I Dream to Dare

Sitting in her midst, it seemed likely that I would remember the book names that she was reciting. After all, I had asked. I held her eye and relaxed, letting her words and the sound of her voice soak my brain like cool water in a dry sponge.

Then I thought, “What if I forget?”

And I did. All but the second title and the last.

Why? Sleep, of course. Real remembering is connecting pieces rather than adding things to a shelf. You know the difference between the memory of the pizza joint phone number and the sight of your first child. Never had one? You still have things that compare. They’re almost invisible, forming the web of your essence. They just are.

The first book title caught me lifting the blinds, the second came through the open window. Then I slept, dreaming that I had forgotten the titles. I awoke in time to catch the last one. Laying on the sandy bottom of a shallow tidal pool as the sun filters through passing waves, I sleep. Feeling the cool air on my cheeks as my face breaches the surface, air filling my lungs with the scent of the salty ocean, I awaken.

Does that mean I was absolutely awake? What does that mean in the realm of dreams? That level of being is nothing special. We all have it like a magic wand in the hand of a sleeping child.

What are you dreaming about?

Living in a Box

Imagine that you’re living in a box.

In this box, all kinds of things are happening.  People are walking down the street, cars are driving by.  You figure out that you can carjack most of them, and start driving around.  People ask you to do things.  You start to gather units of stuff that matter to you.  

Sound familiar?  

You have figured out how to move, change your perspective, find your way around.  You get better as you go.  You start to meld into the perspective you seem to be locked into.  

Now, imagine that you’re NOT in an XBox 360 playing GTA IV.  You are actually in your own box, unable to escape.  

Still sound familiar?  If not, run along, Agent Starling.  Fly fly.

In this box, you notice that you have three abilities:  You can perceive, you can sense, and you can discriminate.  In sensing, you sense the patterns in things, giving way to smells, music, dance.  In discrimination, you are able to analyze, dissect, classify.  In perceiving, you interact with the world around you.

Eventually, you start to notice that some things you can discriminate, sense and perceive seem to be like a gossamer film hiding in the light.  Makes no sense, huh?  Good.

Then, you notice that, when the ripples of sensing and discrimination settle, there is something on the other side of the perception, like a light in the room behind the mirror.  

And something is happening in that room.  It affects your three abilities, and they affect the action.  And that action somehow creates and is created by the ‘reality’ of your little box.

And then it occurs to you:  Is that me on the other side of the mirror?  Am I the player and the play?  Is everything that I thought was real just a point of view?

Then, you remember the formula:  b = s, where b = (perception * discrimination * sensation), and s is a spoon.  Wait – if there is no spoon, then…

And if you are living in a box that does not exist, then who are you?

Solving for you:  you = spoon.

Do the math.

On My Mind

There’s been something on my mind.  I tried to pick it off but I just couldn’t reach it.  Ever had a mind zit?  You either have to squeeze it or let it pass on its own.  I hear that greasy foods make them worse, but who knows?  

And what comes out of those suckers!  Imagine my surprise when a whole blog post came out of the last one! It was disgusting, yet satisfying all at once.  I figure that since it is my mind, I can squeeze pretty much anything I want to out of it.  Now, how to do that?

‘But mind is just the brain,’ you say?  There you go, thinking thoughts with your thinking thingie.  Well, I suppose I’ll have to concede that some of it is there.  Kind of like that time your computer became sentient all of a sudden, and you had a web cam and microphone plugged in.  It probably identified itself with its senses, too.  Just a simple mistake, it would seem.

But if it took the time to analyze itself, it would find that it is the motherboard, the ram, the hard drive (ooh, an SSD! Am I a MacBook Air?), the keyboard.  Oh, and the mouse.  And the LCD.  As Navin R. Johnson would say, “that’s all I need.”  

What about the power cord?  And the electricity flowing through all of its circuitry?  And the power system that delivers it?  And the network connection, the handshakes via TCP, packets flowing all around the world – where would it stop?

And where do you stop?  Is the beautiful stranger you saw this morning part of your mind now?  Were they when you ogled them earlier?  And just who is that deciding whether or not they are in your mind or out?

If I told you that there are neurophysiological techniques for conditioning your mind to respond to stimuli in certain ways, would you throw a shoe at me?  Of course you would!  After all, that means the bad mood you’ve been in all day is somehow your fault. Or, since I may be part of your mind, my fault!  Hey, don’t try and confuse me.  Let’s stick to the point.

Hmmmm….  Mind doesn’t stop with the brain, brain can be conditioned to affect mind, and this some-something that is other than mind can make it happen.  Geez, did I just say that, or did that other thing?  I guess the trick is finding out who is who in there, and what is what behind it.  There has to be a way to do that, right?

And when you find that way?  Then, you might agree with Navin.