Reflections on life after hearing about the death of Brendan Parnell.

I had my first lucid dream last evening. Meaning that in the middle of the dream I realized that I must be dreaming and then was able to take control of the dream and do whatever I wanted. The dream began while I was swimming in the pool in the house that we used to live in in Miami. A got out of the pool and realized that my glasses were broken. In real life I broke my glasses a few months ago so the reaction was fresh in my mind. In the dream, for some reason, my friends son Jack, was to blame for the broken glasses and I was bitterly blaming him for the real life broken glasses also. In the middle of the rant I suddenly asked myself "Could this be a dream?". Everything was so real and vivid.
At first I struggled and decided that it wasn't a dream and that my glasses were actually broken again. This made me even more angry. Then I remembered something that I had read about lucid dreaming. Light switches do not work in dreams (no one knows why this is the case but it seems to be for all people). I walked over to the light switch and flipped it up and down. Nothing happened so I turned to the 'dream Jack' and smiled. Then I got excited and fully accepted that I was awake in my dream! I walked over to a group of strangers that suddenly had appeared in the living room area of the house and grabbed one of them by the cheek. It felt so real, even the feeling of razor stubble and the weight of the head as I tugged on his cheek. I decided that if I could do anything then I could think of much cooler things to do than tug on some strangers face. With that thought I leaped off the ground and flew straight through the french doors that separated the dinning room for the pool area. I continued to rise as I flew through the screen and off towards the sky. I made a quick fly over of my old elementary school and was just about to cross over the Florida Turnpike when the excitement woke me up.
I quickly got up and wrote down the details so I would remember them for later. i have read that one of the benefits of meditation is Lucid Dreaming and now I know for sure. The practice of meditation, or lowering your brain-wave frequency while staying awake, trains your brain to be able to enter deeper wave patterns with more blood flow than normal. When you are asleep your brain goes into a delta wave pattern which has very little energy and blood flow in the brain. In fact the frontal cortex that is responsible for self-directed thought isn't even active while dreaming. That is why you feel like the dream is happening to you not that you are controlling it yourself. So when your brain gets used to going into deeper wave cycles while awake, the increased blood flow allows the frontal cortex to fire up while you are in deep sleep. Some life long meditating monks never lose consciousness even in deep dreamless sleep. I could not imagine what it must be like to be conscious 24 hours a day! I am no Zen monk but I very pleased to have been surprised by this little adventure and when it happens again I will try to not get so excited and enjoy it for a bit longer.

I invented a new game for all the information junkies out there: Wikipedia Diving. Here is how you play: You select a random topic that you are interested in, such as "Sky Diving" then you type that into the wikipedia search engine. YOu MUST read the entire article, no matter how long it is. When you get to the bottom of the article you got back up and click on one of the internal Wikipedia links that will take you to a new topic and repeat the process. You must read the Whole article and then select the next internal link. WHen you are ready to end the game you click an eternal link at the bottom of most articles and then either read or bookmark that external link. You could set a time limit on your diving (30 min to an Hour) or set an end goal topic such as "I am going to play until I reach something that relates to 'Auto Racing'." Not all the info you encounter will be correct but it will be an interesting ride into areas that you may never had thought were out there and you might find some interests that you didn't realize you had. I was gong to call the game "Info-Porn" but I thought Wikipedia Diving is more accessible.