The diversity of pleasure.

Has anyone reading this ever had the experience of being the opposite of dizzy?– a sudden sensation within the head that has many of the hallmarks of dizziness, has the “feel” of it, except for the part where one feels dazed and uncomfortable, instead carrying with it the sense that one has in fact become clearer, suddenly sharp after having been comparatively dazed for some time, and instead of sickliness, a sense of wellbeing and pleasantness in that direction, in the same part of the mind that suffers when you feel dizzy and otherwise feels quiet and neutral?

I think I would be better able to describe a lot of the odd little mental and emotional experiences I have if I defined them in terms of being the opposites of things people know well. There is an opposite, for example, to feeling physically sick, and it’s not just feeling an absence of sickness, or even healthy and lifeful in a generic sort of way; it is a distinct pleasantness, a comfort, in the parts of one’s body that are normally responsible for feeling sick, and not just as the result of eating good food but a more streamlined, “clean”, pure wellbeing. Being well-fed is a pleasant sensation, but it comes with a certain fuzziness, fullness, a feeling of having something else within you that is causing the positive feelings. What I describe is more like the very tissues of one’s body deciding to feel tingly with light and pleasantness, all of their own accord. It is the experience of the direct opposite of pain; which most people would say is “pleasure”, yet have you ever felt pleasure in your temples as the result of having an “un-headache”, or in your lungs as the result of having an “un-shortness of breath” (which is different from just not having a shortness of breath, in the same way that an un-headache is not just not having a headache)?

There are more parts of the body capable of actively experiencing pleasure and feeling alive than one might think. We think the opposite of being in pain, most of the time, is a neutral state. When we think of bodily pleasure it is in a limited sense, a surface sense, the sensation on the skin of a warm blanket or a warm other person, being tickled or kissed or caressed. We don’t think about the many organs and structures of our body that get by day to day not feeling pleasure at all; our livers, our bones, our blood cells, our connective tissues. But they are capable of it.

On dreams, and the release of the “consciousness block”; idle speculation.

I took a short nap just now, having had to wake up comparatively early to take care of some things, and as I was drifting into that strange state of pre-sleep– I’ve oft heard it quoted that nobody knows what it’s like to fall asleep, but that seems to me to be untrue, or at the very least we do know what it’s like to enter the state just before falling asleep and find oneself succumbing. Admittedly I’ve usually heard this quoted in children’s fiction; perhaps the ability to sustain the state and actually note it develops with age?– I found myself noting the curious qualities of dream logic, or more precisely, since I was too awake to be dreaming and thus I don’t believe it’s limited to that state, reduced-consciousness logic. I’ve heard it said that “dream logic makes no sense” or that “anything can happen”, but I found myself noting, specifically, what seems to be the mechanism that makes this so: the part of consciousness we lose first is the part responsible for caring about whether something makes sense. It’s the part that hangs on details and will nitpick inconsistencies in literature, wants things to follow according to what they understand, in the physical world, as typically following. It allows for things to happen in a particular set, expected fashion, and if they don’t happen in such a fashion in fiction, at least within a reasonable range of leniences, experiences a failure to suspend disbelief; if they don’t happen in fact, it probably undergoes one of a wide range of experiences ranging from confusion to possibly even outright, subconscious-level denial and simple eradication of the circumstance in question from memory. (If it is possible to repress memories in mundanely traumatic situations, what else might we be repressing memories of? Admittedly this is a wild theory, yes; and it is one that comes from having just woken up, so do not take it too seriously, on top of that.) Before falling asleep, this seems to be the first thing to go, and all things are accepted as inherently possible; a perfectly ordinary and distinct plot emerges in one’s mind, and then, suddenly, Harry Potter appears! With a toad on his head.* If you’re at the point where you’re willing to accept this as a seamless transition of plot, without questioning why a character from a completely different story has appeared doing something incongruous (admittedly not so incongruous in his timeline), then you know you’ve successfully reached such a state.

My thought: what would it do to our perceptions of the world if that part of our brain were able to be turned off while otherwise conscious? Since this is ostensibly the point of meditation, entheogenic drug use, and other techniques designed to help the human (or other intelligent being) reach a “transcendent” state, I suspect I am not far from the mark in my speculations that it would allow a “purer”, more literal view of the world to free it from the expectations of “what should be”, that it would allow us to perceive things that we normally block or ignore; though of course such expectations are in place to help us handle everyday tasks successfully, and we would not want them always turned off. (As such, I also don’t feel my thoughts are exceptionally groundbreaking; they’re merely musings I’m recording.) Since the focus of perception would not be the idle fancies of one’s mind, as is the case in dreams and, arguably, drug use to a point– one might be perceiving the outside world too, but drugs also cause the thoughts to turn inwards– one would be less likely to see truly nonsensical things, such as Harry Potter, unless they were actually there, even if noticing the additional things that were present and the “raw” way in which the world was perceived would distract one from much else.

*An actual example from the “dream” scenario I was having at the time. Sometimes, I have the suspicion my dreams manage to approach insightful. Other times, they’re just bad fanfic. Of course, it may well have been doing this to prove my point; I can’t remember which thought came first.