#684
I dreamed I was in a cave, an old rock formation carved by water I think. There was fine, fine silt, or sand I suppose, at my feet. It was really thin, like dust almost. I walked and everything was illuminated, but I don’t think there was any light source. I walked between stalactites and stalagmites and I remember thinking about swimming through the air. The whole thing felt like it should have been filled with water and I knew that it usually was but that it wasn’t right now because I was there. I walked through it and took a tunnel out of the chamber. It wasn’t illuminated and gradually the light from the water-chamber faded. I remember feeling mildly threatened because I remembered previous dreams and most of my threatening dreams take place underground for whatever reason. But I didn’t feel anything wrong so I kept going. Then I saw green and blue lights ahead of me and I stopped, again feeling mildly worried. Then I realized there weren’t anything weird, they were just my across-the-street neighbors lights he has in his yard. I imagine they’re for lighting the path at night because it gets incredibly dark because of tree cover, but there doesn’t seem to be a rhyme or reason to them. But once I realized this, I turned around to look behind me and there wasn’t a cave, but my house standing where it should be and I was in my yard. I looked up and could barely make out the sky, but it could just barely make it out against the black forms of the trees and…I felt a particular way. I don’t know how to describe it anymore. Something melancholy but not sad. I closed my eyes tight and opened them up and I was laying in my bed with the sheets torn off my bed and underneath me.
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I’ve been working a ton lately. Haven’t had time to unwind, or sleep really, let alone right. I was on from the last half of the third to the first half of the 9th. 144 hours straight of being on duty, YES. We’ve been getting hit with call after call, quite a few of them really serious, a few people I knew as well. One of them was the little sister of one of my better high school friends. She rolled a dune buggy and got ejected/ran over. Busted herself up pretty decently. Hum. The family has since told me the doctors have said there is nothing was wrong with her and just bruises. But…I know her left eye was reacting very sluggishly afterwards and that infers brain trauma. And I also know that she’s still in the hospital two days later. I also know that she doesn’t have insurance and that if they thought there was nothing wrong w/ her at all that they’d kick her out. That’s just how the hospitals around here function…they get you stable then give you the boot right out of the ER if they think you’re good. And we were able to stabilize her in the back of our rig so….that tells me there’s something the family isn’t being told or that they misunderstood. Or, since it came from an aunt, that the mother didn’t think important enough to tell her sister. I bet it’s because of the potential for serious brain injury and they’re watching her for that. I suppose I could just ask the doctor next time I roll into the hospital what they did with her. Maybe I will.
Work sleep, work sleep. Yeesh. I’ve been meaning to write here. I’ve had things on my mind, but mostly I just talk about them as they come up with others and then let it go. And really, mostly I’ve been rather solitary. I miss kate.
One of the things that has been actively on my mind is the idea of belief and knowledge being a restricter rather than an expander. Normally one would say that the more you know, the bigger the world actually is because you realize it’s depth. Similarly the phrase ‘you’re small-minded’ means you don’t understand much, are open to less and (usually) are wrong. But is that actually correct? In many of the ways implied, sure it is. But in others….perhaps not so much.
Consider three things:
1. When you define something you make it more difficult, and perhaps even impossible, to see that thing in other ways. For example, when you see a cut of meat and see it as something you cook for food and you reinforce that definition every time you see a cut of meat, it becomes more difficult to see a cut of meat as a tool. For example, a make-shift cold compress or a binding material. Or if you’re a racist, if you hate latinos it becomes more difficult if not impossible to see a latino as a trustworthy individual you could be best friends with, or married to. This goes for any kind of thought, positive or negative, every thought limits your ability to think other thoughts that aren’t tacitly implied by the original.
2. When you recall your feelings on something, the strongest memory/emotion is recalled first and not the other things you might have thought/felt about said object. For example, if you went out on a date and it went terribly and the guy was a total slob, if you were to recall that memory you’d remember that first and not remember that the food was nice, the restaurant had good wait staff and the guy in the taxi on the way home switched the station for you etc.
3. Humans learn and think in chains. We define things in a very basic way first, then to a basic way, then to a deeper way until, by the time we hit adulthood, we have incredibly complex definitions for almost everything around us. Even something as ‘simple’ as what the word "water" means to a person is incredibly complex, but it goes by so fast we don’t notice it and think of it as simple.
My chain of thought on water currently goes like this:
Water. It’s something you drink which breaks down to a feeling in my mouth which breaks down to a sort of taste " " the feeling in my throat " " pleasurable feeling " " only drinking so much " " sensation of thirst " " what is thirst? " " thirst is a physical desire " " am I thirsty? " " yes I am " " how much? " " only a little.
And then it goes down another path: Water " " something you cook with " " measuring water " " pouring water into a pan for stew " " everything else about the stew (not breaking this down) " " can use for marinades too (not breaking this down either.
Another path: Water " " Swimming " " Movement through water " " sensation of water on skin " " how you move when in this environment " " depth of water " " sand/mud at bottom " " depth of water " " deep water " " fish in water " " other things in water " " not being able to move as effectively as other things in water " " feeling inadequate in water " " not trusting myself to be safe in water " " not liking deep water " " how much do I not like it? " " a good bit of dislike " " I don’t want to swim in deep water " " How much do I not like shallow water? " " I don’t dislike it " " I kind of want to swim in shallow water. " " What bodies of water are shallow? " " rivers and lakes which goes on and on to rivers vs. lakes and which I prefer etc etc etc.
It’s maddeningly complex. I’m oversimplifying and skipping ideas like whoa up there and even doing that it grew to something rather large. Try it with yourself sometime. Think of a simple object and try to trace everything that comes through your mind. It goes really quickly and it’s hard to do, but you’ll see little chains like mine that are build upon themselves and grow. The placement in the chain matters too because it defines the rest of the thoughts that go through it. Like, if you look at my bit on water, somewhat deeper in swimming chain you notice I don’t like deep water because I don’t feel adequate or safe in deep water because I know I’m not designed for it and that I can get hurt in that way or also possibly because there are other things in the water who *are* designed for it that might want to hurt me and I couldn’t retaliate or protect myself effectively. If that idea had started at the beginning it would’ve influenced the entire rest of the chain. If it was a more powerful fear, it could’ve dominated all of my thoughts. If it was a lesser one, or a suppressed one, it could be so far in the background that it might not even be actively realized yet subconsciously affect the other thoughts in the chain. The position matters, the force of the feeling matters too, the thing you’re most used to in a certain context matters as well. Like I see water first as something to consume and only later as a something to do. It wasn’t until later that I thought of water as a tool. If I had just thought quickly about water the idea of it being a tool would never cross my mind. And that’s restrictive.
That’s a small part of what I mean by when I say the things you know and/or believe restrict you. It doesn’t matter if they are true or not. Even if you think of something as wrong or false it affects you the same way as something you believe or something that you believe is true. So like, for me, it actually takes mental work for me to see water as a tool even if it’s a relatively small amount of mental work.
The bigger thing I mean is that when you believe something, it cuts off your avenues for believing something that runs counter to what you believe. For example, if you believe gays and lesbians should be allowed to marry for reasons X, Y and Z it makes it nearly impossible for you to believe gays and lesbians should not be allowed to marry for reasons X2, Y2, Z2. Nevermind the fact that the idea of marriage is a subjective one, that the idea of sexuality is also a subjective question and that ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ are ALSO subjective ideas; there are no demonstrably right or wrong answers here, it’s all subject. Interestingly, neuroscience has been doing brain scans of people thinking about various topics and there’s a part of the brain that lights up when you ask them a "demonstrably true" fact like 1+1 = 2. Another area of the brain lights up when you ask them a clearly ‘opinion’ question like what color do you like best? Coke or pepsi? That we’ve known for a while, but the interesting bit is that if you ask moral opinion questions, the area that lights up is not the opinion area of the brain, but rather the this is a fact area of the brain. One of the questions they asked was this. You are on a rail platform and there is a train track in front of you and a computer-guided train coming down the track. There are 10 people tied to the tracks further down the line and all of them will die if the train keeps going. However, there is someone else on the train track with you and if you push him off the track in front of the train, the computer will stop the train and the 10 people tied to the track will live. What is the right thing to do?
There are a few major schools of thought on this but I’ll only focus on two, first is the do-no-harm school of thought. In this frameset it says that you live as positive a life as you can while doing no harm to others. In this case it would be wrong to push the man off even at the expense of other lives. The other people are there because of someone else and that is not your fault any more than the death of someone halfway across the world whom you do not know and have never met or influenced is. The other school of thought, the utilitarianism branch of thought, says that you need to maximize positive action and minimize suffering. Thus, you would be morally obligated to kill the man on the platform because 5 lives saved is more positive than 1 life saved.
Needless to say, both sets of logic are sound; what it comes down to is an opinion and what you believe. And when people are presented with this sort of question the area of the brain that is associated with ‘this is a fact’ lights up, not the opinion area despite it being an opinion. That study also noted that when you ask other questions on contemporary issues like gay rights, abortion, democrat vs republican, race, sexuality and others, that the ‘fact’ area of the brain still lit up. The discerning factor for this seems to be the strength of the opinion…the more powerfully you believe something, even if rationally you realize it’s an opinion, it will come to you as a fact, not an opinion. Hum.
Which limits you. It limits your ability to see different point of views and it limits the way you can experience the world. There are so many experiences and so many ways to view the same thing, even things we have in common with people halfway across the globe, things like family or sex or caring. I feel so limited by the things I’ve already defined for myself. I want to break those chains, I want to see things that I’ve taken to be untrue or false. I don’t think I gave the wrong things enough time…the dichotomy between true and false seems to be less and less true the more I see and realize. Hm.
On a side tangent, perhaps this is why things like depression exist; a body once had certain sets of experiences and the brain acknowledged and reacted to them in a certain way, kicking off chemical cascades that push the person towards feeling a certain way. Then that’s passed on via epigenetics and over time that became an actual genetic mutation which is reinforced by the epigenetics a person carries. And now it just hits people even if they have no ‘reason’ to be depressed; it’s the chemical expressions of emotion pushed onto them because of the events of the distant past when they didn’t exist at all. Not that that the origin matters I suppose. I’m going to go lay down. I’m tired.
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