Aristocrates – I doubt that it is Bob Marley’s spirit but it is certainly what you have taken in from hearing and knowing Bob. And smoking is a great thing to help create images of people – created out of our own memories and dream process. Remember that at your core you are everything.
I quote something that shows how much we take in unconsciously copy. It is a personal experience by a famous psychologist – Philip Zimbardo.
Humans have an ability to ‘read’ body language, but it usually takes place unconsciously. It was probably developed in the human race prior to the emergence of spoken language as we know it today. Now it remains as an almost unused function, but operates at times during shock or ‘trance’ conditions — i.e., when the conscious personality surrenders its decision making and critical faculties.
“It was my first day back to work after recovering from a traumatic automobile accident. I was lucky to be alive with only torn ligaments in my leg and a concussion: the driver had been killed by the impact of a head—on collision. As I hobbled up the three flights of stairs supported by a crutch, my initial joy of returning to school was suddenly suspended. With each step I took a strange sensation occurred: I could ‘feel’ myself BECOMING my younger brother, George. Not IMAGINE ‘as if’ I were George, but being transformed physically to be him.
I perceived my face changing to be his face and my body doing likewise. My limp became more pronounced, and it took great strength to climb the last flight. In a panic, I shut myself in my office, not wanting anyone to witness this strange transformation. I avoided looking at my reflection in the window for fear I would see his face and not my own. Had I really become my brother or was I MERELY hallucinating? Time passed during which I tried frantically to relax, ‘to pull myself together,’ and make sense of my distorted sense impressions. After all, I was a normal, serious scientist type not given to such flights of fancy. I lived by the reality principle.
My secretary and colleagues knocked and came into the office before I could say I was busy. They were worried by my abrupt disappearing act. They were relieved to see I was ‘my old self again,’ and I was relieved to see them responding to me as if I were Phil and not George. A glance at my reflection confirmed my hope. I had changed back, ‘or was no longer George or George was no longer manifesting himself in me.’ Whatever? Weird, no? But why?
When we were children, George had infantile paralysis and for a time had to wear leg braces and walk with crutches. I would accompany him to therapy sessions and observe his frustration, embarrassment, and anger at not being able to function normally. Since we were only eighteen months apart in age, I could readily empathise with his feelings. I may have also felt guilty at being glad I too was not crippled. Once I recall volunteering to exchange places with him in the swimming pool exercises, but the nurse chided me, ‘being crippled is not fun and games young man.’ I was about four at the time.
As I hobbled up the stairs to my office some twenty five years later, the pattern of feedback sensory stimulation reactivated this prerecorded motor action plan. Memories of George’s posture and movement were enacted. I had retained mimicry responses of his motor activity that I had observed so intensely. Now I was changing places with him, but not consciously and not volitionally. The suddenness and vividness of the hallucination was frightening because it was so real, yet at the same time contradicted my knowledge of reality.
Philip Zimbardo calls his experience an hallucination, perhaps because he felt fear. However, if we remember something we do not call it an hallucination but a memory. Realising that we remember via body feelings, posture, emotion as well as images and words, enables us to see that Philip, because he was in a similar situation to that which his brother had been, remembered a whole set of responses. During dreams and LifeStream such experiences are not unusual. When they are not seen as abnormal we can accept them without anxiety and they add to our range of information and experience. In fact, if Philip had not been disturbed by his experience, but had sought it as a means of understanding his brother, he could have gathered a great deal of information from it. If we realise that we gather such information from everybody we contact, we can see that we have a very rich source of insight into the lives of those around us. These are important points to understand when we are looking our dreams.
Tony
