Dreaming: For Many, The Most Familiar Altered State of Consciousness

In my last podcast I talked about meditation and David Lynch's theory that it can be a way to tap into the unified theory of physics and, in turn, boost creativity by suppressing negative emotions like anger and melancholy. It prompted me to share what I had learned with the Duncan Trussell Family Hour forum. While there, I read an interesting comment about dualism and being skeptical about the possibility of a disembodied consciousness.

What's so fun about non-agenda, independent journalism, AKA blogging, is that I am free to follow my inquiring mind wherever it may lead. This time it led to disembodied consciousness, which will be the subject of the next podcast. It led me to wonder what science or documentation there is on the subject. I found this BBC video to convince me somewhat, and I also found the Dalai Lama talking about training yourself to be able to disembody your consciousness at will in preparation for the moment of your death, but, as Joe Rogan might say, my bullshit alarm is still going off. Part of the reason for this might be all of the David Icke videos that show up in my searches.

Anyways, I've had a couple dreams lately that I talked about in the last podcast. They were totalitarian in nature and depicted security scanners outside of convenience stores and prisons full of innocent people, locked up like animals, in line for routine electroshock therapy. Perhaps I watched one too many Turkish protest videos, or perhaps those disturbing yet guilty-pleasure satisfying episodes of American Horror Story are just coming back to haunt me.

Whatever the case may be, I had a sense in my dream that my consciousness was outside of my body and it was witnessing something exterior, not of my creation. I had a sense that I was a visitor somewhere. Call me crazy, but I had the sense that the dream was a singular consciousness that I was facing up against.

Usually my dreams are flashes of scenes happening, flickering rapidly from one to the next like an old reel of film. Rarely am I in one place for a prolonged period of time. This time, maybe because consciousness has been on my mind (confusing concept when you break it down, I know), maybe I was a little more observant in my dream, for every time I began noticing what was going on, the characters in the dream seemed to rush me off to a new scene as if not wanting to be recognized or, dare I say, found out.

Of course, I haven't come to any conclusions about disembodied consciousness, but if anything it's a wonderful idea for a story and I've been looking for a good horror story topic that ties into the theme of exploring consciousness. Maybe my dreams were my Muse staring back at me, in there, in the dream that was in (or out of) my head.


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