially such aspects as “amniotic fluid,” Jacob’s ladder, and a “paradise” inside a house—pure projection of a heated brain. All right. The entire interpretation flowed right out of my intuitions into consciousness with great rapidity as soon as I understood the symbolism of the “sticks.” It was my dream, and my mind does work just like that. It is always filled with images even in the most ordinary circumstances.
Three features make dreams of this sort “significant.” One is their high energy, made plain by heightened color and bright light, another is their coherence from beginning to end, and the third is a sense of unified meaning that bursts forth as soon as effort is made to decode the symbols. Thus there is a possibility here that dreams of this sort may be messages. They are more energetic, better designed, and more beautiful than ordinary thoughts. They communicate their meaning more directly. The mind is absent in both, but in the ordinary dream random thought formations are responsible; in the significant dreams, the agency may be fully conscious. And dreams of that sort, furthermore, “higher” dreams, also carry a numinous quality that is quite unmistakable.
A Paradox. Here is a paradox. If the significant dreams are messages rather than thoughts mechanically built by associations of a brain, the recipient of the dream, the sleeper, would have to be at least potentially capable of understanding the symbolism that, in dreams, must be used as the language of communications. In this particular case, I was certainly “adequate” to the understanding of the symbols used. The sender of the message, of course, would also select the symbols so that they would be understood. The paradox arises thus: The very fact that I can decode the dream can be used as an argument to say that no message is being sent, that the whole mirage is my own creation. Things are cunning arranged. You know what you know internally, but the skeptic will also be protected in his skepticism.
Content. In this dream I stood on a grassy plain. Ahead of me in the near distance was a wide river, smooth as glass; it curved to my left; a single mansion stood on its far shore. A boatman across the way was preparing to cross; he was an older fellow but had a young boy helping him. I ignored the boatman, he was to my far right, and headed through grass toward the river’s curve. On my way I came across two long beams or sticks that resembled a broken ladder. I used these sticks to float across the river to the far shore where the mansion stood.
The river was very full but peaceful, reaching right to the edge of the bank. My mother met me at the entrance to the mansion. She was young and wore one of her favorite dresses of that time, blue with white polka dots.
I understood, without communication, that the mansion was her house, still under construction. We passed through a dark passage where workmen had left various tools and supplies. We entered a strikingly bright, radiant, sun-filled sort of living or central room. Its windows were shaded, but very warm sunlight lit them and came in on the edges of the shades. The room faced some inner courtyard or garden, but, I understood, we couldn’t see out until the house was finished and the shades had been removed. Then I woke up.
Meaning and Symbolism. The dream had a peaceful, radiant mood. It had no discontinuities. I felt the water as I laid down on the beams to float across, and the water was warm. I decided to decode this dream to get at its numinous quality.
My mother lay dying in those days. She would die within a month of this dream. I knew right away that a mansion in heaven was being prepared for her; the still hidden garden in the center of the house was Paradise. The river, of course, was the river Styx. I saw that the moment when I attempted to explain the rods I’d seen laying there. My mind kept wanting to call them “sticks” even though they were much sturdier beams and, indeed, resembled the uprights of a ladder. The word ladder, then, in turn, reminded me of Jacob’s ladder, the means by which Jacob had managed to reach heaven. Next I realized that the boatman across the way, preparing to get me, had to be Charon, he who ferries the dead across the Styx. But I crossed lying on Jacob’s ladder, instead, perhaps because I was just visiting.
The dream implied—by the still, warm water of the river and my mother’s youth—that I had made this trip before, but going the other way, the warm water being amniotic fluid…and also in a happier time: “The sea of faith was once, too, at the full and round earth’s shores lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled” (Matthew Arnold, "Dover Beach").
This dream illustrates some aspects of the Unconscious as Carl Jung saw it; it is also a very good instance of the manner in which dreams use images to signal abstract concepts. During the dream itself I had not the slightest understanding of it. Had I had, I would have woken up. The name of the river was symbolized by objects, the two rods which lay pointing in an A-shape toward the water. In the manner of poetry, the image made by the rods had a double meaning, an overlaid meaning. The “sticks” were also a discarded ladder by means of which I crossed over to “the other shore.” The river’s ample curve was my mother’s belly filled with amniotic fluid, and so on. Death’s ferryman was just an ordinary man, not in any way antique in appearance. The symbolism was very sophisticated, the reference to Arnold’s poem, one of my favorites, rendered by nothing more than the unusual “fullness” of the river which I noted as an oddity in the dream itself.
Comment. While this dream was very neatly constructed, coherent, and very vivid, it can still be understood as simply a thought. The thought here could be rendered as: “Mother will soon be in heaven. I hope they’re making a place for her. ‘In my house there are many mansions.’” Something like that. It seems to me that dreams are almost always the “unpacking” of such a thought into symbolism, and as the presentation unfolds, we feel as if we were in the dream and taking part in it although, in actuality, we are a passive observer.
What I saw in this dream—I call it the Styx Dream—was a presentation rather than an actual physical, tangible place.
Some people, reading the dream account itself, will consider my interpretation of it—especially such aspects as “amniotic fluid,” Jacob’s ladder, and a “paradise” inside a house—pure projection of a heated brain. All right. The entire interpretation flowed right out of my intuitions into consciousness with great rapidity as soon as I understood the symbolism of the “sticks.” It was my dream, and my mind does work just like that. It is always filled with images even in the most ordinary circumstances.
Three features make dreams of this sort “significant.” One is their high energy, made plain by heightened color and bright light, another is their coherence from beginning to end, and the third is a sense of unified meaning that bursts forth as soon as effort is made to decode the symbols. Thus there is a possibility here that dreams of this sort may be messages. They are more energetic, better designed, and more beautiful than ordinary thoughts. They communicate their meaning more directly. The mind is absent in both, but in the ordinary dream random thought formations are responsible; in the significant dreams, the agency may be fully conscious. And dreams of that sort, furthermore, “higher” dreams, also carry a numinous quality that is quite unmistakable.
A Paradox. Here is a paradox. If the significant dreams are messages rather than thoughts mechanically built by associations of a brain, the recipient of the dream, the sleeper, would have to be at least potentially capable of understanding the symbolism that, in dreams, must be used as the language of communications. In this particular case, I was certainly “adequate” to the understanding of the symbols used. The sender of the message, of course, would also select the symbols so that they would be understood. The paradox arises thus: The very fact that I can decode the dream can be used as an argument to say that no message is being sent, that the whole mirage is my own creation. Things are cunning arranged. You know what you know internally, but the skeptic will also be protected in his skepticism.
Dreams: More Notes
Dreaming is such a vast subject that second, third, and fourth-order reflections occur at regular intervals. Here are three notes that I want to append to what has been written so far.
Not Telepathy. Shared Memory. When I labeled some dreams “telepathic,” I noted a dislike of the term. I don’t regret the naming because approximate definitions are steps toward better ones. Telepathic captures the sense that we are hearing or seeing something we ordinarily wouldn’t. It occurs to me this morning that dreams of this type might be explained by something analogous to Carl Jung’s Collective Unconscious. There may be fields, as Rupert Sheldrake suggests, that holds all memories. We normally have access only to our own. In sleep, however, the precise linkages between our brain and these banks of memories may be sloppier; it may therefore be possible to touch other’s experiences too. In the great majority of cases, we wouldn’t notice any strangeness. My memory of going to Costco is pretty much the same as another’s trip to Sam’s Club. A dream therefore seems “telepathic” only in cases where (1) the subject matter is noticeably strange, (2) the personality who had those experiences is very differently structured, and (3) we would decidedly not, repeat not, act in that situation as this other person—with whom we are temporarily identified in the dream—acts. In this view, telepathic dreams, so-called, are simply dreaming others’ experiences. We may do that frequently but don’t notice it because the behavior we see more or less fits our own range of reactions.
The Dream-Self is Passive. The more I think about it the more it seems to me that the Self in a dream resembles someone watching a television drama. The couch potato is passive but identified, sometimes strongly, sometimes not. It all depends on how well we like the characters. In dreams the identification is stronger. We’re not merely watching the character drive a car, we drive the car. That aspect of dreams which has to do with choices is very murky. Do we actually make choices or is it something that we seem to do. In dreams I never reflect. When reflection kicks in, good-bye dream. If I acted from my own considered reflection, I would not do stupid things in dreams, thinking in the dream itself, “That’s utterly stupid. I wouldn’t do that.” Such thoughts, of course, come just before I wake up.
Active Elements in Dreams. Contrary to what I just said are instances where we seem to be actively shaping the dream. In a dream I wanted to cut a clipping from a sheet of paper. I needed scissors. Sure enough, scissors appeared on a desk surface where they were definitely absent a moment ago. Quite often when I dream of falling, I slow the fall down before I land on my feet. These are quite possibly cases where the real Self is just about to return to consciousness and therefore becomes a real agent in the dream. After the scissors came, and I “noticed” their miraculous appearance—and after those cases of “slowing down the fall,” awakening is rapid.
Not Telepathy. Shared Memory. When I labeled some dreams “telepathic,” I noted a dislike of the term. I don’t regret the naming because approximate definitions are steps toward better ones. Telepathic captures the sense that we are hearing or seeing something we ordinarily wouldn’t. It occurs to me this morning that dreams of this type might be explained by something analogous to Carl Jung’s Collective Unconscious. There may be fields, as Rupert Sheldrake suggests, that holds all memories. We normally have access only to our own. In sleep, however, the precise linkages between our brain and these banks of memories may be sloppier; it may therefore be possible to touch other’s experiences too. In the great majority of cases, we wouldn’t notice any strangeness. My memory of going to Costco is pretty much the same as another’s trip to Sam’s Club. A dream therefore seems “telepathic” only in cases where (1) the subject matter is noticeably strange, (2) the personality who had those experiences is very differently structured, and (3) we would decidedly not, repeat not, act in that situation as this other person—with whom we are temporarily identified in the dream—acts. In this view, telepathic dreams, so-called, are simply dreaming others’ experiences. We may do that frequently but don’t notice it because the behavior we see more or less fits our own range of reactions.
The Dream-Self is Passive. The more I think about it the more it seems to me that the Self in a dream resembles someone watching a television drama. The couch potato is passive but identified, sometimes strongly, sometimes not. It all depends on how well we like the characters. In dreams the identification is stronger. We’re not merely watching the character drive a car, we drive the car. That aspect of dreams which has to do with choices is very murky. Do we actually make choices or is it something that we seem to do. In dreams I never reflect. When reflection kicks in, good-bye dream. If I acted from my own considered reflection, I would not do stupid things in dreams, thinking in the dream itself, “That’s utterly stupid. I wouldn’t do that.” Such thoughts, of course, come just before I wake up.
Active Elements in Dreams. Contrary to what I just said are instances where we seem to be actively shaping the dream. In a dream I wanted to cut a clipping from a sheet of paper. I needed scissors. Sure enough, scissors appeared on a desk surface where they were definitely absent a moment ago. Quite often when I dream of falling, I slow the fall down before I land on my feet. These are quite possibly cases where the real Self is just about to return to consciousness and therefore becomes a real agent in the dream. After the scissors came, and I “noticed” their miraculous appearance—and after those cases of “slowing down the fall,” awakening is rapid.
Saturday, April 18, 2009
Dreams: The Process
Let me now elaborate on the concluding comment of the last post and say something about the process of dreaming itself. Let’s suppose that dreaming is mostly caused by spontaneous brain activity—and see how that supports or illuminates our categories. I envision the following process: As we fall asleep, the stream of consciousness ceases; the higher brain banks down its functioning; dreamless sleep ensues. At regular intervals throughout the night, however, the higher brain stirs into life. The stream of thought resumes. With little or no sensory stimulus to work on, the brain begins presenting data from memory; it probably left some kind of marker before shut down and starts at the same point where it stopped. The new stream is the dream itself. Clinical studies support this view because we know that at recurring intervals the body exhibits rapid eye movements (REMs). When people are roused from REM sleep, they report dreams; awakened at other times they mostly don’t. Each dream is the dynamic representation of a thought, thus as a moving scene. Discontinuities in dreams are therefore most likely due to the sequences of thoughts. One dream content suggests a new thought. The brain obligingly fetches and displays the association appropriate to the stimulus; the new presentation becomes a new dream sequence. Eventually the dream stops as the brain’s activity once more lapses into dormancy.
Now one of the oddest characteristics of a dream, in my opinion, is the nature of our consciousness—much odder, in a way, than the occasionally weird content. We seem to be conscious but yet not really. We have memories, but they’re dream memories, not our real ones. Otherwise we’d know that we’re in bed asleep. We have intellectual powers of sorts, but they are weak. We accept weird phenomena without a “Whoa! Hold it!” We don’t question violations of natural law such as instant transfers from one location to another. Indeed, when we do begin to question what we see, we rapidly awaken. The self-feeling is present, but it is incomplete. There is a kind of understanding, but it’s a long ways from genuine grasp. My conclusion is that thinking, feeling, remembering, and willing are present—but really only as memories of these. Real mind is absent. When it returns we are awake.
The very absence of mind in dreaming also explains why, in dreams, emotions run high. Understanding is weak and emotional reactions, therefore, unfold without constraint.
The only difference between idle daydreams and sleep dreams, it seems to me, is that in the former the mind is present—but inattentive. At no point, therefore, are we convinced that we’ve really won the lottery, really wrested control of the company from those swine, or that Jane Sexy is really about to yield. We know that we are dreaming. In daydreams the stories we weave also tend to get a bit of an assist from the presence of mind; they’re better stories; and random distractions, so common in sleep-dreams, are absent.
It may seem improbable that a single thought could produce such an elaborate drama as a dream sequence presents. Here I would suggests that we have a poor grasp of the complexity of reality. To give an example. I just now heard Sparky barking next door. One thought. There he goes again. But sitting here, my attention is on this writing. Sparky and his barking are reduced to a single concept. But if my attention weren’t focused, that single riff of barking would produce a world of memories—of our neighbors, of our discussions with them of the barking, of the fact that Sparky only has three legs, of our own dog, Winston, who was a yellow lab (Sparky is dark brown), of banking, because our neighbors is a banker, of China, because the lady of the house is Taiwanese—and so on it goes. In the dream a single thought contains all of these things simultaneous, presented in full flowering without the harsh reducing functions of conceptualization and attention. Take any thought and examine what all it actually contains if, for the moment, we remove the focusing power of the mind as the chooser of those aspect of it that we wish to attend to. Here I refer back to my comments about William James’ view of the importance of attention. In the dream, furthermore, the brain presents the content of the thought in symbolic language. It must translate abstract concepts into images. How would you present a mortgage-based default swap in pictures? The brain does a fabulous job. Teasing out the meaning is the problem.
This view of dreams works well for explaining two categories, those that I call morning and deep dreams. I’ll discuss the other types later. But I note here that the absence of the real mind in dreams is a significant fact.
Another point is worth emphasizing in conclusion. It is that a great deal of mental activity usually associated with the mind itself may indeed be taking place in tissue linked in some ways to memory. Thus the naturalistic view of mind is in part correct. But adult functioning in the real world seems to require that something extra that only the mind itself supplies. Without it we’re just dreaming.
Now one of the oddest characteristics of a dream, in my opinion, is the nature of our consciousness—much odder, in a way, than the occasionally weird content. We seem to be conscious but yet not really. We have memories, but they’re dream memories, not our real ones. Otherwise we’d know that we’re in bed asleep. We have intellectual powers of sorts, but they are weak. We accept weird phenomena without a “Whoa! Hold it!” We don’t question violations of natural law such as instant transfers from one location to another. Indeed, when we do begin to question what we see, we rapidly awaken. The self-feeling is present, but it is incomplete. There is a kind of understanding, but it’s a long ways from genuine grasp. My conclusion is that thinking, feeling, remembering, and willing are present—but really only as memories of these. Real mind is absent. When it returns we are awake.
The very absence of mind in dreaming also explains why, in dreams, emotions run high. Understanding is weak and emotional reactions, therefore, unfold without constraint.
The only difference between idle daydreams and sleep dreams, it seems to me, is that in the former the mind is present—but inattentive. At no point, therefore, are we convinced that we’ve really won the lottery, really wrested control of the company from those swine, or that Jane Sexy is really about to yield. We know that we are dreaming. In daydreams the stories we weave also tend to get a bit of an assist from the presence of mind; they’re better stories; and random distractions, so common in sleep-dreams, are absent.
It may seem improbable that a single thought could produce such an elaborate drama as a dream sequence presents. Here I would suggests that we have a poor grasp of the complexity of reality. To give an example. I just now heard Sparky barking next door. One thought. There he goes again. But sitting here, my attention is on this writing. Sparky and his barking are reduced to a single concept. But if my attention weren’t focused, that single riff of barking would produce a world of memories—of our neighbors, of our discussions with them of the barking, of the fact that Sparky only has three legs, of our own dog, Winston, who was a yellow lab (Sparky is dark brown), of banking, because our neighbors is a banker, of China, because the lady of the house is Taiwanese—and so on it goes. In the dream a single thought contains all of these things simultaneous, presented in full flowering without the harsh reducing functions of conceptualization and attention. Take any thought and examine what all it actually contains if, for the moment, we remove the focusing power of the mind as the chooser of those aspect of it that we wish to attend to. Here I refer back to my comments about William James’ view of the importance of attention. In the dream, furthermore, the brain presents the content of the thought in symbolic language. It must translate abstract concepts into images. How would you present a mortgage-based default swap in pictures? The brain does a fabulous job. Teasing out the meaning is the problem.
This view of dreams works well for explaining two categories, those that I call morning and deep dreams. I’ll discuss the other types later. But I note here that the absence of the real mind in dreams is a significant fact.
Another point is worth emphasizing in conclusion. It is that a great deal of mental activity usually associated with the mind itself may indeed be taking place in tissue linked in some ways to memory. Thus the naturalistic view of mind is in part correct. But adult functioning in the real world seems to require that something extra that only the mind itself supplies. Without it we’re just dreaming.
Dreaming: Some Categories
Dreams are a mystery in part because we give them only fleeting attention. I’ve given them a lot of heed over the years—as might be expected of a person of my temperament. What I may say here, to be sure, is the subjective view of one. I offer them as hypotheses—to be subjected to personal verification by others.
I classify dreams into five categories as follows: (1) morning, (2) deep, (3) significant, (4) telepathic, and (5) precognitive. Bear with me. We’re entering a thicket. The categories may be quite meaningless, but I hope to give them some flesh below.
Morning Dreams. These are dreams we have in the morning just before we awaken. Most of these, I find, may be described as ordinary thoughts that, however, employ “dream grammar” to make themselves understood. Very few people have the necessary skill or patience to translate morning dreams into concepts, but when they bother, their dream unravels relatively easily into something of current concern. The skill required is symbolic analysis—easier said than done. The dream content is usually simply a sentence of this sort: “I wonder if Close Relation has gotten the dreaded Test Result yet?” Not infrequently, the dream itself echoes thoughts we fell asleep with—and as the brain comes awake again, it replays those thoughts again, presented to the not-yet fully awakened personality in symbolic form.
Deep Dreams. These are the dreams of the night from which we awaken because they woke us up in fright or pleasure, usually the former. They tend to be large, confusing dramatic series in which many different events take place, separated by odd discontinuities. We can recognized a discontinuity or shift when people say, relating the dream: “Then suddenly I was downtown, and this bus was coming toward me…” Or: “Then things changed. I wasn’t by the river anymore but at a market…” These dreams tend to be visually vivid; we are active participants, completely absorbed in actions, often seeking difficult objectives. All sorts of people may be present, all manner of interactions may take place, the environment may be very odd, and yet we accept it, or weird things in it whereas, in a waking state, we’d be paralyzed by astonishment. I think such dreams are in the same category as extended daydreams when we’re contemplating past events or projecting to the future—angrily reliving some past problem, usually with people, and rehearse what we should’ve said or done…or daydreams of what we hope to do in the future. Thus deep dreams, like morning dreams, are more or less spontaneous streams of consciousness, but because our sleep is deeper, they are more extensive, elaborated, and richer in content. The discontinuities are caused by new associations produced spontaneously by the brain and presented to us in the form of another scene.
Significant Dreams. These are dreams of the deep kind, usually, but distinguished from those by a peculiar coherence and united thematics. They are significant precisely because, on awakening, we are immediately and fully aware of their meaning or portent. I’ll present such a dream soon and return to this subject them. Significant dreams are of great interest to me because they seem to transcend the two earlier categories. Something else is present in them—call it the presence of another agency at work, possibly another higher level of ourselves. These dreams are artfully constructed. They’re rich with meaning. The other two kinds are just mental operations as usual, but conducted with the self only half or not at all aware. The brain is awake enough, however, to store memories.
“Telepathic” Dreams. This is a category I’m not yet entirely comfortable including. My experiences are somewhat limited, but the few dreams I’ve had have been striking. The label itself isn’t very satisfactory. I’ve had a number of dreams of being in situations where I was a person I could not really identify with, doing and saying things I would never do or say in real life—and, even in the dream itself, I am quite aware of this. These have tended to be “morning” dreams. They put me in very realistic situations with not a shred of the fantastic. What is fantastic is to be in the situation at all. Only the minority of these dreams involve me being an extremely stupid person doing very stupid and usually more or less criminal things. In the majority of these telepathic dreams I experience being in unusual occupations or very interesting but quite alien family situation. I’ve tried to explain these dreams to myself by saying that, somehow, I’m tuning in the lives of other people somehow, experience slices of them (of memories? of actual experiences taking place now?), but feel identified with a person who isn’t really me. Telepathy is a handy explanation.
Precognitive Dreams. This is a well-known category. I’ve had one unmistakable precognitive dream that I’ll relate in another posting and discuss it there in full. What I dreamt was ordinary but unusual enough not be mistaken for a memory. And the action of the dream actually took place two days later. Precognition itself, proved by such phenomena, is a vast subject in which my insights are those of an ant regarding nuclear disarmament.
More on this subject will follow, of course, but I need to have this recorded for future reference.
I classify dreams into five categories as follows: (1) morning, (2) deep, (3) significant, (4) telepathic, and (5) precognitive. Bear with me. We’re entering a thicket. The categories may be quite meaningless, but I hope to give them some flesh below.
Morning Dreams. These are dreams we have in the morning just before we awaken. Most of these, I find, may be described as ordinary thoughts that, however, employ “dream grammar” to make themselves understood. Very few people have the necessary skill or patience to translate morning dreams into concepts, but when they bother, their dream unravels relatively easily into something of current concern. The skill required is symbolic analysis—easier said than done. The dream content is usually simply a sentence of this sort: “I wonder if Close Relation has gotten the dreaded Test Result yet?” Not infrequently, the dream itself echoes thoughts we fell asleep with—and as the brain comes awake again, it replays those thoughts again, presented to the not-yet fully awakened personality in symbolic form.
Deep Dreams. These are the dreams of the night from which we awaken because they woke us up in fright or pleasure, usually the former. They tend to be large, confusing dramatic series in which many different events take place, separated by odd discontinuities. We can recognized a discontinuity or shift when people say, relating the dream: “Then suddenly I was downtown, and this bus was coming toward me…” Or: “Then things changed. I wasn’t by the river anymore but at a market…” These dreams tend to be visually vivid; we are active participants, completely absorbed in actions, often seeking difficult objectives. All sorts of people may be present, all manner of interactions may take place, the environment may be very odd, and yet we accept it, or weird things in it whereas, in a waking state, we’d be paralyzed by astonishment. I think such dreams are in the same category as extended daydreams when we’re contemplating past events or projecting to the future—angrily reliving some past problem, usually with people, and rehearse what we should’ve said or done…or daydreams of what we hope to do in the future. Thus deep dreams, like morning dreams, are more or less spontaneous streams of consciousness, but because our sleep is deeper, they are more extensive, elaborated, and richer in content. The discontinuities are caused by new associations produced spontaneously by the brain and presented to us in the form of another scene.
Significant Dreams. These are dreams of the deep kind, usually, but distinguished from those by a peculiar coherence and united thematics. They are significant precisely because, on awakening, we are immediately and fully aware of their meaning or portent. I’ll present such a dream soon and return to this subject them. Significant dreams are of great interest to me because they seem to transcend the two earlier categories. Something else is present in them—call it the presence of another agency at work, possibly another higher level of ourselves. These dreams are artfully constructed. They’re rich with meaning. The other two kinds are just mental operations as usual, but conducted with the self only half or not at all aware. The brain is awake enough, however, to store memories.
“Telepathic” Dreams. This is a category I’m not yet entirely comfortable including. My experiences are somewhat limited, but the few dreams I’ve had have been striking. The label itself isn’t very satisfactory. I’ve had a number of dreams of being in situations where I was a person I could not really identify with, doing and saying things I would never do or say in real life—and, even in the dream itself, I am quite aware of this. These have tended to be “morning” dreams. They put me in very realistic situations with not a shred of the fantastic. What is fantastic is to be in the situation at all. Only the minority of these dreams involve me being an extremely stupid person doing very stupid and usually more or less criminal things. In the majority of these telepathic dreams I experience being in unusual occupations or very interesting but quite alien family situation. I’ve tried to explain these dreams to myself by saying that, somehow, I’m tuning in the lives of other people somehow, experience slices of them (of memories? of actual experiences taking place now?), but feel identified with a person who isn’t really me. Telepathy is a handy explanation.
Precognitive Dreams. This is a well-known category. I’ve had one unmistakable precognitive dream that I’ll relate in another posting and discuss it there in full. What I dreamt was ordinary but unusual enough not be mistaken for a memory. And the action of the dream actually took place two days later. Precognition itself, proved by such phenomena, is a vast subject in which my insights are those of an ant regarding nuclear disarmament.
More on this subject will follow, of course, but I need to have this recorded for future reference.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Hypnagogic Visions
One of the most obvious exceptions to “absence” in sleep is the fact that we have dreams. Not that we’re aware of dreaming; when that awareness comes, we’re soon awake again. Dreams are a huge subject, so I’d like merely to crack the door today and talk about what seems to me a closely related subject, hypnagogic visions.
Some people have them, some claim they never do. Let me give a simple example of what for me are relatively common experiences (once every other month). I’m going to sleep, eyes closed. What I actually see is darkness, perhaps some moving, disappearing points of tiny light. Not infrequently the splotchy background may feature flickering phenomena with geometrical or other flowing, swirling, colored designs. Images or hints of faces, figures, masks, and other weird stuff may appear. This is the stuff I usually see before I’m out and gone. Sometimes the light increases markedly—and a scene appears. Yet I’m still awake. The state of attention here is very important. It must remain present, and with it knowledge that I’m actually watching. But the emotions must be very calm or else the scene will vanish and I’ll be hard-awake rather than mild-awake—in a manner of speaking. If all goes well I’ll soon find myself in motion, but not as in a body but as a consciousness at eye-level roughly. The motion is involuntary, and stopping or redirecting it is enormously difficult, but not impossible. As the effort increases, the scene begins to dim. The scenery can be quite ordinary (landscapes, farm scenes, urban scenes) and occasionally quite fantastic (out-of-this world architecture). Sometimes I see people, sometimes quite large numbers. Such visions, however, rapidly become dreams and—on awakening—I remember a dream-like progression as the last thing.
Here is an actual vision, one of the more recent; in this one, and others that follow, I emphasize that I was fully self-conscious throughout:
The vision was not exactly dramatic. I was staring into a wet gutter; it seemed to be raining. My awareness seemed blocked to left and right by walls. I had the most extraordinary trouble moving forward. The gutter-vision was quite static. I strained intensely trying move forward and to my left (to look around the wall) but couldn’t. After quite a long time movement began spontaneously. The gutter and the left wall itself began to move forward together, me with them. As this happened a dark vista opened behind me, to my left side. There I saw what seemed to be a much lower wall. Next I rose higher and looked into a garden beyond it, as it were—but all in black, barely visible, yet I felt the forms of fancy bushes and flower-beds inside it. The darkness had been caused by my efforts to move. Beyond the garden rose a vast structure in the center of which I saw a quite outlandish and faintly shiny huge figure of an ogre-like giant—but not a living creature but, rather, a vast decoration on the face of the building that fronted on the garden. My last memory of this vision is my looking up at this shiny but black figure. Then I was gone.
Such visions are routinely described as hallucinations. Hallucinations are thought to be imaginary visions; the word itself comes from the Greek to “wander in the mind.” Note, please, “in the mind”—rather than in a real place. Simply accepting such a characterization seems to me too easy—unless someone has a much better explanation of what imagination really is and how it works. Among my hypnagogic visions was one where, in an outdoor scene, I “climbed” a berm of dirt topped by a wire fence. Looking over it and down a very short distance, I saw a huge herd of elephants all moving in excitement from the left hand to the right inside a kind of gully. Imagination? The scene was totally realistic; the elephants looked very real, very dusty, quite alarmed. I hadn’t heard the slightest sound, not before, not as they were rushing by. Some of my visions showed me architecture so strikingly novel the structures were literally out of this world—meaning quite discernibly products of mind, but not, repeat not, mine. Among my vision, on the other hand, are urban scenes or vistas of quite recognizable modern forms, not at all surprising even if strangely vivid. It seems to me at least equally plausible to hypothesize that the settings of hypnagogic visions are actually real places, some in our own dimension and some in others. Our presence in them, however, is in out-of-body states. How we enter them, why these rather than those, why today but not tomorrow, and by what paths or venues we get there, that remains a mystery.
* * *
My limited experience isn’t much to go on, but some things I note for future exploration. Hypnagogic visions have dream-like settings. They differ from dreams in an important regard: the consciousness is not dreamlike. Another way to put this is that one can evidently experience dream-like visions in conscious states.
Some people have them, some claim they never do. Let me give a simple example of what for me are relatively common experiences (once every other month). I’m going to sleep, eyes closed. What I actually see is darkness, perhaps some moving, disappearing points of tiny light. Not infrequently the splotchy background may feature flickering phenomena with geometrical or other flowing, swirling, colored designs. Images or hints of faces, figures, masks, and other weird stuff may appear. This is the stuff I usually see before I’m out and gone. Sometimes the light increases markedly—and a scene appears. Yet I’m still awake. The state of attention here is very important. It must remain present, and with it knowledge that I’m actually watching. But the emotions must be very calm or else the scene will vanish and I’ll be hard-awake rather than mild-awake—in a manner of speaking. If all goes well I’ll soon find myself in motion, but not as in a body but as a consciousness at eye-level roughly. The motion is involuntary, and stopping or redirecting it is enormously difficult, but not impossible. As the effort increases, the scene begins to dim. The scenery can be quite ordinary (landscapes, farm scenes, urban scenes) and occasionally quite fantastic (out-of-this world architecture). Sometimes I see people, sometimes quite large numbers. Such visions, however, rapidly become dreams and—on awakening—I remember a dream-like progression as the last thing.
Here is an actual vision, one of the more recent; in this one, and others that follow, I emphasize that I was fully self-conscious throughout:
The vision was not exactly dramatic. I was staring into a wet gutter; it seemed to be raining. My awareness seemed blocked to left and right by walls. I had the most extraordinary trouble moving forward. The gutter-vision was quite static. I strained intensely trying move forward and to my left (to look around the wall) but couldn’t. After quite a long time movement began spontaneously. The gutter and the left wall itself began to move forward together, me with them. As this happened a dark vista opened behind me, to my left side. There I saw what seemed to be a much lower wall. Next I rose higher and looked into a garden beyond it, as it were—but all in black, barely visible, yet I felt the forms of fancy bushes and flower-beds inside it. The darkness had been caused by my efforts to move. Beyond the garden rose a vast structure in the center of which I saw a quite outlandish and faintly shiny huge figure of an ogre-like giant—but not a living creature but, rather, a vast decoration on the face of the building that fronted on the garden. My last memory of this vision is my looking up at this shiny but black figure. Then I was gone.
Such visions are routinely described as hallucinations. Hallucinations are thought to be imaginary visions; the word itself comes from the Greek to “wander in the mind.” Note, please, “in the mind”—rather than in a real place. Simply accepting such a characterization seems to me too easy—unless someone has a much better explanation of what imagination really is and how it works. Among my hypnagogic visions was one where, in an outdoor scene, I “climbed” a berm of dirt topped by a wire fence. Looking over it and down a very short distance, I saw a huge herd of elephants all moving in excitement from the left hand to the right inside a kind of gully. Imagination? The scene was totally realistic; the elephants looked very real, very dusty, quite alarmed. I hadn’t heard the slightest sound, not before, not as they were rushing by. Some of my visions showed me architecture so strikingly novel the structures were literally out of this world—meaning quite discernibly products of mind, but not, repeat not, mine. Among my vision, on the other hand, are urban scenes or vistas of quite recognizable modern forms, not at all surprising even if strangely vivid. It seems to me at least equally plausible to hypothesize that the settings of hypnagogic visions are actually real places, some in our own dimension and some in others. Our presence in them, however, is in out-of-body states. How we enter them, why these rather than those, why today but not tomorrow, and by what paths or venues we get there, that remains a mystery.
* * *
My limited experience isn’t much to go on, but some things I note for future exploration. Hypnagogic visions have dream-like settings. They differ from dreams in an important regard: the consciousness is not dreamlike. Another way to put this is that one can evidently experience dream-like visions in conscious states.
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Where Do We Go In Sleep?
Does sleep prove materialism? If our consciousness is the capacity of an immaterial agency, and we are that agency, why do we go away when the brain has to rest?
Let me examine the assumptions hidden in my question above. To make things as clear as possible, let me start by saying that I want to exclude dreaming states for purposes of discussion. Dreams need special attention—and will get it elsewhere. Now to the question. I assume here a duality of body and mind. If I didn’t, the question would be meaningless. To recognize this duality explicitly, I can rephrase the question: “Where does the soul go when the body sleeps?” I assume, further, that body and soul are separable entities; note the distinction: not just separate but separable—else I couldn’t use the word “go” in the question. I also assume that the state of sleep is the sole property of bodies and that souls don’t require sleep—hence they can “go” somewhere. I pose the question in the first place because the last assumption necessarily suggests that consciousness continues even during sleep, but I am unaware of that—and if I am that consciousness, my absence in sleep produces a contradiction. I’m simultaneously asserting that during sleep the soul is both conscious and unconscious.
Let’s next look at these assumptions. Duality rests on my observation of the mind’s behavior, particularly its freedom of action in directing my motions at will. I don’t observe this behavior of self-motion anywhere in inorganic nature. I have a clear understanding of the difference between reflexive, automatic behavior, assigned to mechanical arrangements, and voluntary behavior. The voluntary behavior also requires a cause, and that cause is the soul-mind-agency. In order to move the body, this agent must be in some way independent of it.
That body and soul are separable is not a matter of ordinary observation; experience proves the contrary, otherwise I would never experience pain; I would just go away until it stopped. The notion of separability is a theoretical projection based on my experience of the independent status of my soul, ultimately grounded in free will. But I have no experiential basis for asserting that I can “go” anywhere without old flesh-and-bones tagging along.
My assumption that sleep is solely a property of bodies arises because I cannot find an organic basis for soul. The very concept requires that soul be free of mechanistic determinations. If it isn’t, it would be the body. If soul is independent of the body, it would not seem to require sleep. But that is a relatively weak assumption. By calling soul independent, I have not actually described it very comprehensively. It too may need a constant or intermittent renewal in some way, but, if so, I can’t know anything about that. As Aquinas argues, soul knows itself by its actions, not directly; hence by corollary, soul cannot know anything by its inaction—which is its evident state during sleep.
How then do we deal with the contradiction of a conscious-unconscious soul during sleep? Three possibilities suggest themselves.
· Souls Also Rest. As just suggested above, souls themselves may require restoration and have the functional equivalent of rest. Sleep may, in fact, be viewed as produced by soul-fatigue, produced when a soul, that has exhausted its vital energies, lowers its life-maintaining activity, and the body, in response, slumbers off.
· Souls Are Conscious But Bored. Under this option, souls remain conscious during sleep, indeed continue to have mental freedom to do as they like, but there is no sensory stimulus coming their way. A big black nothingness is what they mostly experience because access to other realms is impossible from this material order. Memories are formed, but they are of the kind almost immediately forgotten. Nothing happens that’s worth remembering.
· Souls Have Experiences, But Memories Aren’t Stored. In this explanation, souls do have experiences, but what with the brain being asleep, it doesn’t store memories of these experiences and, hence, in the waking state, we can’t remember what we saw and felt in our perhaps native dimension.
Notice that in two of these cased (Bored, Experienced), the function of memory is central. In Case Bored, the mind produces memories with or without the brain’s intermediation; memories are of the same kind (let’s say on the same frequency as ordinary memories) and treated in the same way. We don’t usually remember large boring stretches of experience or simply compress them into a very brief token. The other case, Experienced, assumes that for ordinary remembering the brain must be actively involved; the soul may experience events in some other order, may store memories of these events as well, but on another frequency—which is not accessible to the brain but may be accessible to the soul once it is freed of this dimension.
Now some further comments on these cases. The first suggests that the mere assertion of “immateriality” for the soul is inadequate. Hidden within it is the assumption that soul requires some kind of energy for its own maintenance—which it passes on to the body. So the soul becomes more complex, indeed dualistic in turn, consisting of capacities on the one hand and a sustaining energy on the other.
The second depends on the assumption that different orders or regions exist and that the soul, native in another one, is caught in this one, at least while in the body, and unable to experience, at least effectively, any other. Therefore, deprived of sense stimuli, it sees nothing when the brain shuts down. Boring.
I have nothing more to add to the third case. Each of these cases has a certain plausibility and problems. All depend on variant models of reality which are entirely speculative and supported only, and only in part, by highly subjective experiences of the paranormal. Some of that “evidence” I hope to examine in future posts. Here it might be well, once more, to emphasize the problem of knowledge. We have no idea what a soul is, only the experience of its activity; we don’t know how it got here or why it’s tied to bodies. For explanations we must open books of myth. Tough sledding, this business of the mind.
Let me examine the assumptions hidden in my question above. To make things as clear as possible, let me start by saying that I want to exclude dreaming states for purposes of discussion. Dreams need special attention—and will get it elsewhere. Now to the question. I assume here a duality of body and mind. If I didn’t, the question would be meaningless. To recognize this duality explicitly, I can rephrase the question: “Where does the soul go when the body sleeps?” I assume, further, that body and soul are separable entities; note the distinction: not just separate but separable—else I couldn’t use the word “go” in the question. I also assume that the state of sleep is the sole property of bodies and that souls don’t require sleep—hence they can “go” somewhere. I pose the question in the first place because the last assumption necessarily suggests that consciousness continues even during sleep, but I am unaware of that—and if I am that consciousness, my absence in sleep produces a contradiction. I’m simultaneously asserting that during sleep the soul is both conscious and unconscious.
Let’s next look at these assumptions. Duality rests on my observation of the mind’s behavior, particularly its freedom of action in directing my motions at will. I don’t observe this behavior of self-motion anywhere in inorganic nature. I have a clear understanding of the difference between reflexive, automatic behavior, assigned to mechanical arrangements, and voluntary behavior. The voluntary behavior also requires a cause, and that cause is the soul-mind-agency. In order to move the body, this agent must be in some way independent of it.
That body and soul are separable is not a matter of ordinary observation; experience proves the contrary, otherwise I would never experience pain; I would just go away until it stopped. The notion of separability is a theoretical projection based on my experience of the independent status of my soul, ultimately grounded in free will. But I have no experiential basis for asserting that I can “go” anywhere without old flesh-and-bones tagging along.
My assumption that sleep is solely a property of bodies arises because I cannot find an organic basis for soul. The very concept requires that soul be free of mechanistic determinations. If it isn’t, it would be the body. If soul is independent of the body, it would not seem to require sleep. But that is a relatively weak assumption. By calling soul independent, I have not actually described it very comprehensively. It too may need a constant or intermittent renewal in some way, but, if so, I can’t know anything about that. As Aquinas argues, soul knows itself by its actions, not directly; hence by corollary, soul cannot know anything by its inaction—which is its evident state during sleep.
How then do we deal with the contradiction of a conscious-unconscious soul during sleep? Three possibilities suggest themselves.
· Souls Also Rest. As just suggested above, souls themselves may require restoration and have the functional equivalent of rest. Sleep may, in fact, be viewed as produced by soul-fatigue, produced when a soul, that has exhausted its vital energies, lowers its life-maintaining activity, and the body, in response, slumbers off.
· Souls Are Conscious But Bored. Under this option, souls remain conscious during sleep, indeed continue to have mental freedom to do as they like, but there is no sensory stimulus coming their way. A big black nothingness is what they mostly experience because access to other realms is impossible from this material order. Memories are formed, but they are of the kind almost immediately forgotten. Nothing happens that’s worth remembering.
· Souls Have Experiences, But Memories Aren’t Stored. In this explanation, souls do have experiences, but what with the brain being asleep, it doesn’t store memories of these experiences and, hence, in the waking state, we can’t remember what we saw and felt in our perhaps native dimension.
Notice that in two of these cased (Bored, Experienced), the function of memory is central. In Case Bored, the mind produces memories with or without the brain’s intermediation; memories are of the same kind (let’s say on the same frequency as ordinary memories) and treated in the same way. We don’t usually remember large boring stretches of experience or simply compress them into a very brief token. The other case, Experienced, assumes that for ordinary remembering the brain must be actively involved; the soul may experience events in some other order, may store memories of these events as well, but on another frequency—which is not accessible to the brain but may be accessible to the soul once it is freed of this dimension.
Now some further comments on these cases. The first suggests that the mere assertion of “immateriality” for the soul is inadequate. Hidden within it is the assumption that soul requires some kind of energy for its own maintenance—which it passes on to the body. So the soul becomes more complex, indeed dualistic in turn, consisting of capacities on the one hand and a sustaining energy on the other.
The second depends on the assumption that different orders or regions exist and that the soul, native in another one, is caught in this one, at least while in the body, and unable to experience, at least effectively, any other. Therefore, deprived of sense stimuli, it sees nothing when the brain shuts down. Boring.
I have nothing more to add to the third case. Each of these cases has a certain plausibility and problems. All depend on variant models of reality which are entirely speculative and supported only, and only in part, by highly subjective experiences of the paranormal. Some of that “evidence” I hope to examine in future posts. Here it might be well, once more, to emphasize the problem of knowledge. We have no idea what a soul is, only the experience of its activity; we don’t know how it got here or why it’s tied to bodies. For explanations we must open books of myth. Tough sledding, this business of the mind.
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Brain-Mind Duality: Implications and Issues
I want to look at mind in another way today, more comprehensively that earlier, thus from a rational as well as an empirical point of vantage. These views seem to be in conflict, hence we have “issues” to discuss. The rational approach produces the conviction that mind can’t be an “emergent” phenomenon; it must, it seems, come from another realm. The empirical approach, by contrast, teaches us that a material faculty—the brain—is “almost” always associated with mental activities. I want to record my reasons for putting quotes around the “almost,” but I’ll do that later. Here I want to focus on the difficulties of the brain-mind linkage generally.
From a logical point of view, mind is immaterial, above nature, “metaphysical,” in fact. But if that is so, and reason says so, what is it doing in a body? Why can lesions in the brain block any evidence of it? Why do people sometimes lose their memory after injuries? Why does schizophrenia render individuals defective?
Heads: If mind is transcendental, why does it need a chemical tool?
Tails: But let’s turn that around and show the other side of the coin. If mind is just an emergent property of matter, then what in the name of heaven does life want? What explains the deep urge in matter to wish to become conscious, to struggle, to experience joy, to undergo the humiliations of aging, to suffer, and finally to go out like a candle and turn back into matter once again?
These are the two faces of the coin. Throughout history, people have favored heads over tails. Times like our own, casually materialistic, have also recurred at intervals (usually when civilizations were decaying), but never have masses of people actually adhered to materialism in large numbers in ancient times. Epicureanism is a prominent earlier example. Only small elites, enjoying ample wealth, have ever done so, and not all members of those. Our age is unique in one way only. Thanks to fossil fuels, large majorities have risen high enough from subsistence so that materialism can be accepted by relatively large masses of people, at least passively. The majority of mankind, even in the twenty-first century, still calls for heads. The polling evidence for this is accessible here for the United States and here for the world.
I expect to discuss in other posts the traditional arguments, doctrines, and speculations that attempt to present explanation for the more plausible argument, namely that material bodies make sense for a transcendental agency. They all demand models of the cosmos. Here I simply note the fact by way of introduction.
I’ve discovered, mulling these matters over for years, that other more down-to-earth issues are of considerable interest once we brush away the materialistic explanation and at least for argument’s sake accept the transcendental nature of mind. Most of these issues are in empirical, experiential category. They either support or complicate the explanation. One example and I’ll close.
The core of this example is consciousness and sleep. Where is consciousness when we turn in for the night? If it is extinguished, it would then seem to require a fully functioning brain to manifest it at all. But that would also imply that brains come first, hence mind is an epiphenomenon. This happens to be a favorite materialistic argument, and any one on the other sides is obliged to address it. Now for a corollary. If consciousness remains intact during sleep, why don’t we remember anything about those periods? That question hides a number of others connected with memory, some of which I’ve already touched upon earlier: how are memories stored, how are they retrieved, how are they lost. And what do we find pro or con in studies and writings related to the paranormal.
From a logical point of view, mind is immaterial, above nature, “metaphysical,” in fact. But if that is so, and reason says so, what is it doing in a body? Why can lesions in the brain block any evidence of it? Why do people sometimes lose their memory after injuries? Why does schizophrenia render individuals defective?
Heads: If mind is transcendental, why does it need a chemical tool?
Tails: But let’s turn that around and show the other side of the coin. If mind is just an emergent property of matter, then what in the name of heaven does life want? What explains the deep urge in matter to wish to become conscious, to struggle, to experience joy, to undergo the humiliations of aging, to suffer, and finally to go out like a candle and turn back into matter once again?
These are the two faces of the coin. Throughout history, people have favored heads over tails. Times like our own, casually materialistic, have also recurred at intervals (usually when civilizations were decaying), but never have masses of people actually adhered to materialism in large numbers in ancient times. Epicureanism is a prominent earlier example. Only small elites, enjoying ample wealth, have ever done so, and not all members of those. Our age is unique in one way only. Thanks to fossil fuels, large majorities have risen high enough from subsistence so that materialism can be accepted by relatively large masses of people, at least passively. The majority of mankind, even in the twenty-first century, still calls for heads. The polling evidence for this is accessible here for the United States and here for the world.
I expect to discuss in other posts the traditional arguments, doctrines, and speculations that attempt to present explanation for the more plausible argument, namely that material bodies make sense for a transcendental agency. They all demand models of the cosmos. Here I simply note the fact by way of introduction.
I’ve discovered, mulling these matters over for years, that other more down-to-earth issues are of considerable interest once we brush away the materialistic explanation and at least for argument’s sake accept the transcendental nature of mind. Most of these issues are in empirical, experiential category. They either support or complicate the explanation. One example and I’ll close.
The core of this example is consciousness and sleep. Where is consciousness when we turn in for the night? If it is extinguished, it would then seem to require a fully functioning brain to manifest it at all. But that would also imply that brains come first, hence mind is an epiphenomenon. This happens to be a favorite materialistic argument, and any one on the other sides is obliged to address it. Now for a corollary. If consciousness remains intact during sleep, why don’t we remember anything about those periods? That question hides a number of others connected with memory, some of which I’ve already touched upon earlier: how are memories stored, how are they retrieved, how are they lost. And what do we find pro or con in studies and writings related to the paranormal.
Monday, April 6, 2009
Memory
Sufi-Style Joke
A drunk is looking for his car-keys by night in the circle thrown by a street lamp. His strange behavior draws the attention of a passer-by. He asks the drunk why he’s crawling around feeling the gutter. The drunk mumbles his answer. The passer-by looks around. “Where’s your car?” “Down there,” mumbles the drunk and points into the deep shadows far off under thick trees. “Why are you looking here? Did you drop them here?” “No,” says the drunk, “but there’s no light there. Can’t see anything back there.”
Where’d You Put Those Memories?
Today the New York Times announced successful experiments by neuroscientists to suppress selective memories in mice and rats. That memory is linked to brain chemistry no one doubts, but no one has succeeded in showing that memories are actually stored in the tissues of the brain. That they are stored there is an article of faith; the problem is that no one has produced a testable hypothesis of how that storage is accomplished. What we do know is that different parts of the brain are associated with different activities; the assumption therefore is that memories are polled at certain brain locations for certain behaviors. By inhibiting activities in neuronal synapses using chemical substances of a certain design, we can now interfere with or block memory.
Rupert Sheldrake has proposed the idea* that memory is stored in what he calls morphic fields—off-line, as it were, not in tissue. Memory narrowly defined is but a part of a much more ambitious conceptualization Sheldrake offers to explain the enduring forms we find in nature as a whole, including their evolution. His theory is modestly naturalistic in outline but has enough flavor of the transcendental (undetectable and subtle fields accessed by resonance equally undetectable) so that he is treated as a pariah and heretic by orthodox science.
This is an example of the iron curtain philosophical presuppositions produce in the Borderzone. We cannot actually get any closer to understanding mind—or one of its functionalities, like memory—if we dogmatically restrict our search for answers to places where our light actually shines.
__________
*In Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature. Sheldrake's site is here.
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
How Do You Know?
When we hear someone using the phrase in the title above, we’re witnessing epistemology in action. The Greek root of that word is knowledge-knowledge or knowledge-information, knowledge about knowledge, theory of knowledge. English is murkier; it is a Mississippi of a language so that its water is thick with the mud of other tongues. German lives closer to its roots and renders epistemology as knowledge-teaching (Erkenntnislehre); that word defines itself for the young German and doesn’t wear a haughty mask of impenetrability like Epistemology. But behind that Greek mask lurks some fellow asking: “How do you know?”
That is an interesting question, isn’t it? We ask it all the time. We ask it of the TV set, of books, and of our less trusted informants. The most authoritative answer to it is “I was there, I saw it” — or variants: “I had the operation. You want to see my scar?” It is equally fascinating to follow such a dialogue if the questioner isn’t immediately satisfied. If the answer points to a third party, for example, the questioner will next proceed to establish the third party’s competence, his state of knowledge, how he obtained it. We all do this. We are Everyman. When Everyman is trying to get an answer, he can be a ferocious epistemologist without a trace of Greek or philosophy anywhere in sight. Now if we listen carefully, it turns out that the questioner is seeking a two-fold set of facts: One, is the information based on direct experience and, Two, is the source of it a competent, mature, and honest observer. If there is a chain of informants, each must qualify, not least the last person actually responding to the How-do-you-know. Failing to get to this point, the questioner may wave off the answer and dismiss it saying: “Well, that’s just a rumor.”
I find it useful to examine epistemology, or what lies behind it, from this perspective, as understood in ordinary life. In that context there is never any talk of the Correspondence Theory of truth over against the Coherence Theory, no debate between epistemological monism and epistemological dualism. The questioner assumes correspondence to be true unless he has reasons to doubt it; he also demands coherence. Correspondence in this context simply means that what is observed is really there: the words refer to concrete realities. Coherence means that a presentation of data is logically structured. Our questioner ignores the dualism-monism issue as a brand of philosophical baloney. Dualists say that there is a difference between the sensory data reaching the mind and what is really out there—the phenomenon/noumenon pairing. Monists say the two are one and the same thing: “When I see an apple, an apple is what I see.” “Hairsplitting” says our questioner. “Get on with it. I just want to know what happened.”
The questioner’s dual interest, in direct experience and in the adequacy of the reporter, is of interest to me particularly in the context of the mind and related areas: paranormal experience and proof of a beyond. I note here especially that Everyman routinely assumes that people are reliable channels of information provided that we know something about them and their limitations. Indeed Everyman assumes that they are perhaps better sources than instruments. Everyman has reasonable doubts about instruments, jigs, tools, and the like and applies to them the same rules of competency. Some products work better than others. Brand XZ is junk, as he is likely to say. His approach to reality is integrated. He assumes the presence of mind in others and knows how to judge its qualities by various other indicators. But he is no fool; not everyone with arms and legs qualifies as a good informant. I stress this point because orthodox science, in contrast to Everyman, has a positive bias against human experience, never mind the competence of the reporter. It insists on physical measurements as the sole proof of anything. That is the reason why a peculiar form of psychology called behaviorism could get any traction at all: don’t believe what people say; only believe observable behavior.
I make these points at length because, in days to come I want to examine some of empirical evidence—meaning experiential evidence—for the transcendental nature of aspects of reality. In that context it is useful to have in mind how we can know. In virtually all matters that touch on paranormal phenomena, for instance—telepathy or precognition, let us say—good cases are based on the experience of people; the experience itself, however, is inaccessibly to anyone other than the experiencer. A telepathic message is perceived; it doesn’t come as a sound through the air that instruments can capture. Precognitions typically come in dreams. We never say: “Here! Let me run off a copy of my dream for you.” What we encounter in these cases are actual phenomena—but inaccessible except through a single mind. They are direct experiences. How do we know they really happened? We can only know by testimony. How can we trust the testimony? Can we ever do so without a Xerox of the dream? Everyman’s answer is that mind is competent to judge reality to a sufficient degree so that we can confidently speak of certainty. Not all will be believed. But then, to be sure, our physical tools also fail frequently enough so that absolute certainty is pretty much out of our reach.
That is an interesting question, isn’t it? We ask it all the time. We ask it of the TV set, of books, and of our less trusted informants. The most authoritative answer to it is “I was there, I saw it” — or variants: “I had the operation. You want to see my scar?” It is equally fascinating to follow such a dialogue if the questioner isn’t immediately satisfied. If the answer points to a third party, for example, the questioner will next proceed to establish the third party’s competence, his state of knowledge, how he obtained it. We all do this. We are Everyman. When Everyman is trying to get an answer, he can be a ferocious epistemologist without a trace of Greek or philosophy anywhere in sight. Now if we listen carefully, it turns out that the questioner is seeking a two-fold set of facts: One, is the information based on direct experience and, Two, is the source of it a competent, mature, and honest observer. If there is a chain of informants, each must qualify, not least the last person actually responding to the How-do-you-know. Failing to get to this point, the questioner may wave off the answer and dismiss it saying: “Well, that’s just a rumor.”
I find it useful to examine epistemology, or what lies behind it, from this perspective, as understood in ordinary life. In that context there is never any talk of the Correspondence Theory of truth over against the Coherence Theory, no debate between epistemological monism and epistemological dualism. The questioner assumes correspondence to be true unless he has reasons to doubt it; he also demands coherence. Correspondence in this context simply means that what is observed is really there: the words refer to concrete realities. Coherence means that a presentation of data is logically structured. Our questioner ignores the dualism-monism issue as a brand of philosophical baloney. Dualists say that there is a difference between the sensory data reaching the mind and what is really out there—the phenomenon/noumenon pairing. Monists say the two are one and the same thing: “When I see an apple, an apple is what I see.” “Hairsplitting” says our questioner. “Get on with it. I just want to know what happened.”
The questioner’s dual interest, in direct experience and in the adequacy of the reporter, is of interest to me particularly in the context of the mind and related areas: paranormal experience and proof of a beyond. I note here especially that Everyman routinely assumes that people are reliable channels of information provided that we know something about them and their limitations. Indeed Everyman assumes that they are perhaps better sources than instruments. Everyman has reasonable doubts about instruments, jigs, tools, and the like and applies to them the same rules of competency. Some products work better than others. Brand XZ is junk, as he is likely to say. His approach to reality is integrated. He assumes the presence of mind in others and knows how to judge its qualities by various other indicators. But he is no fool; not everyone with arms and legs qualifies as a good informant. I stress this point because orthodox science, in contrast to Everyman, has a positive bias against human experience, never mind the competence of the reporter. It insists on physical measurements as the sole proof of anything. That is the reason why a peculiar form of psychology called behaviorism could get any traction at all: don’t believe what people say; only believe observable behavior.
I make these points at length because, in days to come I want to examine some of empirical evidence—meaning experiential evidence—for the transcendental nature of aspects of reality. In that context it is useful to have in mind how we can know. In virtually all matters that touch on paranormal phenomena, for instance—telepathy or precognition, let us say—good cases are based on the experience of people; the experience itself, however, is inaccessibly to anyone other than the experiencer. A telepathic message is perceived; it doesn’t come as a sound through the air that instruments can capture. Precognitions typically come in dreams. We never say: “Here! Let me run off a copy of my dream for you.” What we encounter in these cases are actual phenomena—but inaccessible except through a single mind. They are direct experiences. How do we know they really happened? We can only know by testimony. How can we trust the testimony? Can we ever do so without a Xerox of the dream? Everyman’s answer is that mind is competent to judge reality to a sufficient degree so that we can confidently speak of certainty. Not all will be believed. But then, to be sure, our physical tools also fail frequently enough so that absolute certainty is pretty much out of our reach.
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