Actual Freedom ~ Frequently Asked Questions

RICHARD: Yes ... three-four hours at night (occasionally five).

RESPONDENT No. 20: Do you experience three states of consciousness? Four? One only?

RICHARD: One.

RESPONDENT: Richard, your response prompted me to write about an issue that I have been pondering for some time. That is the relationship between instincts and sleep. Its seems that on night when I have had only 4-5 hours sleep, I wake finding that I have very little activity in the area of emotions, yet after a night of long deep sleep my head is groggy and the emotions are much more sensitive. This seems odd as most people I know get more emotional when they have a bad nights sleep. Do you recall having any experience with this? If you were now to sleep 9 hours what do you think would be the effect?

RICHARD: First, it would be impossible for me to sleep 9 hours ... I only have three-four hours (five at the most) of sleep in any twenty-four-hour period to use. When I have used up that amount there is no reservoir of sleep left to call upon ... when I nod-off watching TV for, say, an hour and then go to bed I can only sleep another 2-3 hours before waking. Last night, for example, I did not get to bed at all ... I used all of my quota up sleeping through three-four TV programs.

Second, I can recall that too much sleep (9-10 hours non-stop) back when I was a normal working family man (an instinctual being) all those years ago would result in a grogginess ... but I cannot recall what you report (4-5 hours resulting in very little emotional activity). My memory says that 7-8 hours was the norm then – as was three full meals a day plus snacks – but, then again I was not examining consciousness on a moment-to-moment basis in those days. Once I started doing that though both sleep and food consumption became very erratic (as did my entire life).

Maybe somebody else can be more up-to-date informative than me on this subject?

GARY: Richard, it occurred to me awhile ago to ask you about dreams. It really is a very simple matter: do you dream at night? From reading your website, Journal, and correspondence with others, it is clear that the imaginative faculty was eliminated when you underwent the radical mutation which resulted in an Actual Freedom from the Human Condition. I find your comments about the lack of the imaginative faculty to be, well ... honestly, fascinating. After the mutation you experienced, did you notice anything about dreaming at night? I saw a program on TV recently in which dream experiments were being conducted on human subjects, with the object of understanding what happens when human beings dream. An expert on the program opined that dreams originate in the lower, more primitive sections of the brain which sends signals or transmissions into the higher, cortical centres which then get remembered as dreams. The expert also opined that dreams have little significance other than just being random transmission from these deeper emotional parts of the brain. This caused me to consider what happens when the primitive animal instincts are extirpated and eliminated: do dreams then stop completely?

RICHARD: As I drop off to sleep at night there is the diminishing awareness of being a flesh and blood body situated in physical surroundings – always delicious – until there is no awareness at all ... whereupon there is the growing awareness of being a flesh and blood body – always delicious – situated in physical surroundings upon awakening a ‘split-second’ later. Upon looking at the bed-side clock I can determine whether I have slept for three or four or five hours ... for there is no other way of knowing: sleep is total oblivion. If there be dreaming occurring during the three, four or five hours I have no awareness of it whatsoever.

I sleep like a log, as an old saying goes ... unconscious, unaware and (probably) dreamless. It would take an unusual noise (a window being broken) or an unusual smell (something burning) or an unusual sensation (a creature crawling) to awaken me. Usually upon waking I find that I am lying in the identical position (flat on my back) that I went to sleep in – complete with reading glasses perched on nose and book/magazine held in hands slumped to the belly – indicating no movement at all.

It has not always been like this ... I tracked down the dreamer of dreams in the same way as the waking entity is tracked. I used to have horrific nightmares as a child, as a youth and as a young man (which I recall always considering terribly unfair, back in those days, as living in the ‘real-world’ was traumatic enough and night-time repose should be a relief). For all those years both dreams and nightmares were in full-colour imagery (same-same as ‘seeing in my mind’s eye’) with a fully-committed ‘dreamer’ participating helplessly. After the end of the intuitive/imaginative facility the dreams were ‘word-scenes’ of circumstances or ‘word-descriptions’ of events (no images) with no ‘dreamer’ as a participant ... somewhat akin to arbitrary, or stray thoughts, which sometimes wander around in day-time and are associated with nothing at all.

Any examination of the content or meaning of dreams always showed them to be nothing but haphazard, unsystematic thoughts – generally taken from events such as depicted on TV programs or in other media combined with daily experience – all mixed-up and firing erratically ... like pulling items from a ‘lucky-dip’ at a fair. There is nothing to be learned or gained from dreams other than what one wishes to read into them ... the disconcerting part of dreaming is the ad-hoc juxtaposition of seemingly real events happening in a seemingly real world. I also observed that a portion of the ‘dream-scape’ would be drawn from past dreams and making it difficult to discern whether they be drawn from real-life or not. There would also be a mix-up of the ‘dream-people’, with characteristics of one ‘dream-person’ all-of-a-sudden being the characteristics of another ‘dream-person’, or an admixture of the two ... leading to further confusion or perplexity. And so on ... and so on.

So I would say that the emotional content (and the imagery itself) of the dream-process is, as the expert on the program you write of opined, originating in ‘the lower, more primitive sections of the brain which sends signals or transmissions into the higher, cortical centres which then get remembered as dreams’ ... but not dreaming per se (night-time arbitrary or stray thoughts). It would be beneficial to compare notes with another like myself so as to distinguish between what is humanly common and what is bodily specific ... the particular genetic arrangement of this individual body as compared to the general genetic arrangement of every human body. But, until then, what I have to report is all that exists so far ... just do not take it as being set in concrete and typical.

Nothing I have to say is carved in stone tablets.

RESPONDENT: Are you actualised free people able of siddhis?

RICHARD: No.

RESPONDENT: Why not? Because siddhis do not exist?

RICHARD: Yes, I have no power or powers whatsoever ... there are no ‘siddhis’ outside of the human psyche.

RESPONDENT: Or because you did not develop them along your former state of (conventional) enlightenment?

RICHARD: I neither developed nor pursued them ... even though some came and went spontaneously.

*

RESPONDENT: Do you dream?

RICHARD: As far as I can ascertain ... no.

RESPONDENT: What ‘I’ says that?

RICHARD: This flesh and blood body.

RESPONDENT: Second. When you say ‘as far as I can ascertain ...’, this means that simply you have no memories of dreams when you wake up in the morning? If so, could happen that you have forgotten your dreams but can’t be sure of not having them?

RICHARD: No ... I sleep like a log, as an old saying goes, unconscious, unaware and (probably) dreamless. It would take an unusual noise (a window being broken) or an unusual smell (something burning) or an unusual sensation (a creature crawling) to awaken me. Usually upon waking I find that I am lying in the identical position (flat on my back) that I went to sleep in – complete with reading glasses perched on nose and book/magazine held in hands slumped to the belly – indicating no movement at all.

Sleep is total oblivion: if there be dreaming occurring during the three-four (or five hours) I have no awareness of it whatsoever.

RESPONDENT: Lately I was reading the section on AF site where you reported about your lack of dreaming. I was confused by this part:

[Richard]: ‘...After the end of the intuitive/ imaginative facility the dreams were ‘word-scenes’ of circumstances or ‘word-descriptions’ of events (no images) with no ‘dreamer’ as a participant ... somewhat akin to arbitrary, or stray thoughts, which sometimes wander around in day-time and are associated with nothing at all.’ http://www.actualfreedom.com.au/sundry/frequentquestions/FAQ60a.htm#1

Weren’t you telling on other place of the same page that you aren’t aware of anything during the sleep or that sleep is oblivion?

RICHARD: Yes ... the reference to sleep nowadays being oblivion is towards the end of the paragraph just before the one immediately preceding this paragraph you quoted from. Vis.:

• [Richard]: ‘(...) sleep is total oblivion’. [endquote].

And the reference to not currently being aware of anything during sleep is at the beginning of the paragraph immediately preceding the one you quoted from. Vis.:

• [Richard]: ‘I sleep like a log, as an old saying goes ... unconscious, unaware and (...)’. [endquote]..

RESPONDENT: Thanks for your attention.

RICHARD: Perhaps the confusion you speak of comes from not taking notice of how the paragraph you quoted from began. Vis.:

• [Richard]: ‘It has not always been like this ...’. [endquote].

To put those three paragraphs as succinctly as possible:

1. In all the years before the ending of the intuitive/ imaginative facility dreams were in full-colour imagery (same-same as ‘seeing in my mind’s eye’) complete with a ‘dreamer’ participating ... somewhat akin to a fully immersive three-dimensional surround-sound first-person computer gaming experience.
2. Immediately after the end of the intuitive/ imaginative facility the dreams were ‘word-scenes’ of circumstances or ‘word-descriptions’ of events (no images at all) with no ‘dreamer’ as a participant ... somewhat akin to arbitrary, or stray thoughts, which sometimes wander around in day-time and are associated with nothing at all.
3. Whereas nowadays sleep is total oblivion; if there be dreaming occurring during the three, four or five hours I have no awareness of it whatsoever ... I currently sleep like a log, as an old saying goes, unconscious, unaware and (probably) dreamless.

I am none too sure just how long it took, with the continued application of (what I later found was called) lucid dreaming, to get from situation No. 2 to situation No. 3 ... probably somewhere around thirty months or so.

If you were to want more information on how that works you could access the e-mail exchange at this link (and the one immediately following it):

*

RESPONDENT: I’m adding this mail to my earlier request

Is it possible to have it cleared out for the sake of clarity of reading the correspondence?

RICHARD: Sure, the first quote you provide above is about what occurred during the thirty months or so after the end of the intuitive/ imaginative facility. Here is how I explained that to you in my previous e-mail:

• [quote]: ‘2. Immediately after the end of the intuitive/ imaginative facility the dreams were ‘word-scenes’ of circumstances or ‘word-descriptions’ of events (no images at all) with no ‘dreamer’ as a participant ... somewhat akin to arbitrary, or stray thoughts, which sometimes wander around in day-time and are associated with nothing at all’. [endquote].

The second quote you provide above is about how those twenty or so months were experienced: it was all rather banal (as banal as watching TV is with the sound turned off) inasmuch there was nothing worthwhile to be discovered as only ‘my’ presence made dream sequences meaningful.

The third quote you provide above is about how my experience shows that while both the imaging and the emotional content disappears, immediately after the intuitive/ imaginative facility ends, the arbitrary and stray thoughts do not necessarily cease.

Indeed, to this very day there sometimes is, upon waking, a vagrant thought aimlessly occurring (just as during the waking hours there sometimes is the sporadic wandering around of a meaningless thought).

The fourth quote you provide above is about how it is all currently experienced (after the twenty or so months of continuing to apply the lucid dreaming process) in that sleep is total oblivion and if there be dreaming occurring I have no awareness of it whatsoever.

In short: there is nothing inconsistent at all (let alone blatantly so).  

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