I began composing this blog while struggling to wake up out of sleep paralysis. I forgot it was sleep paralysis, and only recognized it as this familiar state which I had visited before.
As i woke up, moaned desperately, and drifted through various illusions of wakefulness, i thought "What is this state really?"
The various false wakes had included many scenes with people i know, and seemed like they couldnt take place in the present. But maybe it would happen in the future. So, maybe this trembling, fear stricken state of in-between conscious, trying to break through the thin transparent film of sleep into wakefulness- maybe it was really the mind/body trying to break through into another time, another reality.
I am regularly struck by such thoughts. I also regularly experience 'deja vu' or visions.
The prevalent view of deja vu is that they are actually just differences in sensory intake speed, so that some sensory data bypasses the short term memory, goes straight to the long term memory and then gets fed back to you as a memory, so thus you are experiencing new data and remembering that same data.
But my visions have become more than deja vu. They are quite clearly associations that make no sense in my present context and vanish quickly, leaving only what i can conscious repeat to myself, thus inputting into my memory.
So, I cant quite explain this in terms of that deja vu model, but the discrepancy between data intake and processing being a causal factor does seem to make sense.
Because these visions seem more common when i have alot of caffeine in me, when i have an empty stomach and i start to get jumpy, or when i havent gotten any sleep.
An example of one of these visions is:
The other day i was teaching a corporate class. We were having class in the main training room. Previously, the tables at which the students sat, had been arranged in a set of four. So that at each table three to four students sat.
That day, the seats had been changed so that they were all joined side by side, like a straight 'u'. The new arrangement triggered a vision, where I was seeing this arrangement like a memory.
The trick is that this deja vu was just the catalyst, the rest of the experience was a series of associations.
One of these associations was something like 'the woman is evil' and 'i need to tell stephen'.
These two thoughts- i cannot say they are truly part of a novel experience, because they are likely to have been influenced by my state of mind at the time.
The thought of and evil woman seemed connected to the woman who was in charge of training at that company. The thought of warning stephen fits into a general pattern of worrying about him all the time.
But there was one novel thought. It was "el nunca vences" but the 'vences' was pronounced with a hard 'c'
The question I have is: Where does this come from? How can my brain produce such fascinating data?
It is not enough to say that the experience is erroneous, although this is often the main concern.
Some people just want to right this sort of phenomena off as brain mistakes. But they are not merely mistakes, they are novel and bizarre occurrences.
If my brain mistakes the name of one of my students, that is understandable and the elements of the mistake are mostly obvious.
But when my brain is suddenly seized by thoughts and feelings that seem to come from nowhere. And that provide names that dont exist, words that dont exist, I think this is important.
Whether or not my visions have any real use, they represent the conscious mind being seized in a state where utterly novel phenomena are produced.
Now that i think of it, it is rather like an inverted dream.
Whereas the bits of conscious and on-the-periphery-of-conscious data are rearranged in the subconscious during dreams,
My visions seem like subconscious data rearranged in my conscious actively experiencing mind.
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