Frowning takes 68 muscles.
Smiling takes 6.
Pulling this trigger takes 2.
I'm lazy.
"Conscience dreams were a great study in college!" --Jared Leee Loughner
That quote interested me. What was Loughner learning in college? I looked through the Pima College on-line catalogue for "Conscience Dreaming" and couldn't find anything.
But when I googled "conscience dreaming," I found a lot of links to "conscious dreaming," which is also referred to as "lucid dreaming."
Lucid Dreaming --Wikipedia:
In a study of fourteen lucid dreamers performed in 1991, people who perform wake-initiated lucid dreams operation (WILD) reported experiences consistent with aspects of out-of-body experiences such as floating above their beds and the feeling of leaving their bodies.
It seems to be a New Age practice that blends Eastern meditation techniques with astral projection and old-fashioned "consorting with spirits."
Christians know that attempts to conjure up "spirit guides" and "dead loved ones" are occult activities that place the practitioner in grave spiritual danger.
Equally as frightening is this quote from the Booklist review: "an angel in a dream could be the dreamer's better self." Ideas like these, if taken to heart, can provoke profound psychological disturbance --even psychotic breaks-- as do New Age practices like "A Course in Miracles":
During a time of incredible loss, (the murder of her infant nephew and subsequent life sentencing of her brother, the suicide of one of her New Thought students, and the mental collapse of another; resulting in her being committed to a psychiatric ward) Sharon says she saw clearly, as if for the first time, the very real consequences of sin and the true teachings of the Bible playing out right before her eyes amid the tragic events surrounding her. With courageous honesty, she reveals how her "New Age" influence may have unwittingly played a part in these tragedies. --About Sharon Lee Giganti
From a review of the book on Amazon:
I loved this book, and found it to be a very "shamanic" dreamwork manual. It has wonderful exercises for both the beginning and more advanced dreamworker and includes everything you could imagine, from dream incubation, dream reentry and working with nightmares to shape-shifting, meeting deceased loved ones, angels and psychic self defense.
What are they teaching at Pima College?
Can we find out what courses Loughner was taking?
He was a violent pot user with drug infected mentality.
Mind. Just say no.
He’s just crazy, probably schizophrenic.
Lots of people have lucid dreams—it’s nothing more than a dream in which the dreamer becomes aware he is dreaming.
He is just plain mentally ill, nothing more than that.
His friend said he had alcohol poisoning so that could effect everything he thinks, up to the day he took it out on the folks at Safeway. He was nuts.
“Did “Conscious Dreaming” Cause a Psychotic Break?”
You would need a psychiatrist to weigh in on this topic. Maybe Dr. Charles Krauthammer will address this when he’s on Fox News.
It’s also possible that Jared suffered from some type of drug induced psychosis. Or maybe he was having severe mental health problems all along, and the drugs only worsened his condition. As to the latter, his mother had a responsibility to get him psychiatric help.
Lucid dreams are not related to mental instability.
IMO those that have them are intelligent individuals far less likely to engage in violence than the general population.
I managed to lucid dream after doing just a few exercises. It was actually a lot of fun. My son only has lucid dreams and he does this naturally. I think that he manages to do this because he suffered terribly from nightmares from age two until he was about six. He got control of his dreams and he’s steered every bad dream into a good one since.
This guy was a nut. He probably has schizophrenia. He was obviously into just about every conspiracy theory out there.
It’s impossible to understand crazy. That’s why it’s crazy! Trying to link his insanity to music, political ideology or anything else is tilting at windmills. Sane people will never be able to really understand insanity. It’s the very nature of the thing.
And yet, for some strange reason, we all want to try. We don’t want to accept that some people just have broken brains and that’s all there is to it. That he’d be driven over the edge if he’d been exposed to nothing more than videos of playing puppies. He’d manage to act out if he’d had access to nothing more than plastic butter knives.
I have some past experience with lucid dreaming. It’s not all fun and games. For me it was not a positive experience, it was very disturbing.
Look into Carlos Castaneda, in particular his personal life and that of his close associates, to see what can happen.
It’s opening a door that should remain closed, imho. I can see how it would send an already disturbed individual over the edge. The bounds of waking and sleeping, fantasy and reality can and do get obscured.
Read Loughner’s rambling screeds again knowing this, and the one thing that shines through is that he thinks he’s as able to manipulate and control waking reality as he is in the fleeting unreality of his dreams.
Some dream beings persist, though. You’re not in control of them. This is a time honored and known experience of practically all who attempt to practice lucid or conscious dreaming, to the point of being regarded as “spirit guides.”
Castaneda advised embracing them. Very bad idea, imho. Particularly if you’re Christian. I am, now.
I am acquainted with an individual who is involved with the New Age nonsense. Amazing to see a bright and educated individual become so brain fogged from their practices that they loose the ability for critical thinking. ‘Their reality’ and point of reference becomes a matter of that which they experience in their minds/imaginations, thru these practices, and their point of reference in how they view pretty much everything and everyone.
The tragic part of the above is they become so dependant on these experiences that it does not take long before they live for the next one...and the next. Isolation is not uncommon..Job loss..family loss..but even with this they “believe” their path is real though they are indeed in a fantasy land ‘of their minds own making.” Very sad.
When you add New Age practices to this guys apparent lack of stability in the first place, nothing good would come from the path he choose.
He had alcohol overdose in ‘06, which can most certainly cause brain damage. Importantly, he seemed to have a fixation on literacy and language, which is interesting because two parts of the brain that are readily damaged with oxygen deprivation are involved with language.
When I first heard the bit about “conscious dreaming†(lucid dreaming)I wondered if he was under some mind-controlled, MK Ultra type psy ops. I’d like to know more of his background, including who his parents are. Some are recruited by their parents. His history reveals that he was somewhat of a loner. Maybe he had been manipulated for years. It did happen at a most opportune time for those trying to usher in a “transformation”. Sacrificing a moderate, so-called Blue Dog would get them a lot of mileage.
I got stuck with the spelling errors and never made it as far as you did. “Conscience dreaming” is a bit removed from “Conscious dreaming”...
So there I sat...trying to imagine - does one dream about Jiminy Cricket? How does one dream a conscience? Wouldn’t someone without one not know they didn’t have one? Do sociopaths wish they had a conscience? I became tired trying to grapple with the whole idea.
“Conscious Dreaming” is an open invitation for demonic influence.
it seems like both he and OZERO have “DREAMS”...hmmmmmmm
The two women were part of Castaneda's inner circle, which he referred to as "The Brujas", and both assumed different names as part of their dedication to their new beliefs. They were originally both graduate students in anthropology at UCLAGood old college.
Here’s a documentary that gives interesting insight.
Low, You may need a murderer.
Alan Sparhawk of the band Low is featured - great band, brilliant musician, but a few years ago he had what can be labeled a psychotic split. He began acting oddly, with mental issues likely from drug use, and began to ponder the biblical stories where God orders killings and other tasks of faith (Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, etc.)
It’s meant to be a band documentary, but in context is an interesting study in lucid dreams, OT vs the modern day, etc.
http://player.omroep.nl/?aflID=6751556&md5=33bce1658e01db796f924221cd487d03
I suppose it has something to do with what you DO with your lucid dreams. I have them occasionally (non-drug induced). I don’t go looking for an adviser from a a spiritual plane.
Mr. Gutierrez said his friend had become obsessed with the meaning of dreams and their importance. He talked about reading Friedrich Nietzsche’s book “The Will To Power” and embraced ideas about the corrosive, destructive effects of nihilism — a belief in nothing. And every day, his friend said, Mr. Loughner would get up and write in his dream journal, recording the world he experienced in sleep and its possible meanings.His "lucid dreaming" may have also opened him up to demonic influence:“Jared felt nothing existed but his subconscious,” Mr. Gutierrez said. “The dream world was what was real to Jared, not the day-to-day of our lives.”
[Textbook definition of psychosis]
And that dream world, his friend said, could be downright strange.
“He would ask me constantly, ‘Do you see that blue tree over there?’ He would admit to seeing the sky as orange and the grass as blue,” Mr. Gutierrez said. “Normal people don’t talk about that stuff.”
He added that Mr. Loughner “used the word hollow to describe how fake the real world was to him.”
The friends said Loughner told anyone who would listen that the world we see does not exist, that words have no meaning - and that the only way to derive meaning was during sleep. Loughner began obsessing about a practice called lucid dreaming, in which people try to actively control their sleeping world.
--Shooting suspect's nihilism rose with isolation
Hidden within a camouflage tent behind Jared Lee Loughner's home sits an alarming altar with a skull sitting atop a pot filled with shriveled oranges.Skeptical? Check out this discussion thread from the Catholic Answers website:--Frightening, twisted shrine in Arizona killer Jared Lee Loughner's yard
The Secret Ruined My DaughterMy daughters Health teacher decided to show her 9th grade class the movie: " The Secret"... At a public Charter high school.
This was three months ago, and my daughter is still talking about "positive" and "negative" energies, and how she can "make" things happen as she deems necessary. What does a 14 year old know about life that she should even attempt to make things happen "her: way...
On top of it all, I've noticed that since her new obsession, she's been escaping Sunday Mass as much as she can... I think she is using negative energy to get out of Mass.
Could I be overreacting, or should I start using good Catholic sense to purge her from The Secret.