Are You Dreaming?

Dreaming and the subconscious world we inhabit each night is an interesting subject. And one I have already speculated upon in my articles Dreams and A Quantum Leap, In Dreams and will probably reference this article in one being worked on currently called Sleep Stalking. But this one is for the meanings and beliefs around them from other cultures and times and how they were viewed, and to a point, probably still are today. It’s a strange thing that no-one can really define, test or prove with any certainty, yet many people experience them in some form. It’s interesting once you start to read about how they are viewed or understood by different parts of the world.

Baku Yokai – Japanese dream devourer “The Baku Yokai is revered as a powerful force of good and a sacred protector of humanity. It has been considered a symbol of good luck, health, and protection against nightmares and evil spirits. The image of the Baku has been used as a talisman and amulet to ward off bad dreams and illness.”

Aboriginal – Dreamtime “The Dreaming is used to represent Aboriginal concepts of Everywhen, during which the land was inhabited by ancestral figures, often of heroic proportions or with supernatural abilities. These figures were often distinct from gods, as they did not control the material world and were not worshipped but only revered“. I personally prefer the their term for it Everywhen, rather than the anthropologists naming it dreamtime.

Egyptians believed dreams were messages from the Gods. Although they had Bes the God of dreams, and Tutu, to protect from bad dreams, so gods protecting you from gods?

Chinese theory is yin and yang are out of balance and dreams come into being. Which ties into lots of the dreamology discussions in modern times, tying it into psychology and waking mental disturbances causing subconscious nocturnal struggles. But could it be that we are given a chance in our dreams to rebalance our waking lives, letting us run through some things that wouldn’t be possible in real life, or would take too long? Maybe that only counts if you remember the dream, I’m not sure, I still haven’t decided my position on that idea.

Greek mythology had a land of dreams. Morpheus being their God of dreams and nightmares and the subconscious sleep realm. Fitting then perhaps that they chose that name for the character in The Matrix.

Mayan – “the Tzotzil Maya see dreams as a way to “live a full life” and “stay alive.” They believe that dreams are a means of “seeing with the soul” what we can’t fully comprehend with our body and mind.”

The main religions also believe dreams often carry a message or prophecy from the divine.

Night Hag – closely related to the below definition of nightmare, this is now mostly known as sleep paralysis these days, not an incubus sitting on your chest giving you nightmares. But it is said that was the belief for quite some time and still is in certain places, folklore of it is found in Scandinavia, Europe, Africa, Canada, US. They have similar tales in China, South Asia and South East, The Middle East and so on. All having a myth about ghosts or demons affecting you while you sleep and paralysing your earthly body while you are forced to endure the experience.

Nightmare – original meaning – a mythological demon or goblin who torments others with frightening dreams. 

Day Dreaming – “Daydreaming is the stream of consciousness that detaches from current, external tasks when attention drifts to a more personal and internal direction. There are various names of this phenomenon including mind-wandering, fantasy, spontaneous thoughts, etc.”

An odd thing really, when you think so many clearly experience it and it would appear to be a common occurrence, why it should be given a demonic overtone. Why is that the go-to for explanation, when we clearly have logical minds among us and always have. Why does the fantastical or the hysterical win out when to comes to coming to a conclusion? Or maybe the question should be, why do we suffer from such horrible visions in the form of nightmares, when we are supposed to be in the resting cycle? It’s not very restful or relaxing to be anxious about going to sleep, worried about what you will have to go through in a place you don’t recognise, where time doesn’t exist and you are at the mercy of the experience. But dreams entice you and can make the sleep world seem so much safer than the real world, until you start to see like Alice did when she fell sleep, and then fell down the rabbit hole. Whether you are asleep or awake, not all is as it seems…

Max Ernst

(c) K Wicks

Depends How You Spin It

SPN numbers, which became known spin codes. A secret coding system to apply to discharge forms of military personnel, to initiate a programme of exclusions from society from within corporations.

The following article I found covers the basics – Denied a job or VA benefits?

“Those SPN numbers were created to hide secret comments by the military, many of them negative and harmful.  The major corporations all across America were provided with a conversion chart for those numbers.

By 1960 those secret codes were being rampantly abused causing many vets to be denied jobs, loans, home mortgages, veterans benefits, and life insurance, among others.”

The article then goes on to list the codes and their hidden meaning. It certainly does go some way to explain the how when it comes to understanding the situation many found themselves in. Simply put down as mental illness and addiction issues after such an experience, but perhaps it could be how they were treated upon return from such conflicts that contributed to such instances. Not always applauded as hero’s if the propaganda machine had turned the people back home against war, they get used as experiments and front-line fodder for political gain, and weirdly excluded when you get back.

I then think to the why for all of that. Why would you want people you have spent years training for purpose, not able to fit it, get on and convert back to be a normal member of society. Perhaps it is because they pose a threat thereafter in the darkened minds of the war mongers, and because they are trained and supposedly the most patriotic of the people, they would be the most likely to mobilise should there be a more local threat than they had previously been used to.

And that’s what I ended up realising, when thinking about war being for the benefit of those who organise them. They also like to cover a few bases, so psychologically it makes sense to encourage the brave and patriotic to sign up with propaganda first, and a backup plan of forced conscription to catch more. As they know the projected losses already, they remove a certain amount of genes from the overall pool. Eliminating entire male lines in some cases. Then you use them to test weapons, drugs, strategies, etc, to perfect the methods of war, also creating sub industries upon return. Trauma and violence creating a different society in certain minds, changing people beyond repair in mind, as well as physically. Or changing a family when they come back as someone else, or not at all. The cruelty starts from the moment they convince people that war is necessary, and everything that follows thereafter just gives it a different layer…

(c) K Wicks

A Message From The Future

There is big talk around private messages again, this time the scrutiny is upon the people who claim to be in charge. But alas, like with a previous political debacle, suddenly the electronic trail that is supposed to be there, is missing. How convenient you might say, that when it comes to accountability there is nothing to prove anything with. Which could work the other way too, as they have no evidence of who did what, they could all be held liable for bankrupting the country. If they can’t remember basic facts and actions of their own selves only a mere few years ago, how can they be trusted with anything. We know they can’t, but it does seem as though gross incompetence, negligence and criminal activities are overlooked currently when it is politicians.

But another thought occurred to me about it, how it might also serve a double purpose aside from getting them all out of a publicly embarrassing jam. It would neatly usher in more monitoring, of personal devices by anyone working in government or certain institutions deemed of interest. Because if the people running the country can just ‘lose’ such vital communications, it should make people question whether 100% electronic is even viable anymore. But instead they will say it was the ‘human hand’ that screwed it up. If only it was monitored and backed up to a central point (which everyone seems to believe WhatsApp did anyway). Whether they can or not won’t be the focus probably, it will be the consequences of those messages all being deleted. No-one gets held accountable, and the technology gets even more scrutiny when it should be the people.

Like the new regulation that has just been bought in which says the government can monitor the bank accounts of pensioners. An odd move when literally they are means tested to get that pension in the first place, and most of the time have actually paid into the system to create that benefit. Not monitoring the people who are known to scam thousands each year via all sorts of benefits which are approved along the way, so they allow the corruption to occur, facilitate it, and then use it as a tool to impose further rules and restrictions, while not actually stopping the flow of thievery.

In fact, it has given new ground to all forms of it, and it’s obviously reaching a tipping point. Elections and more laws and rules to come, power struggles and political wars using people as pawns. It’s clear that someone needs to pull the plug, but that’s why they made sure there is no one plug anymore. A convoluted society with so many middlemen, gatekeepers and jobsworths it creates its own problem. Of shirking responsibility, spending others money and helping to hasten the country’s demise. And they just keep going…

(c) K Wicks

Hard Copy

It’s been noted there is a digital revolution trying to take over and sweep away reality, knowledge and history as we knew it. Things being changed and updated, revised and remade quicker than people keep up.

The Mandela effect was a sign, and probably an early test, to see how quickly they could create a conflicting story or event which people were sure they knew had happened, just as sure as the people who had known it didn’t happen. A firmly affixed memory you can’t quite place, but it is there to convince you of what you think you know, with your own brain playing along to create the ‘memory’. And it helps to keep things up in the air and being questioned, if people can’t agree on what occurred, how can they identify how it occurred? Or avoid it happening again. I have even seen online what is claimed to be newspaper evidence of it being reported that no-one died on the Titanic. Now, you could say that was fabricated, changed, or simply was misreported at the time. Handy how the term can be used to discredit the real information accidently getting through isn’t it? Label it as misinformation, or unverified and then once it has been deemed public worthy, it gets allowed. Factcheckers have that covered now apparently, as with an array of laws, censorship and various agencies set up to create, steer and stem the flow of information as they would like it.

We know that all people do not see or think the same things, even when presented with the same information or view before them. And they say a witness is actually the weakest form of evidence. I think of an event now and again, from 1917 in Portugal. The Miracle of the Sun known as the Fatima Event. It’s a very interesting and strange tale in its entirety, but the brief for this, is that thousands of people witnessed an event, yet did not report witnessing the same thing –

Newspapers published testimony from witnesses who said that they had seen extraordinary solar activity, such as the Sun appearing to “dance” or zig-zag in the sky, careen towards the Earth, or emit multicolored light and radiant colors. According to these reports, the event lasted approximately ten minutes.

There has been much analysis of the event from critical sociological and scientific perspectives. According to critics, the eyewitness testimony was actually a collection of inconsistent and contradictory accounts. Proposed alternative explanations include witnesses being deceived by their senses due to prolonged staring at the Sun and then seeing something unusual as expected“.

But books, games, videos and all the other real things you can hold, have and watch at your leisure, are slowly being replaced by their digital counterparts. To be downloaded or viewed from a central database, where it can not only be monitored and withheld, but it can be altered and revised without scrutiny. Only those with a sharp eye, or good memory will be able to know the difference, others will just accept the new version as no different, possibly already in a semi-hypnotic state so not aware on a real functioning level to notice anything.

The Time Machine – the books that turned to dust when he touched them, and the strange rings with warnings and words of information about what transpired. Making it seem as if the printed word was useless against time, but a sort of digital recording was still there to tell the tale as it were. But of those digital rings, how do we know that at some point in the past of that fictional story, someone didn’t erase and rewrite those rings? We just took it on face value that they were telling the truth, or assumed that it was the truth because it was the future, and most of humanity as we know it was done. And like the Eloi, didn’t really question further the whole set-up, or who might be controlling the morlocks, who were then controlling the Eloi.

I saw a piece today in the Guardian, which fits well in the subject as it’s an article about Digital Wills and how they want to destroy lots of historical documents once they have been digitised. To save on space. The argument is that they important documents of people’s lives, and should all be kept, and to a point I do agree. Especially as they are also legal documents for estates, because to me that will be the real reason to want to destroy the hard copies, rather than find alternate storage options. At a time when ownership and property are of great concern, and of nefarious interests being so heavily involved in rolling out all the technology needed to tie it up. I would worry they want it all digital, so they can change it, and without an original hard copy to verify that, things can easily be rewritten or changed. However, we all know how many records have mysteriously disappeared over the years, or gone up in smoke, or have simply been shredded to get rid of whatever is in the way. And again, you can fake documents too, so how do we even know that what is being preserved is real anyway? We don’t is the short answer to that. Which is why maybe personal truths are so important, the things you can verify, know and understand from your own life and thoughts. Because with everything else, you just can’t be sure…

(c) K Wicks