This is the way. To cycle through several times may take years, but over time all the bits of practice add up. Until one day, you look at what you’ve created, and realize that you’ve actually gotten quite skilled.

When I started using a camera as a teen, I didn’t let people call me a “photographer.” I was just “a person who likes taking pictures.” To me, being a “photographer” implied possessing skills and purpose beyond what I’d had.

A few years later, I came across some blog about various artistic principles, including ratios and framing. I went back through some of my favorite shots and was surprised to realize they already followed those rules. Apparently, over the years, I’d picked up a bunch of photography skills that people take classes to learn. It just took tons of practice and experimentation, which I returned to in cycles.

Haha, this is what I say, too! “My hobby is collecting new hobbies.” There are supplies for no fewer than five types of crafts on my living room table right now. (Also water bottles, several video game controllers, a solved Rubik’s cube, my medications, and some cannabis paraphernalia.)

You clearly never saw me in my “edamame everyday” phase.

Wait, what? Where’d you hear that from? I’m on .world and my home internet is hard wired to a VPN. I’ve never had a problem.

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.

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.

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?”

Or a song repeats on full-blast inside your head, drowning out your own thoughts, all because a car drove by an hour ago with the windows down and that song was on their radio. Now your brain won’t turn it off.

My brain also does this neat/annoying trick where it connects details I see or experience with details from song lyrics. Like, I could have to stand on a corner waiting to cross a street, and my brain will decide to start playing, Take it Easy by The Eagles for the rest of the day… just because I was “standing on a corner” (though not in Winslow, Arizona.)

Some people think I have an irrationally strong negative reaction to catchy “ear worm” songs… but I figure it’s because such songs aren’t as debilitating to most people. For me, when songs take over my brain like this, I can’t think a single sentence straight through. They legit hijack my brain and I’ve never learned a way to make it stop.* It’s as distressing as it is distracting.

* I haven’t learned a way to make it stop in the moment. However, I have found that anti-depressants help prevent this from happening overall. Just as negative thoughts stop looping through my mind when I maintain my Lexapro, songs are less likely to get stuck in my head. Just an interesting sidenote.

AuDHD here. I also have very little filter for incoming noises. I suspect it’s an auditory processing issue.

My “cocktail party” effect is weak, I sometimes struggle to hear words properly through phone calls (which is a big part of why I don’t like making them), and if a show or movie doesn’t have captions on I’ll probably miss a lot of dialogue. I’ve had plenty of people ask, “Are you deaf?” or tell me to get my hearing checked when I ask them to repeat themselves, despite every hearing test I’ve ever taken showing that my hearing is better than average. It’s not my ears that struggle, it’s my brain’s ability to filter/process/prioritize sounds that’s unusual.

At the same time, I’m distracted by all sorts of details. I had an ex once remark that when people spoke a language he didn’t understand, he found it easier to tune out. I thought that absurd; if anything my brain becomes even more distracted by foreign languages. I still detect (and can recreate) novel language sounds, even though linguists and brain-researchers claim I should’ve lost the ability to do that decades ago.

I wish I could get a brain scan when listening to sounds and compare the results to scans of other people. I can’t help but think it would shed light on a lot of life-long issues and peculiarities.

Reach out and spend wads of money on someone.

I’ve got a season pass to Six Flags, and part of the deal is getting free “bring a friend” tickets.

Unless the guy’s treating his taxi driver to meals in the park, this outing could possibly have been free.

Upvoting for the typo.

How do they do it?

I assume they just don’t. For my mom at least, she absolutely will not apply mental effort to anything that doesn’t strictly require it. If a mental task can be offloaded to someone or something else, she’ll do that instead, every time.

Fascists never need an excuse to react. They’ll find scapegoats when they want to, but the fact is they don’t truly need them in order to retaliate - Trump and his ilk will do what they do regardless of what the rest of us say.

Is your feeling okay more important than fascism flaking?

I thought the point of the phrase was to bruise Trump’s ego and reputation? It’s not “We believe this in order to make ourselves feel better,” but rather “Trump attempts to project a strong self-image, but he’s actually an insecure little chicken shit without a sense of personal conviction.”

Oh snap, you’re me.

As an agendered pansexual, the wildest thing to me about the trans/cis divide is actually feeling that strongly about having a preferred gender. I simply can’t fathom caring hard enough to put up a fight about it. I default to “female” because I was AFAB, but if someone calls me by a different pronoun, it’s whatever to me.

Now let me be clear - just because I don’t feel gender for myself, doesn’t mean I can’t respect and support those who do feel strongly about their genders.

And as a reference to this comment, this post was fueled by unmedicated ADHD, autism, and cannabis (and a bit of frustration, since I accidentally closed the window after the first time I wrote it, so I had to write it twice.)

Thank you for your service, Rex Banner