Just an idea, that we can drop general questions here, the answers to which will be of maybe be of use to a wide audience.

Here's one:

Lots of people experience a major disconnect between 'asleep' consciousness' and 'waking consciousness' such that when awake we can't recall what has occurred while sleeping, and while asleep, sometimes physical waking knowledge is equally unavailable. That seems to imply that there is something intrinsically different in the information processing in the realms. If all is reduceable to ones and zeroes at bottom, then is it the case that this is some kind of software mis-match? And if so, what is the trick to managing awake consciousness so that it gets some traction with other styles?

Montana,

Imagine taking you barbarian from world of Warcraft and playing him in The Sims where he would marry, live in the suburbs, get a job as an accountant, and throw parties for his neighbors. Two different rule sets, two different data streams. Now imagine that WOW and Sims were owned by the same people and they decided to sometimes (on a case to case basis as assessed some criteria) allow some interactive synergy between the two games. Perhaps the barbarian could get a job as a disco club bouncer and maintain his spells and hit-points from the WOW game.

Tom

seems to me the veil is intentional, not error?

have you studied standard lucid dreaming techniques, which starts with a dream journal?

I am spectactularly incompetent in this area, but I like to read about it

_________________
Does this PMR make my butt look big?

Montana - for awhile I was kind of obsessed with this idea of integrating my waking awareness with my sleeping awareness. I think this is not do-able all the time even for people who regularly lucid dream. As you said, I think the translation of the dream VR back into PMR VR is never a one to one. Also I believe you are operating in the dream VR with your being and not with your intellect. That is where the lessons in the dream VR are supposed to come from. And so by bringing awareness to your dreams you can bring in some intellect and that may interfere with the purpose of the dream lesson.

Something that I have become aware of lately is that I don't think I am interacting with any other consciousness in my dreams. I think it is more of a pre-recorded data stream. I say this because after I woke up one morning and was thinking about my dream I realized that one of the characters in the dream (some one from my waking PMR) was mis-cast. That person didn't fit the part at all. I think the LCS was giving me a nudge into understanding a little part of how the dream VR works. Now often when I wake up and think about my dream the person that was a friend in the dream isn't a person I know in my PMR life at all. In the past I think this would have bothered me a lot. Now I don't care.

Thanks you all, and Tom, on this one occasion I think I might speak for the group enough to say we're all glad to see your spending more time here.

It sounds then like it is partly a matter of the relative quality of the consciousness in the two states. .

I didn't explain my experience very well... I will be sitting in a chair, meditating or even dozing ... puzzling over something ... utterly non-verbal, I should add ... oh, it might be something like 'the general structure of the feel of a dendrite from the inside and trying to size it up as a potential descriptor, (background implications of 'inhabitable' different geometric structures waiting to be noticed and compared) of experience-able consciousness milieu. I am awake in physical, eyes closed... 'enter the tunnel' (terrible expression .. it is more like an elevator without walls that doesn't go anywhere, but the felt substance of the surround changes), then I am on the other side. The idea then goes through various modulations and I get (what is for me, for others it might be a big Doh!") a great insight and think, "Ooo ... better get back and write this down or I'll forget it!" But more often than not the structure simply evaporates as I slip back through to this side. Sometimes it doesn't, I get to bring it back, write it down, puzzle over it, and integrate it. Other times, not. So the question becomes: what is different on the different occasions? The relatively exotic (unfamiliar) content? Structure/substance is maybe one dynamic, but only a part. I don't so far detect anything even approaching the dramatic difference in brutishness between the two presentations of consciousness, either in feel or in content quality, suggested by the WoWist / SIMMist contrast. It's rather almost like the two information processing systems are not mutually interchangable: like say .pdf vs. .txt files. The point is that sometimes the information DOES get through: sometimes the two information systems ARE, to some degree, couple-able. I'm trying to identify why that changes ... points to look for ... what data to watch for, that, when sorted and filed, will help construct a model that will predict when (through the 'why') this coupling will be more or less effective.

Randy: The 'veil' may or may not be intentional. It seems like it is more like the difference might seem to a fish that transforms into a bird between water and air: the fish/bird knows that something is different, when crossing the boundary, but just what, there is no existing name or model (so, essentially, it is 'unthinkable') ... meanwhile thoughts thunk and skills exercised are only very partially translatable to the other side: For instance, there is direction, velocity, acceleration on both sides, but in the air the flapping tail doesn't work, while in the water, remembering the feel of wings gets interpreted through the guiding fins and 'thoughts thunk' with wings in one realm just all apart in to meaningless in the other. Something like that. Yes, I have studied dreaming in the past. Back in my teens I was fascinated by the idea of being awake 24 hours a day, asked for this, and got something very close: I was busy (so that I could remember it upon physical waking) most of the night. After only a few days, I realized it was way too much .... I could never integrate it all ..."get any sleep" or rest, so to speak, and said "Turn it off already! Turn it off!"

Sains, yes it sounds like you understand the difference I am pointing out.

In terms of 'mis-cast' dream characters, and similar mismatches, I came up with the following strategy back in my days of studying Jung: It happens that when we are dreaming we are thinking in images rather than words, and as all the various 'chunks of consciousness' of which we are composed engage in dialog (some dreaming is largely, apparently, a matter of settling of accounts of the day). The communicative coin of the realm here is the common fund of images (visual, audial, kinesthetic, etc), not words. (Where words DO surface, they are often used in pun-like fashion). So: If one chunk wants to represent a certain property, oh, say, a kind of Charity that our friend "Madge" characterizes best, it will show 'Madge', but devoid of all the other properties we know Madge to have, adding in others that are consistent with the message that it is trying to convey. Images used in this way will be not at all consistent with what we know them to be here ... it is approximately like (there) using images of numerals as pixels to raw a picture .... a series of modified "4's" stacked on top of each other might look like the Eiffel tower, having nothing to do with 4-ness. So, with all that yackety out of the way, the technique is precisely this:

Unit of meaning = X - X + A, where X is the set of properties associated with the image, and A are properties added in after. So, continuing with the example, I would say "Well, that's Madge-ness without any of the properties of Madgeness, except these (A) few here (Madge-flavored charity). I know that sounds like a complicated and bass-ackwards way to handle the data, but it actually makes for a pretty clean crisp filter when used on dream content where sub-components of consciousness are dialoging. (Not all dream content, obviously is of that nature. Some is 'lessons', some is doing and being, etc.

-Montana

Tom has describe before that there are fundamental differences between communication in different VR spheres. In NPMR, which is I believe more aligned with dreaming than PMR actually is, communication is more in terms of gestalts or whole concepts rather than linear sequences and separation of things and characters. Here in PMR we are separate things and persons. We see basically linear sequences of events. When dreaming we are more in the NPMR mode and must interpret. Things really are not that easy to bring across from one mode to another. Things within dreams are readily lost or forgotten based upon this fundamental difference.

Ted

That (non-linear to linear) is certainly a component, Ted.... though I think I have that somewhat in hand. It is the reason for the ungodily complex sentence structure as the stuff comes in and gets flattened out linearly. As much as anyone here, I look at them and roll my eyes... if I wasn't there myself when the sentencery was formed, I would think that the writer was intentionally trying to make things obtuse. And yet if I fully unpacked the stuff the writing would run many many times longer. My only consolation is that maybe it confounds the shit out of the spy bots.

Though, revisiting the the whole gestalty-rote ball vs. 'linear language in time or space' thing, I'm picking up that it is not just a simple difference between the two... but rather that the non-linearity has more dimensions to it than I was (from here) supposing.

Metaphorically, the difference is not the difference between Y= mX+b and Y= aX^2+mX+b, but rather the difference between Y=mX+b and Y= a whole shovel full of non-linear operators in there ... cosines and pis and variable compressed spaces and cube roots ... a while suite of mutually irrational (in the mathematical sense of not being definable as ratios of one another) model axes. (The 'X' being still nestled in the center of the right side of the equation: quiet, puzzled, wide-eyed).

LOL, in fact that 'ole Y is probably thinking "What the hell kind of line is this???? Who's running this crazy operation anyways???" : The fractal spit 'n image of his dad!

Montana

Sorry, to simplify phrasing I did not put in a comment by Tom that NPMR communication is also somewhat like a multi media presentation that also must be unwrapped and comprehended in all of its multiple modes.

Ted

Mm. I might well have not assembled the meaning at any rate, at the depth. It was one of those "well, who would've thought to look over there too ...??? ...and ... and over there as well ...?" moments.

Sigh~

When the variables in your equations start to pipe up with questions about your judgment ... You just know you're in a whole new kind 'a Kansas.

-Montana


ps: See? This is one of those posts that are probably about useless to non-native speakers of America English. What does plumbing or Kansas have to do with anything?

Should I be decoding these...? Here it would mean describing the origin and development of the expression "to pipe up" as well as the variant on the whole Wizard of Oz thing.

Or am I just living in my own private Idaho with this concern?

->Doh!~<-

As one possible "victim" I'd say: don't bother :)

I was to say:
Alice is known elsewhere - and plumbers too.
Then I noticed that the girls name in Wizard of Oz is Dorothy.
Is Alice in Wonderland wrong for picturing the meaning?
I obviously thought the stories to be similar but I have read neighter - just seen the 2010 movie.
The same may be true for natives I guess.

This stuff is hard enough to talk about when you are allowed to use all of the tools at your disposal.
If native speakers/writers would limit themselves by beeing concerned whether some idiom will be comprehensible to each and every potential reader and preemptively used a more simplified language, then this would make expressing things harder for them and not neccesarily be of benefit for non-natives.

Where would the line be?

One could always ask ... and there are search-engines just one click away.

rhethorical question:
How is a non-native to get to know a language better if it is not used in all its variety?

It can be a bit challenging especially at the beginning. However, much is decipherable by taking the context into account.
This has its drawbacks. See beginning of this post -
and my example: "abundance"
For quite a long time I took that to mean the exact opposite of what its actual meaning is.
Because I did not ask and seemed to have it from how I interpreted the context when I first encountered the word.
But I figured it out eventually because in another context my peceived meaning did not make sense at all.

All the best!

Jonathan,

In a sense, both Dorothy and Alice fit. The thought is expressed in the Wizard of Oz by Dorothy to Toto, as I remember, that more or less 'this certainly is not like Kansas'. In Alice in Wonderland, Alice is also struck by the strangeness of it all. The recent movie however has a great deal of deviation from the original, whether book or cartoon movie version. There are many versions of Alice and more than one book as "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking-Glass". Both in general fit although only Dorothy really fits in re Kansas.

I try for clarity in statement and using words in the context of their standard dictionary meanings. Even if that results in an uncommon word to provide the best nuance of meaning. That way looking things up can provide an understanding versus a non standard meaning that leaves one wondering. As you say, a lookup on the Internet is just a click away. English has the advantage, admittedly based upon so many words 'stolen' from other languages, of an extremely wide range of concepts being possible of expression. What becomes difficult to understand is when posters mix the following, texting abbreviations, do not bother to turn on their spell checkers and use so many homonyms, homophones and homographs by mistake. Some of the posts here become a guessing game because of this. And out of that you are supposed to pick out a subtle meaning.

Ted

Thank you Ted,

so, the metaphor is about the strangeness and different rules than used to.
I got it right, then.
Though I have read neighter story in the original, I did read one of a russian author (A. M. Volkov) when I was a kid - which has been almost verbatim taken from The Wizard of Oz.
There is no english version - the book is described as re-creation of The Wizard of Oz, though.
Its title was "Der Zauberer der Smaragdenstadt" which translates roughly to: "The Wizard of the Emerald-City" ;)
I liked it very much. It became a whole series of 6 books.
(I grew up in the eastern part of the then devided Germany - we would never have had opportunity to read the original then. I guess the Author found a way to give people access to the original book that way.)

_________________
"First of all, let me make one thing perfectly clear. I never explain anything." Mary Poppins