Dreams and the duality of life.....

A cpl. of days back, Ms. Moon and i were chatting online and she happened to share a cpl. of her poems with me.....lovely writings! They really did strike a chord, because in many ways, they reflect my own thoughts too :). One of them talked about dreams.....dreaming with your eyes wide open.....and how they are equally wonderful, as the ones we see while sleeping.....may be even better! Atleast they don't leave us halfway through.....Dreaming at my own will, that sounds fantastic, even reassuring.....as i said, i am a dreamer :).

Its raining outside right now. Raining after a long long time.....The weather has changed so much since the bright and crisp morning.....and so have my feelings.....Swinging between hope and thoughtlessness, i have suddenly found my ground.....and i know, its okay to dream.....as i said, i am very much a dreamer.....i dream about reality.....

..............

That is an oxymoron.....Well, life presents you with lots of duality.....we just need to let go and accept this duality :).

Few days back, i was waiting at the bus-stop.....completely tired, and completely hopeless.....figuratively and literally.....i tried to cheer myself up by engaging in small talk with a cpl. of students who enquired about a bus schedule. They had been waiting for a long time. Finally their bus arrived.....they left, with a smile. Smiles are infectious, i smiled too :). And then, i noticed something.....A poor, homeless man was picking through the trash. That is an everyday thing, they sometimes pick out plastic bottles, cans etc, i thought. But this was different.....he picked out two huge plastic cups, almost filled and drank up the soda greedily.....as a tear rolled down my cheek, the homeless guy burst into a nervous laughter.....Was he happy? I don't know, i won't know.....but i learnt that life is all about living on.....i tucked my small worries and tensions into a tiny pocket in my mind.....my bus had arrived.....

Away from oneself :)

Oh! This is not some sad poetic reference for me being away from the diary for quite some time :). And you'd rather not get me started on that! There's already plenty of "i am lazy"' "i post only when i really feel like" stuff in the earlier posts ;). This one is about taking a real trip out of your own self and floating free :-D. Brought to my inbox courtesy dear buddy MD.

Few days back MD mailed to me about a cpl. of articles published in Science, about out of body experiences. We have all heard stories of people claiming that they had an out of body experience. Till recently such experiences were thought be either figments of someone's imagination or a result of treating yourself with hallucinogenic chemicals! However, things have been changing. Rick Strassmann proposes that in natural states, body's own hallucinogens such as DMT can trick one into an out of the body experience. And finally, there are these papers now, which describe how, without even taking any help from endogenous or exogenous hallucinogens, you can trick your mind/brain axis into having an out of the body experience! Finally, a more scientific and humane look! The authors basically have aimed at "disrupting the spatial unity between self and body" to quote them.

Read more about it here.

The experiments involved use of head-mounted video displays and manipulated the sense of touch to create such an experience. The subjects were made to see their own backs using the video displays and by manipulating the touch, they were made to feel out of the body!

For one of the studies, a team led by Bigna Lenggenhager and Olaf Blanke, both of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, asked people to stand in front of a camera while wearing video-display goggles. In one experiment, subjects saw the camera's view of their own back, computer-enhanced to create a three-dimensional "virtual own body." When the subjects' backs were stroked with a highlighter pen at the same time they saw their virtual back being stroked, they reported that the sensation seemed to be caused by the highlighter on their virtual back, making them feel as if the virtual body was in fact their own body.

Adopting a similar strategy to attempt to induce out-of-body experiences, Henrik Ehrsson of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, asked men and women to sit in a chair and don a video headset connected to two cameras that provided a stereoscopic view of their backs. As a subject viewed his or her own back from behind, Ehrsson used two plastic rods to simultaneously stroke the subject's chest and a location behind the subject's back. Although people felt the rubbing on their chest, in the headset they could only see Ehrsson's arm moving behind their back, reinforcing the sense that they were sitting at a location behind their actual body. The experience often elicited surprised giggles, says Ehrsson, who has tried it out himself. "You really feel that you are sitting in a different place in the room and you're looking at this thing in front of you that looks like yourself and you know it's yourself but it doesn't feel like yourself," he says. "It's almost like you're looking at a dummy." Nearly all subjects reported similar impressions on a questionnaire.

Brilliant, really! These studies remind me of the famous experiments by V. S. Ramachandran, who used mirror-image experiments with body-image, when he tricked the mind of the patients to cure phantom limb pain and tried the same for mirror agnosia and made the patients feel that the object they were asked to grab was within the mirror!