Daily Archives: October 14, 2012

Hit by the sand truck

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At least, that is how I feel right about now. I feel like I got run down by the sleep truck, and I have to tell you, the sensation is not entirely unpleasant.

Not entirely pleasant either. Right now, I am dizzy, dehydrated, and it feels like the walls are moving on me when I am not looking.

I am on to you, walls! As soon as I figure out how to look in all directions at the same time, you guys are going to be in a lot of trouble!

But I also feel more relaxed and mellow than I have lately. Finally, I got the deep refreshing sleep I have been craving and needing lately. I had been going through one of those periods where I had trouble sleeping at all (even with the Quetiapine) and when I did sleep, I awoke feeling much the same as when I went to sleep.

That is really fucking irritating.

And so I am glad the other shoe has fallen and that I am now catching up on that deep deep sleep.

And of course, with it comes hyper vivid dreaming. This time, I had another hospital dream, and luckily, it was the pleasant sort, although those have a disturbing element to them as well.

In this dream, I was feeling very spaced out (kinda like now, actually) and was just sort of wandering around random city streets, extremely disoriented. In this state, I wandered into a fairly large city hospital. Big enough that the various wards were quite large, and sort of worlds unto themselves, just like the departments in a large office building.

So there I was, wandering incoherently through a large hospital, when I stumbled into the psychiatric ward. From the point of view of my now waking mind, this seems inevitable. I have had a terrible fascination with psych wards and asylums (asyli?) for a long time.

Somehow, despite my incoherent state of mind, I managed to convey to someone there that I was not feeling at all well, and I was admitted to the ward. (Uh oh.)

And this is when things begin to get weird. For some reason, in order to get admitted fully, I had to go through this procedure where they had to use this odd instrument to scrape skin from my back quite painfully. Then they had to check my hair for fleas and lice and such. (Makes sense. I would imagine that some of the people who end up in that ward are coming straight from being homeless and wild. )

And then, for some reason, they had to sedate me. The nurse said something about “taking care of my fingernails”, which would make sense… if I was a nervous Doberman. But at the time I just accepted it as standard procedure for potentially dangerous nutcases.

After all, they don’t know I am not the dangerous kind of loony, and given that I am a big and potentially pretty scary looking guy, I can see them wanting to make sure I was quieted down before I went on some giant crazy person rampage like I was a biker in the cop shop in a cop movie.

In the real world, fully awake, I doubt I would be quite so trusting.

Anyhow, they stuck a needle in my thigh (hurt like a bitch, ow) and watched the room get all wobbly and out of focus before I conked out completely.

So there I was, falling asleep in a dream. That is downright trippy, man. So meta.

Some indeterminable time later, I “awoke” into the dream again. It took me a few seconds to remember where I was and how I got there, and I remember thinking “I guess my fingernails are all trimmed now.”

I remember laying there, relaxed in a nice dark room, for a little while before getting up. When I got up, I somehow (dream transition) ended up being told it was time to eat, and I was seated at a table with some other patients of the ward.

And I was so relaxed from my chemical nap that I had no problem just being pleasant and making friends with the other people at the table. In fact, I was quite happy overall. I felt great. At peace, comfortable, relaxed, and enthusiastic.

Although one fellow patient, a dark and glowering fellow, said “yeah, well life stinks!” and I nodded and said “For everybody!” and he sort of growled and said “Well OK, MY life stinks” and I said, rather primly, “Then make sure to say that next time!”, and I have no idea what came over me to be such a shit.

I mean, sure, that is how I feel. People make pronouncements about life, but the only life they know is their own, and they are really talking about their own lives. So they should be honest about it, and not pretend to have some kind of insight into Life itself.

But I would never be suck a dick about it. Perhaps a happier me would feel less inhibited about doing things like that. If so, eww. Something to guard for as I recover.

Anyhow, then he explained that his life sucked because he was prone to these…. somethings. He used some word I don’t know and don’t recall. But they made him make terrible noises like a combination of extremely loud stomach growling along with a kind of strangled deep moaning.

That is a pretty bad affliction. But at that point in the dream, I began to feel weak, and conked out again. I assume that, in dream logic, I was carried back to my room by orderlies.

Sorry for that, fellows.

So then I wake up back in my room like before, and I lay there thinking “I thought I would be in that other place this time. ” And by “other place”, I meant reality. My real, actual life.

Then I drifted off again, and when I awoke, I thought, at first, that I was back to reality. But that was before I actually opened my eyes and looked around and realized that this room was nothing like the room in the “other place”.

So I deliberately went back to sleep, determined to wake up in the right place again, and this time, I did. That is when I woke up for reals.

I was completely disoriented and probably did not even know my own name, but at least I was home. In fact, I remember thinking “It’s good to be home. It’s good to be home. It’s good to be home. ”

Pretty fucking messed up, overall. I do not like it when my dreams get all meta and super intense like that, so that they warp my sense of reality and leave me feeling shaken.

Although I have to admit, I felt quite good when I woke up. It is only now that I am disturbed by the whole thing. By the reality warping, and by having to face that the idea of being in a psych ward is actually extremely appealing to me in a sick sort of way,

Imagine, no obligations, no pressure, no more being responsible for oneself, no need to be an adult. I could just live and concentrate on getting better.

No wonder I felt so good when I woke up. It was my best/worst fantasy. A complete retreat from adult life. Just do what you are told and everything will be OK.

And you even have people paying attention to you!

This is clearly something I will have to bring up with my therapist on Thursday.

And that is why I am glad I wrote it all down here.

Superstition versus Religion

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Well, I am totally bored with talking about myself again, so let’s get into some philosophy.

Superstition and religion have a long and fruitful association. Rather hilariously, one of the results of the Enlightenment was that religious institution like the Catholic Church began promulgating the idea that “primitive” people had superstition, and “civilized” people had religion.

Thus, the same people who seriously expect you to believe that only they can communicate to an all powerful sky god and save you from terrible things that will happen after you die could, seemingly without irony, claim to be saving people from “primitive superstition” in the name of damn Reason herself.

And this has largely been a successful meme. Pretending you are eating the flesh and drinking the blood of a guy who died 2000 years ago is considered religion, but astrology and crystal therapy are considered to be mere crackpot superstitions.

The message is clear : religion is superior to mere superstition.

But it is my contention is that this is precisely backwards, and it is superstition which is far more powerful and pervasive than mere religion.

In fact, religion can succeed only inasmuch as it is successful in installing superstition in its adherents, and if a major religion were truly successful in eliminating superstition, all its professional practitioners would find themselves out of a job.

That is why it is so vital for any successful religion to get their hands on the children when they are good and young, so they can instill their superstitions into their future adherents when they are far too young to process the information rationally and when, in effect, the whole world seems mysterious and superstition is their best defense.

Think about it : a small child might not grasp that they need to look both ways before crossing the street because they might get hit by a car, but if they parent successfully gets the simplified message “this is dangerous”, then the child will be safe.

This is how superstition operates. It allows us to develop aversions to things without us having to truly understand the dangers involved, and to form long term associations between situations and outcomes that help us avoid dangers we have been exposed to in the past.

That is, when this mechanism works correctly. When it malfunctions, we end up with phobias, post traumatic stress disorder, and in the worse case scenario, illnesses like Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

A person with OCD, in fact, is a person at the mercy of the superstition drive gone berserk, causing the victim to be plagued by multiple persistent and extremely strong superstitions that they absolutely must obey, otherwise the superstitions will fill them with an incredible feeling of dread that it is hard to imagine if you have not been there yourself.

Back to religion now. The real message of any religion, the message that our deep animal drive that lies somewhere between simple association and actual reason can understand, is “you are in great dangers that are absolutely beyond your control except if you perform these specific rituals.”

And the rituals, of course, involve the intervention of the professional practitioners, the “priest class”, who extract various forms of tribute in order to protect you from those dangers that you would not even know existed if it was not for them.

Again, the basic nature of childhood helps them in their goal. Children are, quite literally, at the mercy of forces they cannot understand or control from the adult world. This is why children develop their own superstitions quite spontaneously, like being afraid of the monster under the bed or jumping over the cracks on the sidewalk because “step on a crack, break your mother’s back”.

Transforming unnamed fear and dread into a specific superstition allows the human mind to exert a measure of control over the random and arbitrary and unknown forces of the universe. Keep your feet from dangling off the bed, and the monster can’t get you. Skip over the cracks and your mother’s back is safe. Go to a specific building on a certain day of the week and participate in a group ritual, and you will be OK for another week, if you are good.

And often, even after the religion has gone, the superstitions remain because they still perform a function even when the largely superfluous dogma supporting it has been discarded.

Many an ex-Catholic who has not seen the inside of a church for decades will nevertheless cross themselves if they are narrowly missed by an out of control bus.

And there are all kinds of secular superstitions as well. There are the obvious ones that everyone knows about, like about what is “bad luck” (smashing a mirror, walking under a ladder) or what is “good luck” (finding a penny, or a four leaf clover).

But there are also the subtle superstitions that everybody develops that tend to fly under the radar because they operate at a very deep and subrational level of the consciousness and we are so used to them that it never occurs to us to question them rationally.

And they can have a deep and profound effect, especially if the superstition is broadly defined and hence runs deep into the marrow of existence.

For example, a person might have a superstitious belief, lodged deep in their brain, that if they are ever truly happy, they will let their guard down, and the moment they let their guard down, something terrible will happen, and so being happy is not “safe”.

Thus, this person subconsciously sabotages their own happiness because the superstition overwhelms them at convinces themselves that by avoiding happiness, they are actually making themselves “safe”.

Rationally, this is insane. What can be worse than being unhappy?

But that is the power of superstition. These associations we form can be far more powerful than our rational and conscious minds, and can even be the real force behind all of a person’s decisions, with reason left trailing behind to make up rationalizations.

And until we understand superstition as the pervasive and powerful phenomenon it is, and are humble and honest enough to recognize it in ourselves, reason will never truly stand a chance.