The January 11, 2022 Insight Timer live event description explaining the title questions:
Let’s powwow for 30 minutes or so on these two questions from my “Distortions and Dreams” event to address any parallels between thoughts and dreams. We may even do some mindfulness of thinking meditation
To save time, the short answer is I don’t know.
Feel free to listen in and/or check out some of the notes:
Thoughts and thinking
"Thought" definition: 1) an idea or opinion produced by thinking, or occurring suddenly in the mind 2) the action or process of thinking [and/or] …conscious cognitive processes that can happen independently of sensory stimulation.
- Images and/or words
- very pronounced to faint blips like small bubbles popping
- Where do they come from? Outside the mind(?)
- Joseph Goldstein/Munindraji
- How do electrochemical occurrences translate to particular distinct thought(s)?
First more background:
All experience is preceded by mind
Led by mind
Made by mind.
Speak or act with a corrupted mind,
And suffering follows
As the wagon wheel follows the hoof of the ox.All experience is preceded by mind,
First two verse of the Dhammapada — translation by Gil Fronsdal
Led by mind,
Made by mind.
Speak or act with a peaceful mind,
And happiness follows
Like a never departing shadow.
Mental activity: judging, reasoning, concept formation, visualization, problem solving, deliberation, considering an idea, memory, conversations, reflection, imagination, contemplation
- emotional feedback loop and moods
- Frequency spectrum — alpha, beta, delta, gamma, theta
- Brainwave entrainment
- Pattern recognition & completion
- Conditioning
- Proximity
Fringe and parapolitcal:
- TV programming
- Subliminals
- Retinal induction programming (seizures)
- MK Ultra
- Trauma based mind control
- Mythology: Thoth
- Experiences beyond frequency spectrum:
- stilling/quieting mind and jhanas
- Maybe an interface: experience, perception and consciousness are translated into words and images and/or vice versa words and images influence experience, perception and consciousness
Now back to phenomena of thoughts and thinking:
- trance of thinking
- demonizing and/or worshiping thinking
- overthinking as alarm clock
- heart alignment to amplify what?
- use thinking instead of thinking using you
- arhats only thinking when choosing to
Dreams
"Dreams" definition: 1) a series of thoughts, images, and sensations occurring in a person's mind during sleep 2) a cherished aspiration, ambition, or ideal
- States of (human) existence:
- Waking
- Dreaming
- Deep sleep
- Meditation/substances/(altered) states/mix of these
- Types of dreams:
- visions of past (lives)
- visions of future
- messages from other realms
- wind in the belly
- [cold room, “cold” dream]
- loving-kindness for sweet dreams
- perception (recognition) and consciousness (knowing shape and color)
- waking: limited by acuity of senses and misperception
- dreaming: perception opened up
- Bhavaṅga: deep sleep. when drowsy between taking up mind objects
- Unconscious Asaññasatta world attained by consciousness suppressing practices
- sense of time passing during an anesthetic vs deep sleep
- (lucid) dreaming practices:
- visualization of 16 petaled blue lotus of throat chakra
- last and first breaths
- looking at hands
- reading
- walking meditation
- “am I dreaming?”
- light switch
- devices
- alarm
- journaling
- look for these dream signposts/indicators — like light switches, hands, reading, (picking up) things on ground — in both waking and dreaming life
- awareness in deep sleep?
- sea mammals sleeping with halves of brain
- AjahnPunnadhammo talks:
Guided Practice:
- words or images
- location
- observe
- pink elephant
- how is the mind pre-thought?
- catching arising, if remaining, passing
- thought energy
- suppression?
Audio: What are thoughts? Are dreams like thoughts?
Or listen via Insight Timer (app or website)
Starting at 43:34 Pa Auk Sayadaw answers how devas can appear in and influence dreams
The raw unedited YouTube transcription of this podcast:
easiest way
[Music]
Intro
homeless and welcome this is josh dipple from integrating presence and today’s topic
what are thoughts are dreams like thoughts so the description i have here
let’s powwow for 30 minutes or so on these two questions that came from a distortions and dream
event that i recently led and address any parallels between thoughts and dreams
we may even do some mindfulness of thinking meditation so this will be in two main parts
Disclaimer
i’ll allow you all to draw most of the parallels on your own dreams and thought i’ll kind of address each one we’ll
start with them thoughts what are thoughts and of course standard
disclaimer that this is just pretty much my um experience in research this
information sharing is it’s not to be taken as truth it’s just a starting point for
your own investigation and research yes i’m not responsible if you do or
don’t do with this information and of course this is only going to scratch the surface because you know thinking it’s
just a huge vast topic and that’s only one small part of mine too so the standard our
Definition
definition here we thought we’d define as a group here what we mean by thought
before we get going it’s an idea or an opinion produced by thinking
or occurring suddenly in the mind it’s a dictionary definition it’s also the act or process of thinking of course we all
know what this this means it’s just kind of put words to this right are conscious cognitive processes that
can happen independently of sensory stimulation
and then thinking of course is the process of anyone’s mind to consider a reason about something
My experience
so when you look at into this more simply in your own experience there seems to be kind of two camps of people
usually that think in either images or words so the images is pretty straightforward
words can be um like a voice are also
seeing images of words it’s from what i understand that’s a little bit more rare
there’s a teacher joseph goldstein and he talks about thoughts being
faint blips or like bubbles like these wisps of smoke that are barely distinguishable that just
very ephemeral very subtle a lot of times kind of popping but then again of course
thinking can become very pronounced very um at the forefront of our experience too
a lot just depends on kind of the causes and conditions so the big question here is
for me anyway is where did they come from i think if you ask science where they come from they don’t really know so
much joseph goldstein’s teacher in india merninderjee
from pronouncing that right i remember him saying on talk that he said they come from outside the mind
and that’s was a really provocative statement a claim for me and it really wasn’t elaborated on and i’m not going
to elaborate on i’ll leave it at that for now but science and now this is probably a gross
misrepresentation and jump in here to add to this please
they seem to think it’s just kind of like this electrochemical occurrence or processes in the brain
and somehow that translates to particular distinct thoughts
so like if they put you in an mri and they test on thinking and then they will
map the brain which parts light up uh intensities and things but
is so depending on causes and conditions would that happen the same inside or
outside mri machine would you know what led up to that
time if something else would have happened would that the same test have been the
same what if the certain areas of the mri light up in
different people but then they have different thoughts or thought processes
so there’s just there’s just so many different causes and conditions that could be gone into so it seems really
complex and of course they’re trying to kind of map and catalog
and build databases and use ai and machine learning and algorithms and
trying to quantify and preserve um thinking in the mind there’s tons and tons into this now
i’ll just leave it at that for now so so before we get into just the thoughts or
Background
thinking more specifically let’s do some background on this um
so this includes the broader range of mental activity is what it’s often
called in mental formation so this might include judging reasoning
concept formation visualization problem solving
deliberation considering an idea memories
conversations reflections imagination contemplation
and volition as well so if there’s any others then i’m missing
maybe you can come back to that so there also seems to be this emotional feedback
loop with thoughts so a lot of times thoughts will drive emotions and vice
versa the emotions can fuel certain thoughts and as soon as we can realize
this we can focus on one and as we take our foot off the gas pedal of one
the momentum tends to slow down a little bit so you can try this for yourself the
next time the the minds out of control or the emotions are out of control or seemingly out of control um
they seem to be amped up high speed can tune into one of those and see how it’s being fed is it being
it’s like for an emotion is it being fed and fueled with more thoughts or is vice versa is the thinking mind
uh take a pause and look at the emotional experience emotional body and see what kind of emotions are going on
there and if they keep occurring um okay so
Moods
also moods obviously are really important so moods are kind of like the season
of the mind right and the kind the thoughts and emotions are more like the weather
um so a mood tends to be like um something that sticks around a little bit longer emotions tend to be i guess
intense a lot of time or short-lived so when we talk about
the mind there’s the e what is it the eg spectrum eeg frequency of alpha beta
delta gamma and theta waves i won’t go too much into that
mostly because i don’t really know at least from this perspective of established science how to speak much to that there’s also
brainwave entrainment um so i guess that’s when they hook you
up to an e in eeg and study your brain waves and do certain
Pattern Recognition
procedures perhaps to affect a certain outcome of certain brain waves for particular results and do training that
way and of course there’s pattern recognition which humans are fairly
decent at supposedly be able to pick out patterns within a bunch of data
it’s also pattern completion you know you’ve seen the thing that um that you can fill in like sentences
without the vowels i think it is and then you don’t need the vowels you can just fill in the gaps or i think there’s allusions where pieces are missing you
don’t really notice it until you look the parts that are missing of course there’s conditioning like
pavlov and then there’s proximity i feel that
affects mind too what we’re around who we’re around how
close we are how intense it is and then i’ll just mention some briefly the fringe and parapolitical here
surrounding this um probably starting from the more common um to the less
common more fringe um tv programming it’s interesting it’s called programming
right like we’re programming a mind um what you know what the intense beh the intent intense and agenda behind tv
programming things like that are public information now like project
mockingbird about certain intelligence agency assets in
Programming
in the media of course there’s subliminal programming we’ve seen these things or heard about these saying some
people say it’s overload and some people say it’s not exposed enough about um was it 24 frames a second and
did this experiment where they put you know a classic experiment with a flash coke and popcorn just like one
one frame at a time and it just blipped and most people can’t really perceive it but then people were supposedly going
buying more popcorn and soda there’s something called retinal induction programming
Subliminal
i think that might be a specialized term that’s not too wide spread out there actually that’s
probably kind of ties in with subliminal things as well now there is um well something
like this might be the seizures like if you go to certain websites sometimes you’ll get a warning that if
people are susceptible to seizures please don’t watch this
because of the different frequency and intensity of light and the duration and amount that it flashes
on and off there’s a project that was declassified the 1970s
called any ultra and this involved the cia doing different experiments with things like electrodes and lsd
a lot of it has been destroyed but some of it was released and went through congressional hearings
and you can you can read about this on wikipedia it’s pretty mainstream it’s not covered too much though and there’s
something called trauma-based mind control which some people would say that part of those experiments has stuff to
do with that i won’t give that more energy that needs if you’re interested and look that up and some of the most obscure things are
Traumabased mind control
something like called remote neural monitoring and there’s a whole book by
dr robert duncan who’s claims to be xcia and in his book
project soul catcher let’s leave it at that of course in mythology there’s a character in egyptian mythology called
thoth and just the word t-h-o-t-h is similar spelled to thought and
and that’s pretty widespread information that you can look up on that and how that may or may not
be related beyond thinking and thoughts and these
Jhana
experiences beyond the frequency spectrum of thinking when we still and quiet the mind which just happens fairly
naturally with decent meditation instructions and a regular consistent practice
then the mind will calm down and settle and then there’s these um states of consciousness that are possible called
jhana and these are in eight levels and they’re divided into form and formless
states the first four form the second are formless and i’m not going to go too
much into these there’s other information on my site some information on on this but these are not everyday
states of consciousness that um are possible to reach with meditators
and they go into gradually more and more subtle refined
states of consciousness starting with kind of joy on up to the
the highest level uh of jhana um immaterial realm that’s
called the the sphere of neither perception nor non-perception
means such a rarified state of consciousness is that okay
What if
so what if thinking was kind of like an interface what if
experience perception and consciousness can be translated into words and images
kind of what we um our everyday life in our experience if we can translate those into thoughts and
then vice versa where words and images can influence our experience perception
and consciousness okay now back to phenomenon of thoughts and thinking
Whats here
so um there’s a meditation teacher and psychologist tara brock i love her
material especially this question i like to throw at people if they’re open to it is
what’s here now if there’s no problem to solve and some people can’t even fathom even
considering that even as a hypothetical question have to kind of emphasize oh it just is this
hypothetical like a thought experiment you know because they really hardly can perceive a world or even just a few
moments without any kind of problems so what’s here now there’s no problems
to solve there’s nothing to fix or change what’s here now
and i’m not going to answer that for you i’ll just go into the other thing that she talks about this trance of thinking
so we can get lost in thought that’s another common expression where we’re just so absorbed into the
Becoming mindful
thinking mind that we don’t really even notice that thinking is even happening
um until we become mindful that thinking is happening oh i’ve been thinking especially in meditation it’s
really easily noticed i’ve been thinking for five minutes and i had no idea i was sitting here with my eyes closed i just
been lost in thought and so what tends to happen with this is it becomes really tricky
some people will demonize thoughts um really kind of lay into them and say oh you have to be quiet then you have to
completely stop thinking and well that’s okay but i don’t think they’re the enemy
as well but then on the other extreme you get worshipping thoughts and intellect and just keep feeding
discursive thought and what what not so i think it lies somewhere in between you
Overthinking
know it’s kind of like um it’s like maybe um thinking is like a
this analogy where it’s like a sledgehammer and it works great for certain things
but you wouldn’t want to make a cake with a sledgehammer right and so overthinking can also act as an
alarm clock i like this kind of teaching and analogy um they’re kind of overthinking or just kind of the minds
out of it seems to be an issue then you can use that as oh hey i need to tune in to my heart now tune into my
emotions and what’s going on in the heart so it’s kind of like to wake us up to to
check in with that and a lot of times um overthinking can be used as an escape for pain so
all the different strategies for escaping pain one of them is a distraction into thought to avoid
feeling or turning towards pain and seeing how it is now of course things can get so overwhelming that we can’t
just always dive into the pain and just live there and be there because sometimes it can get pretty
severe and i’m not just talking about physical and talking about like psychic and emotional pain emotional pain
Heart amplifies
so the heart tends to amplify things right so what are we aligning with
what is what what is the heart aligning with and what are we using it to amplify i mean emotions can actually be very
helpful to pour a lot of energy into amp up
something so it’s um very important to realize what the heart
is in alignment with and what it’s amplifying right and this notion of using thinking and
not thinking using being the master of thoughts not thoughts mastering us
and i’ll just wrap this up by saying that it’s often said in um terabyte of buddhist circles that the arhat are the fully
enlightened ones um they will only think if they want to there’s no kind of
stray thoughts right because if we tune in maybe at the end here briefly there seems to be
some agency to some of our thinking and then but some of it just seems to occur
out of nowhere without us willing or wanting it to happen um for whatever
reasons if we’re just observing thinking thinking mind okay now on to dreams to define this
Dreams
um a series of thoughts images and sensation sensations occurring in a
person’s mind during sleep number two a cherished cherished aspiration ambition or an ideal
we’re going to focus more on the first definition of what happens during sleep states
kind of covered that second definition on the last event this was derived from
and i’ll be borrowing a little bit from ah john putidamo’s um talk on a couple talks on dreaming
so there’s various states you know we um pretty much all know this right states
that we can experience dreaming deep sleep and waking states
the fourth one kind of i just kind of lump a bunch of things together on the fourth one like meditation
kind of can touch into all those potentially substances of course certain drugs and
substances can induce certain states that maybe not wouldn’t
fit directly into those other states um there’s altered states maybe like through drumming chanting
uh practices i mean wild practices like people being buried
um you know uh with enough oxygen you know so they’re not they don’t die obviously
Types of Dreams
and then a mix of all the above can be as well now the the buddha says that there’s these different types of
dreams so it can be visions of the past either in previous
lifespans uh if people are um willing to consider that we can there can be dreams of visions of
the future i’m sure pretty much everybody if they have any at least experience that for themselves they’ve
heard you know dreams come true right okay messages from other realms that’s kind of a more rarefied one where
if we’re open to things in dreams angels or devas or dewas or other beings from
other places and this could go into who knows you know um if you’re open to considering
things like this even could be like you know technological or you know
remote influencing people talk about but then the other one is um wind in the
belly i think he called it so it’s just kind of like you know um just different
nighttime phenomena that really doesn’t need to be put much attention on there’s that
thing where if you’re like in a cold room at night and um maybe you’ll have some kind of dream
like i don’t know there’s like a lot of ice or ice cubes or something to do with um coldness in
general so the big question i have for this are you know where do the dreams come from and how do they happen like how does a
particular dream happen versus myriad possibilities of that could be happening it’s also said that loving
kindness meta is it’s great for uh sweet dreams having
sweet dreams i do this often times at night and just wishing people well
um wishing safety kindness happiness ease
strength health well-being um being free and just can run that through
whoever you’d like and just really calming protective so when we look at dreams you have to
Perception and Consciousness
look at perception um and consciousness so in everyday life you know perception
is kind of like our recognition and consciousness is knowing so if uh let’s take the visual consciousness shape and
color it’s usually kind of the senses really only see it’s said shape and
color and then our perception or recognition of what that particular shape and color is
is then given a recognition a perception so in waking life you know that’s
limited by the acuity of our senses and the faultiness
faultiness perception i’m sure we’ve all seen things where it’s been dark out a classic example is like a rope and it’s
being mistaken for a snake um i think it depends where you are in the world maybe people in the north might
mistake like a tree stump for a bear so when we dream the
those limitations are fall away a lot perception opens up
there doesn’t seem to be as much limitation on perception and with the daily meditation practice too the
perceptual sphere perceptual field starts open up start to see more choices different ways looking
at things considering things and viewing things in more of an expanded perception
perspectives so we talk about deep sleep too it’s in terrible buddhism it’s called um they
Deep Sleep
call it bavanga consciousness so this is kind of like the you know it’s a deep sleep
there’s no drink going on during that portion of sleep we can also experience this when we’re drowsy and then the mind
isn’t taking or between the mind taking up objects so whatever the mind focuses on and before it focuses on the next
thing there’s this kind of gap where it’s not focused on an object there’s even this place
in i think buddhist cosmology where these yogis would suppress their
consciousness and perception so kind of they wouldn’t want to hear anything see
anything or be conscious of anything they would do all these extreme practices to blot all this out and the
buddha condemned this and they said the next life they would be born in a heavenly realm
where they wouldn’t remember any of it so they would only remember like the very beginning and end of it and then for i
don’t know how many eons or however long a time um they would have no memory of it they
might be having the greatest kind of pleasures and time but no consciousness of it
so the other interesting thing to look at with um dreams and consciousness like this is going under um
being ministered an aesthetic and i’ve never done this so i can’t really speak to this
Going Under
but from what i hear the stories i hear is that um it’s different than deep sleep because a lot of people will just
go you know two or ten not and then go in the next thing they know they’re they’re waking up in
the recovery room with a deep sleep though there seems to be a passing of
time i guess some people have experienced passing of time while going under
and this anesthesiology but from what i understand most people um
just kind of there’s the sense of time passing is not similar to deep sleep
Lucid Dreaming
so now we can look at lucid dreaming practices i’ve done a little bit of this one of the things i’ll just go through
some techniques here and by lucid dreaming i mean when you’re dreaming you’re aware that you’re dreaming you
know your dream so what you can do is pretty much anything some people fly some people
have relationships with as many people as they or whoever they want which i don’t know is the wisest thing or not i think in
the tibetan tradition visualization of a 16-petaled blue lotus at the throat
chakra and this is supposed to be said to be involved with dreaming
the one that i have done is um last and first breath so paying attention to the last breath
before you fall asleep which i have yet to do i’ve tried i’ve tried i haven’t been able to do
that yet but keep sitting the firm intent and resolve to see if we can become aware of the
last breath before drifting off into sleep and it said you become pretty much lucid and a lot of people i know at
least when i become aware that i’m dreaming a lot of times i’ll just wake up because it’s um
i don’t know i don’t know i won’t speculate on why but the one thing i have been able to do though is
kind of pretty much catch the first breath upon waking and this will kind of wake us up pretty much instantly if
we’re aware of that if it’s an in-breath or an out-breath the first breath upon waking
another thing is reading in dreams um so i’ve done this before i’m in a dream and i’m reading something and i look away
and come back to it and then it’s completely different some people i think experience garbled text but
for whatever reason it just seems confusing when i i don’t don’t put two and two together and
realize it’s a dream a lot of times or when i do i wake up again just kind of like this frustration of going back and
forth to the test and it being different each time the other thing is looking at your hands that’s said to be
a common one to look at your hands while you’re dreaming i don’t know about that maybe they distort and a common one is
asking yourself throughout the day sincerely am i dreaming getting to the habit about five times a day just taking
a break and say looking right now and so this builds up a habit so it supposedly will carry over into dream
state so you ask yourself in a dream am i dreaming and then oh you might realize
that oh you are dreaming again it might wake you up or you might turn lucid to a dream another one is
Light Switch
light switch flipping a light switch on and off a lot of this is also in the movie waking life
kind of like a rotoscoped which means animate it’s a shot live action and then animated over the top
walking meditation is the newer one i’ve heard uh i don’t know exactly how this works but see if you can do walking
meditation in your dream i know i was having these dreams for the longest time where i would i couldn’t find a place to
meditate my dreams that was my goal and i just kept getting distracted or something would happen and i couldn’t
find a so i had this like this weird kind of anxiety of trying to meditate what um and not being
able to in a dream okay so there’s all kinds of devices you can buy too for this if you’re
Other Devices
interested in i i don’t know much about these um i think there’s one that will flash some kind of lights when you’re
getting in certain states that are peak times for um dreaming maybe in certain areas
of rim rapid eye movement and that can supposedly indicate that you’re in a dream without waking you up if i’m
getting that right another way is to set an alarm um this is kind of harsh but you set it for like i don’t know 3
42 in the morning um if you’re sleeping during that time and kind of wake up and it’s jolts you
out and more than likely you’ll be able to remember what you were dreaming at at
least for that short amount of time right before you woke up with the alarm and journaling that’s uh classically
recommended to as soon as you wake up and remember a dream keep a journal right by your bed and write down what it
was and you can do any interpretation later on that or then too if you want to go back to sleep or not
it’s an interesting question to see if there’s awareness and deep sleep and there’s some yogi’s that claim they can
be aware while they’re in deep dreamless sleep just knowing that and so i don’t know about that i can’t really speak to
that and then they also the other one is i thought was fascinating see mammals can sleep
um or actually sleep with one half half of the hemisphere of the brain while the other half is awake
uh that way they can have some kind of you know protection if they need to move or do something so they’re not entirely
all the brain isn’t entirely asleep so what we’re going to do now is a mindfulness of thinking if you all would
um feel called and moved to do so so let’s just
close our eyes take another keep a couple deep breaths
kind of let the words fade away from what i’ve been speaking on
you can return to your natural breath
invite you to turn your attention to thoughts and thinking being mindful of
thinking
so if there’s no particular thoughts happening there’s no incentive to make those happen right now
just kind of occupy the space where thoughts arise from
turn your attention there
so notice if you’re more of a visual image
thinker if thoughts happen in images more or
in words either as inner voice
or just language
or maybe even a visual image of words
so if no thoughts or think are occurring just for the sake of this meditation
i’ll drop in this don’t think of a pink elephant whatever
you do do not think of a pink elephant
so notice what happened and if it was a visual
did you notice where that image appeared
for a lot of people it’s kind of like in front of the face maybe a certain distance away
or maybe even inside the head then we can look like a
look into like a movie projector where we see where where does it seem to be coming
from and then where is it experienced so sometimes it can be seeming to be
projected from the inside of the head and then displayed
outside the face or could be elsewhere
if it’s a language or
thinking in words can notice what part of the body that
seems to be coming from sometimes it could be the head it can be
the throat if we can tune into
if it’s a inner voice if that voice is our own
if it happens to be maybe from an authority figure or a parent maybe a teacher
friend whoever it may be
and let’s just spend a few more moments observing thought thinking
so being the observer observing the thought
not being the thought or entangled in the thought maybe like you’re watching tv
or you’re listening to a podcast
and again if there’s nothing happening that’s okay can just be in the space where thoughts arise from
return to perhaps
and now more subtly tuning in that tuning still into that space where thoughts arise from
see if we can detect the energy what it’s like energetically
before thoughts arise and then see if you can catch the
the arising of a thought the first moment you’re aware of it
and then if it persists for however long
and then it’s passing it’s rising and falling
very subtle phenomenon thinking
there may even be a possibility to kind of sense when a thought is
arising and a choice to
have it bubble up into awareness or choose not to have it bubble up an
awareness it’s less of a control than just kind of
a sensing and a choice
maybe uh wondering if this is suppressing anything that’s a good question i don’t know
okay in a few moments i’ll end this brief mindfulness of thinking
meditation
without a bell we’ll end it here and when you’re ready
you can open your eyes bring yourself back to the room or space find yourself in in
this moment can wiggle or move around
do any movements that feel good i wish you all very sweet dreams pleasant dreams
productive dreams and kind of knowledge
of dreams and whatever you may wish when it comes to this
as well as exploring thinking and how to hold
and view and respond to thoughts and thinking mind
much love and blessings
Integrating Presence 
2 thoughts on “What are thoughts? Are dreams like thoughts?”