David Bailey
Member
I think if there is a continuity between dreams and NDE's (less sure about OBE's) it must also include ordinary consciousness - in other words they are all related, but we knew that already! However, in saying that, I am not trying to minimise what you have written.
The simplest interpretation of the candle story, is obviously that OBE's do not access reality. On the other hand there are plenty of people who claim to have precognitive dreams, and people in an NDE often collect data about the resuscitation process. I have always thought this fact is underplayed. I mean, suppose you were conscious (with eyes open) while being resuscitated, you would have a very poor view of what was happening, and be distracted by intense pain and fear.
In his book about his dreams, Paqart describes one particular dream in which he was lured into a side street and mugged and killed. Some time afterwards, he encountered this event for real, but forewarned is forearmed, and he managed to escape his fate. I think his experience is not untypical. One way to understand this, might be if time is branched, and we have some control over which branches we 'occupy', and we have some limited access to future times. Presentiment is also consistent with this idea.
This reminds one of the 'many worlds' interpretation of QM, in which the universe is constantly splitting as each and every wave function collapse resolves into its component possibilities. This seems ludicrous to me, unless there is some mechanism that 'culls' most of the alternatives, but even so, maybe some branches (and even reconnects?) really do happen.
If indeed the brain receives consciousness - something like a bidirectional radio device (a TV seems a poor analogy) this selection of branches by looking ahead and choosing a desired branch, may be the way we control our bodies at the deepest level inside our brains (then the signals fan out down the motor neurons, etc.). The interesting thing about this idea, is that the controller doesn't need to understand the whole cause and effect chain, it just picks an outcome that it wants by viewing the immediate future! From that point of view, precognitive dreaming is just a hugely amplified version of a process that is vital to life!
David
The simplest interpretation of the candle story, is obviously that OBE's do not access reality. On the other hand there are plenty of people who claim to have precognitive dreams, and people in an NDE often collect data about the resuscitation process. I have always thought this fact is underplayed. I mean, suppose you were conscious (with eyes open) while being resuscitated, you would have a very poor view of what was happening, and be distracted by intense pain and fear.
In his book about his dreams, Paqart describes one particular dream in which he was lured into a side street and mugged and killed. Some time afterwards, he encountered this event for real, but forewarned is forearmed, and he managed to escape his fate. I think his experience is not untypical. One way to understand this, might be if time is branched, and we have some control over which branches we 'occupy', and we have some limited access to future times. Presentiment is also consistent with this idea.
This reminds one of the 'many worlds' interpretation of QM, in which the universe is constantly splitting as each and every wave function collapse resolves into its component possibilities. This seems ludicrous to me, unless there is some mechanism that 'culls' most of the alternatives, but even so, maybe some branches (and even reconnects?) really do happen.
If indeed the brain receives consciousness - something like a bidirectional radio device (a TV seems a poor analogy) this selection of branches by looking ahead and choosing a desired branch, may be the way we control our bodies at the deepest level inside our brains (then the signals fan out down the motor neurons, etc.). The interesting thing about this idea, is that the controller doesn't need to understand the whole cause and effect chain, it just picks an outcome that it wants by viewing the immediate future! From that point of view, precognitive dreaming is just a hugely amplified version of a process that is vital to life!
David