Request for advice

[Walkabout]

yes Seesthru , I dream like before , short dreams repeated over and over. One change is when I wake I am hot and sweaty , the more intense the dream the greater the effect . Nightmares usually require drinking frig water and cold water packs.

[seesthru]

I don't recall if I wake sweaty from dreams or not. I have. But then, I've woken sweaty from nothing but room temp! LOL

I'm glad you got your REM back.

[Libby]

I don't know. Maybe I"m talking silly here. But when we grow up, we do things we didn't do as kids, like drink lots of coffee, smoke, or drink alcohol. Then as we get we get stuck on meds for this condition or that one... we get so stuck in some regimented life. We don't get enough time off to play, because even when we aren't at work, we are doing work at home, or thinking about work, or thinking about bills or worrying about kids, the job, or whatever. We lose the freedom for many that is childhood. Homework and a chore or two, then you can play.

I don't think you're talking silly - I think you make a good point.

We don't really know the point of dreaming: maybe it's partly about filing or discarding our memories of the day; but maybe it's partly to do with letting our subconscious out to play, because we can't really do that in our daily lives.

I'm currently just at the end of a series of lectures on the Industrial Revolution. It's history, but it's also a story, and, once upon a time, there was no electricity, no kerosene lighting, or whale-oil lamps, possibly for the poor there weren't even decent candles. But there was a fire, and especially during the long dark hours of winter, people would gather around the fire and tell stories. Often they were sagas of great mythic heroes, often they were stories handed down through generations of our ancestors and their journeys. No pictures (or powerpoint!), so it all worked because of people's ability to imagine.

I used to listen to plays on the radio. As fans of radio-plays often said: the pictures are better in my head (than TV or movies). I can recall reading books when I was young and being completely enthralled by them, especially science-fiction and all the what-ifs and possibilities of a world completely different from the one I lived in. I'd love to experience that again.

I seem to be stuck in the watching of documentaries, seeking facts, and trying to cram them into my brain. But with these lectures on the Industrial Revolution, I didn't do that. I knew most of the facts anyway, so instead I sat and watched them while doing knitting. It's an amazing story, with personalities, and wrong turns, and triumphs and disasters, and I swear there were times when my eyebrows went so high they almost met my hairline (and I occasionally dropped some stitches). Good lecturers are good story-tellers, whatever the subject.

I think I do need to let go of the idea that my intellectual worth is demonstrated by remembering facts and formulas and dates. In reality, the people who made the difference were those who had knowledge plus imagination. People like Einstein succeeded mostly because they allowed their inner child out to play.

If you've hijacked this thread, seesthru, then so have I. But in doing that, we might have given TranshumanOwl some more pointers.

[seesthru]

I was just talking to someone about good lecturers/teachers. They make the people and events come alive. I had a great western civilizations instructor that did that. I too have been a little too focused on history, I watch youtube documentaries, and documentaries in netflix, all about history, past disasters, wars, climate, or rather I listen to them as I lay in bed. I don't have to watch much, I can imagine, war and volcanoes and all that stuff.

I think that we are flooded with information so much that maybe, we as a species will lose the ability to imagine, save for a very few. When I was a kid, TV had 3 channels, black and white at first, then color. We were behind the times where I lived. We had the dirt road, the woods, a small store a couple of miles away. I would lose myself int he woods, imagining I was an indian, or a panther, or something like that... Toys bored me. The were inanimate. My imagination didn't extend to toys really. I was happier with a stick that was a pretend spear, and a fishing pole than with dolls or toys. I dreamt more as a teen and young adult than as a child. I dream still, but the dreams aren't about possibilities as much. More often they are about frustrations, incomplete missions or tasks, unwon battles etc...

I will say. I don't profess to be psychic, not in the least. However there have been events in my life where I realize that years prior, I dreamt the event. It's always weird. Always a bit scary. But I think everyone has those moments.