The Stuff Of Dreams

It's Monday. I know because the clock on my monitor says so. I'm not sure what happened to Sunday. I had a visitor who stayed a while and we talked without saying anything new or interesting. I don't know which of us are in the deepest rut. My youngest brother had friends and family over and they asked me to stop by because of some them hadn't seen me for a long time.

One of the non-kin visitors and I hadn't seen each other for more than ten years. Although she and her husband are good friends with my brother and his wife. She was angry at me the last time I saw her. She pissed me off, and I turned her over my knee and spanked her. Then, she got pissed off at me because she had a climax with her clothes on. She's been married for ten years to her present husband, and she's fifty years old now.

The first thing she did when she saw me was to look at me quizzically and asked if bygones were bygones. When I nodded, she came and gave me a warm hug, and I assumed our standoff was over. It was easy for me. I think she was mad because she felt as though I had no right to know that about her. I found out quite accidently. I'm ever so jealous of that happening for her.

I was happy to see her and meet her husband. I didn't see him enough to get much of an impression. He was running around with our other brother getting a tour of the farm and helping mend some fences where the cows had gotten out. They live up near D.C., so I might not see them for another ten years or never. That's fine. I know lots of people with which I share one strong incident that serves as a touch stone.

The twin grandsons have been in town for a week or so. My sister in law usually brings them by my house while she rides them around on her lawnmower during their visits. They don't really look alike, and yet they're twins. When I went over to visit with the out of towners I guess I was a more familiar sight to them, and they seemed to lollygag around me a lot in a moving crowd of strangers.

I've tried to prevent their familiarity with me in a way because then there's this rather large group of people that feel like they have the right to monitor my behavior around these children, and that irritates me. They seek me out if I'm around, so I'm pleasant to them and nasty to their parents for trying to control me.

I was able to avoid my younger brother's children so their parents wouldn't try to boss me around. My younger brother and I never have hit it off well. Fighting over how I might behave around his children could have gotten one of us killed. If I gotta put up with that, I'd just as soon not get to know his children much at all. They won't be children long, and then they can make up their own mind if my deportment is any more offensive than anyone else's or not.

As much to blame for this as anything is my need to be alone. Sometime I sit here and wonder why it's so okay with me that I spend 95% of my time by my lonesome. People like to be around me. What's weird is that I don't let that happen much. I have to make myself go be around people. That may be the main reason I changed my mind about doing the research up in Durham. It might have been just to be around people, but strangers. People I don't know and who don't know me.

People I don't have to be a certain way around or they won't know me. Then, get offended if I don't obey their rules of conscience. 99.44% of the people I associate with (who are not strangers) don't know they have "rules of conscience", much less that they expect both me and themselves to obey these shadowy creatures. They appear to expect me to obey their subjective rules of conscience even more so than they expect it of themselves.

I disclaim knowing the truth. I use words to capture passing thoughts and drifting fancies. I wouldn't know what the truth is if it was all I could perceive en toto, and every image that's sot before me might all be just that. I can't write or type fast enough to capture the essence of those images (eye mages) and be able to discern in the immediacy of their present being whether what appears in my mind's eye is true or false.

If I focus on what's actually there in every detail in some futile effort to be responsible for that content, then It's not true to say what I see so briefly anymore. I can't even hold on to these passing thoughts long enough to know if they're mine or somebody else's.

What I'm trying to write down is the stuff of dreams. The behavior of that dream material become what I somehow filter for with my adopted rules of conscience. The rules of conscience I adopted in a constant fashion from a short time after taking my first breathe already ex-is-ted without me having to reinvent the wheel.

I spent a considerable amount of ti-me inside the sensory deprivation chamber I built for myself. If you've read my blog for anytime at all you will have already perused my many accounts of how it took me about 45 minutes inside this tank I was floating in to let go of trying to receive my comprehensible stimulus through my sensory modalities. Through my eyes, ears, skin, taste, and smell. The tank was built to shut those sources of information away from my five senses using thick layers of insulation to shut out the sound and light, the warm, epsom salt solution to help my body to float and remove the sense of gravity, and the water was heated to the perfect temperature in order to deprive my skin from finding differences for my mind to contemplate. Taste and smell was smothered in a sameness that they could easily ignore.

After the period of being inside the sensory deprivation device long enough for my brain to figure out, that no matter how much it opened my consciousness to find external stimuli to keep formulating strategies base on that outside noise, it suddenly, but predictably (to a limited degree) changes over from looking for external stimuli to plot it's course through life, and turns instead to an internal source for it's stimulus.. the stuff of dreams.

I spent hours at a time inside that float tank watching the stuff of my dreams in as conscious a state of being possible for me as a homo sapien. That's just how sensory deprivation works. That's why all these world saviors spend so much time (in the past) in caves and deep caverns. They enter the caves and go far enough inside of them that it's a 100% dark, and 100% quiet, and with their eyes and ears totally deprived of external input, the other three senses are easier to account for, and ignore.

Just taking this action alone will eventually cause the brain to open up the consciousness of the mind as open as possible in it's attempt to hold on to the light and sound show it centers it's activities around. It doesn't behave any different when it switches from focusing on external stimuli than it does when it's attuned to internal stimuli. It processes the stimuli it gets in the same way from either source.

Granted, when I got out of the float tank after several hours, holding on to what happened as the conscious mind processed the stuff of dreams that appears when the connect to external event is physically blocked off, what happened in that extremely conscious state is most often forgotten just like the dreams that disappear when I wake up from regular sleep. In other words, it's not much different than what happens when I daydream.

The dynamics of what happens when I daydream are very similar if not the same thing that happens in what some call lucid dreaming. That's what I'm writing these days. I'm exploring whether what happens in my daydreams is what I'd call lucid dreaming if it happened at night while I'm asleep and unconscious to the dimension I'm at during the daylight hours. What happens to this "dream content" when I'm focused on the daytime events?

It's unlimited in scope and range as far as I can tell. Everything I perceive in any state of being comes from the same source as far as I know. Even the stuff that I "see" while in a chemically altered state. To me, all theses "states", altered or no by whatever are different frames that contain the same dream stuff, and it's the frame and not the stuff that becomes comprehensible.

If I frame it in Christianity, it's takes on the appearance of what I think Christ might be like. If I frame it in Buddhism it takes on the characteristics of Buddha, and it gets framed in a psychology framework it be-co-me-s Jung, and in philosophy Sartre. Sa-me stuff. Different frame.