Important Note - Mental Conditioning

Dream journal

: several days ago, cuddled and made out with a girl I worry about, who has been in some ways the love of my life. She seemed to enjoy the time in our dream. After the dream, I told her over instant messenger, I know dreams are not reflective of the people which inspire them. Classification: wish fulfilment.

Dream journal

: a few days ago, one of those where a mosquito inserts a worm beneath the skin, you try to swat the parasite as it swims around, visibly black on light flesh, beneath skin. Classification: nightmare, or just curiosity/concern.

Comment to present partner

: (Anyone's) self-loathing is kinda pointless. I think looking for a forever person is a bad use of (my) time, so (I) don't. But (anyone) might find a forever person even if (they are) not looking!

Mental conditioning

:

I notice that I may be experiencing some depression symptoms as a direct result of overfiltering sense stimuli. When I notice a sensation (initiated either from the peripheral nervous system, or from memory: both passing through the imagination), I typically push it to one of two buckets...

(a) marked for deletion (and monitoring until deletion), or

(b) marked for integration into main working memory (and monitoring until integration).

This is a trained response, for improving SNR in working memory. This is how one learns to delete dreams and other relatively useless ideas from working memory.

When noise filters are too aggressive, nearly nothing gets admitted to working memory. This is good when there is a lot of heavy processing to be done. But this is bad if you're not very awake, at the beginning of the conscious day, or if your working memory had slowed down mid-day due to overuse of a repetitive process - these are periods when the absence of new ideas for integration actually results in lethargy.

So as I woke up today and observed this in my thoughts, I made a point to recalibrate my integration filters. In order to ease the process of waking up, daily, I have to configure my filter into the opposite mode of what it does when I ignore distractions in order to help myself to fall asleep. It seems insufficient to let the subconscious decide what to integrate upon waking - if the subconscious is so used to being told to ignore all distractions, it continues to do so when one is supposed to wake up.

This is a good learning. It is a significant one. In college many years ago, I taught myself to forget dreams, as they occurred, to increase working memory. Perhaps now I shall have to dwell on dreams a little, if it helps me wake up when i want to. I have been studying this pattern for a couple of years now.

Normally (in these years) I only enjoyed the stimulus of conscious (lucid?) dreaming after many hours of sleep, during periods of sleep which have had a lower priority, say from hours 9-14. Supplementation of the diet with B12, caffeine, protein, etc. makes it more likely for lucid (we shall just call it this, for now) in earlier sleep hours... particularly during naps. For several years I have studied the experience of REM sleep to see if can be appreciated consciously. I am not sure if this is REM sleep, but I have enjoyed the process of closing my eyes, and relaxing the muscles which control my eye movements, so that the eyeballs thrash around, somewhat, while the nerves in those muscles experience the same sort of pleasure the larger skeletal muscles receive from light exertion, or rest after heavy exertion. Unsurprising, as the eye muscles do so much fine tactical work.