The Rembis Report And Other Fascinating Topics - Volume CXXXVII

This is the final essay in a weekly series about the personal nature of thinking, thought progression, dreams, and ponderings on the subject of quantum entanglement.

I recommend reading this from the beginning.

CLICK HERE for Albatross - Part I

CLICK HERE for Albatross - Part II

CLICK HERE for Albatross - Part III

CLICK HERE for Albatross - Part IV

CLICK HERE for Albatross - Part V

“And if I can't wake up will I be all alone,
A stranded orphan here?
Or will I bump into some other wandering soul,
And will they talk to me?” - Wake Me Gently, Alice Cooper, 1976

This is a line from a song in one of my favorite concept albums, Alice Cooper Goes To Hell. It is the story of a fellow who falls asleep and dreams of going to Hell, in a rock-opera version of Dante’s Inferno. No true spoiler here, but in the end, he awakes to find that his life is as he left it, and it is good to be home. Which it generally is when we awake, as opposed to being in Hell, or some other place we would rather not be.

Some mornings as I awake, I achieve a state of being I call oblivion. It does not always happen, but this morning, it did. It is blissful. There is a gap of time when my consciousness bleeds into my sleep. I am aware that I am sleeping and on the verge of waking life. I know what I dreamt and gently recap it, like I just watched a TV show. In this state, my eyes stay closed and I feel the weight of my body like a sandbag, unmoved, and I remain perfectly still. I don’t feel my heart beat or hear myself breathe. I have no sense of the world around me, just a sense of existence. I am aware of only myself. The world around me, in my waking life, feels far away. All is void and timeless. This does not always happen as I awake, but when it does, I find this to be as peaceful as I can ever be.

I wish I could give you the whole story about Mrs. Song and the blond kid and the men locked in my house in Mall City, but I can’t. I don’t know exactly what is happening there.

I experienced a few brief flashes of Dreamland Four the other night. I even went back and read my most recent reports for clues, to see what I should be thinking about. Maybe to see if I could get lucid there. (I never remember to try lucid dreaming when I am dreaming. It only happened that one time.) In review, I noticed that, at first, I reported no graffiti or horses. Later, I said I saw these things sometimes. To clarify, I do see horses sometimes, in the distance, on the roads near my house. I recall that now for sure. And the only place I am certain of graffiti is just as you get into downtown coming south on 7th Street. A couple of buildings are tagged, but it is not overdone or outrageous, and they are not vacant. I don’t know what the graffiti says. I recall walking around over here looking for the tea shop. The rest of the city is quite clean.

In my dream the other night I was in my mall, up in The Bazaar, carrying my clipboard and pen. The tea shop was no longer vacant. But it was no longer a tea shop, and Mrs. Song was not there. They were selling clothes and purses. A man was at the counter. I got the impression that I should have been handing him one of those brown paper packages, and he seemed confused when I had nothing to give him. I also remember driving to and from my house. Not being inside at all, just driving nearby. It was early morning. Misty fog. I saw horses nearby.

I recognized these places but can’t put together what was happening there. That’s it.

Trying to force the memory of a dream - you may know how difficult that can be. You can’t always do it. Sometimes fog and horses and quizzical looks from strangers are all you get. Putting in the effort to remember may even create false memory. Fiction. Illusion.

Everyone’s mind wanders to some degree whether we like it or not. If you are trying to recall a dream, or something else you want to remember, you may end up thinking about something else, entirely. In bobbling through my thoughts over the last month, I recall now that I wanted to tell you more about Preet Chandi. I have been forgetting this, so here it is.

I reported on her last year when she walked to the South Pole solo for the second time. Then I mentioned her a few weeks ago in my 2023 year in review. The day after I posted that, I visited her website to discover that she had done it again! She trekked solo to the South Pole for a third time! This time without fanfare, without daily reports to the outside world, focused on pushing herself to break her own records, and attained the round trip female speed record, going from Hercules Inlet to the South Pole and back, 1,130 kilometers (702 miles) in 31 days, 13 hours and 19 minutes.

I wonder about this obsession of hers. Why go and do this a second and third time? You can read all about it, on her website, in articles about her, in the children’s book she recently published to inspire young girls to follow their hearts and dreams, and you may still never get it. Walking through endless white haze at the bottom of the world to manifest her personal dream, is she able to dissect her memories of each expedition, or do they all blend into one? If I ever get the chance to ask her, I will.

Out there alone on the ice, there is no doubt that her mind must wander to some degree, that her thoughts must shift constantly, while looking forward, sometimes into a solid white sky that melds with the horizon, down to her compass, and back again. If ever there were anyone with a lot of time for uninterrupted thought, she has certainly met that criteria.

She probably dreamt when she slept. What are her Dreamlands like? Has she found a narrative to follow? Did she spend her waking life thinking them through since she had the opportunity to spend more time for recall, as I suspect? Maybe. Or perhaps she gave little thought to her dreams, letting them slip away like morning mist and sifting snow.

Preet reported that on her first expedition she pushed herself so much that she was sleep deprived and began hallucinating. She does not go into detail on what those hallucinations were. Could those hallucinations qualify as dreams? Does the brain produce thoughts like dreams to help a tired person cope? It is widely accepted that dreams and hallucinations are two different things.

But what if they are not?

Pushing this idea to the edge of science fiction, we may consider that true hallucinations are manifestations of things we encounter in our dreams, and if those things are encountered through a process of quantum entanglement with ourselves in another dimension or parallel timeline, might they not be windows to those other places? Might they be an experience of another realm of existence touching this one?

I don’t know, Mike. That’s quite a stretch.

It is, but I am not saying that is what hallucinations are. I am merely asking questions.

Rainforest shamans have been guiding ayahuasca users on their spiritual journeys for thousands of years with the direct purpose of reaching another state of being. Utilizing this psychoactive drug is meant to find peace and heal whatever negativity one feels in waking life. This is the same reason people get into heroin, cocaine, fentanyl, or anything else that offers an altered state of consciousness. When people get high enough, they certainly hallucinate and feel separated from the world around them. Perhaps they do reach another plane of existence, their thoughts wandering the multiverse to entangle with another part of themselves.

If your thoughts manifest within you, where do they go? Do you keep them within you, or can you reach out to the universe with your thoughts in some mysterious way? Or, when a thought you do not expect comes to you - where does it come from?

No way to know for sure, but if we take a moment to consider quantum entanglement, and use an example presented to us in popular science fiction (like the power of The Force in Star Wars), the idea that we are able to communicate with both ghosts and people across interstellar space using only our minds, explains a lot.

Many people believe that they can communicate with spirits. I am not citing any specific examples, but there are lots and lots of stories out there. Stories of talking with the dead go back forever. Bizarre tales of reincarnation and past lives and thought transfer - you name it. Weird stuff has happened to lots of people in all walks of life from every culture on every continent.

So, what is the common thread?

I have an idea, but first, think about the Sokushinbutsu - Buddhist monks who thought themselves to death.

They got so deep into meditation that they sat down and starved themselves while just thinking about whatever they were thinking about and died. Is there really some idea, some single thought the mind is able to conjure that is so fantastic that it becomes central and core to your being, shutting out all other things, even self-preservation? Apparently so.

Did they find what they were looking for? Unless you can figure out how to reach your own state of blissful oblivion and disappear within yourself, you will never know. They may have had heart attacks and not made contact with any spiritual beings or alternate dimensions at all.

However, the question comes back to what if they did?

Philosopher Alan Watts recorded hours of lectures on the subjects of Eastern religions and all things cosmic, groovy, and mind expanding. His work is profound, and still studied in-depth now, some 50 years since his death. If you have not heard his lectures, I highly recommend listening, for no other reason than to open yourself up to thinking about some things you may not have given much thought to before.

He had ideas on lucid dreaming and these monks who thought themselves to death. He said way more than I can elaborate on here, but his point always came back to the self, to you. That you are your own creator. That your choices make up who you are. And that you are already who you are, whether you know it or not, no matter what you strive for. He gets heavy. Alan Watts also has more questions than answers. That is a good thing. It provokes thought. Still, however a thought manifests, even when an idea is planted by a philosopher, or a cleric, or whoever, it all comes back to what you think of that thought.

I mentioned Keith Richards a while back. How he wanted to get that sound, an elusive sound he had been chasing his entire life. Some exotic guitar twang that is only in his head. Trying to hit that chord just right has been his life’s work.

This is the thing about thought progression. Everybody has their own path. A body of work. Every person has their own unique goal, and whether they talk about it or not, they think about it. And it is who they are.

Preet Chandi, Keith Richards, and the mummified Buddhist monks all have that in common. Everybody has some singular thing that resonates with them.

That single thought is what you expel to the universe. It is within you, around you, and waiting for you far away, all at once. Sort of like The Force, surrounding us, penetrating us, binding the galaxies together.

That single thought is both the seed and the harvest of your body of work.

Could you read everything that one person writes? Probably. Can you watch every single movie a director ever made? Sure. Or every film your favorite actor has been in? Maybe, if you can find them. You can certainly try to enjoy a person’s body of work. In this example it is easier to focus on artists than a mechanic, or a plumber, or an accountant, or a baker, or a landscaper, but they all have their bodies of work, too.

Can you listen to all of the music of a single musician? Absolutely. Can you enjoy their entire body of work though? No. But you can get close.

This is because music, like so many other things, is collaborative. When you hear a song, you are not listening to just one artist, and you are not just hearing everyone in the band. You are hearing an echo of whatever inspiration drove that song into being. The same goes for a finely prepared meal. That chef required not just the food itself, but training that was handed down, perhaps through centuries, from others who we can never know.

Thoughts are passed on.

There are bands I like, whose music it is fun to know that I have heard all of, like the works of Pink Floyd, Billy Joel, Led Zeppelin, and lots of others. When I discovered that Fleetwood Mac started out long before Lindsay Buckingham and Stevie Nicks joined the band, I went back and listed to the old stuff. Peter Green played guitar and sang some great blues tracks when they first started out in the 1960’s. Once I heard that, I decided to listen to all the rest of his stuff that he did without Fleetwood Mac.

Then I got a look at everybody who ever played with Fleetwood Mac at one time or another and I realized what a truly collaborative effort it all was. Then I sought out each individual musician and their bodies of work and went and listened to all of them, too.

This was no easy task. It took me a couple years and I finally decided I heard most of it, but don’t think I heard everything. Every band member, including Mick Fleetwood and John McVie, all did solo work and collaborated with others. It was a lot of music to get through. Mike Campbell, who joined the band in 2018, has cut records and toured with just about every other rock band you can imagine.

The tendrils of talent reach out far and wide, not just in terms of time back to the 1960’s, but to hundreds of other musicians throughout the world developing a wide range of musical styles. In some songs and albums, I could sense the culmination and influence of things I had heard before. Even if it was a thin thread of sound; a guitar lick, a drum beat, a piano clack, I could sense the connection between the artists, even when they had not ever played together, and possibly never met.

Fleetwood Mac and the musicians who contributed to it have a common thread that you can hear. Of all of Fleetwood Mac’s songs, it all comes down to Albatross.

This simple instrumental, recorded in 1968, has been performed and re-recorded over and over again, by later band members. It is soft, and slow, and lovely, like a nice dream. It is an echo of the past and an inspiration for a lot of other music. You can hear a sense of this song in every Fleetwood Mac musician, whether they are playing with the band or somebody else. It is like a constant thought that they are reaching back to. A genesis. Listen to any other song that any of them have done, and you can feel Albatross in there.

Physicists tell us that the most abundant thing in the universe is dark matter. They can’t measure it, but it is believed to make up 95% of everything. They can’t prove it exists, and just like a thought, you can’t prove that it does not.

So, are thoughts in such abundance that they easily tie us to all of those things we only see in our dreams, just like dark matter? Are there invisible notes of music that reach out from one mind to another, like Keith Richards hears? Does the inspiration to keep trudging miles forward in spite of freezing temperatures come from the universe itself? Did those monks achieve absolute bliss?

I don’t know. I am certainly not out of questions, but I don’t have any answers, either. Just that, maybe, some of this might make sense to somebody, and they will get it, and share my thoughts.

As far as what all this means, I make no claims. I have found no way to measure a thought, or to wrest control of one to find out where it came from, or discover where they go. Everyone is free to interpret the science, the mystery of dreams, déjà vu, ghosts, and hallucinations as they wish. Maybe there are other worlds that some people are lucky enough to touch briefly on rare occasions.

Or maybe all of these things are just our imagination.

It is just something to think about.

If you are new to the Rembis Report and would like to read any of the previous issues, PLEASE CLICK HERE to access the archives. To read it from the beginning, PLEASE GET A COPY of The Rembis Report: An Observation.

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