May 5, 2015

May 5, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

 

I woke up from a good night sleep, which ended with a dreadful dream. Bonnie my wife and I had come to an edge. There was an abyss and in the distance a mountain range. It seemed to me I needed to be on that mountain range and I was sure my little towel would fly me there, if I held it spread out in front of me. I demonstrated to Bonnie how to hold it, so that she could fly too, but I noticed she didn’t believe it was possible. It then dawned on me that if she would take the jump, I would witness seeing her crash to her death. I didn’t want that, of course, and all of a sudden I didn’t understand anymore how it had been possible that I had been thinking that I could fly across this abyss? It was impossible and although initially this seemed like a realistic plan, I had been woken up due to her fear and I called off the jump.

When we analyze this frightening dream with the certainty that comes from the knowledge that human beings behave their environments neurally - that is, due to conditioning, we acquire individually different verbal and visual concepts with which we navigate and construct our ‘reality’, which remains inaccessible to others - we find that this dream has something interesting to convey. 

Although the dream appeared to be about Bonnie’s fear of flying, it was, of course, about me. The fact that my neural behavior concatenated this dream is undeniable. I woke up from this dream in which I was looking with Bonnie at this deep abyss and across at the distant mountain range. I held a small towel in my hands and Bonnie held one in hers and according to me it was possible to use that towel to fly across. 

 

It is not so odd to think of a dream within a dream, when one realizes that one can only think about the dream after one has woken up. Interpretations of this dream are only possible following an ‘awareness’ of the dream, that is, after the chaining of covert, nonverbal, neural behaviors, we are aware of the dream, or rather, we believe when we verbally express this chain that we are aware of ‘it.’ It is not even so odd then to think of a dream within a dream within a dream, because the chaining of neural verbal and nonverbal behaviors makes this possible. There is truth to the 'esoteric' fact that our body knows.