Communication with the Dream Condition

[Jessup2]

http://www.powerofdreams.net/dreamlanguage.html

 

Your limbic system controls "breathing" and "emotion". Both of which are considered necessary for developing and using energy like "chi"...

 

I have had the pleasure of learning a second language after my first, English. The difference is that once you have solidified one language, it is difficult to relaize that thought itself has no language until you learn a second. True fluid language skills come when you don't have to "think" about it to "express" thoughts, feelings, emotion, or details that become instantly clear to the listener.

You realize that you are dreaming in another way. You realize that your mind is functioning by using whatever expression, and it was not English it has been babbling all this time, or any other language, even if the end result is the ability to speak it.

I realized this is true of walking and moving about. I don't have to think about it, plan it or worry about whether it is the correct way or not. We simply do it once we know how, and call this muscle memory. Even if it is much more than that.

 

So as we move into meditation, and practicing movements, we slowly learn a new way of being. We drag a bit of the limbic into our control, which focusing on breathing and controlling it is. Limbic exercise. And asking any "healer" using chi, they will tell you that it won't flow without breathing and emotions, also both limbic.

 

Science, Language and the Dreaming Brain

Only the executive and sensory functions are off line while the rest of the brain is active. This includes the rational thinking and sensing part). The Limbic system, the part of the brain that associates emotions with sensory information, is highly active while in the dream state. Dreams process unresolved emotions though this process in the limbic system.

Language centers on the left side of the brain are off-line but the same centers on the right side, responsible for processing associations, are active during dream sleep. Therefore the language of dream is that of association, in particular emotional associations, not the literal naming by which we identify things in waking life.

 

 

[Jessup2]

https://www1.udel.edu/chem/C465/senior/fall00/DrugAddiction/Parts.html

Drugs and the Limbic System

[Jessup2]

Because subparts of the limbic system ultimately regulate important aspects of our conscious and unconscious patterns — including our emotions, perceptions, relationships, behaviors and motor control — it’s easy to see why damage to this region can cause serious problems. Disorders or behaviors that are related to limbic system dysfunction, or sometimes limbic system damage due to things like traumatic injuries or aging, include:

• Disinhibited behavior: This means someone doesn’t consider the risk of behaviors and ignores social conventions/rules.
• Increased anger and violence: This is commonly tied to amygdala damage.
• Hyperarousal: Amygdala damage, or damage to parts of the brain connected to the amygdala, can cause increased fear and anxiety. Anxiety disorders are sometimes treated with drugs that target areas of the amygdala to decrease fear-based emotions.
• Hypoarousal: This can cause low energy or lack of drive and motivation.
• Hyperorality/Kluver-Bucy Syndrome: This is characterized by amygdala damage that can lead to increased drive for pleasure, hypersexuality, disinhibited behavior and insertion of inappropriate objects in the mouth.
• Appetite dysregulation: Destructive behaviors tied to hyperorality or thalamus dysfunction can include overeating, binge eating or emotional eating.
• Trouble forming memories: Hippocampal damage can include short-term or long-term memory loss. Learning is often greatly impacted by hippocampal damage, since it depends on memory. Someone with the condition anterograde amnesia loses the ability to form and retain new memories. Interestingly, sometimes someone can hold on to older/long-term memories but lose the ability to form new short-term memories.
• Cognitive disorders, such as Alzheimer’s disease: Research shows that people with Alzheimer’s and memory loss usually have experienced damage to the hippocampus. This causes not only memory loss, but also disorientation and changes in moods. Some of the ways that the hippocampus can become damaged include free radical damage/oxidative stress, oxygen starvation (hypoxia), strokes or seizures/epilepsy.

 

[Jessup2]

• Research shows that the olfactory bulb projects information into the ventral part of the hippocampus, and the hippocampus sends axons to the main olfactory bulb, (including the anterior olfactory nucleus and the primary olfactory cortex). This is how memories and smells become tied together.
• Once engaged, sensors emit strong emotional signals based on smells starting from your limbic system (hippocampus) and spreading throughout the rest of your body to places like your heart and digestive tract.

I do not know of scent processes in Tai Chi or other practices. Perhaps the use of incense and tobacco?

 

[Jessup2]

http://www.medicaldaily.com/while-dreaming-during-rem-sleep-brain-captures-visual-images-darting-eyes-347716

 

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2013/04/03/science.1234330.full

 

Edited December 20, 2017 by Jessup2

[Jessup2]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_perception

Effects of emotional states

Awe

Research has suggested the feeling of awe has the ability to expand one's perceptions of time availability. Awe can be characterized as an experience of immense perceptual vastness that coincides with an increase in focus. Consequently, it is conceivable that one's temporal perception would slow down when experiencing awe.

Fear

Another temporal illusion, possibly related to the oddball effect, occurs when a person perceives a potential threat or mate (See Fight-or-flight response). For example, research suggests that time seems to slow down when a person skydives or bungee jumps, or when a person suddenly and unexpectedly senses the presence of a potential predator or mate. This reported slowing in temporal perception may have been evolutionarily advantageous because it may have enhanced our ability to intelligibly make quick decisions in moments that were of critical importance to our survival. However, even though observers commonly report that time seems to have moved in slow motion during these events, it is unclear whether this is a function of increased time resolution during the event, or instead an illusion created by the remembering of an emotionally salient event.

Research suggests that the effect appears only at the point of retrospective assessment, rather than occurring simultaneously with events as they happened.^[47] Perceptual abilities were tested during a frightening experience - a free-fall - by measuring people's sensitivity to flickering stimuli. The results showed that the subjects' temporal resolution was not improved as the frightening event was occurring.

Events appear to have taken longer only in retrospect, possibly because memories were being more densely packed during the frightening situation.

People shown extracts from films known to induce fear often overestimated the elapsed time of a subsequently presented visual stimulus, whereas people shown clips known to evoke feelings of sadness or emotionally-neutral clips from weather forecasts and stock market updates showed no difference. It is argued that fear prompts a state of arousal in the amygdala, which increases the rate of a hypothesised "internal clock." This could be the result of an evolved defensive mechanism triggered by a threatening situation.

When exposed to a threat, three-year-old children were observed to exhibit a similar tendency to overestimate elapsed time.

Empathy

The perception of another persons' emotions can also change our sense of time. The theory of embodied mind (or cognition), as caused by mirror neurons, helps explain how the perception of other people's emotions have the ability to change one's own sense of time. Embodied cognition hinges on an internal process that mimics or simulates another's emotional state. For example, if person #1 spends time with person #2 who speaks and walks incredibly slowly, person #1's internal clock may slow down.

Depression

Depression may increase one's ability to perceive time accurately. One study assessed this concept by asking subjects to estimate the amount of time that passed during intervals ranging from 3 seconds to 65 seconds. Results indicated that depressed subjects more accurately estimated the amount of time that had passed than non-depressed patients; non-depressed subjects overestimated the passing of time. This difference was hypothesized to be because depressed subjects focused less on external factors that may skew their judgement of time. The authors termed this hypothesized phenomenon "depressive realism."

Changes with age

Psychologists have found that the subjective perception of the passing of time tends to speed up with increasing age in humans. This often causes people to increasingly underestimate a given interval of time as they age. This fact can likely be attributed to a variety of age-related changes in the aging brain, such as the lowering in dopaminergic levels with older age; however, the details are still being debated. In an experimental study involving a group of subjects aged between 19 and 24 and a group between 60 and 80, the participants' abilities to estimate 3 minutes of time were compared. The study found that an average of 3 minutes and 3 seconds passed when participants in the younger group estimated that 3 minutes had passed, whereas the older group's estimate for when 3 minutes had passed came after an average of 3 minutes and 40 seconds.

Very young children literally "live in time" before gaining an awareness of its passing. A child will first experience the passing of time when he or she can subjectively perceive and reflect on the unfolding of a collection of events. A child's awareness of time develops during childhood when the child's attention and short-term memory capacities form—this developmental process is thought to be dependent on the slow maturation of the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus.

One day to an 11-year-old would be approximately 1/4,000 of their life, while one day to a 55-year-old would be approximately 1/20,000 of their life. This helps to explain why a random, ordinary day may therefore appear longer for a young child than an adult. The short-term time appears to go faster by square root of their age. So a year experienced by a 55-year-old would pass approximately 2¼ times more quickly than a year experienced by an 11-year-old. If long-term time perception is based solely on the proportionality of a person's age, then the following four periods in life would appear to be quantitatively equal: age 5 to 10 (1x), age 10 to 20 (2x), age 20 to 40 (4x), age 40 to 80 (8x).

The common explanation is that most external and internal experiences are new for young children, while most experiences are repetitive for adults. Children have to be extremely engaged (i.e. dedicate many neural resources or significant brain power) in the present moment because they must constantly reconfigure their mental models of the world to assimilate it, and properly behave from within. On the contrary, adults may rarely step outside of their mental habits and external routines. When an adult frequently experiences the same stimuli, their brain renders them "invisible" because the brain has already sufficiently and effectively mapped those stimuli. This phenomenon is known as neural adaptation. Thus, the brain will record fewer densely rich memories during these frequent periods of disengagement from the present moment. Consequently, the subjective perception is often that time passes by at a faster rate with age.

Effects of drugs

Stimulants produce overestimates of time duration, whereas depressants and anesthetics produce underestimates of time duration.

Psychoactive drugs can alter the judgement of time. These include traditional psychedelics such as LSD, psilocybin, and mescaline as well as the dissociative class of psychedelics such as PCP, ketamine and dextromethorphan. At higher doses time may appear to slow down, speed up or seem out of sequence. In a 2007 study, psilocybin was found to significantly impair the ability to reproduce interval durations longer than 2.5 seconds, significantly impair synchronizing motor actions (taps on a computer keyboard) to regularly occurring tones, and impair the ability to keep tempo when asked to tap on a key at a self-paced but consistent interval. In 1955, British MP Christopher Mayhew took mescaline hydrochloride in an experiment under the guidance of his friend, Dr Humphry Osmond. On the BBC documentary The Beyond Within, he described that half a dozen times during the experiment, he had "a period of time that didn't end for [him]".

Stimulants can lead both humans and rats to overestimate time intervals, while depressants can have the opposite effect. The level of activity in the brain of neurotransmitters such as dopamine and norepinephrine may be the reason for this. Dopamine has a particularly strong connection with one's perception of time. Drugs that activate dopamine receptors speed up one's perception of time, while dopamine antagonists cause one to feel that time is passing slowly.

Effects of body temperature

Time perception may speed up as body temperature rises, and slow down as body temperature lowers. This is especially true during stressful events

[Jessup2]

http://www.world-of-lucid-dreaming.com/30-common-dream-symbols.html

 

The difference in communication, and how what we use in waking life influences in the other direction. By practicing certain visual techniques as well as physical, we pass information requesting that different portions of the being participate or move the energy. I doubt very much that we are actually changing chi or other energy at all while awake. I think we setup the process by practices and meditations, but that these simply activate or link to what happens after we sleep, or during that phase between being awake and sleeping.