Wild ideas 2: Does the dream state have a life of its own?

...and maybe it controls the responsiveness of the waking autonomic nervous system.

I am unvaxxed

What exactly is our dream life?

We are led to believe that our dreams are the way by which we process the events of our daily lives.

We are led to believe that our waking state is our real experience, and that our sleep state merely helps us process that experience.

1. But what if they are at least equal realities, and what if both states co-exist at all times, with the only difference between sleep and wakefulness being the dominance of the voice we can hear (and our ability to physically move, of course)?

2. And what if, as we become more aware of our sleep state during our waking hours, and more conscious in our sleep state, that we become able to hear both voices in both states, some of the time? Could certain types of meditation be training us to do this?

3. How much is our waking state talking to us and even controlling us during our sleep state, and how much is our sleep state talking to us and even controlling us in our waking state?

4. How much “bleeding” is there between sleep and wakefulness and what form or forms does it take?

Have a look at my title. I would love it if there exists some research or philosophy that discusses the questions above and that can lead me directly to the answers. Please let me know if you know of any resources.

The dream state has always fascinated me

My father was the classic absent father, but he turned up, from time to time and affected my consciousness in very meaningful ways. One of the most meaningful was when he suggested, on tucking me into bed one night, that I try to watch the point at which I fall asleep and the point at which I wake up. I learned particularly to watch the hypnagogic state I entered upon falling asleep, and for a time, was able to consciously stay in it and take actions in it, albeit very much larger than life. I also learned how to take control and become conscious from within a dream and “lucid dream”, although always accidentally. I even had dreams where I was participating in real time events, and saw the whole event act out. I also had a few premonitions that came into being, and many apparent premonitions which did not. I never mastered the point of wakefulness because I would go into waking paralysis which terrified me.

This set me up for a lifetime of being fascinated by dream states and various other altered states, but my waking life has taken my attention for much of my life and my sleep state skills have diminished over time.

How high blood pressure has led me here

My blood pressure is dangerously high and not coming down, either with drugs or with natural high blood pressure treatments. Nothing seems to be controlling it. I have gone through a battery of tests to prove that there is no clotting or other physiological malfunction causing the blood pressure to go up. During this time, when my doctor has been looking for a physiological cause, I have been insisting that the cause is anxiety based, that it is behavioral in some way. Now that the tests have eliminated a physiological cause, he wants to treat the anxiety by doping me off the planet, which I refuse to do. My brain is the only entertainment I have and is my most valued attribute. I have no intention of deliberately doping it down or in any way compromising it more than the long covid is already doing. I do not intend to reduce myself to a fraction of the person I am.

So, as is my wont, I have a problem to solve and I will work out my own way of solving it.

Tracking down my high blood pressure. My new toy, a SMART watch. (yes I know, EMF danger alert!)

I have just bought a smart watch, in an attempt to come to some understanding of why my blood pressure is so dangerously high, even when I think I am relaxed. It measures all sorts of things, that, when put together, paint an interesting picture. I don't think it is entirely accurate, particularly with regards to blood sugar and blood pressure. But the movements of both are about right, which is good enough for me to work with, and heart rate and oxygenation are accurate. It also measures not only sleep but sleep stages, and it turns out that I am only getting about 4-5 hours total sleep at night, according to my watch, and often zero deep sleep.

It is early days, but the readings are leading to some interesting speculations and insights. Last night, according to the watch, I was awake from 5-6am, my heart rate jumped to 90 at 5am, and my blood pressure jumped by about 5 points. Both slowly came down after 6am. I was clearly in some kind of crisis, except that I was not awake at 5am - 6am and not even dreaming (the watch classified me as awake, not as in REM sleep, and there was no REM on either side of the apparent period of about 1 hour awake, just “light sleep”. So something about my sleep state caused a real physical crisis reaction, that the watch read as being awake, even though I was not, at any level, conscious.

This started me off on some wild speculations this morning about how separate the two states of sleep and wakefulness really are and whether clues to our health issues might lie in how those two states work together.

Visceral responses to dream feelings that persist during the day

We all know those times when we wake up from a dream and the "feeling" we had in that dream, often an uncomfortable one but sometimes a beautiful one, follows us throughout the day. Even if we cannot remember the details of the dream we can still return to the feeling it invoked, a feeling that has a built-in visceral response, whether love or dread or fear or some other strong emotion, registered in the body. While we feel it, we are feeling an emotion in real time that has nothing whatsoever to do with what is actually happening in our waking state. It has bled through from our sleep state to our waking state.

For me the visceral dream emotion is often a new feeling - a feeling I have not experienced in my waking state, but now it is registered right there in my body somewhere, without any memory of how how it was laid there. Even when uncomfortable, I choose to go back to it and visit it and try and find it again because it is fascinatingly new. Something is bleeding through from my sleep state into my waking state and I want to know what it is and where it has come from.

Am I having real experiences overnight that are part of my consciousness and my being even though I have little or no waking memory of them?

Excessive waking responses

During my waking state I seem to have what everyone else regards as excessive emotional and physiological responses, bursts of adrenaline and cortisol, to an amplified sense of danger. If I walk into a room where I have to talk to any other person, my body produces all the stress reactions of this person being a threat to my life. During my waking life, my heart rate and blood pressure both spike with EVERY human contact (which includes letters in letter boxes and phone calls). With some, I do actually dread the contact, with others, I am not aware of fearing the contact, but my body is still reacting as if I do.

This is, of course, very bad for my health and my life - with every human interaction sending my body into fight and flight mode, when there is nothing there to fight or run away from.

Could the threat be real?

My autonomic nervous system is on high alert for much of the time and there are all sorts of treatment regimes for people like me, that fail miserably. They treat the anxiety state as an aberration rather than a potential reality. But what if it is real? What if it is justified?

Today, for the first time in my life, I have asked myself whether my dream state is running in the background, during the day, with the volume turned down. I am asking whether it might be controlling my hyper-vigilant autonomic nervous system. Is there a real world happening in my dream state, and running in the background during the day, where my life really is at risk, and where each human interaction might be an opening for a threat from my dream life - or some other level of consciousness - to bleed through into my waking life?

Anxiety dreams

All my life I have had anxiety dreams and nightmares, and many of them have caused me to wake in terror, sometimes apparently screaming, although I have no idea if the scream actually made it through into the waking state, and whether I screamed out loud or just in my mind.

In recent years I still get nightmares, but I seem to be better able to take over. I am about to save myself from whatever is threatening me, but just as I am about to reach safety, which entails something really physical like jumping over a fence, I find myself awake in mid air, tangled in my bedclothes and landing heavily somewhere near my bed. And it hurts. I have injured myself three times this way. So these more recent anxiety dreams, whilst being less terrifying that my earlier anxiety dreams, are bleeding through somehow into my wakefulness - a rather dramatic form of sleep walking before I wake up in mid flight and crash to the floor.

My dream has been real enough to translate into a physical action, presumably with its corresponding spike in heart rate and blood pressure, although I did not think to test them at the time. Next time it happens, the watch will tell me what physiological response I was having at the time.

How do we get well when our health is crashing?

I have been trying to track down the actual cause of my recent and rapid health decline. I had started to ramp up exploring the neuroendocrine system as a way of potentially managing fibromyalgia, long covid and insulin resistance, when I got sidetracked dealing with two cancer diagnoses, but I am now heading back in that direction. Why is my autonomic nervous system so determined to keep me in a state of hypervigilance, and how can I calm it down without dumbing it down with mind numbing drugs?

I know I need to calm down the stress hormones, but how?

Can we trust the wisdom of the body?

I like to think that my body knows best, and with that logic, if it thinks my life is under threat, then maybe it is, and maybe I should be running away from or fighting something if only I knew what it was. If the threat is invisible, like EMFs, or ideas carried on air waves, and received into my body, particularly during the night, but during the day as well, maybe there IS a real threat to be handled. Maybe what has to be damped down somehow is not my body but some aspect of the air waves around me that are apparently threatening me.

Is there a threat in the airwaves?

Which reminds me of another anecdote. In my younger years I was working at a home for young female offenders, where they were locked in at night, but free during the day. This night, we had been held at gunpoint by an irate Muslim father and his male relatives toting guns, demanding that we return his daughter to them. It was not until early morning that the gun toting men decided to go home and my replacement staff member arrived, so I got to go home myself. I was in a shock state, so I called in at an all night milk bar to buy a sugar hit, to get me the rest of the way home. I walked in and asked for a Picnic. Now I never eat Picnics. I detest Picnics. The man behind the counter said “that was quick” and when I asked him what he was talking about, he said, “the advert has only just been on”, referring to an ad on TV for Picnics. He told me he always gets a rush after an advert. So something on the airwaves bled into my shattered brain, and took over. What chance is there that the hypervigilance of sensitives is detecting a real rather than imagined threat?

Worth exploring eh?

Now how do I find a therapist I can afford to explore micro-dosing with psychedelics, in an attempt to get more consciously inside these altered states and find out what is really going on there? Even if it does not help me get well again, it could make my declining years vastly more entertaining and rewarding. I am so over being straight!

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Can you help?

I intend to keep writing of my journey through this rather strange time in my life, and for this planet. As soon as I know, you will know what does and does not work to exorcise this bio-weapon from our bodies.

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