Waking consciousness

You have now constructed the citadel in the finer etheric, astral, and mental substances drawn out from your own aura, and so it has a close psychic link with you. As each chamber inside this Tower of the Art, corresponds to one of the subjective Sephirothic centers, you have thereby constructed a remote-control device. The tower is a means by which you can concentrate upon and direct energy to the chakras, without any concentration upon the physical centers at all. By working in the appropriate chamber in the castle, you can produce an effect upon the inner levels. From there, you work naturally through into physical, waking consciousness. So this etheric structure prevents damage to the physical body, but at the same time allows the spiritual powers of the etheric centers to unfold quite naturally. Most people incarnate today have a... 

Our normal waking consciousness is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of... 

As mentioned in Chapter 1, psychiatrist William James touched on this extra dimension of reality and perception when he wrote, Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.... No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. 

Waking consciousness, whatever its content, can be controlled to help keep it on track. Left to its own devices, it might flit from external to internal stimuli and from one internal stimulus to another. Continuity (vs. discontinuity) is one example of this form of consciousness. A related formal property is congruity (vs. incongruity), which describes the coherence of the contents of consciousness at any instant. If continuity describes smoothness (vs. choppiness) of flow of the stream of consciousness, congruity describes its integrity, the compatibility of its components, channels, and elements. 

Because waking consciousness is so much the norm, we often forget that the content of the perceptual channel of consciousness need not always reflect the external world. This is still another example of the form vs. content distinction. If the percepts arise in response to entirely endogenous stimuli—as they do in dream hallucinations—the form, as well as the content, is likely to change. This is because it is more difficult to simulate the complexity of the external world than to copy it when we... 

During the first half of the twentieth century, subjective experience— both natural and drug-induced—was declared off limits to psychology. The 1953 discovery of REM sleep opened the door to a reconsideration of dreaming and other naturally altered states of consciousness that occurred in mental illness. This discovery coincided with a rise in amateur experimentation with drugs that altered waking consciousness. 

As far as I know, this alteration in my consciousness happened spontaneously. And I have no idea, even in retrospect, what if anything in my recent experience stimulated or was—even symbolically—represented by it. All I know is that any time I begin to write about dreams, my awareness of them increases. Because this book is about the psychedelic potential of dreams, it is certainly possible that my brain-mind is primed to produce exotic imagery. But I did not prime it explicitly as I do sometimes when I want to have a specific kind of exotic dream or become lucid and enjoy watching a dream unfold with half of my brain-mind dissociated from REM and bumped up into waking consciousness. 

This scenario makes perfect sense to my waking consciousness. I have even imagined it, in a variety of forms, as our lab conflict has heated up. But so far I haven t spoken this out clearly while awake. 

My inability to take stock of what was going on, to direct my dream action, and to realize that my experience was entirely illusory denote the loss of critical judgment, self-reflection, and insight that we value so much as executive functions in our waking consciousness and without which we are as lost and helpless awake as we are in our dreams. 

Activation-synthesis ascribes dreaming to brain activation in sleep. The principle engine of this activation is the reticular formation of the brain stem, just as it is in waking, but the chemical mode of activation is distinctly different. It is for that reason and that reason alone that dreaming and waking consciousness are so different. In waking, the noradrenergic... 

I will address the mechanistic implications in the following section on cortico-limbic interaction. With respect to function, the most immediate and compelling hypothesis is that the subtraction of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex from the otherwise highly activated forebrain maps on to the subtraction from waking consciousness of self-reflective awareness (self-evaluation), lack of capacity to direct thought (active evaluation), and failure to enact deliberate behaviors, however fictive, in dreaming consciousness (volition). 

In order for dreaming to be contained in sleep, the brain must sharply demarcate its states. But it often fails to do so, as anyone who has awakened from a nightmare unable to move knows at first hand. The terror that prompted the awakening in the first place is not only unabated by the arousal, but it may be augmented as the return of waking consciousness takes account of the persistent sleep paralysis. 

The first is that the activity of chemically specific cell groups correlates more strongly than any other brain measure with REM sleep vs. waking neurophysiology in animals (and hence, by implication, with dreaming vs. waking consciousness in humans). 

The second is that the most potent means of experimentally driving waking consciousness in the direction of dream consciousness in humans is to introduce drugs that directly interact with the specific chemical neuromodulators that change naturally in the wake to dream consciousness alterations. 

The best dream journal that I have found is called The Dream Journal of the Engine Man. Its author was a railroad buff. I like it because it was recorded in the summer of 1939 (when I was only six years old) and could not therefore have been influenced by my theories. I also like it because the descriptions are so detailed and so free of interpretation. Some are even accompanied by simple but expressive drawings. To control for the fact that the Engine Man, like me, is male, we have collected journalistic reports from our female colleagues and students. All show the same robust formal differences from waking consciousness that I have emphasized here. 

Thus, the same participants who give us dream reports also give us reports of their waking consciousness. This last advantage is crucial to our effort to extend our understanding of mental life back into the waking state, and to obtain comparable quantitative data from the minds of the same individuals when awake and asleep. 

Why is dreaming so rarely self-reflective, when waking consciousness is so often dominated by internal thought ... 

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