DEUS EX MACHINA
Our lighting designer literally broke a leg, but he’ll be fine. Around the Full Moon, we began having a series of problems with our water main. One leak in the basement lead to small scale flooding. Them “fixing” that lead a series of other problems: when you begin tinkering with a system under pressure, problems tend to get pushed through the system as it absorbs the changes into its equilibrium.
Dreaming, I think, is like theatre. Actors get drafted from your ordinary life to play parts written by some subconscious writer/director, and endlessly rehearse their strange dramas backstage. Techies, I think, are a little bit like angels. They function invisibly behind the scenes to set the stage, to move forward scene changes, to make sure things are where they need to be in order for the action to occur.
Last night I dreamt I was visting with a woman who has been a friend of mine. She wanted us all to go to sleep in a room which she explained had once been her son’s who spent a long time in a coma and then died many years ago. She still kept the room for him, sleeping their every night in some kind of dark denial of his never-coming-home. I laid down even though I knew it was too early to go to sleep. The girl I was with stood at my bedside and roused me though, telling me about a “Moslem tradition” wherein a house plagued by death must be aired out. I got up and we proceeded to open all the doors and windows. At some point in the night, I also learned about electricity in the body leading to seizures and the touch of God.
Show Boat came and went. I didn’t get to meet Al Sharpton and his daughter has moved on. Tomorrow night Can-Can opens, which just makes me want to see Moulin Rouge. Next week is another Gilbert & Sullivan - this time with fairies - Iolanthe. Time continues to both crawl and fly sideways by.
- END -
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12 Comments
Somewhere there are shows being staged that our spirits attend. I’ve been backstage at one and this woman worked on stage at another. I can’t find the page where she describes this performance though. She thinks she was there to calm the audience but she made a mistake and threw the audience into a panic. She believes someone died that night (in real reality) as a result. As a result of what? She doesn’t know.
http://www.firedocs.com/bewilderness/bw_ch_21b.cfm
http://redcairo.blogspot.com/2008/03/red-door-is-dor.html
A while back you posted a clip from the David Lynch movie Mulholland Drive. It was a woman signing “Jocando” in a theater and the two stars are watching the performance. I watched that clip dozens of times and saw something different each time. I think it portrays this theater experience. I still haven’t seen the movie yet.
I think I posted a comment at the time but I’ll try to remember my point. The dream stage is more real than real and we make “real” stage performances to recapture what we’ve seen in our dreams. I’m pretty sure this is why stadiums are built too. I’ve been to a dream stadium several times and I would try to build one too if they didn’t already exist.
We are being greatly manipulated by these activities. More so than by what we see on the evening news. If people repeatedly stage a massacre in the dreamworld how many people are inspired to kill? I think this goes a long way to explaining how reality is created.
Can we consciously control our dreams or what shows we participate in in our dreams? Are the dreamers choosing to stage a massacre or participate in a massacre staged by other(s), or unwillingly participating in something staged by other(s)?
Julia,
I think every single one of our thoughts and intents, both conscious and subconcious, go into this dreamworld-play-ritual. It spreads out through the boundaryless realm of no-thing.
And everyone else’s thoughts do so as well. This is why ‘positive thinking creates a positive reality’ doesn’t work. People are forgetting about the effect their thoughts have on everyone else.
Of course, the power that our thoughts do or do not have, is based on the focus and clarity of our thinking, as well as our groundedness in reality (the currently swirling maelstrom of what is).
jwx,
I think that we do consciously control this, every moment of the day. These are the seeds that we sow, of which we later reap.
I have very little knowledge about this but I’ll give you what I’ve got. It’s only about half a dozen experiences, the womans experience on her web site and the David Lynch movie confirming and expanding on my observations but I think there are a lot different types of dreams and a lot depends on gaining a brief awareness during the dream.
There are dreams that are staged by someone else and those can be used victimize people and/or create a damaging reality if it serves the interests of the stagers of the dreams. This is a technology that I can witness but I can’t break it down into its component parts. It’s like trying to describe an ocean wave.
The ‘we choose to be here (anywhere)’ idea is even trickier to deal with when your talking about a dream. You can choose to go to a movie but be very displeased with a scene in the movie or the behavior of a fellow patron.
It gets even more complicated because after I became aware of this I tended to incorporate it into other dreams. The stadium feels great and is overwhelming and when I dream of an overwhelming idea sometimes I put myself there to convey the feeling so I’ll get it. That doesn’t mean I’m in THAT stadium.
My feeling is that you can’t consciously join a dream. I think this because I don’t think you’re meant to be aware of these dreams. I got security called on me when I was backstage. I don’t know what security consisted of but they dealt with me and I’ve never woken up in the theater since. Seeing the David Lynch clip makes me realize that I’ve been in the theater many times since though.
The dreams may be consciously controlled by others or not. They have a heirarchal command structure just like a theater or stadium. People do jobs there like we do at work or if we volunteered to put on a play. I snuck in and the spell wasn’t working on me because I wasn’t in the audience.
I don’t think the audience is active. They are very passive and have to remain so for it to be a successful performance. There may be other dreams where audience participation is encouraged but I haven’t experienced them to my knowledge.
I think some of the things that happen have intensely personal effects and others have real large scale societal effects. If powerful people are in the sudience it has an effect on people who can influence others. If average people are in the audience it has a smaller effect.
I think the unwilling participants help create reality partly by their reactions in the audience in the same way that a movie audience creates reality following watching a movie. But, since they’re unconscious its a more powerful effect.
I think it has as sort of public opinion poll effect too. The performance was successful therefore reality has been shaped by the opinions of the audience members. The people have spoken. But, they were asleep, weren’t they? Just like real reality. And, maybe the precedent needed for reality to occur.
The movie Mulholland Drive may have more insights but I haven’t seen it yet.
It’s not Jocando, it’s Llorando. Duh.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLhbf-K10IM
control what? I think I missed something.
Julia,
thanks, that helps, I think?. Wild stuff. I forget much of my dreaming so if I have ever experienced anything similar, I have forgotten.
I have experienced the vague sense of dreams having been hacked or artificially influenced, and have read about others with similar experience.
I think what I’m describing is the same thing but on a much larger scale. Or, I could be totally wrong about everything.
I think that we do consciously control this, every moment of the day
Was in response to your question:
Can we consciously control our dreams or what shows we participate in in our dreams?
It has to do with what we allow our consciousness to rest on, be it real objects or imagined ones, and the prior associations that we have attached to those objects.
Consciousness is like a self-referential feedback loop that we can feed and build by focusing it on something. And dreaming is just one aspect of this.
i cannot say conclusively that our dreams, and our “consciousness” it`s self aren`t hacked occasionally or consistantly, but i can say that postive thinking produces positive results…..my whole life has been a result of that……if for no other reason than to point out that it`s the only way i have recovered from the shit i`ve been through.
and who or what is doing the hacking?
…..and i also think that there is a blurring of the dream and waking state at times, that suggests a form of communication….either between parts of ourselves, or from another.
signposts.
These two bits seem to be contradictory. In the first you appear to be saying that thinking does cannot change our reality in a certain direction, while in the second you do. You are communicating something complex here that I am not quite getting. Appreciate any help you can give here.
Also, can you give any advice or links on how one can work to consciously shape one’s own dreams? I am thinking in real time or perhaps just as one is going to sleep?
always good to be reminded of this, my ground is so easily swept away by the maelstrom these days.
Well, to be honest, it’s a little complex for me as well. I haven’t quite worked out exactly how those two fit together in real life. Yet they both feel true to me, so, I will try to explain what I mean.
Consciousness can be seen as a feedback loop of reality, in that what you maintain focus on tends to come up more and more often. Of course, this does not take into account any unconscious forces within yourself that might be acting against you, skewing your focus so that you think you are focusing on one thing, when your focus is really on something else.
An example: You want to focus on getting a new job, but part of you just wants to be lazy. Unless you can consciously acknowledge and account for that lazy part, it will always skew your desire to get a job. There’s nothing necessarily magical or spiritual about this, it’s just a description of how some people are more motivated than others.
So consciousness, or awareness, amplifies what is put into it. It is sort of a negative entropy, I guess. And focused, one-pointed consciousness can achieve some magical-type results, although the process of learning to focus your attention will probably make the desire for magical-type results decrease significantly.
Now reality is, in one way of looking at, a consensus reality. This is not to say that objectively this is so. If everyone decided to focus on making the sun stand still in the sky, it wouldn’t work, for many many reasons that I hope are rather obvious. Foremost being the fact that the sun doesn’t actually move through the sky at all anymore.
But reality as we experience it and describe it to each other on a daily and subjective level is a very much more consensual kind of thing. Hence peer pressure, religious beliefs (that is, myths taken as fact), etc, etc.
It is this consensual reality which we can effect with our focused thoughts. The difficulty arises when you attempt to put any of these theories into effect. If you truly can make pretty much anything happen, what will you choose? What will you focus your attention on, to the exclusion of everything else? Generally, if you split your attention to take care of all your needs, I bet you would find yourself in pretty much the same state you are currently in. The more needs you have, and the more contradictory they are, the less effective you are as a person.
So you are left with trying to figure out what, in the end, would truly be beneficial for you to focus on. You can stay stuck on this for a long time, trying to work a way out of it. I tend to think that really, in the end, the only thing worth this amount of effort is something along the lines of “the enlightenment of all sentient beings in this lifetime”. It is the only aim along which all our other aims can also be met.
On the other hand, if everyone is focusing on the same things at the same time, but expecting different results (the example of getting a new job works here as well), then there can be a lot of conflict. Positive thinking only results in a positive reality when it is positive for every conscious being within that reality. Positive thinking for your own ends might benefit you, but it might also hurt someone else. Not much of a positive reality there. Taken to the extreme, you have one very happy person and a lot of very very unhappy people.
So I guess the problem with positive thinking is not only that the positive result can be nullified by other peoples own thinking, but that it can be nullified or skewed by your own unconscious contents as well…
Anyway, this is all very theoretical, but trying to work it out over the years has been pretty beneficial to me. I don’t think of this as a perfect model of how consciousness works, but it is the closest I have come at this point.
To get back to the topic at hand of controlling or directing your own dreams, all I can say is to work on your focus. There are plenty of sites out there detailing meditation techniques and consciousness growth. Find one that seems to work for you. Then focus on what you want to dream about before going to sleep. Also, acknowledge and accept reasons as to why you might not dream about that, and try to come to peace with them.
Personally though, I like my dreams the way they come. I’m kind of a butterfly dreaming I’m a Taoist, in that way…