deeper and deeper
I’ve been reading Terence McKenna’s book, True Hallucinations and the Archaic Revival, which is like wandering through the Amazon jungle in 1971 with a very intelligent but almost completely bonkers young hippie from Berkeley. This adventure in cosmic and hallucinatory phenomena has me somewhat flummoxed, but it’s warmed up my ability to conceive of the inconceivable. So when I came across this choice quote today I nodded and thought to myself, “Of Course!”
The zero-point field of the quantum vacuum is a “Dirac-sea”: a sea of particles in the negative energy state. These particles are not observable physicists call them “virtual.” But they are not fictional for all that. By stimulating the negative energy states of the ZPF with sufficient energy (of the order of 10- 27 erg), a particular region of it can be “kicked” into the real (that is, observable) state of positive energy. This is the process known as pair- creation: out of the vacuum emerges a positive energy (real) particle, with a negative energy (virtual) particle remaining in it. Thus the Dirac-sea is everywhere; the observable universe floats, as it were, on its surface.
Stepping back one stone in my subjective experience, we come to this idea:
Entertain the idea for a moment that the subjectivity of dreams derives not so much in what we dream about, but in how we perceive what we dream about, and then later, how we interpret what we dreamed about.
Rather than creating dream imagery, we use psi to tune into dream imagery.
Well, what about memory? Don’t we create our dreams in large part based on memories “stored in the brain”? Well, some popular theories promote this idea. But attempts to find a specific location for memories in the brain have met with failure. Dr. Karl Pribram developed his “Holographic Brain” model as a result of this failure.
Recently however, he and his colleagues have gone even farther – coming up with the theory that memory does not reside in the brain at all, but that the brain simply serves as a retrieval and read-out mechanism in the ultimate storage medium, the non-local Zero Point Field!
What might this mean if true? That even in the most commonplace of mental activities, in the accessing of our own memories, whether in the waking state or while dreaming, we may use psi to do so . . .
The more I read about dreams the more I come across the ideas of parapsychology, psi and precognitive dreams. As far as accepted psychological topics go, they are right out there in left field. But they have been around for a long time. Even Freud had his brush with parapsychology, but he decided to vehemently oppose it because he felt that if he accepted it publicly “there would no longer be any solid ground for science to rest on”. And it’s true. If you think about it, the experience of a precognitive dream (where something that one dreams about actually happens) calls into question all kinds of assumptions about the nature of space and time.
It’s a jungle out there.
