"We all know a little about lucid dreaming: the fascinating idea of waking up in a dream with all your wits about you. Over the years I’ve read much about lucid dreaming, but I’ve been frustrated that it’s mostly portrayed as an amusement park ride. Surely, there has to be more to it than spectacle and entertainment..."
"There are many forms of relaxation: mental, physical, visceral, temporal, pertaining to health, exercise, work, play, or relationships, for a start. These feel different, require different means, and have different ends, but we distinguish them
"A long time ago, before I can even remember, I saw a picture of a balloon-like animal conjectured to live in the atmosphere of Jupiter. That image caught my imagination, and stuck with me... and now I have
This piece is about what we think is real and the difference between sensation and feeling. It is about the worlds of imagination and dreams, and the process of making feelings into sensations, that is making dreams real.This confusion about real and imagined disease is just plain dumb. It is a fallacy that imagination is not real, it can have as much effect as any other perception. In fact, everything sensed through perception is an act of imagination.
"One of the paradoxes of sleep is that the harder you try, the less you get. It would seem you are responsible, but lack the authority to procure it. The fundamental rule that authority must come with responsibility doesn't apply to sleep... It's a paradox for me too. I can see a person's problem, and what he or she needs. I could sell them an illusion that there is something they can do, but it would never work. What they need is not to do, and not to try. You cannot force your way into a sleeping state of mind..."
"If we don’t approach change correctly, we can’t make it happen. If you want to make better changes, you need a better understanding of how things change. This applies as much to your
"Reality consists of our assumptions about things we have not experienced: the common elements. We fill in the blanks by social contract, seeing the same things in a world of which we're mostly unaware. Everyday events are so familiar as to mean little. We 'think' strings of events and actions into stories flat and forward looking. And when we're finished building our flat story, with idiosyncrasies removed, we call it reality. The 'real world,' as opposed to the dream world..."
"We talk about the lifetime of a system as the time over which it works, between its beginning and its end, and for stars that shine this is a long time. "What does it mean
"There are well-documented reports of people healing ailments beyond what's considered possible. It is my own experience that many people with chronic ailments are already exercising an unusual skill in maintaining these ailments, although how
"Different parts of our body have their own personality and memory. Memory works when the attitudes and objectives of these parts are in harmony, and it fails when there is discord. You struggle to recall
"Consciousness is being aware of what comes up in your mind. That means thoughts, perceptions, and sensations. Consciousness is not the control of these things, it's awareness of them. Control happens elsewhere. "We are not
"Ever since Descartes poked us in the eye with 'I think therefore I am' people have been thinking straight, believing in one cause for every effect... but neither people nor the world are straight. They
