It bugs me how I get some of my best ideas while driving.
I’ve had a number of “car journals” throughout my life, because sometimes I just have to pull over and write some thoughts out.
It sounds to me like the sleep paralysis episode began, then you realized you weren’t awake.
Our brains are really good at rationalizing all sorts of experiences. A lot of “editing” goes on in our brains between initially receiving a sensation, and becoming consciously aware of the sensation. Sometimes it can even trick us into believing things happened in a different order than they really did.
The fact that you felt a sense of panic, which is a typical reaction to sleep paralysis, makes me think some part of your brain became aware of the paralysis by that point. All parts of our brains don’t wake up simultaneously - deeper, older parts usually wake up before the outer, younger neocortex (where rational thoughts and impulse control take place.)
The awoken amygdala can send out panic alarms due to the body being paralyzed, but the young, rational part of the brain is still mid-waking up. As you begin to gain awareness, you could simultaneously realize you’re in an altered state of consciousness, but also feel terrified for no clear reason.
So, good news! You probably didn’t do anything to cause the sleep paralysis (except maybe by sleeping on your back?)
I could feel this. Like how the person you were with was your sister, but also not your sister. You had a sense of familiarity with whoever you were traveling with, the same feeling as when around your sister. But at the same time, she wasn’t literally your actual sister. It makes sense in dream-thought, even if it doesn’t make sense in awake, logical thoughts.
I could imagine dreaming that whole thing out myself (except maybe the being in England part, since I’ve never been there.)
I don’t want full lucidity, because I like seeing what my subconscious comes up with. I have enough control to steer dreams away from things I find unpleasant, and I’m happy with that.
But I also have recurring “places” I go to in my dreams. There’s one particular place I enjoy going to, which feels like close to Florida (in my mental GPS) and has an eastern coast, but its geography otherwise is more like southern California, with mountains and rocky beaches/islands. It has the games, rides, and boardwalks of New Jersey, as well as an unlit stretch of a moonless beach that I once experienced in Delaware. (I was a child, and I vividly remember walking into a pitch black void, hearing the waves crashing, but not knowing how far away the water was. My family was ahead of me and kept telling me to keep going. That moment comes up a lot when I think about the future.)
Anyway, I’ve spent dream times all over that place. Sometimes it’s part of a road trip and I’m just traveling through, sometimes I’m visiting people who live there, sometimes there are events going on, or I need to navigate a busy, multi-story shopping mall.
It’s a pretty pleasant place, honestly.
I’ll be leaving my phone at home, and writing my lawyer’s phone number on my body.
I strongly recommend others do the same.
There's also this wonderful comment about memories of playing "peek-a-boo" in the bathtub.
It's important to take time to enjoy the simple things in life.
I would like to second this. Researchers are standing by and ready to learn.
The thing about jokes like that, is that trusting you on your word, without checking for one's self, is what actual gullible people would do. Skeptics verify information, and to do that, they'd have to look up.
So if you say something like that and people look, they're not the gullible ones.
I know, I know, "I must be fun at parties."
As someone with a long name, the bane of my existence is signing online forms without a touch screen. I just had to sign off on four different consent forms online for a new doctor’s office - using my mouse.
I usually take time with my signature, but for this I did the lazy thing of a stylized first letter, followed by a squiggle. I don’t like doing that and don’t want to do that… but I’m tired, y’all.
Do you truly believe that matters to this regime? That it would matter to ICE officers charged with capturing you?
It's certainly a comfortable thought to consider yourself "the exception," but it's dangerously naive. Racists hardly care if you speak English. Complaining about immigrants not speaking English is an easy target to hit, especially since the people being complained about can't argue back. That doesn't mean they like foreigners who speak English. If they wanted to complain about you, they'd just pick some other thing that makes you "different."
You're still a foreigner, and there are enough fascists out there who don't care what else you are.
Wait, didn't you post almost the exact thing in this same thread just a few hours after this?
I'm not complaining, I like the comments and I agree with them. I just felt deja vu reading this and when I scrolled back up to see the same username, I was like, "huh, maybe there was a glitch?"
Not OP, but I can see their point. I may have a different perspective from them, though.
Dreams aren’t simply movies our brains make up. They are multi-sensory beyond sight and sound. In particular, I can feel things in my dreams. Not just textures, but emotions. Those emotions include enthusiasm for nonsensical ideas that take place in those dreams, or fears based on abstract concepts expressed through metaphors (but that wouldn’t make sense IRL.) I’d say that emotion is key to our enjoyment of dreams, and that emotion comes from inside us. Without it, we’d basically be watching abstract art films and wondering, “This is weirder than I remember. Why did I like this so much before?”
Can such a dream-capturing device recreate all the emotions present in the dream?
But also, would we really want a device that could force someone into experiencing something so intense? It sounds like something that could easily be used to manipulate people, and that worries me.