"Towards the end of the book, Cartwright explores the role of sleep and dreaming in consolidating what we call the self, with another admonition against memorys self-editing capacity:
[In] good sleepers, the mind is continuously active, reviewing experience from yesterday, sorting which new information is relevant and important to save due to its emotional saliency. Dreams are not without sense, nor are they best understood to be expressions of infantile wishes. They are the result of the interconnectedness of new experience with that already stored in memory networks. But memory is never a precise duplicate of the original; instead, it is a continuing act of creation. Dream images are the product of that creation. They are formed by pattern recognition between some current emotionally valued experience matching the condensed representation of similarly toned memories. Networks of these become our familiar style of thinking, which gives our behavior continuity and us a coherent sense of who we are. Thus, dream dimensions are elements of the schemas, and both represent accumulated experience and serve to filter and evaluate the new days input.
Sleep is a busy time, interweaving streams of thought with emotional values attached, as they fit or challenge the organizational structure that represents our identity. One function of all this action, I believe, is to regulate disturbing emotion in order to keep it from disrupting our sleep and subsequent waking functioning."
-- Edited by Torig on Sunday 4th of November 2012 02:05:43 AM
Months ago after I first moved a pkwheel I decided if anything was possible I'd be happiest if people couldn't be hurt so I then practiced with that reality in mind. As I began moving larger objects and moving papers from further away I noticed my dreams becoming more vivid and memorable.
In the first of these dreams I had relations with someone that seemed so realistic I only remember a flying dream years before it. It could've been my own projection because she reminded me of someone I actually knew at the time but she had different colored hair and a tattoo on her back. What made it seem more real while it was happening was that when we "finished" I was still there lol. I still remember putting on boxers, looking at my body and seeing I looked the same and her standing up and putting on a shirt while looking at me. I then remember walking into a bathroom and seeing a mirror. She then stepped into the shower there and I remember steam. Around there I woke up.
I've since only remembered dreams after that one and last night I had about 4 dreams I remember but one seemed more like a vision because the details were like the screen I'm looking at now. But I was in third person view which is not like real life and I was watching a man wearing sandals who didn't look like me pedalling his bicycle on an Interstate highway I know with nothing but cars passing him as he kept pedalling forward closer to buildings I saw.