I’ve been using the Muse S for over a month to track my sleep every night. According to the device I spend very little time in the deep sleep stage. Here are three recent hypnograms showing my sleep stages and deep sleep intensity:
The Muse S also tracks “Deep Sleep Intensity,” a measurement of delta activity (associated with deep sleep).
Would a “sufficient” amount of delta activity be equivalent to spending time in deep sleep, with regards to cleaning the brain of gunk, the accumulation of which is associated with dementia?
Note: I mainly posted this thread to facilitate asking questions to Ed O’Malley for the next sleep seminar. I’d be interested in any opinions/thoughts/information on this from others as well. My questions:
Would a “sufficient” amount of delta activity be equivalent to spending time in deep sleep, with regards to cleaning the brain of “gunk” (e.g. Beta-amyloid), the accumulation of which is associated with dementia? Do you think I’m getting enough deep sleep?
In an earlier sleep seminar, you told someone that Ambien was especially good at producing deep sleep. Is that functionally equivalent to natural deep sleep?
Earlier in my life I used Ambien every night for 10 years – it was awesome – then stopped because a new doctor told me prolonged Ambien use is associated with an increased dementia risk. What is your view on this?
Did Ambien facilitate or retard dream activity or perhaps it had no effect? I remember Ed telling a woman who was similarly advised to drop Ambien for the same reason, that that was not a great piece of advice.
I don’t recall an explicit effect on dream activity. But it was a long time ago that I stopped taking it. What I do remember is getting to sleep easily and sleeping much better than usual. And also, a couple of times I didn’t get to sleep right away and experienced interesting hallucinations.
For me lucid dreaming is a fascinating state of consciousness with myriad potentials for psychological and spiritual growth.
Your perception that it is obviously not Dharma I’m aiming for is interesting; it is definitely an assumption, and not necessarily accurate. I’m not sure what you mean by Dharma, but if you mean literally believing everything Buddhists tell me, then maybe that’s not what I’m aiming for. If you mean truth or Truth, then maybe I am aiming for it, but a) that doesn’t mean I’ll actually get there; b) I don’t take an uncritical approach to such things.
If you can find that post I’d like to see it, so I can determine how I conveyed that impression. To be clear, I don’t find the concept of reincarnation ridiculous, I am merely skeptical that there is convincing evidence of it, I’m also deeply suspicious of things that I feel highly motivated to believe are true, and I believe the human mind (including my own) has an enormous talent for self-deception.
One of my favorite novels of all time, which I’ve re-read several times, is Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson, which involves a “soul family” going through many lives over about 800 years, meeting up in-between in the bardo. I would love for that to be how things work. I’m just not convinced that that is The Truth.
Also, one of my favorite parables is the one about the person who asks the Zen Master “Is there life after death?” “I don’t know.” “But you’re a Zen Master!” “Yes, but not a dead one.”
If I end up in an after-death dream realm, I’ll be very happy about it – up until demons start eating my face off, probably.
I currently do not consider it likely that there could be compelling evidence. I remember an interview with Ken Wilber in which he mentioned the book Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation, and noted that they are suggestive but don’t actually prove reincarnation. Even if those cases are valid, the information people are accessing could be coming to them via some means other than “a soul floated out of one body and into another, preserving the continuity of an individual from one life to another.”
Sujata, I thought of a couple of scenarios that I might consider interesting evidence IF they happened, but right now my computer is nonfunctional and I’m typing on my phone. Maybe I’ll have more to say when my computer is working again. Meanwhile, if you have faith in such phenomena, cool. I have no direct personal experience of such things at this point in time. If I met such an Arhat I’d probably react like: cool, I see that you are reporting a subjective experience of remembering past lives, I wonder what’s going on with that. If someone is reporting precognitive dreams I might suggest they start putting them in a predictions registry. Dream teachings can be evaluated on their own merits, regardless of their (unknown) origin (Also I welcome any incorporeal teachers who would like to show up and bend my dream ear). If something like reincarnation happens I wonder if subsequent iterations are like recurrent dream characters in the Kozmic Dreeeem.
Cool, what does “consciousness” mean in this context? How does “it” migrate? Does it store information on the previous life?
To me selflessness implies that I’m not any kind of essential persistent individual from one breath to the next, let alone one life to another. More like a temporary standing wave in an ocean of consciousness.
If you mean truth or Truth, then maybe I am aiming for it, but a) that doesn’t mean I’ll actually get there; b) I don’t take an uncritical approach to such things.