Tag Archives: dreams

Dreams of darkness and fear

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I knew I would someday have use for this picture from the anime Please Teacher.

We had yesterday off from work because of the Pentecost. These three days, when I have been at home or walking in the neighborhood, I have barely had any of the imaginary breathing problems at all. On the other hand, this morning I had unpleasant dreams again. Dreams of darkness and fear. Not the overwhelming, paralyzing fear like those extremely realistic dreams I had after I began using brainwave entrainment (and overdid it a bit). This was a fear I could kind of live with, although highly unpleasant.

In one of the dreams, I was wandering a half familiar countryside alone. I don’t think the landscape is familiar to my waking self, but because I had recently dreamed of it. But now it was darker, not the pitch black of night but a deep twilight or like a night with bright moon, where you can walk. The landscape was familiar, but not quite. It was as if some things were inexplicably changed, or I was not sure I was in the right place and going in the right direction. And there was this fear, not of any particular thing but of Something.

Alone and scared in the deep twilight, I vaguely remembered Ryuho Okawa’s words: “Pay attention to your dreams, and you will have an idea of where your soul is destined” and “If you should find yourself in Hell, your only hope is that you have learned Buddha’s truth while you were alive.” (Well, those may not be his exact words, but pretty close. He is generally more wordy than I.) When I realized that I was dreaming, I made an effort to break out of it. I did not manage to wake up to the 3-dimensional world, but I managed to get out of the dream and stay for a brief while in a state of self-awareness, in a place outside the dreamworlds, where I have sometimes also been before. In that place, the dreamworlds pass by like a giant, slow rolling wheel of doors. If I wait, the door to the current dream will close and another will open where I can enter. So also now.

I don’t remember what happened next. I think some time passed before the next unpleasant dream. In it, I was again in the half familiar landscape, quite possibly the same as last time, but it was less dark. I was no longer alone, but together with a young goddess. Unfortunately it was an unreliable, if not outright treacherous goddess. I knew that she did not intend to help me should I need it. I honestly have no idea who she was, as I did not really reflect on it in my dream. My impression is that she was a descendant of the Norse pantheon, born long after they faded from power. Be that as it may, her company was not really better than nothing, but I would be wise to not say as much to her face. What scared me, except for the treacherous company, was that it was now bright enough to say for sure that things had changed. Things that should be there were not there, or the other way around, as if months or years had passed while I turned my back.

Back in the waking world, I still doubt that you will get out of Hell by means of Buddha’s truth, or even Christ’s truth. If you go to the Biblical Gehenna, it will presumably be too late for self-reflection. Catholicism has the concept of Purgatory, which is so eerily similar to the Buddhist hells that I find it hard to believe they did not pick it up somewhere on the Silk Road. But there is no mention of this in the Bible, only a fearful expectation of judgment and of raging fire that will consume the enemies of God. (Why yes, I quote Hebrews 10, right after the most disturbing words in the New Testament. Lo, I have warned ye.) If we want to reflect on ourselves, we better do it in this life.

In other news, I finished reading Okawa’s book The Challenge of the Mind last week, and am now starting on Bishop Kallistos Ware’s The Inner Kingdom. I expect it to be much heavier reading.

More dreams

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Tonight I actually did dream about Hell, but only in the most tangential manner. I dreamed that I was in class, college or at least the final year of high school judging from the age of my fellow students (I did not think of it while the dream lasted, so I don’t know for sure.)  Our teacher asked us if we knew what “helvete” meant. (That is really the Norwegian word for Hell, and the whole dream was in Norwegian. The word means the “realm of Hel” or “punishment of Hel”, Hel being the Norse goddess of the boring dead, those who die by sickness or old age rather than in war.  Corresponds largely to Greek Hades.)  I explained the etymology of the word, but in the dream my communications skills were insufficient: The teacher asked the class again, even though I had already answered his question.  The students then came up with various theories, and soon several people were talking at once.  The teacher looked like a liberal, by the way. I don’t think anyone considered that he might be asking for the classical definition of Hell as taught by several of the world’s great religions.

I had several other dreams this night, because I slept in.  The first of them was about the death of someone I have known quite well in waking life. It was kind of sad but dignified. I will not give any details of this because this would give away who it was.

There were a couple more dreams, but they were lost in the hour of delta brainwave entrainment that followed.  They seemed less poignant anyway.

Land of mass confusion

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Picture from the so-called “real” world today.  Not a bad place, I guess. At least for me.

This morning I woke up before 7.  I am not built to get up at this time, but that’s what happens when I go to bed before midnight. I woke up from a dream, and in the interest of checking on the status of my soul, I tried to remember it.  I only got the last part though:

Together with a female friend, I went into a shop where I hoped to get a job, as they were looking for a new employee and I felt that I might be qualified. However, the woman in charge rejected me out of hand, because I owed them money for stuff I had bought there and not paid.  She immediately produced a paper detailing the goods and the amount.  I had no memory of this, but started to explain that I had not intended to cheat them and of course I would pay it at once.  Then I looked at the amount and did a doubletake.  It was way too high, thousands of dollars, and when I looked at the specification, there were several TVs.  I haven’t had a TV in my lifetime.  In fact, it was all consumer electronics, and the shop was a clothes shop for men. For good measure, there was no name anywhere on the paper.  It had nothing to do with me at all.

At that point, I realized that I had not been rejected for the job – I had disqualified myself.  It was a test:  If I was honest enough for the job, I would immediately have realized that it could not possibly be true under any circumstances, and would not have started to think of excuses or reasons, I would just simply have stated that it could not possibly be true.  Because I had reacted differently, they knew that I was the kind of person who had problems with money, and they could not safely hire a person like that.

By the time this all sank in, I was already awake.

So yeah, still not Heaven I guess.  Although I suppose the Hell of Rejected Job Seekers is rather a pleasant stay compared to the Hells of classic lore with their pitchfork-equipped demons and stuff like that. Still probably depressing if you stay there long – I have a good friend who is depressed and going through that experience in real life now, and I remember collecting a couple hundred rejections myself when I was young.  It wasn’t particularly pleasant in itself, but not a Hell in any meaningful sense.  At least not in Norway, and at least not to me.

The world of dreams reminds me again of the expression “Land of Mass Confusion”, which I heard in Chris de Burgh’s When I think of you, the song where he portrays an infatuated, inexperienced and quite possibly insane (or at least mentally challenged) person in love.  Of course, it is hard enough for normal people to tell infatuation and insanity apart. And in a sense, each of us is also insane every night, unless your dreams are enormously more boring than mine.

Huston Smith is also convinced that our dreams take place in a real but different plane of existence.  Our subtle (“energy”) body parts way with the gross (physical) body and goes on to have its own adventures in its home realm.  Of course I don’t mean energy in the scientific sense, but the word “energy” has been used in the other sense long before modern science.  So let us not mix these up.

Anyway, that is just one way of seeing it.  Biologically, dreams are caused by a bioelectric storm in a small part of the limbic system. As it spreads outward from there, it stirs up all kinds of activity, first in the instinctual deep parts of the brain which we share more or less with reptiles and birds, then with the emotional brain that is approximately like that of our furry friends, and finally all the way to the “big brain”, the neocortex that has our personal memories and tendencies stored.  This is also true.  But this is like looking at how electricity moves through a computer, and make conclusions from this about the nature of Windows or iTunes.  The software is not really part of the computer, and the mind is not really part of the brain, even though each of them would be pretty useless to us without their hardware.

Huston Smith points out that the impact of dreams is largely their intensity, as each dream is the first.  There is no habituation, we experience everything as if for the first time.  Even when a dream repeats, we usually don’t notice until afterwards. Inside the dream, it is still new, whether it be pleasure or terror. They take us unaware, and that is their strength. Their weakness is that they are disconnected, fragmented, unmoored.  They take us away to a land of mass confusion, and we don’t know what to say when they are there.  Like infatuation or insanity.

The same is my impression of childhood, from my memory of it. It was a time of mass confusion, but also of mass novelty.  I am probably still very childish for someone my age, but it is not as if each day is filled with confusion anymore.  But when I look around, I see confused people everywhere. Mostly the young, of course, but not only them.  Some of my best friends are confused on a regular basis. I wish I could do something about it.  I wish I could help them wake up.  But I probably need some more waking up myself first.  “The obscurely spoken is the obscurely thought” after all.

Perhaps I can say something more systematic tomorrow. Then again, that was what I thought today too.

Dreams of Heaven and Hell

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SERVICE WITH A SMITE! Not conductive to visiting Heaven at night, unfortunately. Or so I’ve recently discovered.

In the book “The Essence of Buddha”, Ryuho Okawa has a disturbing and thought-provoking idea. Disturbing because it is so plausible, based on the notion that Heaven and Hell are not “elsewhere” but inside us already in this life. (Christian readers may remember Jesus saying this too.) Okawa’s spiritual bomb is that you can get a good idea from your dreams about which realm you belong to.

If you dream about being happy together with other people in peaceful places, this may be a glimpse of Heaven. But if you dream of darkness, fear and violence, chances are this is what you will experience when you leave your body permanently as well. After all, your dreams are fetching their content from the depths of your own soul: It is not like you are dreaming someone else’s dream, after all. Well, unless you are the prophet Daniel, I guess.

This, regular readers will realize, is bad news for me if true. Probably. Because most of the dreams I remember from my adult life are about either a) being scared out of my skin, b) killing people in war or self-defense, or c) humiliating sexual harassment of other people. This reached its peak in my late twenties, though it continued into my journaling years to some degrees. At least there was no overlap between b and c. I would wake from a dream of grabbing someone’s breasts and feel a sense of joy that at least I had not killed anyone this night!

Over the last years I seem to dream less. This may be a sign that the hellishness is receding. You see, if I actually do dream of being happy and peaceful, I am unlikely to remember it. I wake up if I am terrified, or if extremely excited, and then it is hard to go back to sleep immediately. Therefore I will remember whatever I dreamed just before. But otherwise I tend to sleep until my sleep clock gently wakes me, and in that slow transition from sleep to wakefulness the dream fades out of reach. I may remember that I dreamed something, but not what, unless it made a great impression. This is even more so now that I spend 30-90 minutes in slow-wave brainwave entrainment in the morning. For a dream to still be remembered after this, it better be remarkable.

As it happens, I had such a remarkable dream this morning, causing me to wake up an hour before the clock. Unfortunately for your chance of hanging out with me in The Realm of the Good in some years, it was about war. I dreamed that there was a war of some kind, and we were beset by the enemies, but snatched victory from the jaws of defeat through my supernatural leadership abilities. Talk about mixed messages – but then, that is a pretty accurate representation of how I feel.

Again, it bears mention that I don’t believe any of this “because Master Okawa said so”. That would be an insult to his work, as he strives to explain logically why he thinks we can use dreams as spiritual informants. His argument goes basically: Once you accept that there is an afterlife, the law of causality ensures that it depends on this life. This law is known in Buddhism as karma, and in Christianity by the verse “as a man sows, so shall he harvest”. Unless science, Buddhism and Christianity are all wrong on the same point, the current status of your soul is a pretty good hint of where you are heading at the moment.

(Of course, a major point of religion is to be able to change your future destination, but it is unlikely to just change randomly or through applied ritual without personal transformation. What is the point of going to Heaven if you make it a Hell for yourself and all around you? And if you act and think completely differently in Heaven than here, is it really you who went to Heaven at all, or just someone else looking like you? Do souls even “look” at all, are they not defined by how they think and feel, their attitudes and the assumptions on which they habitually act? If you are bitter and suspicious here, and someone happy and grateful show up on the Other Shore, whatever happened to the real you?)

So yeah, I think the man from Venus is onto something here. Dreams can give us a chance to reflect on ourselves, dredging up feelings and memories that need to be held up toward the Light. But they are probably not representative, unless you have some method to rapidly wake you up at random times and then leave you with enough time to jot down your dreams.

Oh, and about that dream… City of Heroes‘ subscriber expansion number 17 came out yesterday, and I had fun roleplaying my new Lightwielding character, Lord Septim Silver, all evening until bedtime. We totally steamrolled the villains and had tons of fun doing it. SERVICE WITH A SMITE! So, I am not completely sure how representative that dream was…

Sims dream and… asthma?

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di090730

It’s not all fun and games – although this time it began with that.

I became very tired half past midnight, instead of 2AM when I usually go to sleep. (Last night I went to sleep about an hour early too.)  This time I was taken by surprise and fell asleep in my chair. I woke up about an hour later and dragged myself to bed. My knees hurt, as they do when I sleep in my chair for more than a brief nap.

I woke up a little before 3AM.  I had dreamed for a while that I was playing a new Sims game (that would presumably be Sims 4, but in real life Sims 3 is still less than two months old. ) There were various new features, and I only remember the beginning and the end.  Perhaps I did not dream more than those.  At the end, my sim was nearing the end of its brief life and was drifting through town lamenting his fate:  “If only there was a moonless night, or even a cat!”  -for each of these offered magical sims a chance to prolong their life, the first for a longer time and the second for a shorter. But the game offered no such opportunity.  I was about to save and quit the game because I could not stand seeing my sim die. I felt very sad, as if I was the one to die.  Then suddenly all around my sim his friends became visible. They pooled their lifeforce, intending to share each a little of their life with him so he might have the chance to live till the next moonless night. But one of them was a schoolgirl, and she said he could get a year of her life because she wanted to grow up faster anyway.  I was not so sure that was a good idea, because even though I understood the childish desire to grow up, she might regret her sacrifice later. On the other hand, I did not want (my sim) to die.  I had this choking feeling.

Then I woke up and realized that I was indeed kind of choking.  I know I can’t quite trust my body at this time, as the last three days show, but this was all too familiar. I heard the characteristic wheezing sound when breathing out, which I remember from my childhood asthma.

This is not the first time I wake up to that sound even in my adult life.  For a few years at least, I have exercise-induced asthma, albeit in a much milder form.  It does not show up from light or moderate exercise, but if I start panting, the asthma kicks in. The wheezing on the last part of the out breath is really a clincher.  (I not only had this as a child, my mother also got asthma in her old age.)  It is no big surprise that I can get the same reaction after lifelike dreams, because REM sleep causes the heart to race and the lungs to labor, depending on the mood of the dream.  Asthma attacks from REM sleep are pretty common.  REM is also one of the most common triggers of heart attacks, and a lot of people die that way in the morning. Their relatives believe that they died peacefully in their sleep, but in most cases they probably died during or right after an intense dream, either dreaming about sex of another physical exertion like running. Obviously we will never know, but judging from those who survive, we have a pretty good idea.

But I digress. In any case, “madness is not the only danger in  dreams. There is also the danger that something may be lost that can never be regained”, in this case life itself.

While asthma is a life-threatening disease, the attacks I have had as an adult have been much milder than my childhood asthma. This is normal. In fact, a number of high-level athletes have exercise asthma.  They do however use medication to get around it.  With inhalers, asthma that is not coupled with severe allergy is rarely fatal. Since I don’t have medication – I have not even consulted a doctor about this, as it is so rare – I just avoid that level of exercise.  You can keep in decent shape without breathing quite hard enough to trigger it.

REM induced asthma is rarely if ever fatal without complications like allergy asthma, heart disease or OMG SWINE FLU.  (I am so not looking forward to that one, as you may guess.) But the period before the bronchial swelling is fully reversed is quite uncomfortable, especially for one who has bad memories of life-threatening asthma.

I am not sure whether my subconscious is assisting in staging this attack. It seems likely, given the previous three days of imaginary breathing problems. You can’t fake the wheezing though, but I suppose you can “crisis-maximize” it, as we say around here. Psychological factors are known to make asthma attacks worse or milder, probably by affecting general breathing and heart rhythm.

If this is the case here, my subconscious must have something desperately important to tell me to run a risk like this on the very edge of the flu season.

Unfortunately for my dear readers, all previous big announcements of my subconscious have boiled down to “it’s time to shed another layer of your learned human-ness and become more alien.”  Perhaps the message of this dream was a different one. Or perhaps the message of the dream was the reason why I got an asthma attack.  It’s too early to say.  In fact, it is like 4 AM, which is really too early for anything.

Dreams and life converge

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di090426

This dream is perfectly natural for a healthy male. Finally.

Since I have described three strange dreams since I started doing brainwave entrainment, I should include this one. It certainly seems to be the fourth in a series.  As you may remember, the first and second dream were terrifying, hair-raising nightmares, most of their horror consisting in them taking place right there in my home, to the point where I had a hard time telling what was dream and what was reality.  The third dream shared this,  but was noticeably less creepy. Then again, a month had passed. Perhaps my brain is getting used to my messing with it?  Well, tonight it happened again, but this time it was not scary at all.

In my dream, I was in the living room, looking out the window, toward the lawn. The neighbor’s lawn is also visible from that angle. On their lawn stood the woman who is my neighbor, and a teenage boy who lives there. They were just standing there talking together, and did not notice me.  Actually they wouldn’t in real life either, probably, since I am inside and it was sunshine, making the windows reflective from outside.  And also, the two of them had indeed been outside yesterday, although so were I (raking leaves off the lawn near the fence).  It was a very ordinary scene, and I only woke up because I had to force my eyes away from neighbor lady’s sexy curves.  (Sorry neighbor lady! At least it wasn’t the boy, as I’m sure people around here would expect from a creepy reclusive stranger.)

I went back to sleep shortly after, and remember no more dreams from the night.  I did notice while I was awake however that there was the telltale spindle effect from sleep phase 2,  just like in the previous three cases.

I wonder if this means I can start increasing the exposure to low-frequency waves… On the other hand, I am still not sure why I am doing this, except for the sake of science itself.  Perhaps being self-aware while sleeping is not all that awesome after all.  For instance, don’t I have more than enough to worry about keeping my eyes in place when I am out and about in the real world, if I don’t have to struggle with them in my sleep as well?

Just slightly creepy sleep

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It’s been a month since the week with the two creepy dreams.  Tonight’s was much less so, but still enough to wake me up and give me goosebumps.

In my dream, I was in the house here, and the front door was open, as it often is in summer.  I was looking out and there was a boy standing outside.  He was no more than around 12 years old, possible even less, certainly not someone who would normally be a danger.  He did not look threatening in any way, really.  The strange thing was that he did not seem to notice me at all, even though the door was open and I was standing right there.  He was just not looking that way at all. I found this embarrassing and began to close the door.  But something made me look again.  And he was gone.  Disappeared in the matter of a couple seconds.  That’s when I was creeped out and woke up. That and there were sounds as if there was a tractor or some construction machine outside, and a sound as if something was pulling or pushing on the house and it was giving just a little, like during a storm.  But when the buzzing in my head stopped, the sounds had stopped as well.  Yes, there were spindles again, which means that despite the relative vividness of the dream, it must have happened during phase II.  It was about 20 minutes after I fell asleep.

The only common parts with the truly creepy dreams were the fact that the dream took place here, rather than in some fantasy world or somewhere I lived before, and the experience of someone overlooking me as if I was not there. A bit like those short ghost stories where in the last paragraph the main character realizes that he was the ghost all along.

I am writing this while it is fresh, before going back to bed. There haven’t been any strange sounds in the meantime. I think it was probably a passing train.  They do that irregularly but several times a night, and the heavy goods trains when they race past here make the ground shake.  I can’t imagine how it must be for those who live  almost right across the road from the railway.  There is one more neighbor between them and me, and some of the trains still make things in the house rattle and shake.

Creepy sleepy 2

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di090325

How could I possibly get any sleep when there are nameless horrors in my basement and faces of people who aren’t there?  (Apart from that, however, I’m fine.)

Well, at least I had one night of long restful sleep. Then last night the creepy returned, although different and less dangerous.

I had been in bed for about half an hour, but slept only a few minutes (unlike usual, it took me some time to fall asleep, I felt restless, perhaps because I had not exercised). I had a vivid dream, but this time in my dream at least I was not in my bed. Instead, I was in the hallway, a few steps away. I had opened the door down to the basement, which is currently not in use. The light was on down there, and there was some kind of activity. I called out, but there was no answer. I was filled with dread and slammed the door shut and locked it. Then I woke up in my bed.

The sheer ordinariness actually makes it worse, that it happens at the same place and time where I really am. It was as if I had just actually experienced it. I could not sleep again, also because my body was even more restless. I got up and turned on lights in each room – but the door to the basement I did not open. Even thinking the word “basement” made the hair on my body stand on end.

Having checked the rooms, I started exercising. And gradually the realization came to me. Let’s look at some amazing foreshadowing, here:
“But perhaps you should wait a little longer before you set off to reclaim the parts of yourself that you have thrown down the stairs to the basement and locked the door after. Because there may just be a reason why one would go to such an extreme step with a part of oneself.
Shadow work is not a hobby, to be undertaken for the excitement of it. At the very least pick your shadows carefully, because you really don’t want them to take over your house and throw you down the stairs to the basement, then lock the door.”
-Me, in the entry “Shadow work“, twelve days ago.

For most of my adult life, until a couple years ago, I did not have a basement. In fact, I used to live in a basement of sorts. So the phrase was purely metaphorical to me. Here in this house there actually is a basement – and for good measure, one that is mostly off-limits to me. (The landlord stores stuff there and even used to stay there for some days now and then.) It is the perfect embodiment of the subconscious, and it is right here a few steps from my bed!

For good measure, notice the irony of the phrase “a hobby, to be undertaken for the excitement of it”. What is this brainwave hacking, which I was already embroiled in when I wrote that earlier entry? A hobby, undertaken for the excitement of it. While a lot of people come to Holosync out of a desperate need to change their lives (or at least that is Harris’ impression), I am not one of them. Like my knowledge sims who roll the want to be hit by lightning, I am playing with things that are a few sizes too big for me, because of my curiosity.

And who is the part of me that was thrown down in the cellar? Well, I have a suspicion about that too, based on something else that happened while exercising. When I sit on the bike, my face is high enough to reflect in the glass mosaic window. Not as advanced as a church window, it consists of squares of different hues or different refraction, making it hard to see clearly through. The distorted face in the window took me back to the many years when I was scared of windows and mirrors in the dark, because seeing my face there reminded me of a childhood memory: Seeing the face of my autistic uncle in a windows when I was little.

My uncle was considered severely retarded (autism was not a diagnoses at the time) and was locked in a room upstairs. Not the basement, but the parallel is still kind of obvious. As a child, I was manically eager to show off how smart I was, and I have later thought this may have been because I feared being locked away and not counted as part of the family if I was too stupid. Like my uncle. We did not visit him, did not even talk about him (although my brothers scared me with him when I was too small to think, and I was scarred for life.) I at least did not even think about him, except when I happened to see his face in the window, the face of someone who wasn’t there, like a ghost only more physical. When that happened, I was filled with a nameless dread – the same dread that I felt this night.
Did Holosync indeed stir up this nest of hornets? I don’t know. It could be the ILP itself, or the time might just be right for it to surface. But messing with your deep brainwaves does seem like a prime suspect.

In any case, it took me a long time to quiet down. I did not get to sleep before the daylight was shining brightly through the window, so I only got like one hour or so of sleep. That can’t possibly be good, although I managed to function through the workday with only a minimal nap, a minute or two I’d say. Perhaps the stomach pain (in the ulcer spot) is also a price for the sleepless night.

I hope this does not become a hobby. But that said, perhaps it is about time the light of awareness starts shining into my basement. Carefully, very carefully.

Creepy when sleepy

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di090323

Not being able to tell real life and dreams apart is a bad thing no matter how you look at it. Although like most things it gets better with cute girls and worse with lethal weapons.

OK, I suppose we COULD blame this one on Holosync, but I am not sure that is fair. I had an even worse episode in the previous century, after all. But it certainly was creepy, to say the least.

I had been sleeping for a bit under half an hour when I woke from sounds in the house, or so I thought. I heard the sound of running water from the bathroom across the hallway, and adult footsteps in the hallway. I was like “the burglars have come, I have to defend myself” and I fumbled for my weapon. Unfortunately, my brain was full of this loud buzzing sound except it was not just sound, it filled the whole brain, and every two seconds or so there was this discontinuity – spindles, it is called in sleep research, and I was aware of what it was even then. Those K-complexes have some serious amplitude so it is next to impossible to complete a thought before they reset your brain. I squeezed my eyes hard shut and created my own buzz, flushing my brain and clawing my way back to a waking state.

As my brain resumed normal operations, it realized that burglars don’t behave like that. They don’t use running water, they don’t walk around. They either sneak or break. Also, there was not a sound anymore. I had routinely checked the door before I went to bed, and I had been in all rooms since last it was open. Nobody could have gotten in without breaking a window. In short, the sounds were some kind of dream experience, which I had mistaken for real life because my location in the dream (lying in my bedroom) coincided with my location in real life.

Still, I really hope this doesn’t become a habit. Or if it does, I may have to reconsider my habit of sleeping with a handgun, a long knife and a hammer under my pillow!

***

In happier news (as in quivering with pleasure and endless happy endorphins, according to their website) I’ve taken a look at LifeFlow, a newer competitor to Holosync and the original Hemi-Sync. It is a simpler approach, but it goes all-out for what it tries to do. Each CD aims to generate one single brainwave frequency, using a mix of binaural beats, isochronic tones (sound bursts) and monaural beats, a less subtle audible wave form. They offer a free sample, and it is not as bad as I feared when they heap on with effects like that. Actually it is pretty melodic.

While Holosync starts close to normal relaxed brainwaves and slowly moves downward (well, for the main program at least), LifeFlow scoffs at this approach. They go straight for the intended level, but warns the user that it will take roughly 8 minutes to entrain. They don’t believe in the story of carrier frequency either. Instead they recommend you start with a high alpha (close to the daily beta level) and use that for a lengthy period, then a lower alpha, an even lower alpha, a high theta etc. As you see, this is a completely different approach. Holosync gets to the slow waves from the first day, but gradually each time.

While I’m reading up a bit on this, I am aware that it may be a bad idea to mix meditations without asking a guru (kind of like mixing medication without asking a doctor, right?). If anything, I should keep a wary eye on my brain function for a while, just in case there is more creepiness.

We don’t want my blog to suddenly disappear, after all, like that other guy!

“Welcome to the family”

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di090319

Your opinion doesn’t really count when people have first decided to be nice.

I came home from work, and checked my physical mailbox. I was mildly surprised to find a package. Less surprised than last time I found a package, which was only yesterday. This one was not priority rush express, so I briefly entertained the notion that it might not be from Centerpointe Research Institute. On the other hand, I can’t think of anyone else who would send me stuff I don’t expect. It was marked as “gift” and “educational material”, which would match my longest reader, who also for a while would send me random books. (This bag was definitely book-sized.) On the other hand, I think I have convinced her to stop with that, after posting photos of my book shelves covered in two layers of books. Plus, I did not recognize the sender town.

Yes, dear reader. It is the amazing Bill Harris, founder and director of Centerpointe Research Institute, who has sent me another book, his own well-received Thresholds of the Mind. I am starting to wonder if he even turns a profit anymore. At least this was ordinary mail, and as such much cheaper than the priority express he normally uses.

The package also contained a letter. It started with “Dear friend” and concluded with “once again, welcome to the Centerpointe family”. Perhaps it was this that made me remember.

Many years ago, in my early days living in the basement apartment that was my original Chaos Node, long before the website or even before the web came to Norway, there was in the neighborhood a girl I liked. There was no romantic relationship between us, not that everyone was absolutely convinced about that, but we were good friends. Her father was also a friend of mine, I was around mid between them in age. One day he suddenly showed up at my apartment with various pieces of furniture. I guess this is a side effect of the golden rule — I can only assume he liked having people show up with furniture without asking whether he needed it. And evidently our dear friend Bill is of the same type. Welcome to the family indeed.

***

And yes, Bill, I am using the Awakening Prologue. Twice a day, actually, because I don’t get enough sleep at night, thanks to my sock allergy. Or whatever it is. I wake up with my feet itching like crazy. But at least I get to remember my dreams by waking up in the middle of the night, so it is good for something. This time I dreamed about a tsunami. But only a small one. Nobody died — none of the people I was with, at least. I am not so sure about the people who were wandering out staring at the starfish and stuff on the exposed sea bottom after the water had pulled out and before it came rolling back in.

I don’t think the dreams have anything to do with HoloSync. It is quite normal for me to have scary dreams in the beginning of the night – in fact, the first often starts within minutes of falling asleep – and then they gradually turn more pleasurable toward the morning.

Anyway, I had wanted to write more about HoloSync today, but then something actually happened in real life, and I remembered something I don-t think I have written about. Perhaps another time!

Oh, and the tooth from yesterday? It hurt less after half an hour with syncing, and was fine in the morning (after five hours of sleep). Yay! But I think it might be wise to try to go to bed earlier or something. I just have to find something really boring to do before bedtime. Perhaps the book Bill sent me can help with that?