Free nightmare hotline still active

Halloween in the USA: basically it’s a nationwide sugar rush and an good excuse to dress up in a sexy costume. But don’t forget the origins of the holiday - that’s some scary stuff. Turn on the tube tonight and you”re likely to see more than your fair share of slasher flicks too. So whether or not you consciously subscribe to the idea that the boundary between the living and the dead is flimsier than usual tonight, horror is “in the air.”

Times like this, it’s good to remember that the Int”l Association for the Study of Dreams still offers its free nightmare hotline. This service is staffed by professionals with decades of experience with frightening dreams and nightmares.

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Laying the groundwork for conversation

My comrade-in-consciousness Kevin Kovelant wrote a post recently about how easily discussions about said consciousness can suffer from miscommunication. This is relevant here as we argue about the terms “lucidity” and “consciousness” in regards to dreams, but are often talking about different things altogether, such as awareness of one’s external environment, awareness that one is aware (meta-awareness), awareness that one is dreaming (meta awareness corner pocket) as well as the simple fact of being a sentient creature and being able to talk about it with other sentient creatures.

Check out Kevin’s post on the distinction between philosophical consciousness and psychological consciousness. This is drawn primarily from the work of philosopher Christian de Quincey, who BTW recently started his own panpsychist blog.

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Night terrors aka Sleep Paralysis

Gyrus from Dreamflesh made this connection between false awakenings and sleep paralysis: in both of these altered states, we feel like we are “awake” and aware of our surroundings. In a false awakening, this certainty of “awakeness” turns out to be a lucid dream about where we are actually sleeping. In sleep paralysis, we also feel awake but the situation is a little more complicated. Here our self-awareness is active and we may even have eyes open, but our bodies are still under the paralysis of REM sleep. The more we struggle, the more it feel like we are being “held down.”

I wrote about the creepiness of night terrors about a year ago on my culture shock blog, so I won’t go on at length here. Even though the REM paralysis is probably what is happening on the “exterior” levels of our reality, we really can’t reduce the entire experience of night terrors to biomechanics. After all, many people throughout history have described intense visitation dreams that follow from the initial feeling that “someone else is in the room.” These night visitors have ranged from dead relatives to benign ghostly apparitions to scary demonic entities to figures of light and peace.

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False awakenings

Kris from Reality Shifter has posted a thought provoking article about false awakenings and lucid dreams.

She describes the false awakening as occurring:

when you”re dreaming and believe you”ve woken up when in actuality you are still dreaming and only dreamed of waking up. You “wake up” and begin to go about your daily routine ” visit the bathroom, brush your teeth, get dressed, etc. ” until eventually you realize you”re still dreaming.

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Ancient humans were slackers

Nature is about to publish a fantastic archaeological discovery. A cave site in South Africa has been excavated by archaeologists, revealing an ancient human encampment complete with cooked mussel shells, small stone tools, and some red ocre.

What makes this ensemble so incredible is that it has been dated to @ 160,000 years ago - roughly 40,000 years “too early” by yesterday’s history textbooks. If the dates are not contested, this has some powerful new implications for the way human evolution is seen to occur.

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Reality Check for Lucid Dreaming

This is cool and it really works. Moving across thresholds is crucial to our experience and construction of reality.

From Youtube filmmaker Adam St John:
This video is a supplement for training yourself to do reality checks whenever you walk through doorways. The goal is to habitually perform reality checks whenever you walk through doors or enter rooms. This will help you lucid dream.

On this note, I attended an amazing lecture on the role of thresholds on fear and ritual objects this past Spring at the annual conference of the Anthropology of Consciousness. C. Riley Auge, in her brilliant paper Fears and Apotropaic Agents, discussed how thresholds are by their very nature liminal places for us.

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The Dreamers’ Resistance

It’s Columbus Day here in the US, the day the banks and post office close their doors to commemorate Christopher Columbus’s colonial exploits in the New World. As Wikipedia neatly summarizes:

“Columbus directly brought about the demise of many Taino (Arawak) Indians on the island of Hispaniola and the arrival of the Europeans indirectly slew many indigenous peoples by bringing diseases previously unknown in the New World. An estimated 85% of the Native American population was wiped out within 150 years of Columbus’s arrival in America, due largely to diseases such as smallpox, which were both accidentally and deliberately spread among Native American populations. Additionally, war and the seizing of land and material wealth by European colonists also contributed to the decline of the indigenous populations in America.”

Many Indigenous people around the world have taken to renaming the holiday “Indigenous Peoples Day.” Venezuela, in fact, recently took the political step of officially celebrating the holiday as el D a de la Resistencia Ind gena. This is a loud signal to the West of the change in global consciousness regarding the true cost of the capitalistic expansion of the Empire.

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Anthropology of Consciousness Wants You

THE SOCIETY FOR THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Spring 2008 Annual Meeting and Conference
March 19-23, 2008 ” Yale University
CALL FOR PAPERS
Theme: Consciousness and Spirit

For all its material correlates and consequences, the anthropology of consciousness incorrigibly connotes an aspect or dimension that is immaterial, yet somehow integral to that which is at the most intimate core of the personal”that which bursts forth in life and vanishes in death, leaving behind a useless husk. Cultures in every age and place have called it spirit, placed it at the center of their worldviews and religions, and sought to grasp its ephemeral essence. Even our materially oriented culture reaches out for the spiritual, however defined.

How does something/someone called spirit impinge on consciousness, lifting it from myriad electrochemical processes into the richness and depth we experience in the world, in others, in ourselves? What is it: will o” the wisp or Pentecostal flame? A metaphor standing in for a bundle of meanings, a component of obsolete dualism, or an emergent property of material processes? A divine presence mixed into physicality”the indestructible lan vital that incarnates (and perhaps reincarnates) to transform dead matter into beings who experience joy, suffering, desire, and mortality? How has it been understood across time and cultures, and how can it be understood in the new century?

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