The Stuff Of Dreams

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So, it's Saturday morning, and the only thing it actually means to me for it to be Saturday morning or night is there is a PowerBall drawing and there is one-in-ten-billion chances I'll win a lotta money and make life miserable for the few people who know I am is ex-is-es (exists) on the planet Earth… presently.

I did a silly, but smart thing a week or two back. There is a new tractor/equipment store in town and I like to browse through there just to see what they got. I do live in the country and I do need tools occasionally. It's interesting that there are four such franchise stores in town that offers a goodly variety of merchandise associated with suburban life.

The silly/smart thing I did was to buy a box of eighty pair of foam ear plugs for $2. I went back yesterday to get another box of them to give as a present, but they were all gone. I'm addicted to foam ear plugs for all sorts of reasons. Not the least of which is that I use them for sensory depravation.

My addiction started while I worked as a pipewelder/fitter in industrial contraction. According to the type of project I worked on, it could be very noisy, and the safety meetings held on most jobs included instructions of the need to use ear protection.

Many times I was one of the only people on the job sites that followed this advice on a regular basis. Very seldom did I get teased for doing it. Most of the workers understood quite well that it was a sensible thing to do, but many, if not most construction workers appeared to think it was unmanly unless there were extreme conditions and they were ordered to wear ear plugs.

I wear ear plugs when I'm using my brother's riding lawn mower to mow our lawns. The muffler on it is not much better than no muffler at all. I wear ear plugs when he and/or his wife is cutting grass. I wear ear plugs when my other brother uses his diesel tractors for whatever reason. Sometime I wear ear plugs in order to hear my own heart beat when I meditate.

I brought pairs of foam earplugs home from work like some people bring office supplies home from work. Sometime accidentally, and other times quite deliberately. At one time I had a plastic shopping bag half full of sets of ear plugs. I didn't wanna run out. I still don't.

The odd thing about this is that I'm legally deaf. At least that's what they told me at the VA hospital after the audiologists there tested me. I guess they're right according to how they judge hearing loss. My observations tell me I'm not really deaf. If I'm deaf, why are the ambient sounds around my house driving me to distraction?

Nobody complains about me having the TV too loud when it's on during their visit. True, that doesn't happen often. I always stop whatever I'm doing when a visitor comes, and try to honor them for patronizing me. I don't think I talk too loud at the restaurants where I go to eat.

The funny thing is that when I am out and about I talk so little that when I do decide to say something other people stop talking to listen to me on such a rare occasion. In private, it's not unusual for people to get me high just so I will talk. Then, they can't shut me up. Paradox?

I bought this gadget called a Neurophone. It is claimed by it's inventor to train a person to "hear" through their skin rather than or in addition to hearing through their ears. The sound heard through one's ears is sent to the brain through the eighth cranial nerve. Sound heard through the skin is not. Yet, most of the human ear is made of skin.

It was foolish of me, in a way, to purchase my own Neurophone machine. I paid $700 for it, and I think it had a defective wiring system. I think it had an electrical short such that sometime it worked right, and sometime not at all.

The inventor recommended that his patrons use the Neurophone a lot to get the most benefit out of it. One used the Neurophone to train the brain to recognize the audio signals through other than the eighth cranial nerve. I might have overdone it and given myself skin cancer where I wore the device's ceramic "earphones".

Technically, all the neurophone did is change the shape of the oscillated sound waves in order initiate a sonar response in the brain with the skin as the detecting device. It's not a stereo effect, but omnidirectional, because the body is covered with skin from all directions simultaneously.

It's the same sort of training that takes place in a sensory depravation chamber or "float tank". Ideally, all sight and sound is shut out when one enters the sensory deprived situation. It's a lot like being in a cave. When the external door is shut in a well-designed float tank, then 100% of the ambient sound and light is negated.

Sight and sound are the biggies when it comes to sensory depravation. If a person can't see or hear the external world of the senses, then the other senses like taste, smell, and the sense of touch are manageable. In other words, they can pretty much be ignored.

The brain doesn't take to this deprivation thing too well. It needs to see and hear things literally to "make sense" of the world. What happens next is that it turns up the sensitivity of consciousness. In a sensory deprived situation that doesn't do any good, because what can be seen and heard are physically obstructed by insulation and light-proof covers.

Eventually, when the brain (specifically, the medulla oblongata section) opens conscious awareness as much as possible, and it still isn't getting any external stimuli because its blocked out, it stops trying to stimulate itself by external means and starts producing it's own stimuli which is the stuff of dreams.

After this transition to internal stimuli, consciousness is still opened up as far as it can go, and is still as sensitized as possible. All the better to "see" and "hear" the "stuff of dreams" with. This is pretty much the same way that training the brain to recognize vibratory aural sensations from the Neurophone through other than the eighth cranial nerve.

The way I am is putting it together for prime ti-me is that as my normal hearing through my ears that registers with my brain through the eighth cranial nerve begins to lose it's sensitivity to external stimuli, then my brain began to reach for what it had been trained to observe via the artificial stimuli of the Neurophone. Now this, is a true paradox.

The process the mind/body uses to adapt to being place in a sensory deprived situation is what meditation is all about. It's like using the Neurophone or entering a float tank. These are things one practices to maintain what they learn, and by redundancy and repetition, direct the loss of one gift to be replaced or superseded by other me-an-s.
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