Tag: mental-health

“Spiritual” Journeys

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

I have used inverted commas quotation mark here because I struggle a little with how words have in a sense become tainted by multiple usage and being bandied about as PR. Spiritual as a word has had its impact and meaning downgraded to the point of near meaninglessness.

I am going to attempt to put into words something which I have hesitated to do. It is close to impossible. This cannot be undertaken without emphasising just how important a few years of my childhood were in my development, in this life. One constellation in particular left its mark deep in my psyche.

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It was by its light during an English language common entrance exam that I foresaw events near two and a half decades later. It was the harbinger and the key of a volte face in life. I left the harbour alone in my coracle adrift upon the Southern ocean lit by its solace. I left Cape Town after being burned on table mountain.

Later I had another foreboding which was also to find consummation over a similar time delay. Each of these were pivotal. That foreboding prevented me making a UCAS university choice against the advice of my school teachers.

When I was young and in an English boarding school as an expat child I got to read the lessons and the prayers in church. While the others sat with parents. It was like a duck to water that I took to the lectern and the prayer “chair” deep in the nave. There I found St Francis of Assisi.

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« Seigneur, faites de moi un instrument de votre paix.
Là où il y a de la haine, que je mette l’amour. »

« C’est en pardonnant qu’on est pardonné,
c’est en mourant qu’on ressuscite à l’éternelle vie. »

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This man was in tune with the Mahayana bodhisattva ideal. His words touched.

Unfortunately those with the skill of a chameleon can adopt any mask, any direction, any character they choose. Believe me I learned how to blend. And in blending one loses authentic essence.

At the end of my schooling I took general studies courses in Buddhism, cooking and Rastafarianism. Ever Jah, ever loving, ever faithful. Rastafari. I read all that I could on witchcraft and alchemy. I made “friends” with the librarian in our town.

The Buddhism was presented in an intellectual descriptive manner in which the various fetters were enumerated for debate. Although I understood, the manner was for me boring and definitional. I sensed beyond that which was being professed. It was during intense meditation sat in seiza at karate that I learned that I had in fact been meditating all of my childhood. I used to sit and observe. I used to wait. I was touched directly by the dreamtime out in the shimmering bush of western Queensland. The aboriginal pointing stick had cleaved something open.

And then when I went to university I mostly forgot. By the time I was doing my Ph.D. research I figured that I had found something I was good at. So maybe this was the future. I enjoyed “pissing about with lasers”. I was to an extent, life and soul of the party. It was only in the early nineties that I started to withdraw, as if driven by a deeper current, out into the hills, the mountains and the countryside. It set up a kind of imbalance. On the one hand was a “normal” life and career. On the other there was silence and quiet. My reading was more intellectual philosophy, science and philosophy of science. I noted that despite mundane academic achievement many of “the greats” struggled with non-salary paying bigger questions.

I was offered a choice. Fort Collins Colorado or Bern Switzerland. One of those would have brought me quicker into contact with things “spiritual” than the other. The Swiss francs were certain, so I saw the Berner Oberland and learned painfully of “qualität”. Something which I tried thenceforth to express.

In the mid nineties at the place of my prior foreboding I was brought to my knees. Despite writing excellent research proposals I was stymied and unfunded. A grudge held by a “competing” senior academic could kill a proposal with a mere word. I had a breakdown. The answer to life the universe and everything could no longer be found in the laws of quantum mechanics and thermodynamics. It seemed there was more. It was around then that my ambition faded and the picture of a life academic dimmed. I began to search in earnest. I opened myself up wide. Again I largely forgot and tried to rebuild a life after breakdown. For some unknown reason money for research and start-up came more easily. I was “successful” for a while.

In the very early part of this century I was tested by power. I had a taste of it and did not abuse. Like Galadriel I refused the ring and was no longer sorely tempted thereby. It was around this time that a series of what might be called micro-renunciations began. In which step-wise I renounced or was forced to renounce the accoutrements of normal life. Each one was more difficult and profound than the last. Slowly life was stripped of all that made it busy and hectic. Until in the middle of 2006 I renounced all and walked off into the metaphorical “wilderness”. Dramatic as that sounds, at face value it looked simple, at core it cleaved and parted, severed and up-ended.

I did not become a wandering mendicant with charnel grounds for abode nor skull cup for beverage. Though adrift I most certainly was. I had already learned as a child, the nature of impermanence. Strangely without accoutrement life did not cease, the world did not implode, nor did it stop.

When you are thrust  from an Outlook calendar ruled life, with hours dissected into segments, with meetings set for you, with each action seemingly accountable, into nothing. The meaning of time changes in an unalterable and irrevocable way. It is no longer a spreadsheet thing. The boxes, the rice paper walls of the day, dissolve.

At end of 2008 I left the map so to speak. I began a series of meditations which went beyond. There was nothing, despite my research skill, which I could find written. These “meditations” continued in the UK in houses close to civilisation yet separate in the English countryside. I can say that the rigor of these was high and they continued for many years. In around 2010-11 I began having Buddhist dreams.

In the early part of the century whilst still teaching physical chemistry I had a series of waking visions in which I had “om mane padme hum” tattooed on my forearms in Sanskrit and with me in monastic robes. These visions were sufficiently powerful to be present whilst I was lecturing Chemical Reaction Kinetics to undergraduates in South Kensington. It was around then that I got to express my compassion for others, to care for them.

Overlaid on a “Toltec” background was a distinctly Buddhist vibe.

All the while I had a seemingly normal life as a married man doing for quite a while “A” level science private tutoring. The outer world and the inner world differed and markedly so.

To me as a member of the elephant dreaming class there is no problem with the scholastic wisdom teachings of Siddartha and the more dramatic Toltec corpus. The latter is a guide, when viewed with clarity, to the navigation of glamour and illusion. There is probably only one truth expressed via many different approaches. The Tower of Babel has a lot to answer for…

This is probably enough for today…

Marcus Aurelius Quotes

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

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The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.

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If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.

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Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.

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You have power over your mind – not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.

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Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.

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Whenever you are about to find fault with someone, ask yourself the following question: What fault of mine most nearly resembles the one I am about to criticize?

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When another blames you or hates you, or people voice similar criticisms, go to their souls, penetrate inside and see what sort of people they are. You will realize that there is no need to be racked with anxiety that they should hold any particular opinion about you.

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How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it.

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The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are.

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You are a little soul carrying about a corpse, as Epictetus used to say.

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Do every act of your life as though it were the very last act of your life.

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What we do now echoes in eternity.

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Perfection of character is this: to live each day as if it were your last, without frenzy, without apathy, without pretence.

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Nothing happens to anybody which he is not fitted by nature to bear.

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Is Being Negative Clever?

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

This topic was raised in a dream last night.

Some imagine that being highly sceptical and picking holes in everything is the hallmark of intellect and perhaps cleverness. Please understand that when I use the word clever I do not do so in a positive sense. Clever for me is a derogatory term implying an arrogant perhaps smug self-satisfaction, a know-it-all misplaced glee. It is very easy to pick holes, much harder to mend them. I’ll suggest that it is a flaw of human sociopolitical mindset to be negative. To always find fault and thereby prove just how bad and terrible things are. It is a prejudice. A crowd, perhaps baying, will get behind a negative sentiment easily.

Back when I used to do personal and team development courses my favourite piece of personal feedback was, “Alan’s ability to constantly find positives in every situation was tiresome and irritating!” This was from young Ph.D. students at a Complexity doctoral training centre in UCL. Young people full of negativity are hard to motivate. Can’t is a self fulfilling prophecy. Eeyore is alive and tolerably well, not too bad, getting by, moping.

One of the things which has surprised me about France is just how negative people collectively are. They are inert, they complain and find fault. They are actually more negative than cynical Brits. They have shit loads of great technology which nobody outside of France buys. This is because they seem too shy and embarrassed, perhaps arrogant and lazy, to meanigfully address non Francophone markets. There is a cloud of negativity and little encouragement. The medical profession here lacks warmth and is process driven. It is very good but mostly soul less. Few understand my post hip operation career at the Bolshoi. Graveyard humour is lacking and as a result things can be dour and sullen.

In the dream last night I was talking with a British GP doctor. She was posh upper class and old school, roughly my age. She was tweedy and clearly had an intimate relationship with gin and tonic. You could imagine her on a pheasant shoot equipped with cognac filled hip flask. She was looking at all my extensive medical tests. On the basis of these she wanted to know why I had come to see her. I explained that I was concerned about getting a post cold chest infection. She said that I should not be such an idiot. All my tests showed that aside from my arthritis I am in a very good state of health for my age and considering my past consumption. She said that we was considering telling me to fuck off out of her office. I do not have COPD and my ticker works just find. I said that the constant pain puts a down lens on things. She said that in a half a year or so things would look more rosy. Cheer up!

It kind of highlights how the medical profession may send one off to be a lab rat and then forget to give you perspective. If you have 70 medical appointments in a year you will assume yourself to be severely ill, when you may not be. It shows how the big grey heavy mental cloud of negativity can drag you down suck out your spirit like a Potteresque dementor.  On Monday I stood in the “happy” queue at the pharmacy in the local village. Shiny happy people it was not.

“Sitting here eating my heart out baby, I need some hot stuff baby…” It was a shame that the radio was not on…

The world right now lacks direction, positive direction. It is a heavy and very negative space. Hope is a very rare thing just now. Division and negativity are the prevalent toxins.

Being overly negative is a very big downer…man…

Rapport and Communication

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

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The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

George Bernard Shaw

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The above succinct quotation is a lot more apt than many are willing to acknowledge. It is widely applicable. It takes a lot of effort, willingness and practice to enhance communication so that one can be “en rapport” with another. One has to be on similar wavelengths and not too divergent in intellect. There must be some shared commonality of allegory and metaphor, usually some overlap of life experiences. There needs to be some kind of tie, perhaps emotional or deeper. The sharing of space and time with another helps, sharing trauma or profound experience can enhance a shared experiential which enables communication. One can communicate well with someone who one “hates” because that intensity adds focus to communication. This intensity can aid or degrade communication. There are a lot of assumptions and biases present in most attempts to communicate.

Above all one needs to listen attentively and try to communicate, to convey. My experience suggests that many are unskilled in listening. To tune in to another requires one to be passive like a radio receiver. One needs to find the wavelength of transmission on the dial.

If there is poor rapport using conventional methods such as talking it is not surprising that unconventional methods such as telepathy are not well experimentally proven. I like the analogy of an electronic instrument. If the noise in the instrument is high its ability to detect true signal is reduced. The “minds” of most are a cacophony of internal dialogue unable to pick up signal. If the mind is distracted and unfocussed the spoken word fails to register with any longevity in the consciousness. {Oh look a butterfly, my ‘phone has just pinged with a text, what is for tea?}

I’ll speculate that profound inter-human rapport is on the wane.

In the media when a psychic is consulted to solve a complicated murder case, perhaps find a body, they are given a piece of clothing, a photograph. This enables the psychic-seer to tune into to the missing person or object. Logically the rapport gained from a scarf or a photograph cannot be as strong as that gained from a genuine relationship with that individual. Perhaps by taking time to immerse into the life, the bedroom, the friends of the missing person a non-proximal rapport can be gained. But it would not be the same as if they worked together for a decade and shared life’s highs and lows. There may be some more predisposed to such a skill. We have the notion of empath on one hand and trained skilled psychological profiler on the other hand. One uses a subjective rapport and the other builds from a quasi-objective evidence base.

The notion of rapport is of course subjective and perhaps elusive. Rapport must vary in a temporal sense. For example I am markedly different in outlook now than I was two decades ago. Any rapport people had with me from back then has probably passed its expiry date. I can still put on my Worzel-Gummidge science head if needed. It is at the back of the barn behind the haystack.

Because we may lack a genuine rapport we can easily assume that we understand people and their motivation much better than we actually do…

Rapport has cultural elements too. This has been clear here in France. I have had conversations where I know we are not on the same page, in the same book or even the same library. I have noted the case. The other person has not. There is no way that you can convince the adamant that they have gotten the wrong end of the stick, even when you know they have.

Communication is way trickier that we imagine.

In Buddhism the notion of mind to mind transfer is active in the hagiography and key in the Zen lineages. Things are passed on non-verbally. This strays into the parapsychological notion of telepathy. In such instances the follower and teacher have shared considerable time, they have had grumbling bellies when the alms bowls were sparsely filled. They have meditated together. Their way of life has been shared, their philosophies have converged, their wavelengths have become similar and synchronised. Under such circumstances the likelihood of mind-to-mind transfer must be enhanced. They did not go home to their wives nor watch Strictly of a Saturday night. They are not worried about losing their jobs nor distracted by the next vagaries issuing out of Trump’s jumbled mind.

Rapport then is an unquantifiable but when shared is a common subjective experience. Communication is less difficult and mutual understanding more easily reached.  A convergence of being enables rapport.

I liken this mental rapport to the phenomenon of quantum entanglement. Two photons created as an entangled photon pair have their wavefunctions coupled, they are en rapport with each other. When one photon is “asked” about its state of polarisation and answers. The other photon telepathically knows what its state is too, despite any geometric distance between them.

Rapport can be thought of as a form of entanglement, a loss of harsh individuality, where a shared outlook is held, however briefly. During full rapport communication is “instantaneous”. The separate I, me, is melded into an us. In full rapport we might think as one.

The wavefunction contains everything we might want to know about a photon {or pair}. The mind contains everything we might want to know about the non-biological part of a being. Two minds fully en rapport share. Of course mental rapport is unlikely to be total though it could be significantly partial. A shared mental rapport might enable a telepathic transfer, being to being. Physical plane distance need not hinder.

If one studies an individual for an extended period one might get to know them and have a measure of predictivity concerning their thoughts and behaviour. This could be an ersatz rapport when you think you know but don’t really. The grey area between advised intuition and genuine telepathic rapport is probably experimentally inseparable. A stalker thinks they know the victim, a spook understands the target. To generate an accurate rapport with someone personally unfamiliar is not facile. We may imagine we know. We may be overly optimistic as to extent.

What we wish for and what is actual, can differ.

Hmnn…

Different is Scary – Have you Forgotten Your Meds?

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

Clearly along with Senior Service cigarettes and the odd whisky and ginger, my mum must have had too much N-(4-hydroxyphenyl)acetamide when she was pregnant with me. The Flintstones in the White House have so decreed. What does Wilma make of all this?

Last night we watched a film “The Accountant” in which Ben Affleck played a neurodivergent maths whizz who was a trained martial artist and special forces trained assassin sniper. He is a big bloke. His dad told him,

“Different is scary! Sooner or later different is scary and they don’t like it. Fight. Don’t be a victim.”

Or words to that effect. He encouraged his son to fight back when bullied.

I have experimental evidence gained from a FFT EEG; a fast Fourier transform {FFT} frontal lobe electroencephalograph that my brain waves differ from family and friends. The experiments were not exhaustive, they were indicative. The fact that I downloaded and worked through the patent for the device is unusual for others, not for me. I wanted to understand the instrument and its limitations. I know more about FFT than many because I did my undergraduate third year research project using a state of the art Bruker FFT infrared spectrometer on 77K solid state Platinum and Palladium mixed valence compounds. I looked into Fourier transformation. It had a tenth of a wavenumber resolution and could measure tiny site splitting in crystal lattices. We were particularly interested in very low frequency vibrations along the pseudo one dimensional longitudinal crystal axes.

On this basis it is safe to suggest that I could be classed as neurodivergent, without specifying in which manner.

As a further piece of evidence I cite the dream data catalogued here. It diverges significantly from normal.

Using the tag line from the film, some people might find me scary others just odd. I can say that when viewed from a neurotypical perspective I have trouble making and sustaining friendships. I do not engage in the highly transactional itchy back game and quasi-sycophantic behaviours often deemed necessary for career progression. I am not a toady or an arse licking nematode.

If an increasing number of people are being “diagnosed” on the spectrum is that indicative of an increase in the number of people who have passed the qualifying workshops to make such a diagnosis or is it a real thing? Is humanity evolving? Will neurotypicals become an artefact and extinct? The dinosaurs will die out from measles and COVID soon enough…

Of course if you are scared of people like me it is easy to prescribe chemical cosh medication to make the anomalous more compliant. The “monged” argue less. You could suggest that the entire reason I have such an active dreaming is that I have simply forgotten to take my medication like a good boy.

“Have you forgotten to take your meds again?

Just take a few of these and everything will be alright…

You will be normal and somnambulant like the rest of us.

Look here is a big new mobile ‘phone.

Pretty, shiny, precious….

There, there, don’t fret…”

Is it Safe to Write off Dreams?

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

There may be times when we wake up from a nightmare or grimacing with embarrassment from the contents of a dream and in coming to think, “phew, thank God, it was only a dream!!” Yet in the twilight between sleep and “awake” it takes a little while to convince ourselves fully. The dream residue hangs around as we perhaps take breakfast and if we are so inclined, a morning shower. The mind set “it was only a dream” is partially convincing for some and complete for others. The dream echo may last until we get on the Metro train of a morning.

But the funny thing is, you can never un-have a dream. Whether you like it or not the dream has changed you, your consciousness and assimilation of the world. That change may be tiny; it may be huge. But a tiny change, a tiny acorn can become a mighty oak. Things we attempt to sweep under a carpet leave a lump of sorts.

The more rational we imagine ourselves to be the more likely it is that we use the “it was only a dream” explanation and justification. Dreams are for space cadets and rainbow unicorn jockeys after all. They are not real; they have no bearing on waking reality. Bah! Humbug!! In our enlightened AI social media obsessed age dreams have no real place. You can’t make a TikTok out of a dream. You can take a video at Santorini.

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Of course if you are prone to recurring nightmares, they can be tricky to write off with the “it was only a dream” mantra. You may even get stressed about going to bed in case your nightmare returns. Depending upon your point of view, a nightmare means that there is something you need to address in life. It could be a PTSD minefield etched into you being or some other life circumstance than needs attention. Something you are perhaps unwilling to face, to the extent you have nightmares about it.

If you are lucky your dreams may offer you guidance and insights for life. If you are a know-it-all arrogant person, you may squander these with the “it was only a dream” mantra. Dreams can warn you about traps you are rationalising yourself into, they can offer a left sided view aside your insistent justifications.

But if you are of the “phew, I got away with that” mentality you are very likely to discount and write off any advice given in dreams. You are so cunning and clever.

In general most people have a good idea when the need to address some problem or other in life. They know in their hearts. They may lack courage. Their minds may provide an entire Excel spreadsheet of excuses why they do not have to face whatever it is. So they will put it off and put it off and put it off. They may, in this manner, precipitate a crisis of considerable magnitude. They may hope that they never need to face “it” and pray for the fairy Godmother. They may indulge in magical thinking.

I have no idea what you might be dreaming. You could be dreaming a dream in which I am.  In that dream there may be some “advice” for you on what to do. For example if you are fated to meet me, then I might be a recurrent theme in your dreams. If you wish to follow that fate as opposed to stymy it then it might be wise to try to engineer a meeting. If you wish to avoid me you could keep doing than and see if I eventually stop appearing in your dreams or nightmares. If I disappear from your dreams, you could conclude that it is safe to write off dreams in which I appear.

The thing about dreams and dreaming is that there are rarely binary. Dreams are nuanced and partially ephemeral.

I have had hundreds of dreams. Some of which I have been able to act upon meanigfully. There are many for which I am in no position to do anything about. All I can do is note them. I never discount them, but I can’t do anything. It is not my call, my play.

If your dreamer wants to get through to you and you discount what it presents in dreams, it can start to offer omens and dreaming symbols in real life. If for example you have a car crash in real life, then your state of awareness your assimilation of the world and its circumstances needs to and will have an abrupt halt, a forced change of direction. This is a waking dream.

Of course you could ignore it and use the “it was only a dream” mantra and deny your hand in whatever happenstance has occurred.

Did you know that the reason ostriches stick their head in the sand is to better help them to dream?

From my point of view it is generally unwise to chant the “it was only a dream” mantra. Some dreams are relatively safe not to devote too much attention to; others require immediate consideration and action.

Recurring dreams are a subset of dreams that must not be ignored.

Can a Jaguar Changes Its Spots?

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

People can have very fixated images and perceptions of others. They may shoe-horn others into well out of date perceptions. How they remember them can be stuck in a time warp.

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We are watching a TV programme with Eddy Redmayne acting as The Jackal. Even though he is not the same actor, I keep wondering where Wellard or Well Hard the dog is. At the moment in the series  highly armed MI6 agents have just been engaged in a  massive shoot out near Budapest. The sort of thing that is likely to be an international incident but which serves for dramatic purpose.

Not everything makes sense.

It is very easy to get typecast in the eyes of others. There could be a wildly inaccurate narrative circulating which sticks like glue. Once a visiting Japanese postdoc. famous for his drinking prowess back home decided that he wanted to out-drink me competitively because he had heard my legend. We started drinking after I had already had six pints of Stella unbeknownst and unrevealed to him. I stopped drinking a bit before him and he claimed victory. So there may be a story back in Japan of how he beat a champion drinker in the UK. Not all stories are true but it does not stop their circulation.

People can have their perception locked, very locked.

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Many are not a lot like they once were. Some people change. It is said that the warrior’s path is one of transmutation,  transformation and transfiguration. This suggests that the change may be more radical than a cosmetic tinkering.

I’ll wager were I to meet people I was acquainted with two decades ago they would initially interact with me using that out of date context, if they even remembered me at all. There is and was a whole side of me of which most were completely unaware. One student thanked me for my 9 AM winter morning lectures because they gave them a chance to catch up on their sleep in a nice warm lecture theatre. Others have told me that they doubted that boring dead-pan me could be any use to them when they were unwell. After half an hour of quiet chat they were off to see the GP for a mental health consultation and had provisionally booked a session with the on campus councillor.

Few would imagine that I have had dreams of shaman and Jaguars.

Jaguar Dream Link

People struggle to a) notice and b) fully accept change in others, particularly those who they think they know well. Radical change is considered impossible. After all a leopard cannot change its spots.

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Coming Home to Roost Dream and Preparation 02-08-2025

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

Last night in the twilight between sleep and wakefulness, in the cusp between here and yet to come, I had yet another coming home to roost “slide show”. In that, things come home to roost for some people whom I once had acquaintance of. I take no joy or glee from these happenstances, these scenarios, rather a tinge of sadness at folly and adamant folly to boot. For example if you falsify any official document there is a chance down the line that it could come back to bite you on the arse like a rabid chihuahua. If you succumb to temptation and allow the tendrils of evil to find purchase, they rarely let go and your relationship becomes symbiotic. Without knowing it you supply the food. Short of a full blown exorcism it is game over in terms of liberation for this lifetime. Nobody involved in such a symbiosis will ever believe or accept such a statement.

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Everything seems normal to them. Their playbook seems to work and they have success in the world and among peers. They can handle whatever mini-crises are sent to them. Or so they think.

The thing about karma is that it can be subtle. People who believe they are thoroughly entitled do not imagine that it exists. When something happens that is “bad luck” , “unfair” and not an effect which they have had a hand in causing. One day, perhaps in a lifetime to come, people get to have the penny drop whilst incarnated and they see with irrevocable clarity the outcomes and consequences of their actions, their emotionally charged bile and punitive vengeful thoughts. Theory has it there is a review at the time of death too. I witnessed bedside my father struggling with his. It was not pretty.

I have started mentally preparing for my operation and other commitments later in the year. It has become reasonably obvious in the twilight that I need to return to the A-U-M meditations and revisit Phowa practice just in case. I probably need to start doing more stretching exercises and work at building back some muscle in my legs and hips. At the end of the month I start a new birth-year, leading me further into my final pinnacle. Who knows what is in store aside from some hippie action in the operating block.

My understanding is that when people incarnate, they choose all the circumstances of their birth to enable them to learn from a “lesson plan” that might help them best evolve and work at karma. They made this plan themselves. For example I was born into a family in which the education mantra was strong. I was sent to boarding school in another country, education was more important than any close familial relationship. I subsequently ended up working  in “education” for a couple of decades. I planned this before birth.

In the birth lesson plan trajectories of whom you are “meant” to meet are bullet pointed. The possibilities exist. These individuals have the wherewithal through which you might learn. Human choice must be allowed. Thus it is possible to completely screw up the lesson plan which you yourself wrote. Literally miss the boat by miles. You can fuck up a life and badly so, through your own arrogance. The moot point is were you always destined to fuck up or did you simply act that way out of bloody-mindedness? Did you cut off your nose to spite your face or had you zero choice in the matter? In the grand scheme of things learning will inevitably ensue. But it may be many lifetimes later that such a great learning opportunity re-presents. People learn painfully yet effectively through loss.

It is the karma of snakes and ladders.

The thing about dreaming is that timing is never atomic-clock accurate. But when the dreams increase in frequency it does mean that the event is getting nearer in time, it will happen sooner. It also means that the likelihood or probability is increasing.

Dreaming by its very nature cannot be an exact science….