Making Sense Out Of The Invisible

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The 4th of July Weekend appears to be still going on because nobody seems to be working, and the Wal-Mart SuperCenter parking lot (with the fireworks tent) is full to the brim. Crowds of people wandering around both inside of the store and the parking lot who got all dressed up to go to Wal-Mart without any real reason to go there other than to be somewhere besides at home or at work. Why would they not? They gotta go back to work tomorrow.

Holidays still interrupt the habitual flow of the workaday world even though I haven't had a job in nearly a decade. Due to my retirement I can do any mundane chore any time I like, and because I live alone, usually, I can not do a lotta stuff I might otherwise be compelled to perform by marital expectation and role-playing.

It doesn't matter to me that sometime composing these blog entries can take hours to make up (I can't do it if somebody is around). Then, maybe a couple more hours to poorly edit. I do it to make sense out of drifting thoughts. By making "sense" I mean to imply that I attempt to manifest formerly invisible thought forms so that they are physically manifested in the sensory dimension from stardust.

I like to think that the source I attend to in order to apperceive what I'm calling "drifting thoughts" is universal and transcendent of this specific individual lifetime. I've had brief glimpses of images from which I create my copycat metaphors that are obviously not there for the rest of the known world.

I call them copycat metaphors because my metaphors are no more "mine" than they are anybody else's. How could that not be the God's own truth if everything homo sapiens generate creatively is accomplished by imitation and mimicry?

Mimicry or imitation is not a strictly human way of constructing abstract objects that easily go "POOF!" either. Life imitates it's surroundings at any level of ex-is-tense from the microscopic to the macroscopic. Stories and metaphors and parables all have to have something in common for people to have the ears to "make sense" of the uttering and muttering of the other.

Some people do poorly at "making sense" of their drifting thoughts for the sake of the other. Maybe it's a little like trying to tell a little story to represent some recent and dearly departed daydream moments later. Or trying to remember a real dream that took place in the REM period just before you woke up after falling out of bed trying to escape the boogie man.

Joseph Campbell, the noted mythologist and lecturer, wrote the seminal or definitive book on what happens in dreams called The Hero With A Thousand Faces. I think his work is seminal or trend-setting. I got caught up in reading his books and listening to his lectures on audio tapes.

He describes what he calls "the hero's journey" using myths from various cultures, some now defunct, for thousands of years back in history, with implications about objects from prehistory. Campbell convincingly claimed that the dream cycle of the hero's journey into the dreamtime is portrayed in these tribal tales that seem very similar although they originated in places all over the globe.

He seemed to be saying to me by what I read into his writings that the only real difference in the descriptions from these tribal tales is the environment they took place. If the culture lived in the high mountains their tales would reflect the premise differently than cultures that lived in the swamps near the ocean.

People who lived in steamy jungles used different descriptors for the same principle than the people who lived in the desert areas, yet when the environmental lingo was taken into consideration the hero's journey was basically the same structure all over the world.

Campbell states that there is only one story, and all others are just variations of that central theme. He claims to have understood the theme itself and that it was about dreaming. Day dreaming and night dreaming use the same form.

It's as if humans never really stop dreaming ever. They go through various phases of dreaming as indicated by the measurement of brainwave frequencies and which frequency is dominant during what kind of behavior or reaction.

The various laboratories that study sleep problems hook people up to all their feedback machines like the EEG and watch them sleep there in the laboratory to diagnose their sleep problems. The technicians would wake people up during all the various phases of a single sleep cycle, and ask them what they were experiencing just before they were awakened. ''

The subjects reported they were dreaming in some form or the other in all the various brainwave frequencies. At the bottom of the sleep cycle called Delta, because in that phase the delta brainwaves predominate temporarily, several of the patients described existing in a bright golden environment in which they reviewed their daily behavior through visualization in a state of ecstasy.

This suggests that every night during a particular part of a one and a half hour sleep cycle each dreamer enters a state of ecstasy in each of the several sleep cycles the sleeper experiences each night. Unconsciously entering ecstasy in the delta phase of each of four sleep cycles would not be unusual.

The notion of learning the particulars of the hero's journey albeit through the study of myths or just taking Campbell's word for it had a real purpose. The goal of this purpose is to remain conscious through an entire sleep cycle in order to be aware of what transpires throughout each part of an entire sleep cycle.

For all practical purposes this is truly an impossible dream. You don't have to take my word for it. Just try to do it yourself. Instead of drifting off into an unconscious state when you go to sleep at night, stay awake for as long as you can each night until you do it. "It's not easy being green."
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