On 27 Jan 2013, at 13:49, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Sun, Jan 27, 2013 at 1:19 PM, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be>
wrote:
Well, meditations might be enough, perhaps. Sleep leads also to
dissociate state, simpler version of oneself, and the resulting
strange "realities".
Even the idea that we are unconscious during deep sleep does not
convince me.
Me neither. I have always suspected, like Descartes, that we cannot
be "unconscious" (if that is not trivial from the 1p perspective).
And since 5 years, I have clear evidences that we are conscious in
all phases of sleep, but it is a hell of work to be able to memorize
the "events", especially for the slow sleep (the non REM sleep, in
french).
Can you tell us how you did it?
Personally, I noticed many times that when I wake up directly from
deep sleep I am in an alien emotional state, compared to every day
life emotions. I feel things that I have no name for.
Interesting. I have explored the "rem state" for years. I have dream
diaries, where I describe the texture, the colors, the type of
feeling, and if it is lucid, non-lucid, contra-lucid, pre-lucid (there
is a large variety of 'altered conscious state' in dreams).
In fact, from 1989 to 1994, I did some training of myself into the
lucid state (getting an average of four lucid dreams per month). In
1994, I succeeded for the first time to stay lucid falling in sleep,
and remain conscious during the low sleep before the start of the
dreams, and that was pretty alluring.
I don't recommend the technic, as it leads very easily to insomnia.
The technic was mainly:
1) Do whatever to be extremely tired (example: preliminary white
night(s), long walk during the day, ...)
2) Absorb a huge quantity of coffee before going to bed.
As you can guess there are variants, like using alcohol or whatever.
The difficulty relies in a frustration, between letting oneself
completely go, and sleep, and still doing the work of maintaining
attention focused on the fact that we are conscious.
Usually we go to bed to relax and "let it go" (including the memories
and the making of memories). To get "lucid" at night (enough to keep
consciousness, and memorizing it), you have to still make memories (to
be able to witness the consciousness, so to speak), and simultaneously
letting yourself "go enough" to let your brain handle the sleep process.
No doubt you will perturb the process all along, but then in first
person consciousness studies we are our only guinea-pig.
In the slow sleep, there are mixture of "nothing but consciousness",
sometimes a sort of "verbosity", and there are sort of "dreams" which
apparently mix and jump from many scenarios to completely different
one, very quickly, and we don't, normally, remember any of this. They
can support contents which are often related to the thoughts of the
day. (With fever similar states can become quite obsessive).
You can't practice this often, and that experience (with coffee) was
exceptional. But to be frank, I have progressed in that kind of
observation in 2008, when I discovered Salvia divinorum. It seems far
more efficacious, and far less toxic, than coffee, before bed.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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