Pagan Thoughts

When you sit quietly with your eyes closed in darkness, your brain interprets this situation as a signal to start shutting itself down for sleep.  Sleep inducing hormones such as melatonin are released at the same time your heart rate and circulation are reduced due to lack of movement.  You feel swept away on a sea of quiet relaxation.  This pleasant experience may be light sleep state hypnosis, not meditation at all, and thus does you little more good than taking a nap.  Meditation means that you are relaxed as if sleeping, but your consciousness is fully and intensely awake.  Therefore, if you meditate with your eyes closed, the room must remain brightly lit, so that a significant amount of light passes through the eyelids.

The most basic approach to meditation is to relax, let go, and do nothing.  Surrender to the moment and watch yourself as a silent witness.  If thoughts come to mind, then observe the thoughts without adding to them by your active participation.  Be a detached and passive observer and simply feel your most basic fundamental being.  This inherently immense entity has been called "the ground of being."

http://home.att.net/~meditation/MeditationHandbook.html 

The only part of a dream that I remember from my last slumber was: someone I knew (I can’t remember who) was Jabba the Hut, and was eating animals (like cats & dogs) & small children…

I’d come across 2 articles/sites mentioning dreaming today, so I thought I should start a category about dreaming… One site, my bf introduced to me; about lucid dreaming. He has lucid dreams all the time, & finds it interesting that I’ve never been able to do it. I never really knew it existed, heh. But, sometimes, I do realize that I’m dreaming. Like, when I hit the snooze alarm 50 billion times, every time I lay back down I have a mini dream, & I’m usually looking around like "what the fuck is going on in my head?!" Lol. Another site I came across on CS was about how dreams are a form of reality, or perhaps your spirit visiting the spirit world. I was taught in psychology that dreams are most likely your brain’s way of digesting the day’s information. Which kind of makes sense, but…using that theory to explain my dreams?! Far from any possible means of digesting information. I’ll explain the scenery of 2 of my dreams, both of which seem to follow the idea of the spiritual world…

Two main sceneries pop up once in a while. One is of a 4 story mansion, with many many different rooms, and many different things going on in each room. Lots of sullen people, but some bright ones. There’s also a fairly large, cluttered backyard, with a battered car & playset. And it’s always a foggy, cloudy day. The other scenery is of a set of large, almost castle-like buildings.