About realities within realities and dreams within dreams
Last night I've had an interesting realization after a dream.
In that dream I was having a conversation with a woman, but I don't remember her or what we were talking about. At some point she rearranged a kind of a plastic apparatus and asked me to take a seat; apparently we were on a boat. Now I was perplexed because I realized that I didn't remember how I got on that freakin' boat. I tried hard to recall how I got to that point of what I felt was reality, but I wasn't able to find it, there was no past to this, no time. After this realization the dream dissolved and I found myself awake in my bed.
Having no past is something I often experience in dreams. There's actually a technique to induce lucid dreaming where you train yourself to ask the question how did I get here? If you can't see the past then you might become lucid and the dream is all yours. Now you can modify the reality of your dream by intention which can be a very joyful experience of pure creation. I then usually just turn off gravity and fly through amazing landscapes!
Anyway, after I woke up I was thinking about the past I can't remember in this reality, the past before I was born. I came to the same conclusion like in the dream: If there is no past it's just another layer of dream, and only if I understood this on a very fundamental level, I would awaken, I would become free, I would become lucid. You might ask what would it mean to become lucid in this reality? Would it mean I'd be then able to achieve all I wanted to find happiness and fulfillment? The answer is, I wouldn't need to achieve anything. I would just choose the bliss within myself.
which I was working on between 1998-2005.
You can see the complete painting and all details ➞ here.
www.gric.at
My theory about time is it exists in totality, like a large tree with infinite branches.
We're just the ants crawling up the surface, choosing each path as the branches fork.
All possible futures exist, and all possible pasts exist. We're too embedded in the system to see it - so we meld free will with a wholly deterministic system.
... and what if dreams were really fragments of these possible "branches" bleeding through into our minds? That would make a good story.
@talltim,
I'm looking at it a bid differently: I think time exists in totality in that sense, that it's not linear but consists of three or more dimensions. I also think it's us who are creating these branches - these hardforks. With every real decision (not reaction!) we split the time-space and create a new parallel branch. But then I believe that we only make a very few real decisions in our lives, that most of our decisions are merely reactions, not actual creations of new branches of reality. I believe a self-reflecting consciousness is actually here to go beyond causality. We bring hardforks in a deterministic reality so to speak. We break the mechanism of cause and effect by importing something new: Creativity
When I look at what creativity actually is I come to this conclusion: The smallest bit of creativity is decision.
I was presenting a simplistic model, but I think you're right - there is a quantum-esque property there where observation/decision creates a multitude of new trajectories.
But we're too embedded to see it I suppose.
Perhaps creativity is just the best parallel "you's" feeding back into your brain. A lot of physicists think parallel universe theory is somewhat plausible, and I tend to agree.
I enjoy these mental ramblings and guesses :)
Ok, let's do some more mental ramblings and guesses! :-)
I believe that our creative potential comes with the Fall of man: At some point and for some reason (maybe because of an apple, a reptile, Psilocybin or aliens...) some animals begun to develop a sense which allowed them to perceive time. This ability made a fundamental impact on their consciousness - they were now able to step out of the now and entered the dimension of time from where they could see down on themselves - they became self-aware, they detached from their animal-like beeingness.
The implications were tremendous:
But there was a huge price to pay:
I believe creativity can't happen by reasoning and thinking on the time plane but only in the now. Thinking is still all about cause and effect, about logic and mathematics. Creativity is rooted in the now but it seeks to enter a higher (or lower) plane through the time dimension. That's when we come into play. We are the bridge, our thinking mind is time.
Honestly I think we exist at all points on our timeline, and our inspiration is merely the future or the past coming to us, like the vibrating nodes on a string.
We see an "arrow" of time, the cup of tea can't un-mix itself from the sugar and when you paint a canvas the brushstrokes don't slurp back up into your bristles.
I think this arrow is false.
But I have no idea how to contravene it. Interesting thoughts, I'll ponder these my friend.
I found recently another analogy for time, or what you call the arrow:
As we penetrate the time plane with our awareness, we bring light into darkness, or information where nothingness was before, and by information I mean memory. We deposit our memory in the past and the memory becomes our trace in time. And we can't change it once it's written. The future, however, is still empty, dark; for us it's not knowing which bears fear but also expectation. It's like we walk through the darkness with a flashlight pointing backwards. We leave light behind us but we can't see where we are going.
When we look back at our memories we try to extrapolate these to predict the future. We are quite good at it, our whole science is based on this concept. But the inspiration and intuition is rooted somewhere else - not in the past but in the now.
This post man... it's golden.
I actually trained myself to have lucid dreams as well. The funny thing is that as you become more and more lucid the dream is more and more... it's harder to maintain!
So, if you become lucidin this reality... would you die to transcend this plane of existence? Would leave it?
Cheers
The secret of life is to "die before you die" — and find that there is no death.
-- Eckhart Tolle
@spiritualmax, I don't think you die when you become lucid in this reality. I believe life is actually all about waking up to the next level, and we try this over and over again in countless incarnations. When we become lucid (or enlightened) on this plane then all that happens is we realize on a fundamental level that there is no beginning and no end. This single realization ends all of human suffering which is rooted in the fear of death. Every single fear can be traced down to the fear of death. Imagine we would always forget what happened before we fell asleep. We would be as scared of sleeping as we are now of dying. Fear is simply lack of knowing. Awakening is knowing.
I have played around with lucid dreaming myself. Sometimes I will try and hold a picture in my head as I fall asleep just to see how long I can hold it. My brain usually kicks me out within ten minutes and then I drift off.
I don't usually remember my dreams, but I do, I have that same experience of no time. Your post gives me pause to wonder, are dreams evidence of the non-linear aspect of time? Our consciousness experiences time as a linear dimension. But when we're unconscious or dreaming, it would seem possible to experience time as a non-linear dimension of reality.
Just a thought...
@digitalfirehose,
Whenever we are thinking we leave the dimension of now and move to the dimension of time. I believe that time itself consists of more than one dimension, as space does, but we only can perceive time's linear axis (so far). We can sense time with our mind, however, we are rooted in it in a similar way as trees are rooted in the ground. They might sense the space around them but they can't change their location.
Anyway, I think the ability of perceiving time allows us to detach from our now and see at ourselves down from the dimension of time, in other words, it gives us the ability of self-reflection. But the price is high because with self reflection comes the sense of detachment, the fear of death and all the suffering resulting from this.
You have interesting deams :-D Das Bild is auch echt schön, ich kannte das noch gar nicht!!!!
Danke Caroline! Es kommen noch ein paar Bilder die Du nicht kennst! :-)
Freu mich schon darauf!!!!
Wow, fantastic words and truly masterful painting. I really enjoy lucid dreaming too and can relate very well to the flying and no time condition. The nature of time and what reality is, have been always a huge inspiration.
Hope to see you on Sunday at the Steemit meeting;)
Herzlichen Gruß
Danke Bella! Ich melde mich noch wegen dem Treffen!
Wunderbar lieber Peter;)
I had similar experiences in the past, but i did not know how were they called, and i never bothered to research what is happening in my head. The strange thing is that sometimes is really hard to realize that this is a dream. But once you get that it becomes a something like a sandbox game... i don't know how to explain it.
It's lucid dreams. In such a dream you can manifest your intentions without the need of time once you realize you are dreaming. You then can create and shape the reality of your dream almost instantly. Unfortunately these dreams don't last for longer than a few seconds or a minute at the best, at least that's my experience.
Yep. I had similar experiences a couple of times. I can't recall it so well but I remember that I was really tired when I fell asleep.
The lucid dreams lose lucidity the moment you focus on the fact you are lucid, so you have to approach it in a more lateral, indirect manner and then the lucid dream will continue.
Your way of telling your tastes is as perfect as your painting art! I think you have a real ability as dreamy. I look carefully at your ideas and technique. congratulations ..
Thank you @artizm!
What a very intriguing thought. To become lucid in this reality might be what most people would need to be free. I understood it or at least interpreted it to being able to move on and let go of your past as a prerequisite of being truly free... in simpler terms, perhaps acceptance is a step towards happiness and fulfillment.
To me it's like time is the sedative that keeps us asleep. On the other hand it seems we are here to experience time.
It all sounds very paradoxical, doesn't it? In another perspective, time might be what keeps us from being truly free. The moment we run out of time is the moment we become free from its bonds.
You found the cheat code to activate Creative Mode!
(Can you tell me what it is?)
@winstonalden, I'm not sure I understand your question!
When you play a video game, you're constrained by the rules of the game. You've got to walk around. If someone shoots you, you die. You can't go through walls. Ect.
Lots of games have "cheat codes" you can type in to turn off the rules. Then you can just fly around and do what you like. In The Sims you can give yourself unlimited money. In Minecraft you can build with unlimited supplies and fly around. Sometimes it's called creative mode.
It sounds like you found the secret code that lets you unlock the power of flight in your dreams. I was wondering if you'd share it with me.
It has been a while since I've touched a video game! :-)
I wish I'd have a secret code for lucid dreams which I could share with you, but it looks like there's no shortcut. Some people have lucid dreams every night, I was happy to have one every two weeks. You'll find many different techniques on the Internet and some of them might work for you. It's basically about training your self-awareness. You train to regularly question the reality by asking yourself if you are dreaming or awake. Asking this question in a dream often already induces lucidity. Looking at your own hands might also work. Trying to read is another technique - if you have difficulties to read a text or numbers then you are dreaming. If you keep doing this every day and every hour then this habit will eventually penetrate into your dreams. But it all needs patience and determination.
I'll give that a try. I usually have the opposite problem - sleep paralysis after waking up. Maybe this could help counteract it.
Don't pick up the video games now! Making art and flying drones is a lot more fulfilling.
That's interesting. Sleep paralysis was for me the gateway for my lucid/astral dreaming experiments in the late 90s, although I was trying to achieve an out-of-body experience back then. It's a big theme for me and I want to write an article about it.
Oh - I hope you do!
It's inception all over again!
Yes, Inception was beautifully wrapped around the concept of lucid dreams.