[FRIAM] the cancellation arc

[Steve Smith]

Glen -

Fascinating synthetic dream-experience!  I have a LOT of those
(qualitatively entirely synthetic best I can tell) and generally revel
in them.  I don't have conventional "nightmares" but the kind of
vividness you report combined with various (nearly?) unsolvable problems
can be *very* tedious and to the extent I am almost always semi-lucid in
my dreams I often court "changing the channel" and occasionally actually
cancel the whole series in my head over such irritating tedium.

I have my own chronic (hip/leg some back) pain which bleeds over in
sleep/dreams to some extent which may actually contribute to my
remaining semi-lucid in most if not all of my dreams.   I mis-ascribe
the pain/discomfort sometimes.

As a teen I became acutely aware of the idea that the narratives of our
dreams are somewhat (significantly if not entirely?) post-hoc
fictions.   I was taking my near-daily cat-nap between end-of-school and
my night job when I had an excruciatingly frightening dream that
included someone crying for help.   I grogilly came out of the dream to
realize that someone across the road from where we lived was in fact
repeatedly and loudly but not hysterically calling out for HELP!  I
roused myself and followed the sound to a heavy-machinery yard about 100
yards away where the owner had accidentally lowered the blade of his
road-grader onto his foot and was trapped by it.   He had put a 2x4
block under the blade (for whatever he was doing on the hydraulics?) so
his foot wasn't sheared or even damaged as far as I could tell, just
trapped.   He quickly talked me through operating the hydraulic lever
that would release the pressure so he could pull his foot out and resume
his project.  

The point of this long-winded virtue-signalling anecdote is simply that
my dream was *full* of details and pretexts that built up the
dream-reason for someone to be yelling HELP that had nothing at all to
do with the *actual* real-life reason.   The dream ceased as I woke,
possibly only about 5 "HELP"s into the deal (2-5 mins) so the entire
dream that was subjectively an hour or more of buildup to it... I had
probably been asleep less than 15 mins as well.

This realization changed the nature of my lucid dreaming quite a bit as
I *think* I had always assumed dreams happened in real-time and in
linear-causal order, but coming to suspect that they could be hung
together post-hoc a lot like one might write a novel or other fiction.

This is also (might be?)  why I am sympathetic with what you have called
out as "just so" stories... post-hoc rationalizations for
"whatever"...   feels a bit like both overfitting and/or arbitrary
elision of data to support a pre-hoc narrative... what passes for
"news-opinion" through most outlets most of the time it seems.

As I seek the "true nature" of collective consciousness I'm left
noticing that one of the things that comes with it seems to be "dreaming
other people's dreams".   Our elaborate literary, theatrical, cinematic
heritage is only getting more and more finely hashed into sensory-bites
across more and more sensory channels which elude our (heretofore?)
naive intuition about what is the truth and what is a lie. 

DeepFakeNews.

- Steve

On 9/14/21 12:07 PM, uǝlƃ ☤>$ wrote:
> Speaking of dreams ... I had this very vivid color dream sitting on "my" patio, a patio I've never actually seen in woke fugues, behind a house I've never actually seen while awake, watching a non-biomimetically tall deciduous tree that doesn't exist bend to some high winds. An impossibly long branch from that tree broke off an flattened a couple of parts of the house. In the dream, I surveyed the damage and kept thinking "that part's OK, I was gonna tear that down anyway", "that part sucks, redoing the brick so that it matches will be difficult". Etc. I woke up right in the middle of the survey *still* thinking I was thinking about an actual house until I snapped and remembered the house I actually live in (no brick, no impossibly high trees, no patio).
>
> That purely internal experience was the most vivid one I've had since I was a kid, woke or asleep, and not merely visually, physically too, though it was clearly fake because I had no back pain, no headache, none of the chronic pains I always feel when I'm awake.
>
> On 9/14/21 10:58 AM, Steve Smith wrote:
>> On 9/14/21 10:29 AM, uǝlƃ ☤>$ wrote:
>>> Yeah, well. Were I fully liberated, I'd be doing a lot more, and a lot more diverse, drugs than I do. Reading books is all well and good. But my guess is the experience of liberty is more expansive than intellectual knowledge of liberty. It takes a magician to truly appreciate magic.
>> This would be the basis of my support for "the ineffable".   Not that
>> thinking about an experience in linguistic terms isn't possible,
>> rewarding, even insightful, it is not precisely *the same* as the
>> experience, if even close.
>>
>>   *watching/hearing/smelling/feeling/tasting others* having an
>> experience seems *more* apt to inform (apologies to NST) me
>> empathetically/mirror-neurologically, but actually *having* the
>> experience is still somewhat it's own thing.
>>
>> Having *had* the experience allows (perhaps) the linguistic/intellectual
>> and the empathetic/mirror-neuron triggers to help me (re) access those
>> experiences in some inner way.  Just because when watching the Williams
>> sisters play tennis doesn't cause me to shift my weight to plant my feet
>> and flex my racquet grip and swing an arm, doesn't mean the fact of
>> having played thousands of hours of tennis in my lie doesn't give me a
>> significantly different experience from what I might think I "know" of
>> Jai Alai or Cricket or Curling or even Golf ferGawdSakez!
>>
>> I've reported my "locomotion" dreams before, but this puts a nice
>> emphasis on what I suspect to be the difference between even my most
>> extravagant running, jumping, swimming, tree-swinging dreams and my
>> levitating/flying/soaring and especially my orbital mechanics dreams.  
>> The latter is *entirely* symbolic while flying at least is fed (or
>> informed?) by what I see in birds flight and my trivial amount of
>> private piloting (but never
>> hang-gliding/ultra-lighting/ram-chuting/squirrel-suiting).
>>
>> My proto/neo-libertarian nature comes (I postulate) from my having had a
>> *fairly* liberated early life where the primary restrictions I
>> experienced (allowed to constrain me) were the "hard knocks" variety NOT
>> involving other people (especially near-peers).   I've always felt
>> claustrophobic/cramped when confronted with social norms which is not to
>> say I think those norms are *evil* or even *wrongheaded*, just
>> "inconvenient".   The longer I live, the more experiences I have which
>> help me to not only distinguish the "wrongheaded" from the
>> "inconvenient" but also how to *navigate* the isoclines of a
>> high-dimensional socio-political landscape on my own terms and thereby
>> spend less time yelling at the TV or shaking my fist at the kids who
>> need to "get off my lawn!".
>>
>> - Steve
>>
>>> On 9/14/21 9:11 AM, thompnickson2 at gmail.com wrote:
>>>> He was the Mill  that had a scandalous affair <https://www.economist.com/open-future/2018/10/05/the-scandalous-love-affair-that-fuelled-john-stuart-mills-feminism> and went on seances with the likes of Erasmus Darwin.  [Charles never had any truck for that sort of thing.]  Mill sure knew what it was to be cancelled. 
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