Blog 5

This book is a pleasant change from "The Field". However, this book still messes with my head. Maybe the purpose of this class is to put me in an altered state. When I read about a new idea, like how we only sense material that has reached our consciousness through selective filters (cpt 3), I become so absorbed in this idea that my mind seems to overflow. This particular idea boggled my mind: Is there really some sort of filter in our brain? How does it determine what comes through and what is blocked? How much information is out there that we will never know? My questions are endless.

Chapter 1 discusses creativity. We talked briefly about creativity in the beginning of this class and were asked to give a definition of it. I had said that creativity is an original way of doing anything. To elaborate on this, the book says that creativity is the use of imagination to transmute the inner world (what goes on in our heads) into external reality. Creativity is not simply the ideas we might have stored up in our imaginations; it is also how we put these ideas into something physical.

The quote at the beginning of chapter 4 stuck out to me: "The madman is a dreamer". Humans have a biological NEED to dream. While asleep, we enter this dreaming state known as REM sleep. Sleepers who have disrupted REM sleep go into "REM rebound" when deprivation ceases. This doesn't happen when psychotics go through dream deprivation. A psychotic episode (hallucinations, delusions, etc) have the same affect on a person as dreams do. This made me think of other forms of mental illness (depression, manic-depression, etc). Could a bout of depression be an altered state? Suicidal thoughts, for example, don't go through a "normal" person's mind. These thoughts of suicide put a person in an altered state. We already established that dreaming is an altered state. Since every person, excluding those with altered state-inducing illnesses, needs to dream, I think its safe to say that humans have a biological need to be in an altered state (at least for part of their existence). Going back to the first quote in the chapter, if the madman is a dreamer, is the dreamer a madman?