The Unconscious

I had dream around the age of 10 in which the headmaster from the Bash Street Kids gave me a sort of animated book that contained the answer to any question I put to it. So I tried it out and watched as it flipped over its own pages automagically, eventually settling and displaying the information on the page with moving pictures - stuff about the Space Shuttle and Venus Fly Traps I think.

I was so happy, it felt like an incredibly powerful thing to have access to at the time. Then I woke up with it still fresh in my mind and was utterly bereft about the book being a dream and no such thing existing in the real world. Had to wait another 15 years for anything like that to become available.
 
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yyaldrin

in je ogen waait de wind
don't we have a lot of unconscious experiences and behaviour during our time awake as well? who is drawing geometric shapes when i'm on the telephone with someone or when i'm in a boring meeting? who is steering my hands?
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
I had dream around the age of 10 in which the headmaster from the Bash Street Kids gave me a sort of animated book that contained the answer to any question I put to it.

Dreams of The Book are especially blessed.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
Tulpas and other sub-personality phenomena are interesting, because they present as if they have some intentionality of their own - they're not so much "unconscious" as "not integrated into the main branch of consciousness" (assuming that there is such a "main branch").
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I read somewhere that the guy who discovered LSD didn't see any of the stuff that people have come to associate with it - eastern mystic imagery, etc. - with the implication being it was because it wasn't suggested to him beforehand.

Not that I've ever seen any of that stuff on LSD, but I guess I have had "cliched" hallucinations.
 

version

Well-known member
My brother described a dream he had where he was forced to fight his double and every time he damaged it, the same would happen to him.
 

version

Well-known member
I read somewhere that the guy who discovered LSD didn't see any of the stuff that people have come to associate with it - eastern mystic imagery, etc. - with the implication being it was because it wasn't suggested to him beforehand.

Not that I've ever seen any of that stuff on LSD, but I guess I have had "cliched" hallucinations.

I actually thought about this earlier re: food. I find that if I eat a doughnut or something equally unhealthy, it feels unhealthy, it's got a heaviness to it. Whereas if I eat an apple, it has a crisp lightness to it and I couldn't work out whether it was something inherent in the food or simply a psychological thing due to being taught that one's supposedly unhealthy, the other healthy.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
My brother described a dream he had where he was forced to fight his double and every time he damaged it, the same would happen to him.

I don't want to ruin this thread by filling it with movie clips etc but it would be a good thread maybe about films, music, books, etc. That have captured the dream state.

Cos this made me think of the lighthouse scene in annihilation.
 

yyaldrin

in je ogen waait de wind

"Ashley was intrigued by his involuntary speech, and the idea of composing music that was unconscious. Seeing that the speech that resulted from having Tourette's could not be controlled, it was a different aspect from producing music that is deliberate and conscious, and music that is performed is considered "doubly deliberate" according to Ashley.[24] Although there seemed to be a connection between the involuntary speech, and music, the connection was different due to it being unconscious versus conscious."
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
Unconscious minds run the world, largely speaking - at least in the sense that so many of people's actions/orientations are governed by considerations which seem to be beyond their conscious awareness. Obviously the current state of the world is a parable to this effect (well, if only it were just a parable).

Bringing the material into awareness can often be really painful, if it is even possible. 'Easier' not to, except of course it isn't actually necessarily easier.
 
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Corpsey

bandz ahoy
is there a conscious?

Our 'conscious' decisions are made for us by our unconscious. I suppose you might say that science transcends the mental biases it has identified, perhaps then there is only a collective conscious?
 
is there a conscious?

Our 'conscious' decisions are made for us by our unconscious. I suppose you might say that science transcends the mental biases it has identified, perhaps then there is only a collective conscious?

Yes, there definitely is a conscious.
If there wasn't you wouldn't know it, but even to ask the question there must be.
Are you alluding to the Libet experiment where unconscious processes precede action? It recently failed to replicate under more stringent lab conditions.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Are you alluding to the Libet experiment where unconscious processes precede action? It recently failed to replicate under more stringent lab conditions.

Nah, never heard of it.

I'm alluding to the fact that our idea that we make any conscious decisions is potentially vulnerable to attack. Perhaps I'm merely muddying the waters - there exists something we call 'conscious' thought, even if our sense of it might be illusory. The unconscious is the tail the wagging the dog.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
From my understanding, meditation is all about being awake to the "now", to being fully conscious ("Buddah" = awake) - but there's a paradox there in that attaining full consciousness entails the evaporation of the sense of a conscious self. Suggesting that to be conscious, you can't be self-conscious, and so where, then, does choice come in?

I think you start to encounter all this stuff when you meditate -

which is to say, i'm shit at it because i've not done it much but failing to do it is all about realising how completely out of "YOUR" control your mind is

You have to furrow your brow and fixate on your breath to have "full" control over it

DISLAIMER: I'm sleep deprived. Perhaps what I'm talking about is our sense of self, rather than our consciousness. But there's some sort of relation I'm blindly groping torwards.
 

luka

Well-known member
Corpsey is questioning the idea of consciousness as an actor not the idea of consciousness as an observer. Fundamental distinction.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
From my understanding, meditation is all about being awake to the "now", to being fully conscious ("Buddah" = awake) - but there's a paradox there in that attaining full consciousness entails the evaporation of the sense of a conscious self. Suggesting that to be conscious, you can't be self-conscious, and so where, then, does choice come in?

I think you start to encounter all this stuff when you meditate -

which is to say, i'm shit at it because i've not done it much but failing to do it is all about realising how completely out of "YOUR" control your mind is

You have to furrow your brow and fixate on your breath to have "full" control over it

DISLAIMER: I'm sleep deprived. Perhaps what I'm talking about is our sense of self, rather than our consciousness. But there's some sort of relation I'm blindly groping torwards.

You deffo get a weird sense of self from meditation. I think it kinda ruptures your sense of your self as a real thing, a solid object. It starts to feel less fixed, looser.
 

luka

Well-known member
Perhaps the most startling and fascinating things about the unconscious or the Not-I is that it operates outside of time.
 
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