#dream-analysis

#dream-analysis

Attention is the brain's filtering mechanism; what passes through that filter is what gets encoded. What gets encoded becomes memory. And memory is the raw material of identity. So in the architecture of your identity, attention is the doorway.

Metaphors are linked to how we experience the world around us, according to seminal work by researchers George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. In English, we "move forward" with our lives and don't "retreat into" the past. We speak about people who are "cold as ice" and "heavy" matters we need to resolve. Some of these metaphorical expressions are more than just, well, expressions-they are actually based on our sensory experiences. This mind-body link is called "embodied cognition."

Unfortunately, hypnosis has a negative reputation among the general public, in large part because of how it's been portrayed by the movie and entertainment industry. Also, I was aware that in the late 19th century there were many false positive and negative claims about hypnosis that soured the public on the possibility that hypnosis could be helpful. I did not want to create or add to a 21st-century perception that hypnosis was quackery, and therefore chose to withhold telling about some of the most amazing events that I had encountered with my patients when I first wrote about hypnosis, because these stories might have been too hard to believe.

For Plato, psyche meant something like what we'd now call mind -understood as a complex system requiring governance. The psyche had distinct parts: a reasoning part that deliberates, a spirited part that feels emotion and courage, and an appetitive part that desires. Each part has its own function and its own form of excellence. And crucially, these parts need to be governed-integrated under what Plato called constitutional self-rule.

been ignored, neglected, minimized, or dismissed by mainstream psychology but can no longer be denied or avoided without serious consequences. As C.G. Jung (1961) presciently put it, "Today we need psychology for reasons that involve our very existence. . . . We stand face to face with the terrible question of evil and do not even know what is before us let alone what to pit against it."

This story is about complexity, advanced math, cognition, and machine computation. But hold on. For this exercise, my task is to take this complex idea and reduce it-to simplify it into something less daunting and (I hope) a bit easier to understand. So, let's take a step back. My bet is that most of us learned our first piece of geometry with two letters: x and y.

For most of my life, I thought of myself as a fixed entity: This is me. These are my traits. This is who I am. I assumed I was essentially that same person who loved sugary cereal at age 8, fried chicken at 12, and tequila at 21, and who still loves those things now, even if my stomach disagrees. But this is an illusion. Neuroscience, physics, and Buddhism all agree: There is nothing fixed about us-not even close.

Like clockwork, every night around 10 PM, I reach for my phone and open my white noise app. The familiar whoosh of ocean waves or steady hum of a fan fills my bedroom, and only then can I finally drift off to sleep. For years, I thought this was just a quirky habit I'd developed during college. But recently, I discovered there's actually fascinating psychology behind why some of us literally cannot fall asleep in complete silence.