TriumphantGeorge Compendium (Part 11)

POST: Not all insanity is created equal.

And to have no thoughts easily and reliably you literally need to have no concerns about anything. You need to be certifiably insane.

It can be a positive stance, Zen style: that you understand that the appropriate action will occur to you in any circumstances if you let it, since you are part of the larger movement of the world; and recognise that thinking about things and planning actions in advance doesn't actually help you act appropriately.

Yeah, I see two types of thought:

• Unbidden thoughts as arising spontaneously from 'tension' or conflict of some sort, so trying to eliminate the thoughts while still retaining the conflict isn't going to happen. You either get rid of the tension by investigating it and resolving your conflict, or you simply accept it and release control, let go and let it unwind.
• Intentional thinking - deliberate rumination and planning - that's optional and you can simply decide not to do that. You may be an obsessive thinker, but you can decide to give up and let it go, and decide not to follow unbidden thoughts in to rumination territory.

Trying to deliberately fight the first type of thought will not work. "Good Zen" involves simply "sitting" and letting thoughts rise and fall and finish their business, remaining with sensations rather than trying to shut thinking down.

Leading to: surely "seeing all this as a dream" is the ultimate in letting go of personal control and localised (bodily) tension, since we then identify as the whole thing? It's all an "expression of you", after all.

I don't think any authentic Zen masters considered the world something larger than themselves. And neither do I.

No, they considered the world within themselves, but the character they were experiencing was part of that world. So concerns about the character acting appropriately are misplaced. (And mostly when we talk of action in everyday life, we are speaking of that character.)

It depends on what you mean by "personal."

I mean, controlling your "body" (mental or physical) directly - intentional thought and physical control - and by retaining tension in it as a defensive/conflict management approach. What I really mean is, if you truly accept this is a dream, then many of your concerns would evaporate - you would release your grasp - because those concerns are for the survival of the character, not the dream.

Maybe? It's not 100% certain.

For sure, there are different folks and different strands. Most of the stuff I've explored seems to come to this though. Zazen is an allowing rather than a striving.

I don't equate my person with any specific body.

Sure, but most people do, and I'm talking about how a person moves from one view and way of living to another. For clarity: "who you really are" is everything, whilst "people", including "your body", are characters/mental objects within that.

Zazen allows striving and relaxation...

I don't think we're actually disagreeing. It's a "lively sitting". The point I made before (see other response) is that the point isn't to stamp out thoughts.

What do you mean by "everything"? Are you saying I am the sum total of the manifest things?

No, you are that in which the apparent manifest things appear.

If you can conceive of yourself that way, then you can conceive of yourself any way you like. If you can see yourself as a formless container that takes on the form of the objects of experience, then equally you can identify with any object, or configuration of time and space.

Once you've hit "openness", then you can pick and choose. Being able to choose to limit yourself - for fun or curiosity - is the greatest freedom.

One might say that our present localised experience is a limitation we freely chose at some point, but we don't remember. Moving on: The initial pitch was mixing subjective idealism with chaos magick, but we haven't really explored that much.

Q: [Deleted]

I did spot that post, actually. I thought this was interesting:

If you tell your friends, the world will change to make the event mundane. It will turn out that someone left the pad in some sort of diagnostics mode or there will be a software bug that allows 10% of random codes to work or something like that.

This is true, in my experience. The universe (heheh) strives for self-consistency. Open the door, there's a room beyond; seek an explanation, and one is provided. But also:

Magic isn't about making unnatural things happen, it's about making natural things happen at the right times and places.

I just founding it interesting that someone would phrase it that way.

I think that if one does not specify the route the result will take, then it adopts natural processes as the mechanism, in accordance with your own understanding of what "natural" is. When you look for an explanation, one will appear which, again, fits in with your idea of what a reasonable explanation would be.

The alternative is for you not to retain a memory of the change. (Often others don't retain memories pre-jump.)

Q: [Deleted]

He's the man.

I think coherence is semi-inherent. I think things arise in patterns across time rather than events, and so the 'world' tends to keep being 'of a piece'. Once you've accepted one thing, other things tend to fall in line with it, and so on.

If you're not a believer in such things, it could be that your 'reality' of your 'extended person' won't contain such experiences, and you'll subjectively 'split off' if something like that's going to happen.

Q: [Deleted]

Not the best wording. That the world will tend to serve up experiences in line with your beliefs, and that your memories will tend to correspond to your current experience. Your subjectivity would 'split off' rather than give you an experience which wasn't coherent (wasn't consistent with itself).

Yes. An unwitting strategy though. It's either avoided, or edited out.

In our current reality "don't like strangeness" probably describes most people, right?

Whether they realise it or not, yes.

Someone over at 'Glitch in the Matrix' just posted this [https://old.reddit.com/r/Glitch_in_the_Matrix/comments/2gqtyb/metaswitching_realities/], and I thought I'd have some fun replying. :-)

...

The problem would be, can you overcome the momentum of experiential habits such as these?

You fear a personal death. And to be sure, to genuinely confront the nature of yourself and of your world, will indeed involve your death in a fundamental sense. What seems insane on this side of the jump, won't be on the other.

Say: If you genuinely experienced the world around you as a dream, and yourself as a dream figure, then the solid, material everydaymotherfucker would be no more. You would be part of a larger movement.

You have to give. up. (Your personal self. Not a life.)

Stop thinking, my friend. Just stop. You cannot work this out by thinking. The other side, as it were, isn't "over there" - it's "in here" and all around you. It's not even a "side", it's where you've been (and what you've been) all along. So no need to worry! :-)

I'm going to give you a daily practice to do, and other than that you're just going to get on with your life, and see what happens, okay? Stabilisation is key. Here it is:

• 10 minutes, twice a day.
• Lie down on the floor, feet flat with knees bent, head supported by books, arms by your side or hands resting on abdomen. (Like this.)
• Decide to give up completely to gravity: to "play dead".
• Let go of your body and mind, let them move as they will. Allow them to unwind.
• Don't even "pay attention"; just let your attention be open and wide. If it focuses on some thought or pain briefly, let that happen, and let it open out again.
• After 10 minutes, decide to get up, but don't do anything about it. Wait until your body moves by itself. (This won't happen first time, but eventually it will happen.)

Basically, you are letting the "stuck thoughts" and "uncompleted movements" you have amassed unwind and dissolve themselves. You do not need to do anything for this to occur. Gradually, your perception will become clearer and clearer.

Note: Any effort to focus or do anything will get in the way. There is a method of accelerating this by "overwriting yourself", but it's nicer this way.

This is all you need to do for now. As you go about your day, if you feel yourself becoming tense or defensive or worried, take a breath and just mentally recall the last time you were there, supported, by the whole universe. Okay? Trust in that.

Thank you very much :-) I will try this exercise beginning tomorrow, but for now it is time for bed. I plan on sticking around here, this subreddit has really grabbed me. I was reading lots of the posts between yourself and Nefandi and they were very interesting. Out of curiosity, what is this "overwriting yourself", what does it entail?

I should write a post on it really...

Rather than allow the "mental objects" in the space of awareness to gradually unwind and dissolve, you can overwrite space to be empty by direct intention, summoning the extended feeling. However, it means you get no acclimatisation and you are completely evaporating the boundaries very quickly. It involves confronting an existential fear of openness. Imagine if you wished the floor disappeared, casually, and suddenly it turned into an infinite void! You might be... uncomfortable with that! :-)

There's no rush, though; I think it's better to do it the gradual way. Note that Nefandi and I are pushing the edges in our discussion; there's no reason to commit so fully in my opinion, until one feels that they are at that stage (or even ever, as you see fit).

Anyway, do update on how you get along!

...

So what you call "unbidden" I'd call "irritating." They're still your thoughts even if you don't like them.

Surely, but the difference is useful. I can sit here and generate and pursue thoughts deliberately. If thought are arising from conflict though - even if that conflict is an ongoing and maintained conflict through unconscious intention - they are still unbidden, in the sense that I was not intending thought as the outcome. All experience is intentional at route, however there is a difference between direct outcomes and indirect.

In the direct creation of thought one simply has to stop creating them. In the indirect creation of though one has to stop doing whatever-the-indirect-thing is (in this case, the maintenance of conflict or tension).

I strongly disagree. This isn't good Zen at all.

Okay, context is all: the point I was trying to make is that "Good Zen" doesn't involve quenching thoughts by trying to stamp on them, that's a problem and muddling up with modern Western meditation nonsense. It is a staying-with, and more.

Sakyamuni said to the vast assembly, "Through sitting in the lotus posture then samadhi is realized in the bodymind and its virtue and dignity can be recognized by the people. Just as the sun illumines the world so the mind is cleared of dullness, laziness, and indolence. The body is bright and not dull. Perception and cognition are also bright and supple. You should sit like dragons coiled. Just the image of the lotus posture brings fear to king of the demons of delusion. How much more so should he see someone sitting without collapsing or leaning but actually experiencing the truth?

Quite so.

All good. And nice quote. "Investigation" is a good word. It's not an effortful investigation, or a manipulative one, it's an exploration of what-is.

POST: Playfulness.

Extra one:

Imagine - feel - that beyond your field of view, the world just stops, and there's just... blankness. If you're indoors, the view out of the window is just a flat picture, nothing behind it. If you're outside, then the landscape at the end of the road or the garden is just a vertical image, then nothing. And as you walk around and the landscape unfolds, really imagine that it's being created 'just-in-time' for you to experience.

(Extended version: There's always darkness in the direction you're not looking in, in your own self portrait, and the things you see before you are just floating transparencies.)

...

Schizophrenia here we come for the first bit! :-) I really like the "live mash-up" idea, turning things into blended movie scenes. Great!

But honestly, a shift towards some healthier perspectives and philosophies makes mental issues it a totally different experience.

Hmm, so if people have a larger context then these experiences aren't necessarily so problematic. The universe does give you messages, but not always; you are connected to something larger than yourself, but you are also an individual. It's when we are consumed by the experiences that it's a problem.

... how they took a shaman from Africa and showed him the ... He says we have lost the power of ritual which brings understanding and peace to those persons.

With psychotherapy and so on being modern attempts to vent that, but only within a specific modern context. Interestingly though, more and more techniques are approaching vision-searching and shamanic types - Focusing and Reichian stuff, even the current mindfulness fashion. The more we lock ourselves down and 'externalise' aspects of ourselves, they more they will try to break through?

The truth is that normality is a variable in space and time. And delusions stem from interpreting strangeness as symptoms, instead of tools to dismantle the conventional boundary between reality and fiction, truth and falsehood, sense and nonsense.

Yes, I think a lot of modern problems arise from trying to deliberately narrow our experience within certain boundaries - our experience of what's around us and what arises within us. This is why modern life can be so stressful maybe: you are subtly engaged in a constant fight with your moment-to-moment experience.

The missing skill for the typical modern western person, I believe, is to be able to actively engage and disengage with experiences, both conventional and bizarre.

I suppose our basic model is that of "we see things directly". This isn't even about materialism/idealism or whatever - just the assumption that our experiences are unmediated, and responding to them in that way. So we tend to discount things even as simple as how our attention is directed, and that we can take control/responsibility for that, than we can widen with context, or narrow for immersion. Instead, it just all seems to "happen to us", mostly. That, and not understanding intention; trying to do everything 'muscularly' or 'bodily', not realising that the direction we "set" is the main creator - I have been thinking. Any moves in society which shift us along these lines has to be a good thing.

It seems more and more in recent years, to me, that the right way is to not append a truth value to it.

To accept the experience as is, and then have the interpretation as an additional thing, rather than having the two be blended? Then the interpretation can be judged on its usefulness. I like that.

Although this subreddit is about subjective idealism, my baseline default view I go for is much simpler and is simply that of direct experience. Upon investigation:

• It feels like there is a big open space of awareness.
• A world of objects seems to arise within that.
• Bodily sensations and thoughts appear there too.
• The experience seems to respond to my intention in limited ways.
• The response seems to include the environment, as well as my thoughts and my bodily actions: coincidences and opportunities, tuned.
• Whatever is "behind" the experience can never be known, or whether there is anything.

With the addition then that anything else is "explanatory icing on top" and should be recognised as such. Getting narrowed on any one interpretation tend to block out the arising of, or the recognition of, other paths that might come up which are better suited to your desires as they change.

("Getting narrowed" was the nature of my mistake which got me into my messes.)

...

Nice. One word: soundtracking! [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCJOZ8dgSLM]

Similarly, if you're bored, adding (non-matching, comedy) subtitles onto your day is good fun. Don't pre-think them, just decide you're going to have some appear when people are talking, and you'll be surprised at what comes up. Oh, and everyone should be wearing a silly hat.

Q: [Deleted]

That's great, how it can be customised too; I'm going to play with using that sound.

I wonder how far we can go with this, treating our current experience as the "raw material" and editing it. This is pushing towards hypnotism all this (of course, same thing really), but can we edit out sounds and so on, on the fly? I can add things in, pictures and extra sounds, with varying levels of clarity, but I'm not so good at deleting. And then, how persistent can things get.

My only beef with hypnosis is that most of it is highly associated with profit-seeking, and also...

Often, but that's more in the use than in the phenomenon itself. Actually one of the first 'esoteric' books I read was on hypnosis, by this guy whose page on fallacies is quite interesting. That and some book on visualisation by Ursula Markham, who first introduced me to the idea that visualising could affect reality (the old "create a car parking space for yourself" trick in particular).

We can, at least in principle. Isn't this known as a negative hallucination in hypnosis?

Yes, that's why I brought up hypnosis - but I don't seem to be able to do it by my own self-suggestion. And yet, I was viewing this editing process we're doing as essentially self-hypnosis. But actually, there's a bit of a difference between doing direct imagination stuff and suggesting something and accepting/allowing it.

I agree completely. But in practice, suppose you want to learn about hypnosis? . . .

This is where old-fashioned books come into their own. That the internet is the place we look for all our information means we are constrained by the 'form' that it shapes things into (websites, forums all require monetisation or that's why they were started). Authors of paperback books on a topic used to do it for the passion and for a selected audience, because the money wasn't good and the availability would be limited anyway. There are few website versions of that sort of thing, except from more academic researchers or a passion for spreading the good news (e.g. Eugene Gendlin's Focusing library).

Let's see... how about editing out pain? Am I dissolving pain or editing it out? How would I know the difference?

Good point. Pain is an interesting one. You can dissolve it just by including into the the awareness space that surrounds it. This also works for distracting sounds: it seems to be the attempt to isolate the sound or ignore it which makes it distracting. But that's not quite deletion, it's incorporation or dissolving object boundaries into the continuum.

What is the difference you think?

I'm really not sure. At root, it must be the same thing. Something like the difference between deliberately picturing a car (which means you create a particular, chosen image), say, and just saying the word "car" to yourself (which will result in a picture appearing spontaneously). Is it about the level of detail you attempt to control? "Control" seems to be at the core though.

I have about 10 books on hypnosis from the best authors, including Erickson.

Yep, I still think the best info I've got on these topics is from some of the earlier books. (Those early NLP books are probably the only decent ones, for instance.) Luckily: PDFs.

You know that some languages are pictorial to begin with. Like the ancient Chinese was just a bunch of pictures. What I mean is, pictures are not necessarily all that different from words.

But there is a difference between generic symbol and particular instance. Chinese might be a "bunch of pictures", but it's not a bunch of specific images. In the first case I'm choosing this car (controlling the details), in the second I'm requesting a car. So with deletion, perhaps dying to control the negative directly is the problem (basically "don't think of an elephant"?). I dunno.

As I've learned hypnosis is 99% hard work though. I thought there was some trick to it, but nope. Just practice, practice, practice....

I think what's being practiced, though, is intention and being passive, no? The trick to self-hypnosis was always acceptance/giving up, or that's what I found. It's both easy and very difficult (like the threshold thing when inducing an OBE). The thing I found hardest was to resist the urge to try and make it happen.

MILD - good example. WILD or direct-entry being even more so. (Just looked up for examples, and I like the images used in this guide - quite Waking Life movie-like.)

I agree. Words and symbols are more abstract. A symbol doesn't tell you about shadows, hues, and the details of the shapes.

Suggestion: Symbols are abstract, but experiences are always concrete? (Except the experience of a symbol.) So I see the word "car", but it works by triggering a bit of a "car experience" in my awareness; that's how I get the 'meaning" of the word.

What I find difficult is all the talk relating to a hard split between conscious mind and subconscious. It seems like the hypnosis books take the perspective that the conscious mind is somehow an enemy. I always had problems with that.

Yes, it was just a hangover from previous worldviews I think, and a rubbish notion that you directly control yourself and there's the mysterious "other" to be wary of. To be fair, these guys mostly weren't philosophers eh.

I don't agree. I have many abstract experiences. I would go so far as to regard myself as an abstraction. To me abstractions are just as felt and real as any concrete phenomenon.

Explain further. By abstraction I mean "does not resemble the thing it represents, is pointing to". By concrete experience I mean, an experience based on senses, even if "mental senses". So the sense of myself might not be solid like a table, but it's still a direct experience, even though I can't describe it properly. "George", however, is an abstract symbol pointing to that experience.

Actually, I should reassign my words. Let's have symbols are pointers (obviously), abstractions are non-direct-sensory experiences (although they will likely be made up of images, sensations, etc), concrete experiences are external-world-type. Because when I think of the past, although I experience it as a visual timeline from left to right in my experience, obviously it's an abstraction. And if I feel time passing, sure it's a feeling, but it's not a thing.

"I" in this case doesn't point to anything.

Well, that's a special one of course!

Maybe the distinction between concrete and abstract is purely conventional and arbitrary.

I think that's so. All experiences are "concrete" in some way (there's always a sensory component), but they may mean something else. When an experience just means itself then that's fundamental.

That's why you can't explain love, it is "just itself".

Having said that, I think the experiences you list correspond to a "landscape of feelings", bodily sensations, that correspond to the subject or idea or the experience of "being in love" or whatever. You think with your whole body. If you think of "a tree" you get a picture maybe, and some sounds, maybe the idea of an environment, but also your whole body subtly changes into a slight tension-pattern associated with that idea.

This feeling-aspect is key to experience and knowing/being, but cannot be properly verbalised.

What are feelings, if not bodily sensations? If you are scared, for instance, how does that manifest itself?

Impatience is, I'd suggest, a feeling of tension between the position you are in now (literally, physically) and the position you'd like to be in - a muscular tension pattern.

Q: [Deleted]

That's okay. You hear sounds without physical ears, your see pictures without eyes, you feel touch without hands, you feel bodily sensations without a body. You don't actually ever experience a 'physical' body anyway, of course. Even if you were a materialist, you would still have to say that you experience your body "after the fact", as a mental object. We could say "body-space-located" perhaps. But anyway, the feeling of fear is, say, a tight feeling in the stomach area, a clenching of the chest, other sensations, etc.

I know what you mean. But I tell you, when I was floating in blackness in that one experience, I felt fear and I couldn't feel anything like a stomach or tightness, at least, not anything normal that would be obvious.

I do know the experience (a version of it). It still seems to me that it is a "located feeling" with a "meaning". Hmm, but it's basically going to be a felt-sense meaning. You don't need an actual spatial body to have that experience, I guess.

Q: [Deleted]

Open awareness at base (how can one experience a lack of something?).

"Tension" is there's a discomfort associated with the perceived lack of change.

Q: [Deleted]

But what would the nature of that experience be? A tension between your expectation and what's there? For instance, there's a difference between just experiencing an empty garden, and experiencing an empty garden while expecting it to be full of trees. The basic experience is the same, but the latter has tension?

So "an apple" doesn't really refer to anything per se.

Platonic ideals! "An apple" conjurs up a "mental object" of an "apple" (in picture form, other sensations, probably a whole structure actually), that fits or becomes "attached" or anticipates a whole spectrum of experience.

(This is an unsettled topic from hundreds of years, of course.)

I'm going to suggest it's a "global sense of apple" and that it's more felt than experienced as, say, a particular image. That's what I was getting at by "probably a whole structure".

There are only experiences?

We've just got into the habit of categorising some experiences as "concrete" (tables) and some as "abstract" (not tables). More specifically, when we look deeper, we discover that we define things which are actually felt-senses and felt-knowing as abstract. Probably just because they can't be described in verbal language, and representations can't be created in terms of images or sounds or sculptures. However, these felt-senses can to some extent be evoked by other experiences. And that is what art is.

Q: [Deleted]

The pure-blackness experience is one of the things that eyesight improvement tries to do - the Bates Method, specifically. You imagine pure blackness behind your eyes, which corresponds to complete relaxation of the eyeball, hence optimal vision. Supposedly. But it shows the overlap between imagination and perception.

I guess we feel like it's editing if we think phenomenon exists objectively in some external domain. Otherwise we feel it's more like dissolving. But I don't know if there is a clear difference.

That's an interesting point. Also, there's a warning after dissolving pain not to "go looking for it" afterwards to check it's gone or whatever, because you end up re-creating it. Hmmm....

• Dissolving is "delocalising" I suppose, de-objectifying something. That's how the pain thing works: you are dissolving the boundaries around a "stuck thought".
• Dissolving/editing a tree, what does that mean in this context? Exclusion of it from your awareness field I guess, releasing it into the background. "Inserting a new fact" into experience.

What we experience is a continuum which is "cut up" into objects, so we're not deleting that part of raw experience, we're just saying "don't interpret that as a tree", maybe?

In fact I like to check it out often, just to see if it dares to resurface. If the pain does resurface, that's good. I just remove it again, and better.

For sure. I think the advice is tailored to those less well-versed than the likes of you and I! But it's an interesting point: that you can dissolve and and recreate it at will. So it's not real-real.

"What we experience is a continuum which is "cut up" into objects, so we're not deleting that part of raw experience, we're just saying "don't interpret that as a tree", maybe?" Maybe. I've never done this, keep in mind. So I can't talk from experience.

I was thinking of how it might work in hypnosis. Thing is, I'll secretly know it's a tree; do I have to avoid "going looking for it"? I like your idea of starting by making things fuzzy. I'll play with this next time I'm bored in the garden.

...

One time I imagined that corporations had an independent being (like spirits/demons) and were possessing the employees and buildings . . .

That's good. The corporation as egregore/servitor. Probably truth in that. Interesting to actually get yourself to see things that way, though.

The void that I started to see in people's eyes began to creep me out, as did the weird feeling this created when I would walk down a street.

Shows how you "fill in" the idea that there are "actual people" inside the bodies you pass by every day. But really, you don't know. (Philosophical zombies! [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie])

Q: [Deleted]

Look forward to that. It seems that maybe when you "externalise" anything (basically, declaring it not under your direct control now) it takes on a bit of an independent will of its own. Basically like little servitors or spirits, but it could go quite wrong quite quickly if you're not grounded in yourself. ("Schizophrenia here we come!" again.)

This post [http://www.chaosmatrix.org/library/chaos/texts/fotamec2.html] - on the sigil/servitor Fotamecus for time compression - is what brought that thought to mind. Once something is out there, it can become its own thing. I'm not quite sure how to integrate that stuff into the 'subjective reality' worldview as yet.

Reversing heavy othering requires understanding othering, and having the heart to reverse it.

Servitors can be recalled and reabsorbed, but once you've created something that's expanded almost into a world, then it's a more daunting task, of course. Maybe more of a reset.

POST: Death

[POST]

How well do you personally know death? I've been so well acquainted we've shared conversation in dream. Everyone has met her and known her realm. We've all been there before we were us.
Death is a big thing. Friends all.

[END OF POST]

I love this topic. But what makes you think you aren't dead right now?

Because he's God, and God is eternal. Of course.

If everything in God is life, where does the idea of death come from?

Duality. We are so used to the dichotomy of object/space, existance/nonexistance. We cannot comprehend 'oneness' and 'eternity'. The idea of death comes from the temporary nature of appearances.

Where does duality come from?

Good question. The sense of here and there, from the identity we accumulate gradually from birth and from language, from the tendency of our 'attentional profile' to become 'clumpy' and jump to objects instead of spaces?

Duality is inherent to all cognition. Even non-duality is known only in contradistinction to duality.

Ah, nice. All words imply a surrounding space, implying an "other". Language guarantees seeing the world in terms of dualities.

Language / Beyond language.
Duality / Non-duality.
Conceptual / Non-conceptual. <-- this distinction is a concept, btw.
That which is beyond duality is also beyond ordinary cognition.

A-ha, I like that. So, maybe also: direct experience vs thinking-about or conceptualising.

==Well, "direct experience" suggests that there is indirect experience. But experience is always direct. Self-limited people have direct experience, not indirect.

The contrast is between, say, actually feeling the space in the room or experiencing being vastness, rather than thinking-about it. When you talk to people about this stuff, sometimes it's hard to get them to actually use their awareness, rather than just play with the concepts. Took me a while on that score.

Of course, thinking is still a direct experience - of thinking!

Much better than possibly implying people have indirect experiences.

Yes, all experience is direct, it's a case of: what is the nature of that experience. To realise what's going on, it's a matter of directing your attention to the right place. Experience is experience is experience. There can be no indirect, when experience is made from you.

And this amazing "thing" that people could be feeling, this undefined timeless place which is the site of experiencing, it isn't far away! It's closer than the veins in one's own neck. It's all right here.

Right! Intimate is the word!

Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet - Tennyson

People spend years meditating and following this or that path. All of that can be fun, but it is not necessary. You can simply direct your attention to where you are looking from, and see that it is capacity for everything.

NOW you are talking. This is my favorite kind of George. :)

In a way, there's nothing more to say than that, once you've got it.

Well, that's just brilliant, and this combination appears new to me. I haven't heard it said exactly this way before.

I think I probably nicked the term from Thomas Traherne and his idea of a metaphysical space, but there you go. It fits.

Every time I go for a contemplation... Here, let's cheat.

I know what you mean. Playfulness, yes. Insanity one I'm interested in. Also, art and magick and awareness are inexplicably bound, exploring the creative process, combining the two, all that.

Our minds are infinitely creative. You don't have to work yourself over to become creative.

This is bang-on true. In fact, people applying effort to creativity is what prevents it. People try to keep busy doing stuff thinking this will make them more productive and produce more ideas. But that's not true. What you have to do is, clear space for the ideas to come. Or should I say, allow space. Creativity is the rule!

POST: On timelessness and age. (by cosmicprankster420)

[POST]

it seems a lot of humans get worked up over the concept of age, how long ones meat body has been in operation. Something i have pondered is the idea of being timeless or eternal, not defining ones self by their age. For some reason my birthday is coming up in a month and today i was mildly distressed about turning 27 mainly because i haven't accomplished that much in the material world in terms of jobs and mates and so forth. Even though i have graduated college and have a completed fantasy novel manuscript, there are so many ways this golf score we call our age binds us to the material world and reduces lucidity.
In addition to not associate with being human, i've began to realize what makes us humaned or what binds us to the material world is the ticker of age, this scoreboard that defines our worth in this materialistic society. Associating ourselves with our age seems to make us hyper aware of our physical human bodies, and i believe i want to transcend that by not identifying with my age and instead think of myself as eternal, timeless, outside of time, never born. When that ticker becomes insignificant it seems much harder to be attached to this particular dimension and harder to associate ones self with being human. Why should our dream be defined by a score we call age, i just came here to play the game and have fun. If we move the metaphor from dream to video game, its like materialists are those gamers who get way to frustrated in world of war craft and associate their self worth with there score in the game, when being lucid makes you say "dude, its just a game, chill out".

[END OF POST]

AesirAnatman: I'm glad you posted this.
It's interesting because about a week ago I was asked by some document I was filling out how old I am. I sat there for a good minute asking myself 'am I 22 or 23? I'm not sure' until I did the math for the years and figured it out. I realized that conventionally this is a very weird question to ask myself.
Age doesn't matter much to me because I've stopped identifying and caring about that aspect of my humanity. This extends beyond occasional forgetfulness of my own age - I never remember the ages of my friends or family or their birthdays. Stranger yet, when I interact with children or elderly people, I basically treat them as I would anyone else. I don't baby children (and often have ended up bringing out incredibly intelligent aspects of kids simply by treating them as such) and I don't try to appease the elderly. Granted, this isn't entirely true with me with the elderly members of my own family at present, but is basically true otherwise.
there are so many ways this golf score we call our age binds us to the material world and reduces lucidity.
YES. Right now I'm trying to learn to live ultra-minimally so that I can live in a van in order to not need to work very much. However, I'm still going to school for a CS and Philosophy degree in order to pursue a career even though I have no desire or intention to have such a career more than 2-3 years max. I want to have graduated college, with no particular benefit to myself.
i believe i want to transcend that by not identifying with my age and instead think of myself as eternal, timeless, outside of time, never born.
I feel this desire as well.
its like materialists are those gamers who get way to frustrated in world of war craft and associate their self worth with there score in the game, when being lucid makes you say "dude, its just a game, chill out".
Hahaha, I feel this way so often.

Good post. @cosmicprankster420 & @AesirAnatman:

Bringing the magickal aspect into this though: If not things, or a career, there are experiences we'd like to have, I guess? And situations we'd like to be in, and situations we'd like not to be in.

There are two approaches, and I reckon making the decision early as possible is best:

• With Plan: You can select what you want and start adopting it as your reality now (magickal techniques; Neville Goddard; etc). This is the Deity Dreamer approach: This is all your reality, under the control of your imagination.
• Without Plan: You can commit to staying relaxed and open and paying attention, deciding that you will always follow your intuition and the synchronistic opportunities that arise, no matter how you feel. This is the 'True Will' approach, or rephrased: that you already always know what you want in ways that you can't consciously think, but you'll know when to act when the time comes. Intentional purposelessness.

Either one is a form of commitment and works. Half-baked versions of either mean you just get bounced about. I've jumped between the two, and it confused things. (In college days I spent loads of time thinking and reading about relaxation, self-mastery, philosophy and magick and not them putting them into consistent daily practice and exercise or really paying attention to what I actually wanted, flip-flopping. I could have saved myself a lot of messing about.)

i believe i want to transcend that by not identifying with my age and instead think of myself as eternal, timeless, outside of time, never born.

That's great. However, you have to recognised that you will have the experience of being a particular bodily age and so on as 'time' unfolds, and you should plan to deal with that, in terms of what you 'intend' and the situation you want to be in. Better to be in that nice house with a pool and staff, than not.

"dude, its just a game, chill out".

If only there was a handy strategy guide! [https://www.oliveremberton.com/2014/life-is-a-game-this-is-your-strategy-guide]

I mean, it's always going to be better to: a) be a millionaire before 30/35/40 whatever than not, and b) to start doing things you love, with money coming from that, sooner rather than later. And if you're not really interested in CS/Phulosophy or want a career in it, but really want to be an actor, then do that now - etc. Otherwise you'll never get the $10M blockbuster action movie payday while you're still young enough to pull the moves and the ladies*. :-)

The materialism/idealism, waking/dreaming, reality/illusion philosophy or practice doesn't really change any of that, since they are about experiences. Whether you do it by old-fashioned means or by magick, you still have to make the choice.

[Amend as required]

POST: Confessions

On Fearlessness

Hmm. How to assist this state? One of the benefits of recognising that you are not 'this body' but are the whole dream should be the recognition that the whole dream moves with you towards your goals? And that apparent fears are anxieties arising from not completely embracing that viewpoint.

This may have a side-effect though: That any efforts of manipulation that imply that 'you' are separate from 'the environment' might reinforce a materialist view of stubborn not-me resisting change.

Another approach to releasing fears can be to simply to do a daily exercise where you lie down on the floor and just leg go of yourself, body and thought - basically, "play dead" and let things move and unwind by themselves. You'll find that a lot of fear is held as 'defensive tension' in the body with co-located thoughts and feelings. They gradually release and work themselves out over time if given the chance.

Actually, on exercises: Does anybody have particular daily practices they'd like to share? (S.R. or magick-related ones, I hasten to add!)

...

That's why you should have continued! That's the point! It's initially a bit daunting and can be unpleasant though: all your defences are being deleted/released, after all. The process is usually relatively gradual overall but can be very "bumpy" - as in, things might be quiet for a while and then there's a big release.

Edit: Isn't your response at odds with your being-a-deity post?

The thing is, it is scary. You are opening yourself out to "become the universe" - it's the thing all those non-dual and buddhist efforts lead to: identifying yourself with the wide open space of awareness and all its contents.

As soon as you do it, you become aware of all those bits and pieces you have generally been avoiding. And you just feel completely exposed. I guess that's why there's much talk of "faith" and so on. You only realise how hard you are holding on when you try to let go like this.

People who start doing mindfulness, for instance, are often surprised to discover they feel a bit worse when they begin! But then those feelings dissolve into the surrounding space. There's an interesting book by Les Fehmi called Dissolving Pain which has techniques for this; they are applicable here too. In fact, lots of magick/help approaches essentially boil down to the same thing.

There's a book called Busting Loose From The Money Game by Robert Scheinfeld (cheesy website here) basically written as a business self-help book, but in actual fact it's based around a "process" of dissolving "discomfort eggs" as they arise and releasing their energy. In other words, mindfulness and dissolving your reality into openness.

"become the universe" .. It's beyond that even.

Yep, so language update: From now on, let's have "universe" mean "all the objects (content)" and "place" or "ground" of awareness be the vastness with all its enfolded infinite possibilities.

We're talking about the same thing.

But what's interesting is that there are ways to express the same thing that will make people slightly afraid and recoil. And ways that will make people giddy with fun and joy.

Yes. It's a lesson to learn: when you talk to people about this stuff, you have to begin from their worldview and build outwards, leading step by step. That's why there are so many, need to be so many*, ways of saying the same thing.

I don't like this, because it tries to homogenize possibilities.

How does it? We say that "you" are the open infinity, and the "universe" is the temporary objects and processes and observations arising within it.

Only in your mind. Your level of expression hides too much. Fuck people over with insight! Slam them with truth. Maybe not always, but sometimes.

Heheh. But the thing is, they won't understand you if you don't start from their current concepts! I don't mean you start by agreeing with them, only that you begin with their terms of reference.

Your language update redefines the universe to be something completely distinct from how people typically use that concept.

Hmm. Well, maybe it's a word best avoided. I usually use the word "world" anyway, to refer to the "appearances" we experience. It reduces scale to what we're directly experiencing, and makes the bridge to "dream-world" easier. And you can indicate to people how to 'feel the background space' from there. "Universe" is too abstract actually.

You'd be surprised.

Actually, I'm with this to some extent. You don't necessarily need to walk people through from scratch, and you have to 'feel about a bit' to find where to start from, adapt as you go. Assuming the best and tuning is a good approach.

Eh, the word "world" again implies internal consistency...

A "world" does appear to have those things, like a "dream-world" but it's easier to think of it being illusory, and "hanging in space". Or I find it easier anyway. You can literally sit people down and say, 'what do you see?" and then show them that their current experience is limited and sits inside a vast open place.

I mean, all this depends on who you're talking to of course!

Of course, I'm only teaching myself!

They are, of course, not so much "inside a vast open space" as rather "inside me"... Ha. Well, lack of confidence in my ability to communicate it, perhaps. This may indeed be true. But in both ways!

To understand and be understood. :-)

It's a trade-off that you can balance out later. Not so the other way. But, yeah, it's something worth considering, particular with non-face-to-face discussion.

POST: Investigation of the utility of dream manipulation

[POST]

==Dreams have long been used as a form of divination, either as glass through which higher powers are seen darkly, or an interface with the subconscious mind for self understanding. What else can dreams be used for? Herein, we will attempted to break the possible applications of dreams into two primary categories:

1. practice of skills under non extant conditions, and
2. practices of skills that cannot, or do not, exist. Subdivisions of each are explored and reveal a host potential uses for dream manipulation.
   I do not wish to deny the potential of divinatory dreamwork, but since they have been long explored, I instead wish to strike fresh ground.
   The most obvious feature of dreams is that they are a natural (non-drug induced) nonrational form of cognition. Many studies exist that suggest that dreams are a way for the brain to integrate experiences, and to undergo simulation of various experiences without risk. Interestingly, a study was done in which participants practiced a skiing video game. Those who practiced it shortly before sleep learned at a faster rate, and many reported dreaming about skiing.
   It thus seems that dreams allow us to practice skills, and retain some improvement from this practice. Further, given the existence of lucid dreaming, it is possible to practice under conditions that are not physically possible, or to practice skills that could not physically exist.
   Let's examine these two possibilities separately. (1. practice under non extant conditions, and 2. practices of skills that cannot, or do not, exist)
   The former could be of clear use for practicing under dangerous conditions that could exist, but have not yet occurred. Anecdotally, many people who engage in athletics report that first visualizing a task before attempting it results in better performance. It certainly appears that way for me in regards to difficult tasks of fine motor skills, such as playing a difficult passage on piano, or drawing a long curve of relative complexity, and for gross motor skills, such as vaulting objects, and safely landing from a height.
   A subcategory of this conditional practice involves conditions that one does not expect to participate in, such as special cases of physical rules (modified gravity, or friction), or even extremely unusual topological circumstances, such as higher dimensional locales, in which one can move away from a position without apparently moving in the three directions most familiar to us.
   The utility of this subcategory is not as immediately obvious in “waking life.” It can, however, be vital to effective fiction writing and the creation of video games. Further, if memories do entail the formation of neural connections, and there is transferability between skills, then these “impossibly practiced skills” may provide insights into physical practice that would have been much more difficult to obtain otherwise.
   Now we will continue on to the second of the possibilities, the practice of skills that cannot, or do not, exist.
   The first form of utility in this category that comes to mind is that it may exercise abstract thought. In undergoing experiences that cannot exist, one must create them oneself, and thus creative, and likely critical, thinking will be involved.
   The range of environments that can be imagined is far too large to list, so let's devise some categories: literal, symbolic, neither/both literal and symbolic.
3. Literal
   Literal environments that are not possible refers to “physical” environments that are not possible. This was touched upon in the practice of skills under conditions that could not exist. The same essentially applies here. Only in dreams can one hunt the Jabberwock.
4. Symbolic.
   In this category we will find ideas that represent something other than what is sensed. Language, games, mathematics, and allegory, lie here.
   Lived hieroglyphics, while potentially possible with augmented reality, are currently not a reality. The ability to communicate directly through the creation of symbols of meaning or desire with more dimensions than typical speech is possible within dreams. Words can change color. A single person can speak in counterpoint, the precise melodies and species containing relevant information. A person can be surrounded in meaning in a way not currently possible. The environment itself can speak, and change form in linguistic meaning bearing ways based upon what is happening.
   Games that are not possible in real life can occur in dreams. These might include games like Hesse's Glass Bead Game, or could perhaps be even more abstract. Imagine a game in which one must navigate a whirling house party of uncountable rooms by changing the demeanour of each room into something congruent with a sphere of the tree of life, in attempt to create a sequence of rooms akin to the tree,
   It is already common for people to visualize mathematics, so that is not new here. Instead, one can live mathematics. While in mathematics it is possible create rules for a system without regard to its physicality, here the impossible physicality may become manifest.
   Allegory is often employed in the use of dreams for divination, so it does not need any more investigation here. Simply put, forms of symbolism already internalized may be lived out in dreams, and thus one may further develop modes of symbolic thought through ritual in which the effects are much more pronounced.
5. Neither/Both Literal and Symbolic
   Here there are two categories, 1. environments that are both literal and symbolic, and 2. environments that are neither literal nor symbolic.
6. Environments that are literal and symbolic abound in literature. A “real” world exists within fiction, but it often also contains a higher order discourse that uses people and places as its fundamental carriers of meaning.
   Environments of this sort would entail an apparently physical locale, in which every physical action incurs a symbolic response. Cutting down a tree both results in that tree being felled In the “physical world” of the dream, as well as attacking whatever symbolic associations that tree held for the dreamer.
   This is often little different from ritual in folk circumstances as evidenced in Frazer's Golden Bough. For example, Frazer writes of a range of traditions in which the last person to reap their crop is said to have “taken the old man,” “become the old man,” or “killed the old man.” This unlucky soul then undergoes various unpleasant treatments for working more slowly than the others. This may include being wrapped up in wreathes of corn and beaten, or simply having to host a party with free alcohol for all comers.
7. Neither Symbolic nor Literal
   From a rational perspective, this can be interpreted as meaningless. If a sensory impression holds no literal meaning, and it holds no symbolic meaning, where can it hold any meaning?
   To employ a Joycean distortion of language, “information” is “in-formation.” Sensory impressions that are placed into formations have already been placed into a system, and systems, being created by consciousnesses, impose meaning. Of course, many systems can be placed over the same data, but a multiplicity of meaning does not deny meaning.
   Therefore, it would seem that only pure, undifferentiated, sensory input can be meaningless. That is, it is only meaningless if no thought is made about it, if it is not organized in any way, or put in reference (in formation) to something else.
   It could be argued that the mere presence of sensory information is itself information. The fact that a sound is a sound, already means that a system has been placed over it. The same can be said for all of the other senses. For a sensory input to be neither symbolic nor literal, the person sensing must be unaware what sense the input goes with. If the sensing person is aware what sense is employed, then it has already been categorized.
   Further, the fact that something is sensed in the first place is a category! It is a distinction between sensed, and not sensed. No continuum can exist here. If it is partially sensed, then it is still sensed, but one has imposed further information onto it, namely that there is something unsensed as well.
   If one wishes to state that something can be both sensed and not sensed, and not in some partial fashion, but in its entirety, one is still categorizing it, namely into the category of being sensed and not sensed.
   If we assume that something lies in fault with the above, it remains unclear what benefit there is to experience that is neither symbolic nor literal, experience that holds no meaning, not even the concept of meaninglessness. If possible, it may be a way to simulate death, depending on the nature of death, and thus prepare themselves for what is to come, but given that view of death, time is limited, and might not be best spent practicing what they are guaranteed an eternity of.
   …
   It is apparent that dreams may be utilized for many purposes, though some theoretical categories appear to be neither possible nor desirable. With the development of virtual/augmented reality and designer drugs, some of these categories may become accessible in “waking” states.==

[END OF POST]

Interesting post, but I think it might be more suited to /r/LucidDreaming or a subreddit about dream interpretation. This forum is about subjective idealism, as Nefandi mentions, and so is more about the dreamlike nature of waking experience.

Check out our Reading List if you want to find out more, get the perspective.

Whether or not "everything" is "unreal" in the sense that you mean, my points about the uses of unreality apply. It just happens that my points apply to a larger category, if subjective idealism is closer to the mark than materialism.
Details about a speaker do not determine the value of what is said. If Hitler said "exercise is healthy," the fact that Hitler is the speaker makes no difference to the truth value of the statement "exercise is healthy."

Of course, exercising didn't do Hitler much good in the end!

Yeah, everything ends.

He should have stuck to making 'keep fit' videos, made a fortune, retired to an Austrian village in comfort. This may in fact be a way around the "can't kill Hitler" problem in time travel...

Now we just have to figure how to send that message to the future...

...so that the instructions can be followed in the past. Maybe in spring 2015? (Comedy-gold)

...

That's not even the main problem. Nethodsod is not espousing subjective idealism. It's obvious he's a materialist. He doesn't understand that this world is an illusion. He thinks some shit here is real and there are molecules and atoms and shit. And brains with chemicals in them. Basically, from a subjective idealist POV he's completely clueless and his points have no worth at all. He's not showing how everything is unreal or how to get in touch with unreality. He's clinging to convention with every line he writes. I can tell he's scared more than any one of us here.

It is really the main problem. From a lucid dreaming perspective it's all good; materialism vs idealism doesn't really matter. It's just that this subreddit isn't focused on that.

That's only true if you're talking about lucid dreaming as a secular, non-yogic activity, then I agree.

Agreed.

Yes, in retrospect, this post wasn't a great fit for this sub. I was acting under the impression that lucid dreams were expected to be a tool for realizing this unreal nature, and thus figured that an investigation of the uses of dream manipulation would be helpful.

No worries! It's great to know that thoughtful people are interested in contributing.

The idea is here is that your dream and waking life are a continuity - both consist of 'dream images' with no hidden underlying solid substrate - appearing in the common background of your awareness. What they are beyond that is another thing, of course. Certainly, lucid dreams can be great for rehearsal and a host of other brilliant applications, as well as exploring your 'base'.

However, fundamentally the hope is that you might be able to apply your lucid dreaming abilities more readily to waking life (in a "magickal" sense) than is commonly assumed, if you truly accept subjective idealism and operate from it. An additional benefit (for some, the key benefit) is a recognition of your true nature and place in the world, and the nature of that world, as a 'good' in itself.

That's why the reading list is a strange mix of dream yoga, chaos magick, lucid dreaming, personal investigation and philosophy!

You know, I don't really disagree with anything you said. I used to be a very hardcore subjective idealist. However, I have since become agnostic towards the issue. That is, I don't think we can know if anything exists beyond our apprehension (noumena being what is "really real" in philosophical jargon). From that I decided (perhaps not for the best) that it is typically to one's advantage to act as though a physical objective reality exists, even if it does not.
On the other hand, I do practice magick (hermetic informed chaos magick with an emphasis on ritual in dreams, and the creation of egregores/servitores/whatever to personify parts of the mind). And I do think that the observed world (whether or not something lies beyond it) is completely mind. Thus, at least that observed reality, if not "absolute reality," can be manipulated by intent.
What I don't see the value in, is making "waking" life completely like what is seemingly a dream, even if both are hallucinations. Again, that's a result of my "acting as if" principle.

I think 'secret agnosticism' isn't a bad thing either. Thing thing is, 'waking life' does act "as if" there is a background, but it turns out to be flexible: it does adjust to your beliefs and expectations and intentions. Since 'dream world' is the most flexible possible approach, and the most relaxed approach, that is to the benefit. In a way, it's much like magick traditions that all, in the end, teach you to work on yourself and reach 'realisation'. The world does seem to try to respond "as if". There's no such thing as a servitor as such, but the world will respond to you as if there were.

The difference between the waking world and the dream world is really the depth of the establishment of habits. The waking world has been around a lot longer than any dream you're going to have, and has stabilised. It is still potentially semi-unlimited (it is just mind-imagery) though. However, the 'will' or confidence or commitment-to-worldview required to make things happen is much greater. Hence the 'Dream Yoga' style effort (if you've not read Tenzin Rinpoche's book, it's worth your time, and is "available"). I understand your 'objections' though.

Also, something that occurred was, all waking imagery is essentially symbolic too; it represents "meaning". This is something I should have taken from your post.

It is not clear that the Buddhist notion of emptiness is equivalent to "lack of substance."

I've always taken this to be that there is no solid underlying. That the world is an illusion not because it is not a real experience, it is just that the nature of that experience is not what we assume.

One examines the cup of coffee before us, and realises that it has no solidity: it is a floating image, with occasional other sensations when we 'touch' it, but nowhere can we find the 'solid cup of coffee' we imagine. Then we turn our attention to ourselves, and find that we are not solid either: empty space with the occasional sensation floating here and there!

That's my understanding at present anyway.

That's a common one, but it is also applied to other things as well. In Confucianism, the idea of self is "relationally constituted." That is, you are the sum of all your connections to other people (and maybe the state, nature, and "heaven"). This fits in well with the idea of emptiness, and for some Confucian Buddhists, allows for emptiness as no-self to exist without completely leaving behind the material world. Many Buddhists are closer to dualists, thinking that there is something physical in addition to something nonphysical. Buddhism is one of those weird systems that is very open to reinterpretation, having few core beliefs. Given that everything we "understand" is illusion, from this point of view, everything can be reduced to utility, rather than "truth," since all things will be false in some since. This utility is very "Utilitarian" in that most Buddhism involves ways to reduce suffering.

I see. Buddhism seems quite 'scientific' in some of its forms, in the same sense as this. It seems to have a 'practical' aspect that works with its flexibility.

In truth, with idealism there is nothing to say that there isn't an underlying 'X' that 'inspires' our sensory experience, it is just inaccessible and cannot be commented upon. It has to be inferred by the restrictions and limitations we observe. In that sense they cover the same ground.

...

If we assume there is no material world, how does it immediately follow that desire is the only element involved in manipulating hallucinations? Further, it is not desire in general you suppose, but "desire to hold on to the hallucination."
Might there be hallucinations that we do not desire, but seem to arise nonetheless? It is certainly not inconceivable, and thus cannot be assumed an impossibility until demonstrated as such. Then there is the issue of the degree to which unreality is consensual. Do the thoughts of others influence our own thoughts? Do we interact with others at all? Berkely, for example, (a well known subjective idealist) thought that God was all-seeing, and thus kept "unreality" stable. Of course, none of the above matters if you wish to throw out the idea of rationality altogether. However, at that point, anything goes, and there is no-thing to be obtained or lost.

Some good points. "The rope and the snake", for instance?

And, certainly, it doesn't follow that belief/expectation are the only things at work. If this is, say, a 'shared dream' then there's more to it than your personal belief. As I say elsewhere, one difference between waking and most dreaming is the longer-lasting nature of this waking world, and it's potential to have amassed 'habits'.

I say "this" because this is the 'default' world we seem to return to. In fact, it might be better to call this our 'base dream'. I'd say there is no difference to the way waking and dream realities are built and behave, but it might be that dreams build up 'habits' and 'solidity' (really: predictability and self-consistency) over time. And since our base dream is longer lasting with more active dream characters, it has stabilised to a great extend. This is why most magick seems to occur via 'useful coincidences', even if incredibly unlikely. It is rare to directly observe a discontinuity occurring.

Is reality consensual? Berkeley's problem is that he implicitly imagined that there was in a sense a three-dimensional space, but the people in it were only observing certain areas of that space - and that things outwith anyone's observation might 'go blank'. However, there is no such 3-d space. If you examine your own experience, you'll find that there seems to be a "vast unstructured place" where your experience arises. Within that, you experience a 'phenomenal space", a structured space with sensory experience, and other parallel 'ideational spaces' where thoughts are (although sometimes they might seem to be located in the 'phenomenal space' somehow). The alternative view is that the whole world is enfolded into the perspective you are seeing now, and moments unfold then enfold into the background one by one. That way, the whole world is always under observation, or 'within mind', and nobody is 'spatially located'; everyone is everywhere or rather, everywhere is within everyone.

Summary: There are some things that need to be understood by experimentation and contemplation.

The enfolded/unfolded idea is well described in physicist David Bohm's world-view of an explicate (what we see) and implicate (which is enfolded) order.

The hologram analogy applies to a limited extent: if the whole image is contained within each part of the image, then looking at any part of the image at all is to look at the whole - this fulfilling the requirement that the world must exist within consciousness at all times (= be "observed" in the most general sense).

I'm pretty flexible on interpretations; to an extent it comes down to "practicality". However, I am keen on a commonality of viewpoint between dreaming and waking, intention and magick, which I think is achievable.

Also, I don't why thoughts can't have nonspatial dimensions to them that we reinterpret into spatial dimensions.

We do have an ability to think-about. For instance, under hypnosis people can experience "square circles" and so on, because you are not necessarily bound by visual and dimensional restrictions. (You don't need to by hypnotised, you can just do this, but you'll find yourself reluctant to let go to it.)

...

Q1: Here's a direct quote from the sidebar about the stated purpose of this subreddit:
A place for subjective idealists to discuss how to get in touch with the deeper unreality of this world...

Q2: I suppose you are right, that wasn't directly on topic. I was under the impression that dream manipulation in general was a tool toward this end.
If what is dreamt and what is typically called "waking life" are essentially the same, then everything in this post should be equally applicable to the unreality of the dreamt and "waking" worlds.

Except perhaps the 'stability' factor?

POST: This is something I am contemplating currently: Stability.

In other words, intent, I now realize, has a clearly effortless aspect. I would even say that true intent, deepest intent, is always effortless.

Yes, I completely agree with this.

I wonder, is the "replacement grounding" required for a sense of stability possibly the consistent sense of identifying with background awareness, rather than any other aspects of personality or objects or whatever? If everything else is going to be changeable and transitory, all that's going to be left is that background; it'll be the only thing to hold on to.

I haven't tried thinking of making background awareness my home base precisely because it doesn't look like anything, it's like I don't know what it is...

I think its property of "always there-ness' despite having no form is why it's potentially good for grounding / identifying with, whereas intent is content (loosely) and so changes.

In one dream I've had my legs cut off and I didn't even blink... I've had dream environments disappear or drastically change...

But, you did know you were in a literal dream (i.e. lucid dream) at the time. Your ("real") body screams for its existence when it gets in danger; you'd be amazed how much it likes being alive (as we judge it). I have in the past assumed I would get to a stage where i'd not care, but then went beyond it and was surprised how... well... fighty it all is!

I still like intent better. :)

You can have both, because the content is made from / shaped from the background. So it's more a case of focus, I guess. Anyway, it's something to play with.

Actually that's something I am working with right now too...

Well, start with low-speed impacts first, yeah? ;-)

POST: Why is Oneirosophy Good?

[POST]

I'll start by saying all this sounds cool, but I'm curious why it is a good idea.
Why is it good to "feel like [you] are in a lucid dream during waking reality?"
Is there some specific reason people should do this? Is there more to the ideas here that I'm not getting? Is there something that one might gain from this way of approaching the world/reality?

[END OF POST]

The extra part of it is the "magick" part. If you've had lucid dreams, you come to a different understanding of what influence or intention means, and what "you" are, and contemplation of what this all means in waking life leads to some interesting ideas. Bits of this were brought up in other threads, but your notion of yourself becomes everything that you are experiencing or that which experiences and your notion of doing something - anything! - means changing the universe. You are performing magick every time you make a decision. What's more, the more you take on that worldview, the more it appears true. And this is important. When you change your view to see waking life as a dream, it will become more like a dream for you, in all sorts of interesting ways. The expectation is that the further you push this, the more flexible things may become...

But, there's still the issue of intersubjectivity. For which I should start a little thread soon...

I am quite familiar with magick, primarily of the hermetic and chaotic varieties. I've also been lucid dreaming since I was a child. I'm still lucid in cycles (weekly or monthly cycles) without putting any effort into it. It eventually became somewhat boring for me, and now I find non lucid dreams to be more beneficial, since the subconscious wellings are less mediated by intention. So you claim that "you" are what you are experiencing, and that you can control what you experiencing, so you can change yourself? Or do you mean something like Crowley's calling every intentional act an act of magick?
Why is it good for your life to be like a dream? Why should you want things to become "flexible?" Are you imagining something like pure intent manifesting desire?

My interest in lucid dreaming also came and went, although has returned. I stopped fiddling with them in the end, more enjoyed the experience unfolding as an observer more; it became more of a philosophical playground.

Non-duality + chaos magick, perhaps as a summary, but the Crowley quote works for me.

Flexibility in terms of free will for your own behaviour, for lifting boundaries for magickal work (what belief could be more flexible?), but primarily for clearer direct perception of the present moment perhaps.

Note: Of course, this is meant to be an exploratory sub for generating ideas as much as anything else - how far can you push this particular idea and what are the effects if you do? There is to be some fun involved.

What do you mean by non-duality?

In its simplest form, the dissolving of the experience that you are 'here' and stuff is 'there'. It's a perceptual thing, rather than a thought thing. (Many-valued logic does look interesting though. I've heard the sea battle paradox before.)

That's kind of what I was asking you! I'm not sure why direct "perception of the present moment" is desirable.

Maybe it'll just be really cool? ;-) Increased freedom of will would follow from clearer perception, I suggest. But the real point of this sub (which isn't mine actually, it just looks interesting) seems to be a question or two, not an answer: what would it be like...? what would it mean philosophically...?

Ah, you see, I figured oneirosophy would have a goal, even though it moreso appears to be a toolset. Sort of like how gnosis is a state achieved for a reason, though its uses are varied. I hope to some some interesting material come of this board!

Well, the extra question is... what can you do if you make this a dream? If you adopt that belief so completely that you experience it, as in chaos magick.

Well, let's hope so!

Beyond the question of what, are the questions of "why?" and "should I?"

Indeed. All to be explored. Or... not, depending. This is interesting though. What are your concerns about this approach?

Well, the main one is that you might not be able to reverse any undesirable changes you make to yourself.
The higher order problem is of knowing what one should use these techniques for. In many eastern religions, these techniques are used to attain something called "enlightenment," whose nature varies from culture to culture. But essentially, the goal is to be happy, or at least to avoid suffering, and in Buddhism, this is largely accomplished through not feeling attached to things.
Unfortunately, if we think about the character of the person who is merely content, and does not care about anything, does that seem like a "good" person. I certainly don't like being around those people, and don't want to be like that.

It is true that changes would be irreversible, even just because of the memory of the change.

Enlightenment, as I see it, isn't about being happy (although that may come), it's about realising there is no division between you and your environment, that there is no "you" as you conceive of it - rather, you are "the space in which experience arises". (Try Douglas Harding's experiments for a fun taster maybe. [https://www.headless.org/])

This is different to not caring or being content. In fact, it doesn't necessarily reflect on your character at all! There are plenty of grumpy, smoking, drinking enlightened people. Rather, it is simply seeing what you actually are.

This then leads to experiential subjective idealism, and from then to a more direct approach to magick. Is the idea.

POST: How I have changed my core beliefs throughout my lucid dreaming career.

I was excited to have this thought but also angry that I didn't think of it myself and needed some stupid book to remind me. I always feel like that about great ideas, lol. I feel ashamed that I didn't already know them on my own, how dare I not know them?

Of course, if this is a dream, then you created the dream book to tell yourself about the dream nature of your reality. So really, you did think of it Yourself, just not yourself. ;-)

Random quote to end the day, since it seems appropriate to this and the other thread we're running [POST: What is Oneirosophy?]:

==In my first twenty years of lucid dreaming, as I came to seek an ultimate or base reality beyond symbols and appearance, beyond dream- ing and lucid dreaming, something deep within allowed the awareness that enlivens me to experience the "clear light" of pure awareness (as described in chapter 7). After exiting that experience, I knew that each dot of awareness, each speck of aware light, existed equally with all others and equally connected to all others. The awareness of the col- lective could be accessed in the awareness of the tiniest speck.
From that moment, I sensed that behind all appearances an un- paralleled, profound connection exists at a deep, deep level. Beneath each experience lies a connectedness. Behind each life, each object, each action, an awareness exists joined to all other life, objects, and actions. The inner working of all this awareness spills out into a reality formed and experienced and connects all in a massive symphony of individual creativity and fulfilment.
In certain moments, if you allow it, you can sense that the world around you is deeply interconnected: the sound of this bird is connected to a neighbor opening his door, the wind rustling the leaves announces the car appearing around the corner, your brief sudden thought of a friend lies in synchronicity with an action hundreds of miles away. The thought, the wind, the car, the bird, all connect at some deeper level where awareness resides, intersects, creates, and fulfills. Behind all ap- pearances lies the movement of awareness.

• Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self, Robert Waggoner==

...

There's also a tendency for people to "forget" unusual experiences. The just don't get attached to the rest of their memories; they let them go. I actually found it hard to stick at lucid dreaming initially because daily life would quickly 'overwrite' the feeling and disconnect me from it, then I'd 'wake up to it' again.

If you just relax and ignore your dreams, your dream rules can remain the same throughout your human lifespan or they can drift around a bit.

Just as in life. If you never consciously 'intend' or 're-intend' (either in moving forward or resisting a direction) then you and your life environment (the same thing) will just play out automatically. Many people don't realise they can direct themselves; they just experience themselves. Hence all that talk about 'karma' in various writings; really I think this can be viewed as just clearing out 'bad intentions' (or directions) I think.

I think we can be mostly automatic - once we make our occasional intentional adjustments we can let them run - but if you make none at all, you're in trouble. Particularly because external events will, if you don't 'stay awake', adjust your 'character' and implicit direction, and send you off to the wrong place. A main thing in all this seems to be, at a minimum: pay attention and always listen. You don't necessarily need to interfere, but you need to be aware, and do a spot of magickal intention to counter 'drift'.

Nefandi means well. This kind of thing.

There is one warning regarding this practice: it is important to take care of responsibilities and to respect the logic and limitations of conventional life. When you tell yourself that your waking life is a dream, this is true, but if you leap from a building you will still fall, not fly. If you do not go to work, bills will go unpaid. Plunge your hand in a fire and you will be burned. It is important to remain grounded in the realities of the relative world, because as long as there is a "you" and "me," there is a relative world in which we live, other sentient beings who are suffering, and consequences from the decisions we make.
The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep, Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche

Some people can get pretty lost in this stuff, because on the one hand it works (intention via subjective reality worldview does have effects), but on the other hand there are limits and dangers.

On communication, you only need to take a look here on this very sub to see how challenging it is to refer to what you individually assume are straightforward concepts - because different words mean different things to all us different Humpties, just as you say! Especially when you are talking about experiences.

Consequences are important to consider, particularly if there's a risk that other people will be directly affected without their consent, collaterally. Part of the purpose of this subreddit will be, I hope, to explore those issues too. There are practical, philosophical and moral implications here. Subjective idealism is not solipsism. If you are right-handed, do you happily use it to cut your left hand?

Lack of consent is hovering perhaps highest amongst the top of my issues now having pulled the corruption alarm cord. I am very concerned about malevolent corruption of innocence as a result

I think that so long as you don't explicitly target a person with your intentions, you're okay. Why would you pit aspects of yourself against one another anyway?

It is true, however, that there is no filter: if you magickally intend something it will happen in some form or other, regardless of moral aspects and so on. However, how 'the dream' manages and combines the different intentions of everyone into a single movement is of course interesting (if we view it that way). One of the simplest ways is to say that 'everything gets taken into account' from a timeless level perspective, but that's a little out of scope here.

* * *

TG Comments: /r/Glitch_in_the_Matrix

POST: So, my kitchen light moved. And I'm in an alternate universe apparently.

This means, you realise, that is no longer your wife.

See here:

"The day I posted one particular reality shift story, I had woken up to find my key chain had turned gray. My boyfriend and I always had identical key chains (actually they were the lock devices that came with our Jeep), and they were both black. When one of us picked up a key ring, we had to look not at the black device but at the collection of keys, because we had the same house, similar cars and other things -- so we had to look to make sure that the gold keys to my office were on the key ring or not in order to determine which set of keys was which.
One day, I woke up after a fairl[y] hard night of half sleeping, to discover that my key locking device was now gray. My boyfriend never remembers a time when my key chain wasn't gray, and he insists that a difference in color is the way we always told our otherwise identical key chains apart, which makes me think I also do not have the exact same boyfriend anymore."
-- Changing Keys / Instant Costume Change, Realityshifters.com

You should think yourself lucky, and perhaps not look at that lamp too closely. No matter how strange it might start to seem.

Q1: His other self married her, and he is now that other self. By that standard, she is his wife.

But, he's not that other self - he's the same self, now looking out into another world. She is not the woman he married, in his old world.

Q1: No, but she's not a different person, she's a different version of the same person. He, too, is a different version of the same person she married.

Okay. How different does someone have to become before they are considered a different person? What is the connection between this woman and his wife in the other 'reality'?

(The fact of his knowledge alone means he is substantially different to any other person with his body; her lack of knowledge means the same thing.)

Q1: If he can just randomly appear in the other person's body, in the same home with one subtle difference, the same life, without even an apparent death to explain the switch -- the two are clearly closely linked.

We could think of it as being the same "person" (soul? experiencer?) but looking through the "viewport" of a particular body in a particular environment.

That works for him. But what of her? In fact, is there even necessarily a "person" looking through her eyes? Could she just be a philosophical zombie, operating on automatic with no "experiencer" looking through her as their "viewport"?

(The more extreme possibility is that of "personal dream-worlds" - that we are each living in our own dream but they may/may not overlap with others' dream-worlds. So his change is then just a discontinuity, a shift in his dream-world, perhaps in response to his desire and irritation regarding the light. She is just his dream wife. There may be a wife having a dream-world of her own, but that dream would only interact with his to the extent they have common desires of experience. In this scenario, we are "extended persons" of some sort.)

And what could have caused that be the case? I see no reason for him to have switched to a world -- this world -- where she is just a hollow shell. I see no reason for this universe's version of him having been a hollow shell before this version of him appeared in our universe's body, either.

Well, it might make no difference - most of our actions and responses are automatic, it's just that we experience them. We can, if we choose and if we know how, redirect ourselves and our path though.

There is more to our consciousness than we know. He most likely is one facet of a consciousness with multiple bodies, experiencing a multitude of existences, in different universes. That he cannot consciously connect to the other parts of the consciousness does not mean that they do not exist, or are not linked.

Actually, I do prefer this - what I call "extended persons" - but it's hard to tell the difference between this and the "viewport" version with a single experiencer. A hollow shell can behave exactly the same way, externally, as someone with an experiencer, or as an extended person would. In fact, perhaps his wife's behaviour is dependent upon his expectations, rather than being autonomous herself. With the extended person idea, and infinite worlds in which to express all possibilities, other people actually do correspond to our expectations/beliefs/desires (even if those are detrimental to us).

Combining those ideas:

Everyone can get their ideal world. You are extended throughout all possibilities, but only need to experience the possibility-version that you want. Extended persons and viewport-like experiencing.

To me it seems just as worthwhile to point at random people on the street and state that they might be hollow. Well, yes, they might be. But how is it relevant to this situation?

It's to do with the mechanics of the change, and what we're really experiencing right now. A "hollow" person needn't be any different to anyone else. Because you are effectively acting as a hollow person most of the time - you are on automatic. Being "hollow" just means not being observed through.

It's easier to say that there are infinite universes each with a /u/TriumphantGeorge and a /u/parafact in them, but we "the observing consciousnesses" only look through one at a time. When we interfere, then we jump to looking through one that corresponds to our desire/intention.

We are always experiencing never actually doing.

Human bodies are part of the surrounding environment, seamless with them. We are not the bodies, we are just the experiencers of bodies and environments.

I absolutely disagree that we are only looking through one universe at a time. It's just that the part of me that is aware of looking into this universe is only able to be conscious of looking into this one.

It depends on what we mean by "we". Right now, I am only experiencing looking through this universe. I can imagine that other parts of me are looking elsewhere, but if I can't experience it right now, where does that leave me?

I also still do not see the point of contemplating the potential hollowness of OP's wife specifically when, by both your viewpoint and mine, she is equally likely to be hollow in this universe as she was in the last one -- though we disagree on the actual likelihood. Nothing has changed in that regard.

You have exactly the same problem with your "I am looking through all universes" view - it's not testable. You - you right now - only ever experience one universe at a time. If you "jump universes" you will then experience that one, not two at once.

Meanwhile, you can't tell if the wife is "hollow" or not, because it makes no difference to her behaviour. However, if you are only experiencing one universe at a time (which all the evidence points to), then we can assume that is the same for her, and that given infinite universes, it is infinitely unlikely that she's looking out of those eyes.

However, the universes (personal world-dreams) must overlap in some way. We are all alone, but our worlds are "inspired by" the intentions and choices of all other universes as well as our own.

EDIT: That read as being "shouty". Not meant to be, just quite interested in bashing this out. :-)

The essence of this is, "what is a person" and does it require awareness, a "presence" that is experiencing it? I say no. So why do we need every universe to be "looked-through"? You just pick the one you like best! The rest will roll along by themselves.

Previous attempt to visualise this here [POST: Meta-switching realities].

...

Q: [Deleted]

Just decide you are going to notice them. Then you will.

POST: I dream about the future then live it?

[POST]

So this has been driving my completely insane recently and I've decided to share my weird reoccurring glitch.
I dream about and relive days of my life. Now I know how crazy this sounds and I've looked all over for an explanation and I assure you it's not me having deja vu mid day and thinking I had a dream.
This happens about 4 times every year and is usually started the exact same way, with me having a dream about my life.
Now before the incident I'm about to describe I pinned this on stress and told myself I was just making these things up. However this latest occurrence has me 100% sure it was a glitch in the matrix.
Now I've gotten use to these rare dreams of mine but the latest one bothered me because it was so vivid. I specifically remember seeing these pile of blocks when I woke up and someone saying "Frank what if we merge our two piles will my green go with your blue?" The other thing I remember was a co-worker of mine named Jennifer saying something about her son and a baseball injury.
Due to the vividness of the dreams I kept thinking about them all day mostly the blocks and what such a strange phrase could mean.
Later in the afternoon we had a surprise team building exercise with... You guessed it! Blocks.
At first I thought nothing of it because I had become preoccupied and was not thinking about my dream at the time.
The goal was to build certain structures out of these blocks, it began with basic triangles and then it got more advanced to the point we needed to share blocks but every block had to be used in the construct for the team to pass.
I was looking around the table trying to figure out how we could build a tower we needed and I noticed me and my co-worker frank had an extra pile of blocks and blurted out "Frank what if we merge our two piles will my green go with your blue?"
As soon as I heard the words come out of my mouth I froze and remained very quite for the rest of the exercise trying to rationalize what just happened.
After the exercise is done we all head to the break room for some coffee and bagels. While everyone is chatting I hear Jennifer talking to her friend Cathy, I was very hesitant to ask but I forced myself to do it "By any chance did your son get injured playing baseball recently?"
Now I have no outside work Connection to Jennifer so her immediate reaction to me knowing about that injury was to think I was a stalker but I quickly explained to her my dream and convinced her I was not a stalker but she was still pretty sure I was insane.
Creepy right?
But here is where it gets extremely bothersome and the reason I'm debating putting myself in a mental hospital or some shit.
The next day was exactly the same. No dream this time but the day was exactly the same down to little details.
The surprise team meeting was held again with the same problems and initial reactions (the confusion and brainstorming were the same right down to the wire) I was even in the same position where I almost asked frank if my greens would go with his blues.
As we walked to the break room Jennifer was talking to Cathy but I decided to not ask her about the injury this time. Instead she ended up telling everyone about it herself! How could I dream about something happening if the knowledge of the event caused it to not happen originally!?!?!?!?
To this day I still have these episodes randomly but none were as vivid (or maybe I was not as aware) as this one.
Please tell me I am not alone in this and other people have also experienced freak time travel combined with dreams of the future.
Edit: please forgive formatting and errors, I am on mobile.

[END OF POST]

Q1: There's no need to be alarmed by this, it's perfectly okay. In fact, many people have access to this ability, but tune it out or try to rationalize it away.
The thing is, most of our experiences are lined up days before they actually play out in physical terms. So, more sensitive people can get glimpses of the "blueprint" of the event. This often happens in our dream state, because we are less resistant at that time.
Take care and have fun with it :)

It's all deterministic, unless you actively choose to "re-direct"?

Q1: Determinism would imply someone running you life for you. Rather, we have complete freedom of choice- our expectations shape these blueprints. It just takes some time to assemble the cooperative components for the physical manifestation.

No, determinism would imply that a path just "plays out" via its own momentum. When a rock starts rolling down a hill, it doesn't need gravity to keep pulling it. It will keep going until it is redirected (by a collision, or by a change in the landscape).

I think we have free choice to re-point the path, but if we don't then it plays out deterministically. This is why we can tell what is going to happen: the whole future is effectively here, now unless we make an intentional change that affects it at the ground, seed level.

Q1: Ah, I see what you mean.

It's a common point actually. Do we control our actions, moment by moment? Do we constantly intend? No, I'd say we experience ourselves rather than do ourselves - except when we inject a new target into awareness (reshape ourselves). Just as well. I quite like that my blood supply is self-circulating, for instance. :-)

EDIT: Although some people do a constant 'holding back' of themselves. Perhaps most people, even. They don't fully commit to their own flow.

...

Q2: Souuuuuuuurce?

Q3: (It's total garbage, but don't tell anyone I said anything, I'll get downvoted to hell for not believing in supernatural bullshit.)

Q1: Eh, life would be much less fun without the variety of opinions. So we can probably agree they're all valuable. Everyone finds their own little nuggets of truth- who cares, if others agree with them, or not.

Q3: Most of the stuff posted here is 99% batshit insane. There's a few 'actual' glitches that I nor anyone else can explain, but when it's stuff like "I dreamed about the future", I chalk it up to either 1. a brain issue where the person actually thinks they had a dream about that day, or 2. hyperactive awareness in their daily life that allows them to perceive a possible 'future' that just happens, and then they think they are special in some way.
When something posted on this subreddit is only observed by the OP, then the OP should have talked to a doctor to get a brain scan. When it's something like "I have actual proof I jumped into a parallel universe", then I'll be interested. what I'm trying to say, is that for a glitch to be considered real, it should be verified by at least a bystander or a friend, not just by the OP.

Q4: I believe everything follows fundamental laws that we as human beings cannot break. We can't escape from the universe, we can't enter a black hole without being crushed to the size of an atom, and we can't go faster than the speed of light.
As for the question, I believe we have 'free will' in the sense that we can weigh risks vs reward, and make decisions based on that. Unless you have a different definition of free will, I'll stick to that answer.

Of course, nobody's ever tried those things to find out...

As for the question, I believe we have 'free will' in the sense that we can weigh risks vs reward, and make decisions based on that. Unless you have a different definition of free will, I'll stick to that answer.

Isn't that deterministic though? Your preferences are already determined, so your choices are already determined. You might "experience thinking and choosing", but really there's no influence you can have over it. It's all just unfolding, as it always going to be. (And for this reason, nobody has "abilities to see into the future". The future is already there, in a sense. So it's not unreasonable you might end up knowing, but you wouldn't be doing it; the thought would just happen to you.)

Although other views are available [http://www.mth.uct.ac.za/%7Eellis/realworld.pdf].

Q4: It's deterministic if you start from a certain point in time, for one decision. If you start from the very beginning, you're making your own choices (through guidance of parents), and that shapes who you are as a person. Both through nature(genes), and nurture(environment). For instance: I would never eat crickets on a stick. In China, it's a snack you can buy. People love it.

If you start from the very beginning, you're making your own choices (through guidance of parents)...

Is that true, though? I'd have thought the parents and environment were part of the "deterministic" input, so what you've said mean there's really no choice, because you don't choose your nature. You actually never chose not not-eat-crickets-on-a-stick, that choice was pre-made for you by your upbringing.

(Note: I personally believe we do or can have some top-down influence, but it requires a bit of dis-identification with our own body and thought processes.)

Q4: Well it's not like you can be raised by wolves. If you were, and you survived, you would eat meat and berries. You wouldn't know language, and you'd be naked... unless you thought "hmm, fur is warm, I'll skin an animal".

Well, that's determinism in action! No real choices. Wolfy-behaviour all the way.

Q4: You still have choices. "Should I follow this hard rocky road with metal animals?"

Haha. :-) But your options are pre-determined by your upbringing and experiences. In turn, your upbringing led to your nature and preferences, which determine which option you will choose. So it was always going to happen the way it did: loudly squished under the metal animals due to ignorance!

EDIT: Although personally I believe there is the possibility of creativity in the options which appear to us mentally, if we give space for it to occur.

Q4: Okay, then say you get taken away from your parents due to some bullshit. Now you're in a foster home. Your entire life just changed based on that alone. You have free will to hold on to the values your parents instilled, or you can try to get over the trauma of being taken away from your parents, and live out happily with the foster family. Every single person has free will. As a collective, we guide each other.

You have free will to hold on to the values your parents instilled, or you can try to get over the trauma of being taken away from your parents, and live out happily with the foster family.

How do you make the choice? Does the choice you make not come from your 'character'? Did you choose your character? But...

The way out of this is to say: Free will isn't the ability to do just anything, randomly - rather it's to act according to your own nature, given the information available to you. The extra secret sauce is if you discover the technique/ability to "ask for further options" from your creative mind (or whatever). Then, although you will always make a choice based on your nature (determined) you at least have the possibility of a fresh direction (creativity) - which in turn will change your nature. If you don't discover or aren't introduced to the secret sauce, then you'll pretty much unfold deterministically for your whole life. Fortunately, you'll likely be unaware of it. And if you were, you'd respond deterministically anyway...

This whole conversation really boils down to your own definition of what free will is.

Quite probably. Basically, it's a kind of meaningless topic for most people! It doesn't matter if your choices are effectively determined in advance (by upbringing, environment, inherent character, this is a common philosophical argument against free will), so long as they're aligned with your best interests. For most people, that's enough.

Although I'd say that the extra bit: That the options are not necessarily pre-determined, means we have the ability to creatively change our world, rather than simply react to it and be a cog in it.

(Personally, I believe that we can get stuck in a reactive mode, but that we generally do have the ability to live creatively and not deterministically.)

What's your definition?

Q4: My definition of free will is being able to do anything that you desire. If you want to go on a rampage, you can. You will probably get shot, but that's just something that happens. People can snap. They can act any way they want, but they choose to go along with daily life.
An example: I want to uproot my life and move north into a forest. I hate the way society behaves, and I think it's absolutely ridiculous that people feel like this is the way life is (and there's nothing we can do about it). If I chose to go right now, I could. My family would be upset, and my friends would turn on me, but I COULD go. I'm completely free to do so. It is my choice, and my choice alone.
Free will is essentially freedom to act and think the way you want. There's consequences, but that comes with others disagreeing with the way you're acting/thinking.

All good. As Wikipedia says, "The underlying issue is: Do we have some control over our actions, and if so, what sort of control, and to what extent?"

So, you are free to do all those things. But are you free to "want what you want", can you choose your thoughts in advance, are you a victim of your impulses? To what extent are you choosing your actions, to what extent are they happening to you? On what basis are you making the choice that is "my choice, and my choice alone". That's the philosophical dilemma of free will (rather than just "freedom").

In that case, whether you consider you have 'true free will' or not might be about where you draw the line - what you consider as "you" and what you consider as external or "the environment".

"Everyday free will" is just the notion that, based on the information you have, you will make choices in alignment with your own character/nature. I think that's fairly straightforward, and what you're going for?

Q4: Again, you're trying to change the definition of what free will is.
free will: noun 1. the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one's own discretion.
Based on this definition, we have free will.

The definition is half the problem, but going with that:

the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one's own discretion

People could argue - if you examine exactly how decisions and actions come about - that you'll find you are actually entirely subject to "necessity or fate", and that the "discretion" is therefore an illusion, simply an experience you have. Note, I'm not really arguing with you! In practical terms, everyone experiences having free will - they just know they are agents, directly. Logically though, it's hard to prove. But then so is consciousness, which is essentially the same thing (free will being "first cause" if it exists at all). And everyone knows they are conscious, simply by the very knowing itself.

POST: Not sure if this is a glitch or reality

[POST]

I'm going to explain this the best I can then provide several scary examples. I dream EVERY night. They are vivid dreams. I read, write and interact with strangers, family and even go to work. I've heard that it's impossible to read in your dreams ( because that part of your brain isn't active?), but I do with ease. Writing is a bit if a challenge and my handwriting looks like a child's. Anyway, I try to forget these dreams- but they always come back to bite me. The dreams make no sense when I have them. Events are out of order and often I have no idea why I'm somewhere or doing something. If the dream seems important or scares the shit out of me I tell my SO, that way I can point out in the future that we knew it was going to happen. Ok, so these dreams come true. They are impossibly accurate. Every job I've ever had, I've dreamed about months or years in advance. Jobs I could never imagine myself doing ( and I mean never!) and yet, they happen. Before you say the dreams are influencing my choices, no, not the way I dream. Example ( not scary)-
I dream I'm sitting at a desk, calculating percentages and gazing out a window. Out the window I see a tree with its leaves blowing in the wind. On the desk I see some sort of statements, stapler, little do-dads , your typical desk. I wake up thinking what a crazy dream, I'd never voluntarily take a desk job. I'm a typical blue collar worker. Low and behold six months later I apply for a bread delivery job( as a second job). It was a few months into the job at the end of a long day. I had to bill each customer for the bread I delivered and discount for the un-purchased bread I removed from the store. There was a desk in the rear of the bakery positioned directly in front of a window ( it wasn't mine but I was allowed to use it). Frustrated from the paperwork I look up to see the tree outside and wish I was done for the day. Then it hits me like a brick, the tree. The desk. The paperwork. The do-dads. It's all there.
Next dream -
I dream I'm holding the most beautiful baby infant, though it's definitely not mine. I smile and somehow know this baby, but I don't. It was a girl that had blue eyes, and dark black hair. I'm alone in a beautiful Park like setting. I can't see very far in any direction because the sun is absolutely blinding. I wake up it's early morning. I can't go back to sleep so I have a very long day the next day.
I lived over 1500 miles away from my family. But the next day I get a call. My sister had had a late term miscarriage. I asked her if it was a little girl with blue eyes and black hair. She wondered how I had known. Somehow I thought it would help comfort her so I told her I knew when her baby died because she came to visit me. My dream occurred at the time she was in the hospital giving birth the night before.
Next dream-
I dreamed I was in two rooms joined by a doorway there was literally 100 people there. I didn't know any of the people. Somehow they all knew me and were talking to me and touching me. I found this very uncomfortable my eyes search the room for someone I knew. Then I saw my father. I ran to him, opened my mouth to speak then I woke up.
Later that year my grandfather died who lives in another state. Not just another state but on the complete opposite coast. I went with my father to his funeral. You guessed it I was at the funeral home standing amongst lots of relatives that I had never met. Somehow, I lost my father in the crowd. I looked around for him and spotted him in another room. I hurriedly went towards him and as I went to speak I realized instantaneously this was that dream. It scared the living shit out of me and I could not speak.
The problem I have is my dreams are broken bits and pieces. I cannot pinpoint these events that will take place. I only realize what is going on as it is happening.
Have I dreamed about my death? Yes. More than once. I will not elaborate, I have heard that you can influence your surroundings more than you know when you speak out loud/write about incidents and it's possible to make those things happen. I'm not risking it.
Apparently this runs in the family- one of my parents also has these predictive type dreams. They can truly be horrifying.
I also seem to have weird glitches in this reality. I'm a relatively shy person and I try not to make eye contact unless I must in my daily routines. I've had more incidents than I care to recall of seeing someone who is gone mere seconds later.
For instance, I was walking out of a building towards a smoke break area. I was looking down to avoid eye contact with a man that was coming towards me. I passed the man then turned to ask how his day went, the man was gone. He WAS there a few seconds ago.
I walked past an office and saw a man sitting in a chair with the lights off. Being familiar with the men who often work there at night I turned around to ask WTF he was doing with the lights off and to have some friendly banter. The was no one there. It's not uncommon for co-workers to nap on night shift, so it didn't strike me as odd.
I've never been on drugs, medications, I don't drink except on rare occasions ( maybe once a year). I've never been arrested. I was raised religious, but do not attend church.
Does anyone else have similar experiences? Are you able to influence the outcome of reality because of your dreams?
Is there a way to shut off my dreams? Anything over the counter? I never feel rested when I wake up. The dreams wear me out physically and mentally.
I posted anonymously for obvious reasons. If someone told me this, I'd think they were crazy or on drugs. For once Id like to sleep with no recollection of dreams.

[END OF POST]

The "shy person" glitches are likely due to you not truly looking at your surroundings. Your mind just makes a best-guess based on peripheral vision and so on, and fills in the environment accordingly. When you decide to deliberately look directly at the "person", your mind-model gets updated and the person disappears/becomes a shadow/whatever.

The dreams, though, are fascinating! Well, "all time is at once" it is said, so it's already happened from some perspectives. You should maybe play with trying to deliberately imagine situations you'd like before you go to sleep. Some New Thought people used to say that this worked. Worth a go [http://www.thepowerofawareness.org/], as an experiment... you might be able to improve the usefulness of your dreams by doing it.

No, although I don't look at faces as I pass people I see their bodies( often from the chest down), gender, what they are wearing or holding.

Right, that's a bit clearer. Don't know if you've being trying to do lucid dreaming deliberately, but that's maybe worth a look, /r/luciddreaming and the Robert Waggoner book perhaps. Might let you get better control in the dream of yourself if not the situation, keeping calm, the better to ask questions and so on. They sound quite challenging anyway.

What do you think's happening?

EDIT: Just read your other reply on the dream control thing.

i know this stuff is going to occur.

The certainty is interesting. And I think you're right: you can know and it will happen. But...

You should read the Neville Goddard book, but for one idea: That although our lives are deterministic in the sense that they unfold along a fixed path if we don't interfere - we have a "destiny" - we can re-direct our lives, and re-point that destiny. However, this isn't necessarily by action (because we'll pre-dream our actions), but by changing your momentum in some sense. I dunno, it seems to be the sort of thing he was saying (PDF here). Whatever you think of that, his little exercise might be useful for you (summoning the feeling of the new direction, in your dream or otherwise). In some ways this makes sense: If you always act in character, then even "spontaneous" action would be in-character and therefore inevitable. Only by changing yourself can you change how you might respond to something in the future, and change your fate?

I'm sure you've experimented with trying to change things, but maybe it can't be done the way you've been attempting it so far.

POST: I think I entered another dimension...

[POST]

Something is weird here. I don't exactly know what it is for sure, but I know when it started.
A couple days ago I was walking through one of the dorms on my campus. It's the oldest dorm, built pre-WW2, so there's some weird quirks about it. Also, it's incredibly hard to navigate your first couple times. I was going through it to study some calc and had the hardest time finding the right stairwell to get to the room I needed. I went up one set of stairs and saw a sign pointing me towards the set of rooms I needed to go to. I turned left and followed the hallway. I saw a girl with her door open talking about econ, walked passed some guys heading towards the dining hall, and saw one guy knocking on another person's door. I reached the end of the hallway and the only thing there was another stairwell, not the room I needed, so I went into the stairwell.
I saw a sign saying I was on the floor below where I thought I was, so went up the stairs again, confused. One flight up, I saw the same sign that led me to the left. I passed the same girl talking about econ, same guys going towards the dining hall, and same guy knocking on a door. I was really confused at this point, but saw the room I needed to be in at the end of the hall.
Things are different now though, and nobody is admitting it. Every stranger I see in the street makes weird eye contact with me. It's as if I'm not welcome here. I bring this up to my friends and they just laugh and change the topic really quickly. My friends are acting strange too, as if they need to keep an eye on me at all times. I stood up to go to the bathroom yesterday and my roommate said he'd go with me, which I thought was weird. Even weirder when he just stood there and didn't say a word while I peed. Other friends suddenly want to go out of their way to walk with me to my classes. I don't know what's going on, but I feel like I don't belong here.
EDIT: Just to address some issues that plenty of comments have brought up:
a) I am most certainly did not dream it. I have in my notebook a series of notes I took that night, so unless this is still a dream then I was perfectly awake.
b) I understand that people making eye contact isn't necessarily abnormal, but their eyes are telling me something now. They're looking at me like I don't belong. It's a look of disgust, and "what is he doing here?".
To make things worse, I've been pretty thrown off by this so took the half hour train ride home to visit the family for awhile. Things seemed normal, my parents were fine, but my dog barked at me repeatedly. He's never done this before, not even the times that I've visited home before, and he wouldn't stop. He was angry at me.
EDIT 2: After a relatively normal afternoon and dinner with the family I came back to campus. One comment suggested I go back to the stairwell. I'm not really sure what I expected, but I went back anyways. It's like people didn't want me to go back. More than the weird, hostile looks I'm used to being given, people were bluntly bumping into me as I walked towards the dorm. I get to the stairwell and feel fine, everything seems normal, until I almost shit myself when I heard a guy behind me say "You're not supposed to be here". I walked quickly out of the dorm and made way towards my own hall, and people were much less resistant to me walking back. I don't know guys, maybe your reality isn't my reality.
EDIT 3: Went to the University health services office, as people suggested. They recommended me to a psychiatrist, and I was luckily able to walk in to see him. I explained my problem to him, and he had this grave look on his face while I was talking. Once I finished, he simply explained that it must be all in my head and hurried me out the door. I asked if there was anything I could do about this and he told me I was just imagining things.
Strangers are becoming much more aggressive the longer I stay here. At the dining hall this morning the employee that was swiping student IDs had to ask her manager if I should be let in. The manager gave me a weird look, but acted like he didn't want to make a scene and said sure. I was walking to class with a friend and one guy looked me directly in the eye and just said "leave". People intentionally bumping into me is now the norm. They have a look of disgust in their eyes. I'm starting to think that I really don't belong.
EDIT 4: People have been asking for an update, and I wish I could say things have been getting better. Still the same rude behavior from random strangers; the other day I was asked to leave the library because I was "a disturbance to the other students" when all I was doing was reading my textbook. It's finals week right now, so I haven't gotten the chance to see help outside the University. My friends are still concerned about me, and my family still acts the same. This is all becoming "normal" unfortunately.
FINAL EDIT: I've come back. It was the strangest experience. I was at the dining half with my friends and this girl was looking at me the whole time. But it wasn't a bad look, it was friendly. And something was different about her--she seemed just ever so slightly "off", I was drawn to her. After I ate, I told my friends to go without me (which they hesitated to do, but eventually complied). I went up to the girl and before I knew it I had told her my entire story. Every built up frustration, every tear, every bit of confusion, and she just listened. When I finished, she looked me in the eyes and said "Follow me". I did, and she took me to a bridge over a river that connects two parts of the campus. She held my hand and told me to close my eyes. I felt a strong gust of wind and next thing I know I was on that bridge alone, but things were normal. People no longer make disgusted eye contact with me or are rude to me, my friends are normal again, I belong. I have this overwhelming sense of joy, and I think that whoever this girl was knew that I was in the wrong place and somehow knew how to fix that.

[END OF POST]

So, this is the most interesting glitch in ages.

Any other changes? Minor things, even light switches being the wrong way round, things like that? Some people have tried to make changes deliberately and small glitches result (if one believes this):

. . . I wasn't upset by this, I didn't believe in it anyway, so I went home without expectations or anticipation about how my universe might change.
That night I set to making dinner, but when I turned the knob to light the burner under my pan of water for the pasta, the burner behind it went on instead. I had been living in this apartment for close on five years. The inner knobs had always lit the front burners and the outer knobs had always lit the back burners. I got one of my room-mates to come and see. "But that's the way it's always been.", he said. No one else remembered it the way I did.
Later that night I called Ebony. He laughed, but he seemed impressed, "You must really be doing your will if that's the only change your universe needed to balance it." Considering some of the horror stories I've heard related I'm grateful that a switch of the oven knobs was all it took to convince me of the reality of magick!
-- Some memories of Ebony

The overall vibe of "not being in the same place anymore" reminds me of my favourite story on another website:

Suddenly everything had changed. My buddy was not quite the same guy I had known moments before while sitting peacefully on the trestle, the river I knew so well had changed, my home was different, everyone and everything was different, yet appeared somewhat the same.
Everything looked exactly the same as it did before yet it all had a different feel to it. It's as if everything was replaced with identical stuff. It's like accidentally putting on someone else's coat that looks just like your own, but it just doesn't feel the same and the fit is a bit off. It's like walking into a motel room. It's like driving some else's car which is identical to your own.
The way people are different is also hard to describe. They seem the same, yet they act just a bit off from their usual patterns. They don't send out the same vibes. It's as if you are meeting them for the first time. You know them, yet you don't feel like you know them. They seem to be close copies of how you remember them.
-- Realityshifters.com

Having said all that, you have to be careful and not over-interpret.

If you change or shift for some reason then your world will seem to change and shift. One theory is that, like with shared dreams, we are each in our own dream world but we overlap with others via common "archetypes". If we meet in a restaurant, my Wendy's might be your MacDonald's.

If something glitches - which really means that you hiccup in some sense - then the environment image spawning from the archetype might shift. Our environments are made up in our minds; it's just that we don't notice it. This includes our experiences of other people: they are "filled in" based on very minimal information. You dream most of the details of your experience, spawned from a loose outline, in an ongoing feedback loop of enfolding and unfolding.

You might be experiencing an extreme version of that.

EDIT: Does anybody else remember a story (might be here, /r/occult or /r/psychonaut) where everyone on the street suddenly stopped and turned around to look at this guy, who was sitting in the shadow of a doorway or something? Like he'd been "discovered" by the other characters/figures?

Q1: The second one sounds like Capgrass syndrome. Where due to a mini stroke in the 'familiarity' path of the brain, everything seems to be replaced by copies or 'imposters'.

I'm not sure about 'familiarity paths', but yes it does sound like that. A few glitches here have a variation on it: The guy who 'glitched' in his drive and everything changed (car colour noticed first) and was unfamiliar (not his wife anymore); the guy who didn't have that new car after all seems related too. Of course, "brain problems" might just be the in-world ad-hoc explanation provided for the change when you "jump"... ;-)

...

I am most certainly did not dream it. I have in my notebook a series of notes I took that night, so unless this is still a dream then I was perfectly awake

In a way, this might be true. If you did "get back" would it be a waking up into your previous world, from here?

Q2: late to the party and I hope that it hadn't been said before,but have you though about the fact that somebody could have spread (negative) rumors about you? a crazy ex, a deluded friend...did you have any fight or argument with somebody on the campus? this could explain the strange behavior of your friends (who believe the rumors and are not concerned about you, but more about themselves)..the fact is that often we understand the things subconsciously but we cannot explain it rationally. this could also explain the other students' reaction:can be that in some way this rumor is big and everybody knows "about you" or alternatively, could be just this "bad vibe" that your friends are sending you - and you don't understand rationally- makes you a bit paranoid about everybody else...

So your TL;DR is: "You're not paranoid, they really do hate you" - ?

Q2: this made me smile :) I didn't think it exactly in that way, but yes, I think before talking about alternate universes better discard all the other practical options...

With your help, I think OP may be finding the idea of being irretrievably cast into an unfriendly parallel reality is getting more appealing! :-)

Q3: Your story reminds me a glitch I read once (not here) where a woman shifted in another reality and people there looked at her weirdely , some seemed upset to see her. Most people had a hostile attitude towards her. She sat on a bench in a park and a woman came to tell her: You have nothing to do here, you do not belong to this place. She tried to explain that she did not even know how she endep up there but the woman would not listen. Finally, she walked a little and one person came to meet her to tell her that she had nothing to do there and explained her how to return to her own reality. The only difference with your story is that in her case the place was unknown to her. You should go back to the stairwell and if someone talk to you, don't be shy or afraid , ask him/her questions.

Thing is, we are those other people, right now.

Q4: Anyone else think this is a very clever no sleep? Wher3 everything is real even if it Inst? Otherwise welcome to the other side breather we be got the habit movies hope theywerent any better in your dimension

The individual elements are pretty common in Glitch reports, just not usually together. The "lost track of where I was / the map seems to change or repeat" element (seizure/disorientation type symptoms), the "people aren't who they used to be" thing and the world responding to me a bit differently (Capgrass-type symptoms). But: it's not quite inventive enough to be really absorbing as a fictional story or lead-in.

If I were inventing something, I'd go nick some of the stories from /r/psychonaut, like on this thread [https://old.reddit.com/r/Psychonaut/comments/25q6o7/ego_death_from_mushroom_causes_instantaneous/chjt4dd/].

Q4: health context aside I'm starting to blur the lines when I read this sub, most posts are entertaining

I treat 'em all as real for the purposes of commenting, unless they're so obviously fictional prose that it's not even worth the fun.

Thing is, a lot of it is quite reasonable once you've had a couple of experiences yourself - not necessarily dramatic things. Just, say, seeing through your eyelids, dark vision, things shifting before you. Perception isn't as straightforward as you assume. And once you notice it, you see it all the time. You're basically sort of dreaming your environment, based on very minimal cues and updates. (I mean, this whole room looks in focus to me now. But that actually isn't possible if I'm directly seeing with my eyes.)

*Q5: I just found this post randomly. I had a very similar experience back when I used to party really hard. It was at a point in my life where I was drinking heavily and using cocaine heavily basically everyday and also smoking weed, using shrooms and taking my xanax which was the one thing I was legally prescribed at the time. ANYWAYS... everything was fun for awhile, party all night, sleep during the day, repeat. Then everything got weird, I started getting really paranoid. I remember having a similar thing happen where all of a sudden people seemed like they were either staring at me with evil looks or wouldn't look at me at all. In my delusional state I thought that maybe I was witnessing the end of the world and that people were choosing sides. The good people were the ones that wouldn't look at me because I wasn't on the good side yet and the evil people were the ones staring at me because they wanted me to join the side of evil. It got weirder and weirder and more intense every day. Everything seemed to have a meaning and be a sign from god or the devil and I felt like I was being told that I needed to choose a side either good or evil because it was the end of the world and the final battle between evil and good was going to happen soon. I started seeing things as patterns and thought people on television or strangers were giving me clues. Like I had my car worked on and the mechanic gave me back my bill and to me it seemed like he was trying to give me a clue and he circled the number of the invoice and the number contained my current address. Or I would see a sentence on an ad like on a napkin from a restaurant and I would think the slogan had a deeper significance and was speaking directly to me. Tons of stuff like that. The other similar thing I had happen is the getting lost in places that shouldn't be easy to get lost in. I remember being lost outside of my friends house. I was on my phone talking to him and he was trying to direct me to his place but I couldn't follow his instructions even though I had been over there a million times.
So yeah I was really messed up. I quit drinking and drugs BUT I keep living in this hallucinatory state for about 6 months after I got sober. So yeah there was like 6 months where I was still seeing shit and thinking the tv was talking to me directly, hearing voices of people I knew who weren't there, or who were dead, thinking everything was a sign from god or the devil, etc. etc. when I was stone cold sober and under the supervision of a friend who took me in and was taking care of me and making sure I cleaned up and didn't wander the streets. And one night I actually did roam the streets in the middle of the winter and I was officially sober but yeah my mind was still messed up. I remember walking through the snow in my friends yard and then thinking the lights on the neighbors houses were making a noise that I should follow. I don't even remember how I got back exactly but I remember wandering and following the sounds I was hearing from peoples porch lights, at the time I was searching for a house I thought I was being led to by god. But I couldn't find it and then I went back. My friend was really freaked out and started locking me in the room I stayed in at night so I wouldn't wander out and end up hurting myself or getting arrested or something.
Seeing all these patterns and connections in random data I later found out is called apophenia. I also found out later that extreme cocaine abuse like I was doing can cause stimulant psychosis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stimulant_psychosis#Cocaine . Also I've always been more prone to hallucinate than the average person, sleep deprivation, weed, high fevers have all caused me to have hallucinations. So when I added tons of cocaine and booze and drugs to my natural ability to hallucinate easily I believe it caused drug induced schizophrenia.
Moral of the story is yeah I think something is messing with your brain. I had similar feeling of the weird looks and getting lost and feeling like everything was off and like I was in another dimension or another world. My advice is.
1 try to find a safe place you can stay with a person you trust who can look out for you.
2 if you drink alcohol, coffee, do drugs of any kind stop doing them all now, even coffee, even coca-cola. no drugs, no booze, no caffeine. You don't want unnatural substances messing with your mind while you are in this state.
3 SLEEP. Make sure you are getting sleep, even try to sleep more than usual if possible.

4. try to make sure you eat extremely healthy and are getting regular exercise.
   5 if you are completely sober, eating extremely healthy, exercising and sleeping properly and you still are feeling crazy then go get on some anti-psychotic meds. BUT please try the natural ways first since most of those meds are a crap shoot and don't necessarily 'cure' you. sometimes they make you worse, sometimes they just mask your problems by numbing you, oftentimes these meds give you more problems but sometimes they are the only choice you have.
   So yeah you aren't in another dimension, your brain is just malfunctioning. Try the sober, sleep, eat healthy, and exercise stuff first and see if there are any improvements, if not then seek out another psychiatrist or psychologist. I'm surprised the psychiatrist didn't lock you up and drug you up after you told him your story. The shrinks I've dealt with in my life always want to push drugs on me. Good luck dude. I eventually fully recovered but there was a time where my friend who was watching me thought I might just stay in that insane waking dream state forever. My situation was drug induced though so it probably has a different cause than yours but I did experience a very similar distorted reality to the one you describe.*

Great comment, really fascinating. A bit better than the usual "...seizure!" :-)

There's maybe a fine line between having a looser perception of things (making useful connections and picking up on things) to just seeing the whole world as a pattern. I mean, it is a pattern, and things are often personally meaningful in a synchronistic way, but not always usefully so - it's the obsession with it to the exclusion of everyday living that makes things go a little too far.

Caffeine is "connection juice" for me. It's only when you stop that you realise how such an everyday boring stimulant has a strong effect on your "reality".

We need an OP update soon.

...

OP?

POST: Dear rGlitch, do Glitches make you happy?

I think they're a tip-off that "things are not as they seem" and that's quite exciting - because they reveal the rules are not as solid and unbendable as we assumed. There's a genuine, deep thrill when these things occur.

Sure, sometime it's scary too - because flexible rules mean less certainty as well as more freedom and possibility. Your response maybe depends on which side you fall. I'd say freedom = happiness.

Whether you interpret glitches as "the brain does strange things" or "reality itself isn't what you thought" doesn't matter: your previous assumptions about your everyday moment-by-moment experience aren't correct. Which might lead to /r/neuro or /r/oneirosophy or somewhere in between, depending on your taste and inclination.

What can be scary though is that, no matter which path you take, it'll turn out that you are not what you assumed you were.

...

Q1: Stories in this subreddit can almost always be explained by science, but what makes them interesting is that it adds a touch of doubt.
It makes you wonder if perhaps something else that we just don't understand is going on. Something we haven't figured out about this universe yet.
That level of mystery adds beauty to a world too bland and boring. The world is a magical place when humans are too ignorant to know all of the mysteries around us. As a child, when Santa and the tooth fairy were real, that was magic to you. When someone does a magic trick that you just can't understand yet. The reason religions are so popular.

Q2: So, most of the universe? We really don't know jack about much of it, so saying that science can automatically solve everything is a little much.

Q1: I never said anything remotely close to that.
There are known things in this universe we cannot explain, for instance, quantum physics. We don't know how it works, but it still can be observed. Science isn't the "knowing" of this universe, but the search for what is not known using our observations to better understand what is around us.
What I did imply though, is that we can indeed use science to get an idea of why or how these stories in this subreddit happen. Some times people say they remember something that no one else saw, or even saw something on the edge of sleep.
If we were able to replicate these so called phenomena, we could use scientific method to rule out possible explanations that some people have, like ghost or aliens or whatever.
I honesty think a famous magician on stage isn't actually using actual magic to perform his tricks, but is using illusions to trick us. Having said that, I still ENJOY the idea of not knowing, of wondering, of being in awe and still being subject to very simple bodily senses. I won't jump up on stage and wave the "It's actually science!" flag, because people happen to enjoy his act. It's fun.
This subreddit is fun, and I feel that is one of the reasons why, the possibility of the unknown. I was merely answering your question to the best of my ability.

The problem is the replication, I guess.

Science is great at inferring conceptual frameworks from specific, repeatable observations of regularities or patterns, and reapplying those frameworks more generally. (Much of science is also about the "explanation of explanations".) Most "glitches", though, tend to be one-off life events which occur out of the blue. That's why they're fascinating I suppose - but it also makes them very hard to study.

e.g. "Seizure!" isn't much of an explanation unless you can repeat it, say, but objects appearing and disappearing may point to quirks of our perceptual systems that we might be able to study.

There are definitely certain "commonalities" to the many of the stories here.

POST: [Metax2] The Matrix

It's not really a simulation; that's just an idea your experiencing. In consciousness. Computers, the Internet, AI, their intelligence and wonder is actually just the intelligence and wonder of ourselves, as observers, creators and participants. It is we who give life to information.

You're right, though, that this isn't as it seems. Whether it's the strange nature of subjective experience and its dreamlike ways, or our more esoteric attempts to manipulate it by action or exploration. Something is definitely going on!

POST: Astral Projection

You want to check out /r/astralprojection, /r/outofbody, /r/occult and /r/psychonaut really, rather than glitch. Check out this guide if you're in need of hints. Also recommend the books of Oliver Fox and Robert Monroe.

As to what it's made out of, it's the same stuff as your dreams, as your thoughts, as your body sensations, and as the room around you. Something like this post [Outside: The Dreaming Game] or along these lines perhaps [https://web.archive.org/web/20150224160123/https://www.scienceandnonduality.com/the-new-science-of-consciousness/].

/r/psychonaut is pretty good for the philosophical discussion, I find. This subreddit is more about responding to specific stories.

My take is that our ongoing experience is imaginary anyway to some extent (like this), so astral projection is basically viewpoint-shifting within the same information space, or connecting/creating to other dream-spaces, depending on how exactly we approach it.

Q1: I love this. This way of thinking helps a lot with the fear. Think about it: This life/world iS a dream - a dream we've created (as a challenge? like a chess game or ski jump?) with loss, heartbreak, war, illness, death - and also love, fun, laughter, beauty (let's not forget that part!). But IF it's a dream that can cause us to feel we are experiencing very painful and frightening things, then why the hell would viewpoint-shifting to experience a different dream - or the dream from a different "angle" - be "scary"? What can be "scarier" than the ever-present possibility of illness, pain, loss, etc. "here"? Might as well fly and explore!
Seriously, it seems to take a lot of COURAGE and extreme loosening up of nearly ALL beliefs! It seems the known and familiar hut in the valley is not as "scary" as the distant mansion on the hill. :)

Yeah, that mansion eh! :-)

It's scary because it involves letting go, which leads to a feeling of exposure. Beliefs are like "structural tensions", a held pattern through which the sparkles of experience are filtered into familiar shapes, rather than creative avenues. Beliefs control experience, and we know this intuitively. Releasing those tension means you are open to absolutely anything happening. Which makes us feel insecure.

Even doing a simple exercise that involves opening out can be intimidating. For example: Lie on the floor, and give up completely to gravity. Give up all control, let your body and mind and attention unwind and open. Pretty soon, you'll start to feel the openness around you. Pretty soon, you'll feel the 'danger' in the fact that this openness is unstructured, unbounded, and goes on forever. It's like standing a the cliff-edge, overlooking infinity.

We (arbitrarily) identify with aspects of our experience that are unchanging, or change slowly. Primarily, the "sense of viewpoint location" which is a subtle thought, then the "background texture/feeling" that we intuit as ourselves (beliefs, expectations), then regular thoughts, then body sensations then - lastly, because it changes so much - the world/environment. Really, they're all "you", but you bias yourself into thinking you are the most stable of those... and yet we tend to miss the point.

Because of course the most stable isn't an experience at all - it is the background to experience, the background awareness in which experiences arise. That's the only thing that doesn't ever change, so it's the only thing that can be "you".

Metaphysical ramble over. :-)

POST: [deleted by user]

Something a bit like this perhaps?

[QUOTE]

Third Man factor:
The Third Man factor or Third Man syndrome refers to the reported situations where an unseen presence such as a "spirit" provides comfort or support during traumatic experiences. Sir Ernest Shackleton in his book South, described his belief that an incorporeal being joined him and two others during the final leg of their journey. Shackleton wrote, "during that long and racking march of thirty-six hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia, it seemed to me often that we were four, not three." His admission resulted in other survivors of extreme hardship coming forward and sharing similar experiences.
Image i - Two mountain climbers:

[END OF QUOTE]

Q1: Kinda? Except that it doesn't happen in any particularly stressful situation, I don't feel any sort of comfort from it, or discomfort for that matter. So it seems a bit similar in the sense that I will randomly feel there's a third person with us.

It stresses the "stress" factor, but actually it's common in other circumstances. More of a "felt presence". Relevant, perhaps:

In a laboratory setting, they were able to evoke such a presence in an epileptic 22- year-old woman, by electrically stimulating part of her brain.
Every time they stimulated the left temporo-parietal junction - a part of the brain involved in organising sensory information - the woman turned her head to the side, convinced there was 'someone' there.
-- A renowned and respected scientific publication

POST: What is a glitch?

[POST]

I like this thread, there is a lot of good stories here, some with more truth than others, but nearly all fun to read. But something I think we should remember is what a glitch is. Isn't it an error in the system? Well, if it is an error, might we not be able to utilize it, and try to break the matrix? We should find out what triggered a specific glitch, try to recreate it, find out if there are bugs and hacks also! In the name of this subreddit, we state that the world we live in is Matrix, and glitch-able. Shouldn't we then hack it and escape?

[END OF POST]

Q1: Ummmmm. That might kill everyone.

Q2: If we can hack it, it is a simulation, and therefore not real. So should we not do it because some believe the simulation?

The worry is that you are simulated, your body and thoughts, and you might therefore discover there is no solid background to it, to you.

If each character in the world is like a wave in the ocean, pulling the plug flushes everyone away...

...

A1: I am glad you asked. I felt for a while the impulse to write down my own definition.
A glitch is not just any type of paranormal phenomenon, it is quite the specific one and this subreddit needs the definition, if we want to weed out things that are not glitches.
A glitch is an event that, when it happens, seems to show our reality as temporarily "broken", by having us experience situations that are impossible or illogical, while being mundane.
Since reality appears as "broken", the idea of a glitch carries with itself two other ideas, not necessarily mutually exclusive:
a) the idea that our reality is in fact a sophisticated computer simulation, which can occasionally glitch out
b) the idea that there are multiple and slightly different parallel universes through which we accidentally cross, therefore experiencing them at the same time
The following are the most often quoted types of glitches (some of the definitions are mine :o):
1- "hardcore déja vu": we see a person walking by, we look away, see the same person walking by again... we see or remember things before they happen, etc...
2- "doppelgänger phenomenon": meeting ourselves
3- "alice in wonderland": while in a familiar area, we casually wander into an area that is unknown and seems to be located in another time or another place, we then wander back into familiar territory in an equally casual way
4- "the no-players-map": casually wandering into a familiar area or indoor location that was full of people only to find it temporarily completely empty; said people reappear after re-entering the same location during a timeframe that is too short to allow for the movement of those people
5- "quantum suicide": having a near death experience where we should have died... and probably did but "woke up" in another universe where we did not die. Example: driving and crashing into another car, only to find ourselves driving normally again, in the same split second, as if the crash did not happen.
6- "the disappearing and reappearing object": objects that disappear suddenly in ways that are logically impossible (closed rooms, no other people around, etc.) and that reappear in similarly impossible ways (falling from the ceiling, etc.)
7- "the odd synchronicities": bumping into the same person an impossible amount of times, witnessing the same event too many times to be able to explain it, etc.
8- "the groundhog day": very rare, as in the movie by the same name, people report experiencing the same day over and over again; it might stop at some point and revert to "normal"... or it might not
9- "the missing time": as the definition implies, chunks of time missing from our memory although the people around us seem to remember spending that time with us
10- "the alternate reality": remembering people that suddenly seem to have never existed or, rarer, the opposite, not knowing certain people we are supposed to be familiar with... a particularly widespread version of this has been called "the Mandela effect": it is remembering certain events as different from what they are officially recorded today, i.e. remembering Mandela dying in our childhood instead of when he actually did die, remembering the location of New Zealand as being different from its current location, remembering the "Berenstain Bears" being called the "Berenstein Bears" instead, etc.
This list is by no means complete but it contains all the types of glitch I could think of at the moment.
Comments welcome!

Great summary!

I think that glitches can be generalised as "space and time" anomalies rather than "ghosts and spirits". This allows quite a lot of leeway in the specifics, but gets to the essence I think.

POST: [Meta] A lot of the people here may have glitched into our universe

[POST]

Assuming many of these stories are true, does it make anyone else feel strange that a lot of the folks here may have "glitched into" our universe or plane or what have you?
When hearing things like rooms disappearing, people being different and things of the sort, I always consider the possibility that these people glitched into our universe in which these things that they describe never happened or were never there. This could indicate that there is another, very similar version of them in the other universe that may have the opposite glitch story or may just never notice that anything was different.
Rather than thinking that something changed within our universe, it is possible that our glitchers have come to an exceedingly similar universe to the one that they came from: the one we all share now.
I think that's pretty fuckin' neato.

[END OF POST]

I like.

And some of the stories really do lend themselves better to that interpretation. Or similar: That we are each in our own "extended dreams" but we overlap with other people's dreams for a consensus reality experience. However, when we push things to the limit of consensus reality, or 'glitch', we snap into another consensus that better fits our personal dream aspect. Thing is, we retain our memory trail of the previous consensus, even though it's no longer valid...

Q1: "...that better fits our personal dream aspect."
My lifelong work has become to transform my personal dream aspect for the better.

I think it always happens, if you give up and let go to the flow. But that might be bumpy, since it'll unfold in alignment with your expectations and beliefs - or events will happen to knock those out of you, before your journey continues.

So the thought is: To what extent can we directly update the dream, directly make jumps? This would involve accepting "discontinuities" in our experience though: broken narratives. And it seems that one of the things we hold onto tightest is the "coherent narrative of our days and lives".

When strange things happen, people usually wilfully don't see them - they internally refuse to experience something which conflicts with their world-view - as the stories in this subreddit often indicate.

Q2: A cool idea to ponder. Though, it would imply that parallel universes are separate and independent from each other. Perhaps, the more likely possibility is that they represent a mesh of sorts, where time and space interweave. The nodes of the mesh might be represented by ideas, and consciousness navigates and weaves the mesh- resulting, in our perception, in what we know as reality.

Yes, all possible universes are enfolded into the our environment, with individual moments unfolding one at a time from our currently "selected" universe.

Look around: All universes and possible moments are literally here with you right now, enfolded holographically into the space of the room you are in.

It would take only one small push for you to glitch into another reality...

POST: Brought my bouncy ball to school, pulled it out of my desk, and it was different

Which means... your Mom had changed too. Neither the bouncy ball nor your Mom are the same ones you had before school that morning. Like this story:

I had woken up to find my key chain had turned gray. My boyfriend and I always had identical key chains (actually they were the lock devices that came with our Jeep), and they were both black. When one of us picked up a key ring, we had to look not at the black device but at the collection of keys, because we had the same house, similar cars and other things -- so we had to look to make sure that the gold keys to my office were on the key ring or not in order to determine which set of keys was which.
One day, I woke up after a fairl hard night of half sleeping, to discover that my key locking device was now gray. My boyfriend never remembers a time when my key chain wasn't gray, and he insists that a difference in color is the way we always told our otherwise identical key chains apart, which makes me think I also do not have the exact same boyfriend anymore.
-- Realityshifters.com

Yes, that's what I assumed as well. However, why would only two aspects of reality change (the ball and my mum)?

Because what changed was the bouncy ball, but the whole universe has to be consistent with the new bouncy ball, which includes your Mum's memories. And, therefore, your actual Mum.

Yes, the simplest explanation is that you jump realities, and the reality you jump to is always self-consistent (if one thing changes for you, everyone else will remember it as always having been the "new" way). Or simply that your dream updates and remains self-consistent; whatever "other people" are is neither here nor there. This gets away from the idea of some people being "transported" or whatever. Nobody is transported. Your dream from your perspective changes. That's it. There are an infinite number of possible dreams, and everyone gets to live out their own version of things and their own version of other people.

Unfortunately, there's no one else I could ask about my ball.

They'd remember the new version.

POST: My girlfriend never knew me

[POST]

About twelve years ago, when I was a teenager, I met two girls. Their names were Michelle and Anna. I met Michelle first and was introduced to Anna through her. We spent a massive amount of time together over the course of several years. Anna and I were actually dating for the majority of that period, and I still have tons of pictures and online chat logs to prove it. Eventually, college came up, Anna moved away, and we split completely amicably. Michelle left for college not long afterward, but things between us were also amicable. We gradually just lost touch.
I hadn't really thought about them for a long time, but I ran into Michelle a couple of years ago. I said hello, but she seemed to have absolutely no idea who I was. I told her my name, and she just stared at me completely dumbfounded. At first I thought maybe I had misidentified her, so I asked if she was Michelle [last name] who went to [her high school] and had been friends with Anna [last name]. She stated that she was, but still seemed incredibly confused. I told her a few other things in an effort to jog her memory, but her expression gradually changed to one of absolute terror. She became angry and started yelling, "Who the fuck are you!? Get away from me." With no other options, I left.
The meeting with Michelle had really freaked me out. I considered that maybe she had suffered a head injury or something of that sort, but I decided to look up Anna online. I found her, living out of state, and sent her an e-mail. She verified who she was, but also seemed to have absolutely no recollection of me. I gave her my phone number and asked to her call. She did. I tried to make her remember, but she continued acting clueless. I mentioned that I'd dated her for almost three years, but she just laughed at me. "That's ridiculous. I was dating Mike through most of high school!" Who the fuck is Mike, I wondered. She accused me of trying to play a trick on her, and she hung up.
The whole situation bothered me for a while, but I managed to let it go. Then, a few months ago, I started going through CD-R backups I had made of old computer data. On one disc were audio recordings from early 2002, recordings I'd created by recording my answering machine messages into a computer microphone. (That might sound weird, but I'm autistic. I have a definite inclination toward saving and categorizing things which feel important to me.) Much of the disc had become corrupt, but two of the messages which remained intact were from girls. Judging by the filenames, one was named Jessica and the other was Heather. Both girls declared that they loved me, but I didn't recognize either of their voices. In fact, I hadn't known anyone with those names since grade school.
Yesterday I called up a few people who had been my friends when I was a teen. None of them had any idea who Michelle and Anna were. Neither did they remember Heather, but they all mentioned how I'd spent years absolutely in love with a girl named Jess. Apparently they'd all met her at least briefly, I wouldn't ever shut up about her, and I was absolutely heartbroken when she broke up with me. Nobody recalled her last name, where she went to school, or any details I could use to find her. They were able to give me a physical description, short and slightly chubby blonde-haired girl, and tell me that she had a squeaky high pitched voice. The girl in my recording does in fact have a voice which fits that description perfectly.
How did I lose Michelle and Anna? How did I gain Jess? Who even is Jess? Has anyone else experienced this kind of thing?
Edit: Several people encouraged me to send an e-mail to Anna about this and include my pictures. I have now done so. Screenshot of the e-mail:

Edit 2: There has been no response. I promise that I will update this post when/if anything changes.

[END OF POST]

Q1: Something similar, but less extreme, happened to me too. I was 16 (12 years ago) and I met a girl from Austria that was doing a high school exchange in my town (in a high school different than mine). Her name was Theresa and she became my girlfriend. She introduced me to some friends of hers, in particular Julia and Mary. The four of us hanged out a lot for 4 or 5 months. After Theresa moved back to Austria I lost contact with all of them, even though it happened I saw Mary randomly a couple of times.
4 years ago (so, 8 years after) I saw Julia on the train and said hello. She had no idea who I was. I mentioned Theresa and Mary, she knew them, but she didn't remember Theresa had a boyfriend. She sounded genuine. She really seemed not to remember me, even though I could mention a lot of places we went to during that Spring/Summer and those sounded familiar to her. I could say where she lived, the name of her sister, and other details that only somebody that spent some time with her could know. She started to feel uncomfortable, she asked me if I have been stalking her or something, and eventually went to another carriage on the train.
I was really weirded out by that meeting and her reaction. As soon I got home I looked her up on Fb and we had 4 friends in common. Three were people we probably met in different circumstances (I used to live in a smallish town), while the last one was Mary. Well, I wrote Mary and told her about my weird encounter with Julia. She confirmed we definitely knew each other. I asked her what she thought of what happened, and she said it was definitely weird, but didn't seem like she wanted to investigate further. She told me she hasn't seen or heard from Julia for a while. I searched for Theresa on Fb too, but I even forgot how to spell her German surname, so that didn't help. I looked for pictures of that Spring. Digital cameras were not that common yet, but I managed to find a few pictures of me with Mary and Theresa, and none with Julia. (maybe she took those other pictures? don't remember that) I have never been able to explain to myself how Julia could remove the memory of me.

Interesting. But maybe that Spring/Summer just wasn't that big a deal; she was a periphery character (or rather, you were peripheral in her life). Still, you'd think there'd be some fragment of recall.

Q2: From the voice mail OP posted: [http://vocaroo.com/i/s0zNuzxkAm2n]
Updated transcript: This is what I heard. Updated many of the undecipherable parts in OP's transcript here: [http://pastebin.com/7G6S87QT]
Synthesized Voice: Three saved. Next message. Sent today at 12:29 A.M.
Jess (?): Hey, it's me. -sighs- I called my friends, like nnnnone of them respond. Nobody called me back. I'm calling people that I know, and they don't pick up or I get their answering machines or something. Because everybody else I called they're not picking up; I'm gonna cry. They don't love me enough to talk to me. But you've got a good excuse. You're asleep because you've been hurt and don't feel good. -sighs-
I wish I could take care of you... give you a rub down, full body massage, and make you feel a lot better. And I'll kiss you all over and you'll feel so much better, because everyone knows that my kisses are the best kisses -giggle-. Okay, nobody knows that; that's stupid and that's not true. -giggles- I'm a crappy kisser anyway. Anyway... I can't believe I've called you so many times and you haven't woken up yet! Aren't you supposed to be here with me too?,(indecipherable) you're supposed to be like, "Wow!"
-exhale laughing-Idk -pause- I heard a voice and it made me like jump or something, but you're asleep and I can't believe you haven't woken up yet! -sigh and giggle- Oh my God. -sigh- Oh boy. What if I alarm like this? BEEP! BEEP! BEEEEEP! You didn't wake up for shit. (Truly indecipherable), anyway -giggle-
Oh gosh. I'll probably talk to you tomorrow. -sighs- I need to talk to you, techinally it's already Monday so hope-full-ee I'll get to talk to you later today. Email me when you get home from school, and if I can I'll call you..and (possibly says "well" instead of "and")..you know -giggle- I wake up, you know, like every hour, every hour!
When I can, I'll call you, okay? I promise. Cross my heart, hope to die, stick a thousand needles in my eyes. I love you. Bye.
Synthesized Voice: End of message.*

Q3: So...by reading many times this transcription I think we can all agree that seems obvious from the first part of the message that the girl feel like being herself stranger to this world:
"I called my friends, like nnnnone of them respond. Nobody called me back. I'm calling people that I know, and they don't pick up or I get their answering machines or something. Because everybody else I called they're not picking up; I'm gonna cry. "
This could be seen in 3 ways:
1)OP story might check out as himself not having memory of the girl either him or the girl are out of place.
2)OP story could still be true, and the girl just overreacting to her friends not picking up some calls.
3)OP is making up a story, as the "too good to be true" would fit well in this situation.
I mean...How many chances are there that OP could upload this very message?
It kinda looks really suspicious...but maybe coincidence.

Good analysis.

Q4: It's possible that you need medical attention. Speaking for myself, if I found out that my friends remember me being in love with a girl I have no recollection of, I'd schedule an MRI.

Q5: I've actually had an MRI on my brain. I'm epileptic, so it was a necessity to determine that my occasional seizures (which started when I was in my twenties) weren't caused by a tumor or some severe damage to my brain. My brain's fine and Vimpat has kept me seizure free for a long time. I've probably had between 15 and 20 seizures in my lifetime.
Yes, if anyone is wondering, I have experienced short term memory loss after tonic-clonic seizures, which is normal. I've never lost more than a couple of hours, and certainly not details of multiple years. It also wouldn't explain why other people don't remember me.
Edit: And for the sake of making this a more complete medical history . . .
I've never had more than one or two beers in a single sitting, and I haven't drank in years.
I've never used drugs, not even marijuana.
I have experienced clinical depression and social anxiety. I don't have any other mental health conditions.
The only longterm medication I am on is the aforementioned Vimpat. Previous longterm medications were oxcarbazepine and zonisamide, two medications which are also seizure meds.

Reminds me of the guy who went on a ground camping trip, hit his head diving in a pool, and suddenly the girl who he had been getting on with had never been close to him, and the guy who had accompanied him on the walk had never been there, he'd gone home injured on the first day. This is different though - because it seems the other people do exist. And don't remember you at all, not even as a classmate. So, next: Origin of the photographs with Anna, and who is Mike? Plus: school yearbook?

EDIT: Found the story here [POST: The day the world...shifted...].

[POST]

I recently discovered this subreddit via subreddit of the day and was enthralled by all these stories. It reminded me of something that happened to me long ago, something that always stays slightly at the back of my mind. I never thought of it as a Glitch in the Matrix, but this fits so well! The memories of it are still vivid to this day, even though I had also written it all down in my journal a couple weeks after I got home. (that I've used as a refresher for writing this up)
I was 16 and a typical teenage boy. It was the summer of 1993. My parents had sent me to Outward Bound. A month in the outdoors with other "troubled teens" pushing our limits, making us learn trust, etc. In reality, hiking 10 miles a day with 40-60 pounds on your back in the middle of nowhere with other misfits just trying to get through it and back to our lives.
We were in the Three Sisters wilderness of the Oregon back country. Beautiful land. We we're about 2 weeks in to our month long trip. I became close with a girl named Eva in my group (of about 10 girls and boys, and 3 guides, one guy, two women), who was from Sweden. I had been to Sweden a couple years earlier, and we were able to talk about places I visited that she knew. I'll never forget her, I was completely crushed on her. Beautiful blonde, with green eyes. Tan for a swede. The night before this...Incident, she and I kissed, and we made out a little out off by where we camped. We got caught by one of the guides/counselors, and told that relationships (and especially sex) were not allowed. (Something they drilled into us from Day 1. No drugs. No alcohol. No sex - we were just kissing somewhat innocently)
I had also been friends with a guy named Steve. He has got blisters on his ankle the first week, and it got quite infected. The guides wanted him to drop out, go to a doctor, but he soldiered on. We kept it clean and bandaged and even though he had a noticible limp, he managed to keep up with all of us just fine. He talked the guides into thinking it was no big deal and he stayed. He had amazing will power and I kind of looked up to him. He was almost always our group leader.
Now came the weird part. The part where everything changed for me. We were taking a lunch break alongside a gorgeous crystal blue glacial fed pool. There was a minor waterfall (maybe 10 feet) from the stream above feeding it. The water was deep, but absolutely crystal clear and blue. (and COLD! Very refreshing after a hot summer hike) You could see the soft gravel bottom. Five large boulders stood in a perfect circle on the bottom, as if set there by someone. Completely submerged, they were perfectly equidistant from each other. Someone quickly noted that there was just enough room in the center to dive off the waterfall and swim down to the gravely, beautiful bottom. A couple of the other kids (including Steve, with his injured foot) went and dove. I of course wanted to impress Eva, and she said it looked fun, but was too scared to it. She said she would try it if I did it. My teen ego immediately rose to the challenge. I climbed up the wet rocks next to the waterfall to the top.
I remember looking down at the beautiful crystal blue water. The light filtering through the forest leaves. Eva looking and smiling up at me. It was just a perfect, beautiful day.
I jumped.
The next thing I know I'm on the side of the pool coughing up water with two extremely concerned guides nursing over me, and a massive headache. Their telling me I hit my head on one of the boulders. I'm lucky I'm not dead. Steve is no where around. Eva doesn't look a mote concerned, she's off gossiping with one of the other girls. A couple of the other kids are with me, and the male guide helps me up.
The waterfall is there, but the pool is now a murky green/brown. You can barely see the boulders on the bottom. I think I just must have stirred some dirt or something up the waterfall above the fell in. I wasn't thinking clearly. I seem OK (the back of my head hurts, although my forehead is the part that has a minor cut). The third guide (leader) comes up at this point and makes me do some tests. What year is it? Who's the president? What's my name? etc. It's 1993. Clinton is the new president. All is right with the world.
We take an extra long lunch, just to make sure I'm OK. The guides decide I probably just have a minor concussion. They should keep me up all night just to be safe. They decide we're going to hike to a closer, alternate camp, since I might be concussed. If things get worse, they call the rangers. I didn't notice until later, but Steve was not with us. Eva seemed decidedly standoffish, but I didn't get much of a chance to talk to her. The guides wanted to keep me behind them. (One in the back, two in the front).
At camp that night I notice Steve is missing. I freak out thinking we have left him, and tell the guides. The guides quickly calm me down. They tell me Steve hasn't been with us for 4 days. When his foot got infected, they called the rangers and the rangers took him to town. He could barely walk and he's now out of the program and has been sent home. That made no sense to me. I could have sworn he was with us. I remember all 4 days of him hiking with us and his foot getting progressively better everyday. I didn't say anything else, I didn't want them thinking I was crazy. I figured because of my head I misremembered, although it was all so clear. I remembered talking to him at lunch.
That night it got weirder. The guides were going to take shifts staying up with me. I asked Eva if she would stay up with me a little bit. She looked at me like I was crazy. And her accent was different. She just laughed at me. The male guide noticed and he said to me that I was one hell of a persistent guy. We talked. He said I'd been after Eva this whole time, and I really should give it up. He was nice about it, but it got through to me that I was being a creep (or at least he thought so) I didn't understand. And he said, it wouldn't work anyway, when she get's back to Brazil you'll never see her again anyway. BRAZIL. Not Sweden. BRAZIL. Eva was from Brazil. This was not true. I thought I must've taken a bigger hit on the head than expected. I just stayed quiet from that moment on. I was so confused. I stayed up all night, thinking of things. And in the morning I felt just fine.
The rest of the trip was uneventful, but everything seemed suddenly slightly different for me from that day on. I've never understood exactly what happened. I suppose it's just the head injury. That makes sense but some part of me just doesn't believe it. My world shifted that day. The memories before that moment are as clear and as easy to recall as what I had for breakfast this morning, or my wife's face. Even after I got back, my parents seemed different. They kept telling me what a changed and different person I was. (Outward Bound is supposed to change you, just not I guess, like that). The whole world seemed different. Computers seemed better over night. Like I didn't remember having such a cool computer, just a shitty one. Everything seemed...different. Video games were more popular and better. The rest of high school I felt like an outsider. I had always fit in before. But as the years passed, I've grew used to it, and grew back to my old (new?) self.
Even though I have a rational explanation (my head injury), I have always doubted. I wonder if the Matrix reprogrammed itself, or I switched consciousness with an alternate me, or some how, through some fluke of the universe, I slipped through into a universe almost, but not quite, the same as the one I came from. I'm late 30's now, happily married, and I still think about that day, and that crystal blue pool.

[END OF POST]

Q6: They say the human mind rather than recalling a memory like a computer, instead re-writes a new every time a recollection is made... so maybe that kind of head trauma might result in the brain's ability to rewrite being severely interfered with, forcing new false memories to be written up based on bits and pieces of information from the old memories.
This is of course speculation.
If perhaps the person who bumps his head also has physical evidence (like say a picture or a video) of said people who no longer either look the same or recognize him... well, that's a whole 'nother ball game. A quite scary one, but a different ballgame nonetheless.

No location in the brain has been found for "memories". My thinking is that, while the ongoing present leaves "traces" as it unfolds, it doesn't leave full memories - they're too big; where would they fit?

Instead, these "traces" are re-interpretated as mental imagery; memories are created on demand whenever you put in a request for one.

Since these memories are created on the fly, to be consistent with whatever traces and other circumstances there are, very small changes would lead to quite drastically different 'histories'; your mind would strive to create a coherent narrative for you as best it could, based on the limited information available.

That's why memories change over time anyway: once you know more about a situation, you tend to 'remember' it with those new facts take into account.

*Q7: So this is a good one. But when I read the post and the thread, I see a few relevant bits of information.

1. You are autistic (high functioning I imagine, but possibly have social issues, any sensory issues?).
2. You have epilepsy
3. You were abandoned by your father
4. You have social anxiety.
5. You are depressed
6. You are taking Vimpat, and the drug fact sheet has this to say: "If you develop any unusual or strange thoughts and behavior while taking lacosamide, be sure to discuss it with your doctor. Some changes that have occurred in people taking this medicine are like those seen in people who drink too much alcohol. Other changes might be confusion, worsening of depression, hallucinations (seeing, hearing, or feeling things that are not there), suicidal thoughts, and unusual excitement, nervousness, or irritability."
   In short, before I would consider glitches, I would take a more serious look at neurology.*

I'm going for a fit-based rewire as my main theory at the moment. Brain twitch, trace mangling, then subsequent constructed memories corresponding to the "needs" of the other elements.

POST: The lights went out, but no one noticed.

[POST]

This glitch happened on a beautiful, clear summer evening in 1982. My friends and I were all 17 years old. I was with my best friend, Betty, my boyfriend, Scott, and his best friend Steve. We had not been drinking or doing drugs. It was a Saturday night and we had decided we were going to eat at our favorite local taco place.
Now, this place was set up where you ordered and paid at the counter and then someone would bring you your food. So, we’d ordered and after a few minutes the waitress brought our meals. We were talking, laughing and just having a nice time. The eating area was about the size of a McDonald’s eating area. There were booths along the walls and tables in the middle. The three walls of the eating area were mostly windows. We were sitting in a booth near the door. Scott and I were facing the counter, while Betty and Steve were sitting across from us.
Since it was a Saturday night, the place was fairly busy and there were only a few empty tables. The glitch happened when we were almost done eating. With no warning, the lights turned off and the room was plunged into darkness. Now, as you know, when something like that happens you get a few gasps, someone might let out a small shriek, and people will start asking questions.
None of that happened. Betty, Steve, Scott and I all looked at each other in confusion. We looked around the restaurant and everyone acted completely normal. Families were chatting and eating. People were at the counter ordering. The waitresses were bringing out food. One guy got up and wandered into the pitch black bathroom. The cooks were busy cooking in the dark kitchen. A couple came in from outside and placed an order at the counter.
After looking around and realizing no one else was reacting, we huddled together and asked each other what was going on. Moonlight was streaming onto our table. Car headlights flashed around the room as cars passed by on the busy road outside. Red lights flashed around the room as a police car sped by.
We all watched as a waitress brought food to another table. We briefly discussed getting up to ask her what was going on, but none of us did. We watched as the cashier rang up the new order and the couple seated themselves at a vacant table. We saw a small boy playing with his toy car while his parents ate and talked. And all of this was happening in a room lit only by the moonlight.
Unnerved, we decided we’d go up to the counter and ask what happened. Right then, the lights blazed on. We blinked and squinted in the sudden brightness. Everyone else continued uninterrupted. We waited for a few minutes to see if anything else was going to happen, but nothing did. We finally decided to leave. The rest of the night was completely normal and we never experienced anything like that again.
TL;DR: In a full restaurant, we were the only ones who saw the lights go out.

[END OF POST]

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Q1: [Deleted]

Q2: Wow, that's a weird story. I wonder if that's what would have happened if we'd asked another customer (or the waitress) about the light.
And you're right, we were regulars- or as regular as our limited incomes allowed :)

See, for the other story I thought it might be a variation on this [Darkroom Vision & Chef Hats & Dreams] - that what we perceive isn't direct and so maybe goes "wrong", like projected memory or accidental self-hypnosis - but when a bunch of people shared the experience, that's not so explainable!

Q2: That's exactly what I think. Four of us experienced it. I moved from the area and lost touch with all three of them for a while.
In the last few years (thanks to facebook), I've reconnected with the guys (I still haven't found Betty). In different conversations with them, I've brought the subject up again. Both of them agree that it happened. Our memories of the incident are basically the same. What's odd is that we're all still questioning how normal everyone else acted. It was like someone had announced a 'power outage' before we came into the restaurant. The thing is that even the customers who came in later acted completely normal. Ordering and paying for their food in the dark, finding a seat, etc. Not one person acknowledged that the lights were out.
It was definitely weird and unsettling.

It's a great story.

I wonder if "sharing a connection" means we are more likely to share a "localised consensus reality"? Being linked, the group of you had the experience together; others didn't; there was no "really how it was" behind the scenes, everyone was just in their own loosely-connected dream-like states. Or something! :-)

(Other 'glitches' occasionally occur with a couple of people, with nobody else sharing the experience. They end up hypothesising being 'in their own world' or 'jumping universes' for the period, and sometimes beyond. It definitely says something about "how things are really", even if that's not a Matrix-type really. These ones interest me the most - rather than lost keys, dreams, I-fell-asleep-for-a-bit.)