Today in PhiloPsycho Freedom, I shall be discussing that little area of consciousness between waking and dreaming! It's a peculiar area where weird psychological effects can come about. The brief area you experience between waking and sleeping has been labeled as the Hypnagogia (AKA Hypnogogia) and can lead you to have a wide array of experiences – including seemingly supernatural ones.

Supernatural Phenomenon?

Some of the seemingly supernatural phenomena that can manifest in this threshold of consciousness can be out of body experiences, sleep paralysis, hallucinations, and lucid dreaming. Out of body experiences have often been thought of as spiritual experiences, or some sort of psychic experience, but have been attributed to this particular part of consciousness. They also have been connected to Dissociating from reality.

For this post, allow yourself to envision a sterile, lab environment. You're sitting in a hard, uncomfortable chair in front of a stainless steel table, all of which is in a room with white walls. The walls are barren, with a desk in the far left corner of your field of vision. A few moments pass and an experimenter comes in with a sheet labelled "Personality Test", which you are expected to fill out. You comply and wait a while longer for your results to come back. The experimenter returns and hands you a form that reads the following specifically tailored personality description:

Worked in the morning, drank most of the rest of the day to celebrate the solstice. Fireworks in Windsor at the night.

The running soundtrack of my life had his pause last Tuesday and finally resumed as of today to celebrate the solstice. It's not the same to hang by the pool without music. This is why I've excused the use of an iPod and speakers.

You know that Ke$ha song? Yeah, you know it. See if you can guess which one I mean. Phenylethylamine (PEA) is what we associate with the feeling of love. It is a neurochemical which quite literally gets us high. My friend and I got to wondering about it: if it's a drug, it'll act like a drug - addiction, capacity, tolerance, withdrawals, and all. Thinking like that, I realized the addictive capacity for different forms of relationships. With functioning long-distance relationships, you get a quick, strong fix, then a long break between exposures in comparison to their non-long distance counterparts. This would keep the strength of the dose relatively constant and not dwindle in intensity over time. In contrast, close-distance relationships should dwindle quickly due to overexposure of the drug, and probably build dependence.

As I previously mentioned, I'm afraid of falling into the old habits of overindulging in entertainment. As an article I read asked: are we raising citizens or consumers? Our culture encourages discomfort, dissatisfaction, and the lack of a critical mind. Equipped with this mind set, we are fully prepared to "buy this car to drive to work; drive to work to pay for this car." Even I, someone who likes to think that they regularly embrace in the practice of meta-cognition, have bought into this set and had not fully comprehended the extent of it until I've removed myself as best I can fathom.

The experience of driving is evolving; It started as a boring, silent burden and is slowly  becoming a near-meditative state, both outwardly and inwardly focused. It toggles back and forth. Today, I saw a herron flying and smelled the fields as the wind whipped through my hair at 80km/h - all of which I would have missed if I'd been listening to music or the radio.

•  10: Wake up
• 10:30: Renew health card
• 10:45: Buy new chess board from value village to replace the missing one ($2.00!)
• 11-3: Bum around, read, play chess, lift weights.
• 3:30-6: Leave house, hang out with a friend at a coffee shop. Play chess. Walk around town for a bit, then head home.
• 6:15: Hang out with relatives
• 6:45: Swim
• 7:00: Pick up food
• 8-10:30: Eat, play piano, read, play more piano, journal this.