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Take notice of which of two ways your thoughts are elapsing. Are they with or without a narrative? By narrative, I mean, is the thought you’re having this instant part of a sequence with the thoughts you just had and are about to have? This is to contrast against the component thoughts themselves, which are more like flashes of instantaneously thought thoughts that just appear in their totality and go by. Are you cognizant of how these particular thoughts in their sequence add up to something?
Interesting. Back in 1968 at the first scientific conference I ever attended I had been overly ambitious and attended every session for the first couple of days. The third afternoon, I found myself with information overload in extreme. I decided to follow some advice my grandmother had given years before: just sit down, close your eyes, and relax for a few minutes. I found a comfortable chair, sat down, and closed my eyes. I started having a variety of thoughts go by, or parts of thoughts, and had a meta-thought: when a sequence of thoughts start, I already know where it is going so why not just jump to the conclusion without the intervening parts? Tried playing with that for a bit and then started “seeing” my mind like an empty space with thoughts as little bits and blobs and chains of light zipping about like trains in the night. Just watching them, after what seemed a short while, there were fewer of these and finally a single little chain of points of light chugging off into the distance, and then gone. Empty. Opened my eyes, found that about 45 minutes had passed, and the information overload was gone. What I’d wanted to remember was cataloged and available and the rest had been discarded.
I’ve almost lost the ability to live in the NOW. I certainly had it as a child and sometimes experience it when I’m in the middle of a creative endeavor, but, otherewise, yakkety-yak all day long. Maybe I’ll follow Burt’s advice and watch my thoughts drift by as streadily decreasing points of light, but, knowing myself, I’m not terribly optimistic. Like a little kid on a long car trip, I keep asking “Are we there yet?”
For me the narration kicks into high gear when I formulate a plan of action. That plan provides a context for organizing every event that occurs, every thought that I have, or to disregard them altogether. I’m working toward a goal, writing a story, developing a narrative. I find it difficult to get out of that mode. Even when I take a vacation, everything is planned out - it’s hard for me to relax. I miss a lot of now as a result of this. My wife is just the opposite - she lives in the now more than any adult I know - very few plans or goals.
ecurb: For me the narration kicks into high gear when I formulate a plan of action. That plan provides a context for organizing every event that occurs, every thought that I have, or to disregard them altogether. I’m working toward a goal, writing a story, developing a narrative. I find it difficult to get out of that mode. Even when I take a vacation, everything is planned out - it’s hard for me to relax. I miss a lot of now as a result of this. My wife is just the opposite - she lives in the now more than any adult I know - very few plans or goals.
I must be like your wife because I don’t plan either and am rather spontaneous. However, when I am wherever I am, I am not usually THERE; I’m inside my brain chatting away with myself. The other day I was taking a walk and was momentarily struck by the beauty of the many shades of green in a group of trees in front of me, but two seconds later I was asking myself if I was experiencing the NOW. I wanted to return to that wordless state of wonder, but, of course, it was impossible. I guess I switched from hippo to flashlight…. I think. I reached my chunk limit? Oh Gads, I’m going to have to review Nhoj’s scheme again.
For me the narration kicks into high gear when I formulate a plan of action. That plan provides a context for organizing every event that occurs, every thought that I have, or to disregard them altogether. I’m working toward a goal, writing a story, developing a narrative. I find it difficult to get out of that mode. Even when I take a vacation, everything is planned out - it’s hard for me to relax. I miss a lot of now as a result of this. My wife is just the opposite - she lives in the now more than any adult I know - very few plans or goals.
For me the narration kicks into high gear when I formulate a plan of action. That plan provides a context for organizing every event that occurs, every thought that I have, or to disregard them altogether. I’m working toward a goal, writing a story, developing a narrative. I find it difficult to get out of that mode. Even when I take a vacation, everything is planned out - it’s hard for me to relax. I miss a lot of now as a result of this. My wife is just the opposite - she lives in the now more than any adult I know - very few plans or goals.
Good booze helps.
Yeah, a shot of Jack slows the narrative voices down, at least. Being a spectator of something also helps - a sporting event, a concert, a movie. You’re just watching their action, absorbed in the moment. It may be someone else’s narrative, but it’s happening NOW and you can experience it with little effort.
I must be like your wife because I don’t plan either and am rather spontaneous.
Another way that you may be similar to her is that she has difficulty coming to a final decision - there’s always something else to consider. Watching you doing your saralynn waffle dance sort of reminds me of watching her trying to decide what to order off of the menu at a restaurant. You wouldn’t be a Libra, would you?
Mr. B:
I found myself with information overload in extreme. I decided to follow some advice my grandmother had given years before: just sit down, close your eyes, and relax for a few minutes. I found a comfortable chair, sat down, and closed my eyes. I started having a variety of thoughts go by, or parts of thoughts, and had a meta-thought: when a sequence of thoughts start, I already know where it is going so why not just jump to the conclusion without the intervening parts? Tried playing with that for a bit and then started “seeing” my mind like an empty space with thoughts as little bits and blobs and chains of light zipping about like trains in the night. Just watching them, after what seemed a short while, there were fewer of these and finally a single little chain of points of light chugging off into the distance, and then gone. Empty. Opened my eyes, found that about 45 minutes had passed, and the information overload was gone.
Sounds like a typical case of excessive narration. Not every thought process benefits from Libet Bridge supervision. As you say, why should everything have to playback? Thoughts at the chunk limit are swift and efficeint in their own way.
When Mr. Flashlight has done his job of presenting narrations that Mr. Now can summarize and makes nyeeps of, it’s best to stop the narration and let the nyeep pool do its job. Even Mr. Now needs to back off and perceive the process metaphorically (like zipping lights) instead of actual passing information. Beyond a certain point, both of them can only impede the intellectual processes.
Ecurb’s Nosel:
For me the narration kicks into high gear when I formulate a plan of action. That plan provides a context for organizing every event that occurs, every thought that I have, or to disregard them altogether. I’m working toward a goal, writing a story, developing a narrative. I find it difficult to get out of that mode. Even when I take a vacation, everything is planned out - it’s hard for me to relax. I miss a lot of now as a result of this. My wife is just the opposite - she lives in the now more than any adult I know - very few plans or goals.
For most of us, our day jobs require that kind of non-stop narration. We have to make plans, keep track of things and anticipate outcomes several steps into the future. This is vital bridge-work that we could not function without. But it tends to make us into bridge-dwellers. Mr. Flashlight thinks he should be in on life but he really can’t. He isn’t actually attached to the nervous system in any sensual way. Only Hippo and Now experience the sensual delights of Mr. Flashlight’s vacation plans.
Mr. Flashlight cannot go on vacation because he cannot relax. All he can do is ask, “Am I relaxed yet?” and make plans to do things that should be relaxing. Actually, Mr. Flashlight can only believe he is relaxed when all the facts necessary for relaxation are satisfied and that never happens. The real point is for Hippo and Now to take a break from all the constant narration. And to avoid post-cinema perception and take in the more colorful and breathtaking pure cinema view.
On the whole, men have narration drilled into them more than women. I don’t think men naturally tend to be more narrative- I think it is harder for us – but society pushes it on men much harder than women.
Being a spectator of something also helps - a sporting event, a concert, a movie. You’re just watching their action, absorbed in the moment. It may be someone else’s narrative, but it’s happening NOW and you can experience it with little effort.
This is the easiest kind of Libet Bridge- one sustained by external narration. For serious bridge-dwellers, this is the best way to make Mr. Flashlight go away for while because he must sublimate to an external personality and thus can no longer be your identity. You have to be Mr. Now following the narrated flow to remain absorbed.
Take notice of which of two ways your thoughts are elapsing. Are they with or without a narrative? By narrative, I mean, is the thought you’re having this instant part of a sequence with the thoughts you just had and are about to have? This is to contrast against the component thoughts themselves, which are more like flashes of instantaneously thought thoughts that just appear in their totality and go by. Are you cognizant of how these particular thoughts in their sequence add up to something?
Interesting. Back in 1968 at the first scientific conference I ever attended I had been overly ambitious and attended every session for the first couple of days. The third afternoon, I found myself with information overload in extreme. I decided to follow some advice my grandmother had given years before: just sit down, close your eyes, and relax for a few minutes. I found a comfortable chair, sat down, and closed my eyes. I started having a variety of thoughts go by, or parts of thoughts, and had a meta-thought: when a sequence of thoughts start, I already know where it is going so why not just jump to the conclusion without the intervening parts? Tried playing with that for a bit and then started “seeing” my mind like an empty space with thoughts as little bits and blobs and chains of light zipping about like trains in the night. Just watching them, after what seemed a short while, there were fewer of these and finally a single little chain of points of light chugging off into the distance, and then gone. Empty. Opened my eyes, found that about 45 minutes had passed, and the information overload was gone. What I’d wanted to remember was cataloged and available and the rest had been discarded.
In the East I hear they call that “meditation”.
Eh?
Yeah ... I can’t recommend it highly enough.
The constant noise without any breaks has to be profoundly harmful. In any case it’s certainly confusion/chaos-inducing.
Ms. S:
… when I am wherever I am, I am not usually THERE; I’m inside my brain chatting away with myself. The other day I was taking a walk and was momentarily struck by the beauty of the many shades of green in a group of trees in front of me, but two seconds later I was asking myself if I was experiencing the NOW. I wanted to return to that wordless state of wonder, but, of course, it was impossible. I guess I switched from hippo to flashlight…. I think. I reached my chunk limit?
Brain chatting isn’t necessarily a bridge-run state of narration. If you stay within the chunk limit of four things in your mind you don’t need to narrate.
It means that the nyeep flow is full of words and topics and issues that keep flowing by and they consume a considerable portion of the cinema system’s RAM space in doing so. When beauty strikes, the flow becomes chatter free and full of your immediate perceptions rendered by the undivided attention of the cinema system at full throttle. Same Mr. Now, but the flow changes focus to external perception. Hippo can get excited by perceiving that which he desires but awe and wonder are exclusive to Mr. Now via the fabulous cinema view.
One and a half seconds later, your vision may start narrating what you’re looking at and that will raise a bridge, you will reflexily hop on it, and ask, as Mr. Flashlight, what it was you just experienced that you aren’t experiencing now. Recognizing when your EYEBALLS are doing it first can prevent your thoughts from following suit and breaking the flow of the moment.
Technically, you were experiencing the FLOW as Mr. Now. The flow can be filled with a fresh input of awesomeness or stuffed with stale chatter.
In presenting the triune scheme, which is virtually a replacement narrative like a religion, . . .
. . .
Post-Religious Trauma has made some of us see the frontier as a threat. As if it could only be another religious landscape attracting inquisitive apes like flypaper. You may not believe there is a frontier but offering a secular narrative without one isn’t going to appeal to anyone. You may have noticed that for many steeped in religion, their journey may involve passing through many caves on the way out. Freedom of movement is the key. http://www.project-reason.org/forum/viewthread/24611/#289431
Nhoj, I see your system as being narrative, and also meta-narrative. I imagine if it were to become memetic, that people familiar with your system would manage more readily to cross from almost pure subjectivity to at least diluted objectivity in their thoughts and ways. That may be an overly optimistic prediction, so I’ll rephrase and say that people who understand and adopt your system might begin to be able to see their thoughts, opinions, and methods for living as being like bits of clothing they can change as the weather changes. Why wear boots to a beach party?
This is the easiest kind of Libet Bridge- one sustained by external narration. For serious bridge-dwellers, this is the best way to make Mr. Flashlight go away for while because he must sublimate to an external personality and thus can no longer be your identity. You have to be Mr. Now following the narrated flow to remain absorbed.
This assessment of the human condition is very useful in explaining things like hypnosis and fanaticism, but it also makes explicit how we (normally) are attracted to an external narration because it relieves us of our own narrative responses/responsibility. Of course some people just love to always create their own narratives, but many of those are either totally loonie or perhaps brilliant and creative or, most likely, both?
I’m sure it would be rather easy to develop some kind of psychological test that individuals could take which would determine their degree of internal vs external narrativability (I think there’s a neologism here?).
Nhoj, our mutual friend, Mr. Walliser, had a stroke a couple of years before he died. The stroke blinded him partially and it also destroyed much but not all of his ability to form new memories. Most of his friends bailed socially on him and his wife but I lived in his building and appreciated him for his intellect even post-stroke. His pre-stroke memories remained intact and so did his conversation talents as long as you could forgive him stumbling now and then for a word. He seemed entirely sensible and rational. He was as humorous as he’d previously been. He was smart enough to dictate an entire novel and even did so, though it ended up not up to the standard his literary agent demanded. He couldn’t form new memories readily. I remember one time sitting with him in his den when the phone rang. He picked it up and talked with the caller for a couple of minutes. After he hung up, I asked him what the person had said, as I could tell that it was the person who scheduled his Lighthouse reading sessions. His response was, What phone call, Dave? What sort of bridge did Blair have?
In your description, it’s a change of narrative vector that breaks the continuity. I can riff on that idea and relate to your stretcher ride.
Maybe the issue is filing new memories and not forming them. If Blair made it all the way through the phone call without discontinuity than he managed to maintain a single narrator on a single Libet Bridge. Then that story ended because the call was over, and you started another story of sitting in the den with Dave when you threw your voice at him from across the room. Blair lost his phone call narrator and started another one. In the gap, memories of the phone call trailed away without a NEXT cue. Prompted by your query, Blair as self-narrator went looking for the memories. Like you on stretcher, they won’t be found. If you had rephrased your query just so, you might have engaged Blair as Mr. Now for whom the memories would not have been lost and might still be available when he resumes narrating.
That reads like garbage. I’ll try it another way.
People like Blair who have a muscular narrative ability and then have it waste away from injury or disease are very different from those who never had much narrative ability in the first place. I’ll respectfully leave him out the rest.
Imagine a scenario that is the antithesis of your stretcher ride. Jack starts a business phone call to cover a short list of important business points. Jack is fully self-conscious and standing on the Libet Bridge as his own narrator. Jack is fully Mr. Flashlight at the start of the conversation. As the call progresses, Jack’s posture slumps and his brain loses a little bit of blood flow. Jack’s Flashlight identity dissolves into auto-narrators. The new narrator could be either an internally idealized Jack the Businessman or an idealized version of the other person on the phone. Jack is no longer on the bridge. Jack is Mr. Now. When the conversation has run its course and a new thing has come along, that may put Jack on the bridge again feeling like he just woke up.
Or not. Jack is in his cubicle and has just put the phone down. The conversation finished and is no longer happening. The phantom narrator is gone and the Libet Bridge has switched off. There is just Jack and his flow. He looks lost in thought.
Scenario #1…
Jack’s partner Rudolpho has silently approached and leaned over into Jack’s field of view. He lift’s his eyebrows and musically asks, “Coffee?” Jack’s EYEBALLS remain perfectly still and 1.5 seconds later, he mutters, “Please.” His EYEBALLS then float downward to a page of notes he made about the phone call. He’s gently scanning and picking out three or four items of the page at a time. He is about to scan across a word with a fresh action cue attached to it. Whoops… there it is… relevent nyeeps are starting to gather in front of him. Jack sees that he has reached the Chunk Limit and has run out of attention capacity.
That’s fine because, at the same moment, Jack’s EYEBALLS fixed upon that action word for a full half second. Jack’s visual perspective switched to Post-Cinema. Jack is now seeing from a Libet Bridge right at the same moment he realizes that he must “get with it” to get the action done. And quickly. Already, valuable Chunk Limited space is being eaten up by Angry Boss Visual Nyeeps. Jack scrambles to follow his EYEBALLS and get on the bridge. Oh no… his new Mr. Flashlight legs are wobbly. His EYEBALLS are starting to glaze over. Down below the Pool, Hippo is experiencing a sudden imbalance. Jack’s brain is demanding more blood circulation than his slumped posture could ever allow. Jack jerks upright in his chair and draws in a big balloon of air. His bridge legs firm up and his EYEBALLS do a “dart and hold” scan over things on his desk followed by a long look at his watch. Jack is self-narrating again.
The phone call survived the journey across the nyeep pool and arrived at the new narration with only minor losses (things he’ll remember later).
Scenario #2…
Rudolpho has snuck up on Jack while lost in flowing thought after his phone call. Rudy picks up a pen and taps it not once … not twice… but, oh no, three times on the top of Jack’s desk. As Mr. Now in the pool, three rocks have just drop in and their three ripples have trashed his entire attention span. Jack looks up and meets Rudy’s EYEBALLS. He tries to follow Rudy’s flow but almost immediately slams into the Chunk Limit. After fixing on Rudy’s EYEBALLS for half a second, Jack switches to Post-Cinema but finds that Rudy is already Mr. Flashlight and is looming over him from Jack’s own Libet Bridge. Rudy’s program is already in progress. Hippo is already sucking in air.
“Hey, Jack! There is just enough time before the Hoopskirt presentation to throw a pot of coffee together. I want to be wide-awake for that asshole. Do you want me to make enough for you?”
Jack find’s this experience unpleasant. He’s not following Rudy’s narration and his eyebrows are scrinching up. And, for some impossibly stupid reason, Jack’s EYEBALLS are looking for the coffee pot.
Rudy carries on. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to derail your train of thought. It looks to me like you could use a coffee IV. We’re going to get reamed in there.” Jack’s EYEBALLS have locked onto the coffee pot. He mutters, “ummm… Hoopskirt… asshole… coffee…” It took near three seconds but Jack finally switched to Post-Cinema and there was his coffee pot triggered Libet Bridge that Rudy wasn’t already standing on. Jack followed his EYEBALLS right onto it.
It was Mr. Flashlight that looked back at Rudy and responded, “Yes. Make lots and lots. We’ll show those mo-fo’s where the blame really lies.”
Rudy held silent for near a full second just to show Jack he wasn’t going to yeild the narration and then simply said, “K”, and walked off with Jack’s pen. Jack had been breathing normally for long enough now to feel invigorated and back in command. He turns back to his desk and his page of notes by the phone. Jack is already in a state of narration. He has already begun a narrative that is the thing he does next before Hoopskirt is an asshole and the coffee is brewing. His gaze fixes on the phone and he wonders, “Did I make that damn phone call?”
As Mr. Flashlight, Jack scans his current narration for any reason to believe that he has made the call. As Mr. Flashlight, Jack will look no farther because Mr. Flashlight always thinks that the current narrative is the only one that has ever existed in the entire history of the Universe. The phone call did not survive the journey across the nyeep pool. It was attacked and sunk by falling pen-taps.
Thanks, Nhoj.
This is really cool. I’m printing out the instalments as you post them and making notes in the margins (I old fashioned and still need a pen and paper to focus and think clearly) and will eventually have some questions (and perhaps ideas) I hope you will discuss with us. Keep it coming, man!
Nhoj, I was surprised that I basically understood most of these terms before you were kind enough to define them. However, I did learn some new one (hyper-realized nyeep) and shall print the definitions and pull them out when needed. I do have a question though…why do you always write FUN instead of fun?
Is it possible to have narration without words? That is, an idea? The words are useful in expressing the idea to others and in secondarily organizing ideas within the mind.
Thanks for the spurring but I must choose my next words with care. With all the water in one glass, one stupid entry and the whole thing will fog.
Ms. S:
I was surprised that I basically understood most of these terms before you were kind enough to define them.
It looked to me like you did.
why do you always write FUN instead of fun?
Two reasons… one day, there’s going to be a punchline. And when it comes, everyone will say, “oooooh, I get it.”
Until then there is the other reason. I was inspired by perusing other visual FUN websites. Then I started having FUN with SPELLCHECK to capitalize automatically. I have pretty much ruined it as speklling supervisor as you may have noticed. I set it to “fek it”.
Ms. H:
Is it possible to have narration without words? That is, an idea? The words are useful in expressing the idea to others and in secondarily organizing ideas within the mind.
Absolutely. Narrations are made from nyeeps and any kind of idea you can imagine being an idea is a nyeep. It’s a very broad term with one distinction of type that really matters; hyper-realized nyeeps are natural perceptions and ideas that have been laundered by a narration. Squeaky clean, perhaps, but no longer entirely natural. Examples abound. Sinfulness, Grace, etc.
I’m slower than the others.
Hmmm… A trick question. No, they’re just as slow as you are.
Thanks for the spurring but I must choose my next words with care. With all the water in one glass, one stupid entry and the whole thing will fog.
Ms. S:
I was surprised that I basically understood most of these terms before you were kind enough to define them.
It looked to me like you did.
why do you always write FUN instead of fun?
Two reasons… one day, there’s going to be a punchline. And when it comes, everyone will say, “oooooh, I get it.”
Until then there is the other reason. I was inspired by perusing other visual FUN websites. Then I started having FUN with SPELLCHECK. I have pretty much ruined it as speklling supervisor as you may have noticed. I set it to “fek it”.
Ms. H:
Is it possible to have narration without words? That is, an idea? The words are useful in expressing the idea to others and in secondarily organizing ideas within the mind.
Absolutely. Narrations are made from nyeeps and any kind of idea you can imagine being an idea is a nyeep. It’s a very broad term with one distinction of type that really matters; hyper-realized nyeeps are natural perceptions and ideas that have been laundered by a narration. Squeaky clean, perhaps, but no longer entirely natural. Examples abound. Sinfulness, Grace, etc.
I’m slower than the others.
Hmmm… A trick question. No, they’re just as slow as you are.
I asked this question in the middle of another thread, but decided to move it here…..
How does a trioonist explain what happens in dreams? I have been having a lot of peculiar ones lately. They have a narrative, but they occur sort of “on the fly”, so I don’t know if Ms. Now and Ms. Flashlight are engaging in some form of unconscious union. Oh yeah, Hippo’s there, too, but. as usual, she is always lurking beneath the water of thought.
How does a trioonist explain what happens in dreams?
Maybe Nhoj or one of our resident shrinks will respond, but I’ll give it a shot, saralynn.
Trioon characters such as Messrs. Flashlight, Now, Hippo, etc. act as though they are given an enormous dose of something strong while we sleep. Awake-state behavioral tendencies and rules for these characters go out the window. They no longer seem to be at all concerned about how the world works. The other night, part of my dream involved noticing a miniature elephant standing on a chair, which was the size of a cat. But this elephant had no head. Then I realized that it did have a head, but just lacked a nose. Only after I woke up did I wonder about matters such as how I knew that it was an elephant if it had no nose, how I could have mistaken a head for a trunk/nose, or how it is that I was not much more amazed than I was at seeing any sort of elephant as small as a cat. The trioon characters tend to lose touch with certain features of reality during dreams. Also, most people can’t even remember much about their dreams and what we do remember is so hazy that we typically can’t find words to describe events that take place in dream states.
Dreaming amounts to a maintenance feature for our mental equipment. Dream activity helps organize events of the previous day, and it allows us to forget much of what has taken place, or at least to put things into some perspective that might assist us once we wake up. I think that dreams very often help us to solve problems. But I don’t see much if any trioonness there.
How does a trioonist explain what happens in dreams? I have been having a lot of peculiar ones lately. They have a narrative, but they occur sort of “on the fly”, so I don’t know if Ms. Now and Ms. Flashlight are engaging in some form of unconscious union. Oh yeah, Hippo’s there, too, but. as usual, she is always lurking beneath the water of thought.
What one thinks a dream is depends a lot on what one thinks being awake is.
I can’t make a comprehensive explanation of dreams, of course, but I will propose what the trioon machinery would be doing. Lots of animals have dreams and dreaming preceeded humans and their Libet Bridge facility by quite a bit of time. Dreaming as we know it may be as old as stereoscopic sight.
When asleep, we have no power of directed narration and are fully Chunk-limited. While Hippo and Now sleep, there is no Mr. Flashlight. As we fall asleep our external cinema perception is muted but the surface of the nyeep pool does not go dark. Nyeep chains continue to come to the surface and flow across Mr. Now’s field of view. Still awake and trying to sleep, we are “thinking” randomly or making little bridge-driven narrations (won’t help you fall asleep) until we cross a threshold and give up the desire for a single coherent cinema perception. Technically, it is your perception that is falling asleep.
If you’re awake and you look out across where you are, that is a “single coherent cinema perception”. All the shapes, the colors, the shadows and the sense of space is all together in one big view right in front of you. That makes Mr. Now a single coherent perceiver of the cinema view. Mr. Now and the cinema system are “awake”. In nyeep pool imagery, his head is above the water watching the cinema system shine on the water’s surface in a single coherent image.
The cinema view is only coherent at the surface of the pool. Below the surface, the cinema view is no longer a single coherent perception but is not beyond being perceivable. It just means that Mr. Now must no longer be a single coherent perceiver. When he lowers his head below the surface of pool, he breaks apart just like the cinema view. Our cinema perception is still there, it’s just in bits and pieces. The deeper into the pool, the more unconstructed the view and hence, the less constructed Mr. Now becomes. We have multiple perceptions in parallel when asleep, and single perceptions in sequence when awake.
Rising to surface and waking up from dreaming is where the FUN begins. We have only a few seconds of intact visual recall of where we left off before we start mickeying with it. Mr. Now will recall bits and pieces and try to assemble them (within the chunk limit of four parts) into a single coherent perception with Fellini-like results. Then, we’ll start narrating the imagery once we’re awake enough to raise a bridge. Now, Mr. Flashlight will insist that it has a beginning, a middle and an end, as always. Eventually, we will create a story version of the sort we can describe over the phone, with Fellini-like results.
Like our cinema perception, dreams are synchronized to the Mighty Flow… as in “on the fly”. They playback in little nyeep chains that lead to other little nyeep chains. The scheme claims that these nyeep chains grew into extended play versions that, like progressive rock, overwhelmed our chunk limited perceptual ability and spurred the arrival of the Libet Bridge… initially to assist in their playback but obviously, destined to take over the entire business of perception.
As for Hippo… he slept first, apparently. If you’re watching someone sleep, try to spot who wakes up first- Hippo or Now. A poke in the shoulder will wake Mr. Hippo, a soft word from close up will wake Mr. Now. Mr. Flashlight comes last. Sometimes he’s late and doesn’t show up until the second mug of coffee at work. Just tell people, “Whoa… slow down. I’m still chunk-limited.”
Thanks, to both of you, nv and Nhoj. Your comments make sense to me. Sometimes I dream I am someone else and not me. Now, THAT is weird. I can’t decide if this is a sign of approaching enlightenment or insanity.
I’ve decided that the only way to publish your material, Nhoj, is to contact a cartoonist to help you with the illustrations. I can already picture the “characters” in my mind. Mr. Now’s head is one big beam of diffuse light, emerging from the forehead, and the head slowly rotates like a lighthouse. Every once in a while it stops and the beam gets brighter and more focused and then it suddenly switches “on” to become Mr. Flashlight. It’s more complicated than that with chunk limits and panoramic views and the famous Libet Bridge and all those new concepts you’ve recently introduced, but, in my mind’s eye, i’ve created images for them.
I hope I don’t start dreaming I am one of them. That would be freaky.
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