It seems that, somehow, eating peanut butter involves me having more vivid dreams when sleeping and somehow remembering those dreams in greater detail.
Perhaps dreaming can be a type of vacation that I take every night. Having vivid and interesting and sometimes inspiring dreams while sleeping can make life more satisfying.
Maybe a ‘good dreaming life’ can be like having a parallel life distinct from my ‘real life’ yet somehow connected to it.
Often I dream that I am thinking about some idea or am using some physical artifact of everyday life that in the dream seems very old and seems to have a long history for me, but then as my ‘real life’ seems to seep into my cognitive fabric, I realize that the idea or object which seems so old in my dream is in fact very new to me.
Some time ago, perhaps a few years ago, I dreamed I was in some sort of indoor landscape of human-made grandeur. My guess is that my sleeping mind cobbled together this man-made landscape from my ‘latent memories’ of the visual features of human-made environments such as subways, indoor malls, or museums.
In fact I think it was in Singapore or Hong Kong or both that I was awed by what seemed to me to be the grandeur of the indoor malls. If I recall correctly, those malls not only dazzled me visually with their contours, size, and interior design materials, but I was also amazed by how expansive those malls were. Perhaps I am exaggerating, but those malls seems to spread for miles–miles of sort of indoor landscapes. I’ve never been to Vegas–perhaps that is what Vegas is like.
Well, anyway a few years ago, I dreamed I was in an indoor landscape that had colorful patterns on tiled floors and walls. Perhaps my ‘latent memories’ of some of the tile-work in the buildings in Tijuana, Mexico were material that my dreaming mind used to construct this indoor landscape.
If I recall that dream correctly, the colorful tiles and the pattern of those colors and shapes on walls and floors and maybe ceilings too, caused me to marvel in my dream and it involved the visual stimuli intoxicating me and making me giddy.
If I recall the dream correctly, and perhaps I am embellishing, but perhaps the indoor landscape was so dazzling to look at because of its colors, patterns and shapes, and because of the way those surfaces seemed to interact with light so extraordinarily, I was experiencing in the dream something similar to, but not the same as sensory overload.
My amazement and my intoxication was a type of sensory overload but it was not distressing for me. I did not have the sense that I was being overwhelmed with sensory stimuli and I did not have the sense of breaking or shutting down mentally as a result of too much stimulation.
Instead, I had the sense that the extraordinary amount of visual stimulation involved me sort of breaking through my own mental barriers, as opposed to me breaking down.
But, it’s interesting how the human mind, and perhaps the minds of other animals as well, can record sensory data and can record other features of our mental states, and that data-base contains material, much of which we forget about, unless we choose to retrieve it and/or unless something triggers that retrieval.
But, for the most part, each person’s mind contains so much recorded data (sensory info and ideas and other cognitive material) that no person can render all of that data that he or she has gathered over the years and place it, so to speak, in the spotlight of her or his present awareness.
It seems to me that our human mind is just not configured in such a way as to enable a person to do that. To use a likely inadequate analogy, it seems to me that my mind is like a giant inground pool that contains not water but some sort of liquid filled with an incomprehensibly vast and complex array of parts floating around in it.
Using this analogy, I would say that with conscious effort I have a ladle or maybe on a good day a bucket which I can dip into the pool and grab things out. Yet, I don’t have and likely never will have the ability to take everything that is in that pool and examine it.
It seems odd to say it, but in some way the phrase that comes to mind is this : it seems that I inhabit my own mind, similar, in some ways, to how I might inhabit a house or a neighborhood.
Sure, that bio-chemical machine that I call my brain is inside my skull. Yet in some ways, there is a process which psychologists refer to as ‘dissociation of self’. With that process, I get the sense that what I refer to and know as my ‘self’ is only part of the mental activity that occurs within what I refer to as my ‘mind’.
Perhaps selfhood is like a spot light that can only shine on a small part of the vast machinery operating in the dark of a person’s total mind.
This idea about selfhood being only a part of the mental processes of my mind is what I was thinking when I got the idea that what I once thought was my relationship with God was actually my relationship with a dissociated part of my own mind. In other words, there are parts of my own mental functioning that I don’t readily recognize as being an aspect of my ‘self’.
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