Positivism

Positivism (noun):  1)  the state or quality of being positive; definiteness; assurance (2) a philosophical system founded by Auguste Comte, concerned with positive facts and phenomena, and excluding speculation upon ultimate causes or origins.

Today was one of those days where I felt like there was this effervescence flowing through my entire core.  I had no uncertainty in anything I did today.  My alarm went off and I wasn’t even angry.  It was just helping me start my day.  Plus, I was the one who set it the night before.  I got to the elevator and noticed that someone at the other end of the hall was just getting out there door to head for the elevator.  I took the thirty seconds to hold the elevator for him — lets face it, I’d be a jerk if I didn’t.  It still felt really good.  I got to school with plenty of time to spare, spent some time talking to people I don’t normally talk to and wound up randomly receiving a free iced mocha.  A friend had received one by mistake from McDonalds, so she gave it to me!  I went to the most boring class on Earth and actually paid attention the entire time.  I’m not sure how much of it I understood, but I willed myself to pay attention and felt all the better for it.

I was meeting my sister for lunch, and upon heading to the parking lot, I noticed a car circling the lot to look for a space.  I got her to roll down her window and told her to follow me and she could have my space.  That felt really good.  I spent a really great half hour lunch with my sister, that I gladly paid for, and incredibly enough felt even more buoyant upon leaving her presence.  We confided in each other, and it felt perfect.  I headed right back to school and found a spot without much trouble, almost in the same spot I had been in before.  Keeping my nose to the grindstone, I prepared for my next class and in that class I brazenly submitted myself to questioning on a case, which I had prepared thoroughly and was completely unafraid of.  I had a practice with a group for another class, and it was a really good practice.  I haven’t said that for a couple of weeks, but I truly believe it was a good practice.

Perhaps all of this was what most people would consider a completely uneventful day.  To me, it seemed like perfect karmic balance of a sort.  Each time I put something out there, I got something in return.  I wish this kind of confidence was with me every day of my life.  I can’t imagine feeling this way every day — but I’d like to.  So many times I don’t even notice those little moments, or I just let them slip by.  But today it was like I just couldn’t resist using every minute to its best possible advantage.  Felt like there were a lot more opportunities than I usually encounter.  That can’t be true of course, each day must be riddled with opportunities to help others.  Opportunities to put your best self forward.  Whats weird is that I could tell everyone else could sense the same shift in my personality.  Days like these, I am ten times more approachable.  Its on days like these that I rediscover old friendships, I make new ones, and I feel like I am able to socialize with little to no effort.

These perceptions are so rare, I just feel so grateful for today.  The state of mind I’m in right now is sublime.  Positivism.

Dream Believer

I have been sleeping a LOT lately.  I think mostly because of this little cold I acquired two days ago.  As an example, I went to bed at 9 pm last night and slept for 11 hours.  The night before I think I slept for around 10 hours.  A lot of times I think the onset of something like a cold is just an indicator that your body needs rest.  So I have been fully compliant with my body’s request.

A side effect of all that sleep is all the dream time.  I have always been fascinated by my dreams as I tend to remember them with inordinate clarity.  I learned a little about dreams and the way we sleep when I was in undergrad, but here’s a little recap of the stages of sleep in a normal sleep cycle:

REM sleep, or dream sleep, is essential to our minds for processing and consolidating emotions, memories and stress. It is also thought to be vital to learning, stimulating the brain regions used in learning and developing new skills. Most of dreaming occurs during REM sleep, although it can happen during other sleep stages as well. There are different theories as to why you dream. Freud thought that dreams were the processing of unconscious desires. Today, researchers wonder if it may be the brain’s way of processing random fragments of information received during the day. Much of dreaming is still a mystery.  If REM sleep is disrupted one night, your body will go through more REM the next to catch up on this sleep stage.

http://www.helpguide.org/life/sleeping.htm

Interesting stuff, huh?!  To be honest, my curiosity with sleep patterns and dreams has been lifelong.  I remember the first dream I … remembered.  I was 5.  It was also my first nightmare — one of the few in my life.  Or at least one of the few nightmares I tend to remember, the dreams I tend to remember are usually characterized as much more happy-go-lucky.  There have been a couple of times where I woke up and remembered having up to 5 separate and distinct dreams.  There have been dreams that flowed seamlessly from unconsciousness to reality — causing minor panic attacks.

I know it sounds strange, but there have also been dreams that were oddly prophetic.  They caused me to have weird moments of deja vu.  Nothing major, but little events that I most likely anticipated in the first place and was able to construct the most likely version of how they would turn out in my subconscious — a way of soothing some latent unease perhaps.  Then there are the fun ones.  The ones that are vibrant and make little to no sense.  I feel like as I’ve gotten older, I have gotten better at letting my imagination fly in my dreams.  It makes going to sleep that much more thrilling and something that I look forward to every day.  Especially when I know there is a strong chance I will remember it in the morning, it makes me that much more anxious to expand my version of reality into something totally implausible just to give me something to laugh at when I wake up.

For instance, the other night I had a very vivid dream.  The setting was Colorado — one of my favorite places on Earth and therefore a place I frequent in my dreams — and I was high up in the mountains at a sort of base camp.  Its been a couple days, so now I can’t quite remember the order of events, but I do remember some of the people there.  For one, my dreams usually start out based in reality — as in I was in Colorado at my aunt and uncle’s house and I was with my aunt and uncle.  Totally plausible at this point.  Then my uncle says something bizarre like “Rachel, you really should run on up the mountain now, its about time.”  And I obey, because, well it must mean the dream is about to take an interesting turn.  Once I get up the mountain at lightning speed (I was told to run) I reach this enclave of cabins as well as my best friend from high school, Cindy.  I love seeing friends in my dreams.  We try to take the summit together, but a gathering of men stands in our way and tells us that the way is blocked and we have to wait.  This frustrates the purpose of my dream — although the men are tantalizing distractions.  I fear one of them has an ulterior motive, and do not trust them, although Cindy seems inclined to believe them.  We wait for a while, and it gets dark.  I find these 2 pairs of boots and I instantly know that they are the key.  I choose a pair, and when I put them on they have flashlight beams that come from the toes to light my path.  I keep trying to convince Cindy that she needs to strap on the other pair to see what their gift is.  She is too distracted by the men.  I go ahead and start trudging through the forest and I can smell the pines and I am filled with happiness.

My dream shifted then to something kind of weird.  No longer in the same story, I now had no arms.  Or, my arms only extended down to the elbow, beyond that was nothing.  It was kind of unsettling.  I kept trying to figure out how it happened in my dream, but no one would explain it and everyone in my dream acted like this was nothing new.  I went along with it for a little while, but it bugged me too much and I woke up.

So yeah, I tend to remember a lot in my dreams.  Sometimes they are romantic, but I can rarely see the face of my romancer.  Probably because I have yet to actually meet anyone like all those mr. rights to be able to put a face to it.  My imagination has its limitations.  Don’t get me wrong, I have stress dreams, for sure.  Usually I know how to prevent those from even entering my psyche, by simply making sure I go to bed with nothing to feel anxious about.  There are things like tests and so forth that are impossible not to be anxious about and I have the normal stress dreams about waking up late for the test and whatnot.  My subconscious just combats that stress by waking me up extra early so I have no excuse to have that dream become a reality.

I feel extremely connected to my subconscious — there is rarely a dream I have that I cannot logically explain the reasons for.  Even that weird one with no arms (which I am not classifying as a nightmare, by the way).  It made me uncomfortable, but I think it was rooted in a thought I had earlier in the day.  What if I had a disability?  How would I cope?  Would I just totally shut down?  My subconscious tried to help me figure that out, give me an opportunity to test what I would do — but some things are just too difficult to imagine.

Many times, my dreams are manifestations of concerns or wishes that I am trying to conceal from myself.  It is my own mechanism I suppose of forcing myself to deal with what troubles me, or what I want to come to pass.  I’ve never had the same dream twice, but if I dream in the same theme enough, the point comes across well enough.  I also don’t think of myself as unique in my dreaming habits.  I know that everyone has dreams.  The main difference as far as I can tell is that I remember them at a much higher rate than most.  At least most people I know.  I don’t know what the trick is in remembering dreams, supposedly there are certain things you can do to try to enhance your recall of your dreams.  I heard that if you keep a journal by your bed and as soon as you wake up you just write whatever you were just thinking about, it will probably turn out to be your dream.  It is hard to remember dreams as the day wears on.

I need to keep a dream journal.  I’ve written my dreams down here and there in my normal journal, but I have never kept a journal specifically for recording my dreams.  Seems like I should.  It would be fascinating…to me at least 😉

Sides of a Coin

There are always at least two sides to every story, if not more.  Everyone is always so quick to point out that every coin has 2 sides, true enough.  But there is so much more than that.  What about all that in between space?  The part that connects the two sides — the middle ground.  I think the part that links the two sides is so heavily discounted because it is largely unseen.  Each side is distinct and leaves nothing to the imagination, with etched in drawings and words that leave little room for interpretation.  What is so quickly overlooked is the iota of space between those 2 sides that creates the possibility of having sides in the first place.  The glue, if you will, that holds it all together is uncertain.  It is unknowable.  Conjecture as to what lies inbetween is possible, and analysis can be conducted, but ultimately all you are left with is an unending dearth of possibilities.  (note:  obviously, I am speaking metaphorically.  A real coin is made of metal, duh.  Bear with me).  If this makes any sense to you at this point, I would appreciate and explanation…

I guess where my mind is taking me is into the realm of possibilities.  I have always been fairly comfortable with the idea that it is impossible for anyone to know everything.  That we all live finite existences in an infinite universe.  I am even a little more than content with the idea that some mysteries will never be solved.  Perhaps that is where faith and religion make the most sense to me — it is impossible to affirmatively disprove the existence of an ethereal being.  You either choose to accept the impossibility of knowing one way or the other and believe, or reject the idea that anything so vague and elusive could exist without being rationally based.  Either way, its a fascinating set of options.  The latter, probably most notably embodied in the idea of nihilism, is to be totally void of belief.

Whoa, did not expect to go that way.  What I was originally thinking about before becoming so completely sidetracked was the way a story gets formed.  Human perception is so alarming to me, and maybe that is because I can be unfortunately unperceptive.  It seems like people’s true perceptions are never identical — confirming that no two people are created the same…but it certainly creates an overwhelming amount of confusion.  When everyone is simply telling their own version of a story without any attempt at removing their personal slant from the story, well, it makes for complete convoluted chaos.  It is especially interesting when the story is passed by someone who was not a party to the original occurrence, aka, gossip.  Everyone (that I know) presents a slant based on their own perception of the events as well as to whom they are speaking.  A story can go through many different revisions based simply on change in audience.  Makes me wonder if this is something we are all born with — the ability to edit an event to our own liking — or if that is something we had to be taught.  I would err on the side of being taught that kind of behavior.  Especially considering we have to be taught how to lie, and how to empathize.

What would the world be like if we could all see through all the bullshit and actually say what we thought without all the revisions?  Perhaps not as pleasant at times, but maybe a little simpler?  I’m sure it would just be a different version of this reality, with its own set of problems.  Unintended complications and unforeseen consequences, no doubt.

I wish I could tell you what I was really trying to say in this post, but at this point I’m not even sure…a conundrum of the worst kind 🙂