60. 20 February 2019
Shortly after noon local time of course. You are sitting in the living room with Owen and Brennan who will be going out for lunch with you shortly. Both are playing with their computers with the 'nick' on TV in the background. It's settled, you are heading to Potbelly's for lunch. - Amorella
1351 hours. We are back. Carol and the boys are upstairs playing a board game of their choice. Carol plays board games with the boys and I play chess.
You have your silencer earphones on facing north towards the double window in the living room observing a male cardinal on the feeding post in a background of a snow-covered hill with brush, pasture land and trees. You are anxious for Miss Havisham to critique the first chapter. She will set her own style for her reviews. - Amorella
I call these Soul Assessments "Overviews" because overviewing the heartanmind is what I do. This is focus on 'word choice, context, intent and continuity'' from a soul's perspective. If I were in a public high school system my function would be, when needed, guidance counselor to the Living and/or Dead individual's conscious and unconscious heartanmind. While I'm at it I need 'dream' defined because for all intents I am overviews a series of dream fragments in a three novel or trilogy format. - mh
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Dream
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A dream is a succession of images, ideas, emotions, and sensations that usually occur involuntarily in the mind during certain stages of sleep.[1] The content and purpose of dreams are not fully understood, although they have been a topic of scientific, philosophical and religious interest throughout recorded history. Dream interpretation is the attempt at drawing meaning from dreams and searching for an underlying message. The scientific study of dreams is called oneirology. . . ..
Opinions about the meaning of dreams have varied and shifted through time and culture. Many endorse the Freudian theory of dreams – that dreams reveal insight into hidden desires and emotions. Other prominent theories include those suggesting that dreams assist in memory formation, problem solving, or simply are a product of random brain activation.
Sigmund Freud, who developed the psychological discipline of psychoanalysis, wrote extensively about dream theories and their interpretations in the early 1900s. He explained dreams as manifestations of one's deepest desires and anxieties, often relating to repressed childhood memories or obsessions. Furthermore, he believed that virtually every dream topic, regardless of its content, represented the release of sexual tension. In The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), Freud developed a psychological technique to interpret dreams and devised a series of guidelines to understand the symbols and motifs that appear in our dreams. In modern times, dreams have been seen as a connection to the unconscious mind. They range from normal and ordinary to overly surreal and bizarre. Dreams can have varying natures, such as being frightening, exciting, magical, melancholic, adventurous, or sexual. The events in dreams are generally outside the control of the dreamer, with the exception of lucid dreaming, where the dreamer is self-aware. Dreams can at times make a creative thought occur to the person or give a sense of inspiration.
In literature
Dream frames were frequently used in medieval allegory to justify the narrative; The Book of the Duchess and The Vision Concerning Piers Plowman are two such dream visions. Even before them, in antiquity, the same device had been used by Cicero and Lucian of Samosata. . . .
They have also featured in fantasy and speculative fiction since the 19th century. One of the best-known dream worlds is Wonderland from Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, as well as Looking-Glass Land from its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass. Unlike many dream worlds, Carroll's logic is like that of actual dreams, with transitions and flexible causality.
Other fictional dream worlds include the Dreamlands of H.P. Lovecraft's Dream Cycleand The Neverending Story's world of Fantasia, which includes places like the Desert of Lost Dreams, the Sea of Possibilities and the Swamps of Sadness. Dreamworlds, shared hallucinations and other alternate realities feature in a number of works by Philip K. Dick, such as The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and Ubik. Similar themes were explored by Jorge Luis Borges, for instance in The Circular Ruins.
In popular culture
Modern popular culture often conceives of dreams, like Freud, as expressions of the dreamer's deepest fears and desires. The film version of The Wizard of Oz (1939) depicts a full-color dream that causes Dorothy to perceive her black-and-white reality and those with whom she shares it in a new way. In films such as Spellbound (1945), The Manchurian Candidate (1962), Field of Dreams (1989), and Inception (2010), the protagonists must extract vital clues from surreal dreams. . . ..
In speculative fiction, the line between dreams and reality may be blurred even more in the service of the story. Dreams may be psychically invaded or manipulated (Dreamscape, 1984; the Nightmare on Elm Street films, 1984–2010; Inception, 2010) or even come literally true (as in The Lathe of Heaven, 1971). In Ursula K. Le Guin's book, The Lathe of Heaven (1971), the protagonist finds that his "effective" dreams can retroactively change reality. Peter Weir's 1977 Australian film The Last Wave makes a simple and straightforward postulate about the premonitory nature of dreams (from one of his Aboriginal characters) that "... dreams are the shadow of something real". In Kyell Gold's novel Green Fairy from the Dangerous Spirits series, the protagonist, Sol, experiences the memories of a dancer who died 100 years before through Absinthe induced dreams and after each dream something from it materializes into his reality. Such stories play to audiences' experiences with their own dreams, which feel as real to them.
As excitations of long-term memory
Eugen Tarnow suggests that dreams are ever-present excitations of long-term memory, even during waking life. The strangeness of dreams is due to the format of long-term memory, reminiscent of Penfield & Rasmussen's findings that electrical excitations of the cortex give rise to experiences similar to dreams. During waking life an executive function interprets long-term memory consistent with reality checking. Tarnow's theory is a reworking of Freud's theory of dreams in which Freud's unconscious is replaced with the long-term memory system and Freud's "Dream Work" describes the structure of long-term memory.
Role in strengthening semantic memories
A 2001 study showed evidence that illogical locations, characters, and dream flow may help the brain strengthen the linking and consolidation of semantic memories. These conditions may occur because, during REM sleep, the flow of information between the hippocampus and neocortex is reduced. . . .
Dynamic psychiatry
Freud's view
In the late 19th century, psychotherapist Sigmund Freud developed a theory (since discredited) that the content of dreams is driven by unconscious wish fulfillment. Freud called dreams the "royal road to the unconscious." He theorized that the content of dreams reflects the dreamer's unconscious mind and specifically that dream content is shaped by unconscious wish fulfillment. He argued that important unconscious desires often relate to early childhood memories and experiences. Freud's theory describes dreams as having both manifest and latent content. Latent content relates to deep unconscious wishes or fantasies while manifest content is superficial and meaningless. Manifest content often masks or obscures latent content.
Jung's view
relates to the dreamer's unconscious desires. He described dreams as messages to the dreamer and argued that dreamers should pay attention for their own good. He came to believe that dreams present the dreamer with revelations that can uncover and help to resolve emotionalor religious problems and fears.
Jung wrote that recurring dreams show up repeatedly to demand attention, suggesting that the dreamer is neglecting an issue related to the dream. He called this "compensation." The dream balances the conscious belief and attitudes with an alternative. Jung did not believe that the conscious attitude was wrong and that the dream provided the true belief. He argued that good work with dreams takes both into account and comes up with a balanced viewpoint. He believed that many of the symbols or images from these dreams return with each dream. Jung believed that memories formed throughout the day also play a role in dreaming. These memories leave impressions for the unconscious to deal with when the ego is at rest. The unconscious mind re-enacts these glimpses of the past in the form of a dream. Jung called this a day residue. Jung also argued that dreaming is not a purely individual concern, that all dreams are part of "one great web of psychological factors."
Fritz Perls' view
Fritz Perls presented his theory of dreams as part of the holistic nature of Gestalt therapy. Dreams are seen as projections of parts of the self that have been ignored, rejected, or suppressed. Jung argued that one could consider every person in the dream to represent an aspect of the dreamer, which he called the subjective approach to dreams. Perls expanded this point of view to say that even inanimate objects in the dream may represent aspects of the dreamer. The dreamer may, therefore, be asked to imagine being an object in the dream and to describe it, in order to bring into awareness the characteristics of the object that correspond with the dreamer's personality.
Individual differences
In line with the salience hypothesis, there is considerable evidence that people who have more vivid, intense or unusual dreams show better recall. There is evidence that continuity of consciousness is related to recall. Specifically, people who have vivid and unusual experiences during the day tend to have more memorable dream content and hence better dream recall. People who score high on measures of personality traits associated with creativity, imagination, and fantasy, such as openness to experience, daydreaming, fantasy proneness, absorption, and hypnotic susceptibility, tend to show more frequent dream recall. There is also evidence for continuity between the bizarre aspects of dreaming and waking experience. That is, people who report more bizarre experiences during the day, such as people high in schizotypy (psychosis proneness) have more frequent dream recall and also report more frequent nightmares.
Hallucination
A hallucination, in the broadest sense of the word, is a perception in the absence of a stimulus. In a stricter sense, hallucinations are perceptions in a conscious and awake state, in the absence of external stimuli, and have qualities of real perception, in that they are vivid, substantial, and located in external objective space. The latter definition distinguishes hallucinations from the related phenomena of dreaming, which does not involve wakefulness.
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Oneirology
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Oneirology (/ɒnɪˈrɒlədʒi/; from Greek ὄνειρον, oneiron, "dream"; and -λογία, -logia, "the study of") is the scientific study of dreams. Current research seeks correlations between dreaming and current knowledge about the functions of the brain, as well as understanding of how the brain works during dreaming as pertains to memory formation and mental disorders. The study of oneirology can be distinguished from dream interpretation in that the aim is to quantitatively study the process of dreams instead of analyzing the meaning behind them.
Definition of a dream
The definition of dream used in quantitative research is defined through four base components: 1) a form of thinking that occurs under minimal brain direction, external stimuli are blocked, and the part of the brain that recognizes self shuts down; 2) a form of experience that we believed we experience through our senses; 3) something memorable; 4) have some interpretation of experience by self. In summary, a dream, as defined by Bill Domhoff and Adam Schneider, is "a report of a memory of a cognitive experience that happens under the kinds of conditions that are most frequently produced in a state called 'sleep.' "
Selected and edited from Wikipedia
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I also am adding a definition of 'hypnotic trance' because Richard used the device throughout this trilogy. This is, as it were, dreaming the novels with cognitively open eyes. mh
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Hypnosis
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Hypnosis is a state of human consciousness involving focused attention, reduced peripheral awareness, and an enhanced capacity to respond to suggestion. The term may also refer to an art, skill, or act of inducing hypnosis.
Theories explaining what occurs during hypnosis fall into two groups. Altered statetheories see hypnosis as an altered state of mind or trance, marked by a level of awareness different from the ordinary state of consciousnessIn contrast, nonstatetheories see hypnosis as, variously, a type of placebo effect, a redefinition of an interaction with a therapist or form of imaginative role enactment.
During hypnosis, a person is said to have heightened focus and concentration. Hypnotised subjects are said to show an increased response to suggestions. Hypnosis usually begins with a hypnotic induction involving a series of preliminary instructions and suggestion. The use of hypnotism for therapeutic purposes is referred to as "hypnotherapy", while its use as a form of entertainment for an audience is known as "stage hypnosis". Stage hypnosis is often performed by mentalists practicing the art form of mentalism. . . .
Suggestion and Auto-suggestion
Coué was so deeply impressed by Bernheim's concept of “suggestive therapeutics” — in effect, "an imperfect re-branding of the ‘dominant idea’ theory that Braid had appropriated from Thomas Brown — that, on his return to Troyes from his (1886-1886) interlude with Liébeault and Bernheim, he made a practice of reassuring his clients by praising each remedy's efficacy. He noticed that, in specific cases, he could increase a medicine's efficacy by praising its effectiveness. He realized that, when compared those to whom he said nothing, those to whom he praised the medicine had a noticeable improvement (this is suggestive of what would later be identified as a "placebo response").
"Around 1903, Coué recommended a new patent medicine, based on its promotional material, which effected an unexpected and immediate cure (Baudouin, 1920, p.90; Shrout, 1985, p.36). Coué (the chemist) found “[by subsequent] chemical analysis in his laboratory [that there was] nothing in the medicine which by the remotest stretch of the imagination accounted for the results” (Shrout, ibid.). Coué (the hypnotist) concluded that it was cure by suggestion; but, rather than Coué having cured him, the man had cured himself by continuously telling himself the same thing that Coué had told him."
The birth of "Conscious Autosuggestion"
Coué discovered that subjects could not be hypnotized against their will and, more importantly, that the effects of hypnotic suggestion waned when the subjects regained consciousness.] He thus eventually developed the Coué method, and released his first book, Self-Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion (published in 1920 in England and two years later in the United States). He described autosuggestion itself as:
“
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... an instrument that we possess at birth, and with which we play unconsciously all our life, as a baby plays with its rattle. It is however a dangerous instrument; it can wound or even kill you if you handle it imprudently and unconsciously. It can on the contrary save your life when you know how to employ it consciously.
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”
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Although Coué never doubted pharmaceutical medicine, and still advocated its application, he also came to believe that one's mental state could positively affect, and even amplify, the pharmaceutical action of medication. He observed that those patients who used his mantra-like conscious suggestion, "Every day, in every way, I'm getting better and better", (French: Tous les jours, à tous points de vue, je vais de mieux en mieux; lit. 'Every day, from all points of view, I'm getting better and better') — in his view, replacing their "thought of illness" with a new "thought of cure", could augment their pharmaceutical regimen in an efficacious way.
Conceptual difference from Autogenic Training
By contrast with the conceptualization driving Coué's auto-suggestive self-administration procedure — namely, that constant repetition creates a situation in which "a particular idea saturates the microcognitive environment of 'the mind'…", which, then, in its turn, "is converted into a corresponding ideomotor, ideosensory, or ideoaffective action, by the ideodynamic principle of action", "which then, in its turn, generates the response"— the primary target of the entirely different self-administration procedure developed by Johannes Heinrich Schultz, known as Autogenic Training, was to affect the autonomic nervous system, rather than (as Coué's did) to affect 'the mind'.
The Coué method
The Coué method centers on a routine repetition of this particular expression according to a specified ritual, in a given physical state, and in the absence of any sort of allied mental imagery, at the beginning and at the end of each day. Coué maintained that curing some of our troubles requires a change in our subconscious/unconscious thought, which can only be achieved by using our imagination. Although stressing that he was not primarily a healer but one who taught others to heal themselves, Coué claimed to have affected organic changes through autosuggestion.
Underlying principles
Coué thus developed a method which relied on the belief that any idea exclusively occupying the mind turns into reality, although only to the extent that the idea is within the realm of possibility. For instance, a person without hands will not be able to make them grow back. However, if a person firmly believes that his or her asthma is disappearing, then this may actually happen, as far as the body is actually able to physically overcome or control the illness. On the other hand, thinking negatively about the illness (e.g. "I am not feeling well") will encourage both mind and body to accept this thought.
Willpower
Coué observed that the main obstacle to autosuggestion was willpower. For the method to work, the patient must refrain from making any independent judgement, meaning that he must not let his will impose its own views on positive ideas. Everything must thus be done to ensure that the positive "autosuggestive" idea is consciously accepted by the patient, otherwise one may end up getting the opposite effect of what is desired.
Coué noted that young children always applied his method perfectly, as they lacked the willpower that remained present among adults. When he instructed a child by saying "clasp your hands" and then "you can't pull them apart" the child would thus immediately follow his instructions and be unable to unclasp their hands.
Autogenic training
Autogenic training is an autosuggestion-centered relaxation technique influenced by the Coué method. In 1932, Germanpsychiatrist Johannes Schultz developed and published on autogenic training. Unlike autosuggestion, autogenic training has been proven in clinical trials and, along with other relaxation techniques, such as progressive relaxation and meditation, has replaced autosuggestion in therapy. The co-author of Schultz's multi-volume tome on autogenic training, Wolfgang Luthe, was a firm believer that autogenic training was a powerful approach that should only be offered to patients by qualified professionals. Its effectiveness has been confirmed in several studies.
Selected and edited from Wikipedia
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Evening. The Wikipedia material in today's blog shows my base sense of definitions used within my Overview of the Books by Chapter.The purpose of this is to give a general
background to both Richard and to any other interested public Reader. mh
2234 hours. This background gives me a greater sense of ease with Miss Havirsham. In context with this Encounters blog I accept her as a persona of my soul just as I accept I have a persona based on heartansoulanmind and that I have a friend, Amorella, who I trust to help share my fictions mixed with some underlying intuitive concepts about a plausible nature of the invisible reality we humans sometimes sense to be in our spiritual humanity (nature) but by its nature cannot be proven scientifically (nor should it be provable because we are less than purely spiritual beings).
