Chapter 5 is mainly about dreaming and consciousness. There are many different topics in this chapter that I found extremely interesting, mainly sleep stages and out of body/near death experiences. There was a police officer that had an out of body experience while chasing a suspect. She remembered viewing herself from twenty feet above. She watched herself do exactly what she had been trained to do. By the time she was back in her body the suspect had been detained. Out of body experiences like these have always sparked my interest. Near death experiences are even more interesting to me. While reading this chapter I recalled a memory of a tv show I had watched. A man was trapped under a semi and almost had his body completely severed in two. He survived the incident but he recalls seeing himself being pinned under the semi from at least 50 feet in the air. He recalls an angel telling him that he had to choice of dieing or returning back to his body. If he chose to return to his body he would have to suffer through an extremely long and painful recovery. He chose to go back and is still living today. This near death experience came from his Christian background. Peoples near death experiences are typically related to where there from or what religion they practice. I really believe that the mind is an incredible thing and far to complicated for someone to fully grasp how it works.
Chapter 5
No TrackBacks
TrackBack URL: http://blog.lib.umn.edu/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/175548
I think that it's a good point to make that it's far too complicated to fully understand the way in which the human mind works. This kind of philosophy is one employed by Albert Einstein in his later years as he turned into the 'old sage' figure. There are so many factors which go into the way we perceive situations and how we remember our life experiences, especially with the way memories break down and change as we age.