Wake Up and Slap that Left Hemisphere

Hallucinations are more plentiful than cocaine at a 1980s Malibu beach house party. The psychic function has no direction. A wild throng carouses through the mind, brooding demons appear, then morph into reflections from the past, which suddenly dominate, then disappear.

That’s not just me staring at the bottom of my sixth glass.

It’s all of us while sleeping.

After especially vigorous nights, we wake up and go, “Man, that was some wild shit.”

Please forward this newsletter to the sleepwalkers in your life

I heard awhile back that Muslims are converting to Catholicism because they keep having dreams of the Virgin Mary. I get the impression these aren’t “one-off” conversions. A trickle, a wave, a tsunami . . . beats me, but it happens.

Mary, mother of Jesus, pointing the way to Jesus. If you’re Catholic, you believe that’s what she does, which lends a tubful of credibility that something real is appearing to those Muslims.

If you’re a modernist, you dismiss dreams altogether. Sure, you can admit a little Sigmund into your worldview. Maybe that dream about defecating in plain view of everyone says something about your own fears, anxieties, and copro challenges. But as a pointer to anything real? That’s more inadmissible to the modern mind than a victim’s promiscuity in a rape trial.

Moderns respect what we see during the day but dismiss what we see at night.

The problem is, when we’re awake, we’re often asleep. That’s why many of the most profound noggins in history have described the mass of mankind as “sleepwalkers.”

During the day, a Mardi Gras of thoughts parade through our minds, we cringe at our past antics, we concoct hallucinations about the present and the future; frick, we even hallucinate about the past: facts recede and anachronistic current presumptions morph them into something else entirely than what actually happened.

For many of us, all that happens five times before breakfast. But it’s all sleepwalking, pointing to nothing real, except for the neuroses and ulcers that result from them.

Now, if we’re asleep while we’re awake, maybe we’re awake while we sleep. Put another way, if we’re seeing less reality than we think while we’re awake, maybe we’re seeing more reality than we think while we’re asleep.

Maybe we should give those nocturnal thoughts a little respect, like those Muslims who convert to Catholicism after seeing the Virgin Mother of God.

And maybe we should give our daytime thoughts a little less respect.

Good luck with that.

The modern world is erected on Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am.” It’s the dumbest-ass thing ever, but the frick if our culture hasn’t adopted it as its starting point, its default mode, and its religion. We’re taught from toddlerhood to respect our thoughts as reliable guides to reality.

But our thoughts aren’t reliable. How many times have you freaked out about something that wasn’t real, like when a friend doesn’t reply to your email only to find out that it went to his junk box, or entertaining a calamitous prediction about the future that never materializes?

How many micro-strokes triggered by imaginary things do you need before you kick that deceitful whore called “your mind” to the curb?

We’ve always given our brains too much credit. Those sages have been referring to men as “sleepwalkers” longer than a homeless guy’s been wearing the same pair of underwear.

It’s natural.

We give our brains too much credit because we need them to survive. If we don’t trust that our brains are providing at least a measure of reliable feedback, we won’t kill that mastodon to feed our family, and we won’t provide customer service to collect our weekly paycheck.

Survival: It’s first. It’s what the left hemispheres of our brains do, and they do it well.

But “first” doesn’t mean “only.” It doesn’t even mean “most important.” It’s just “first,” which, instead of being “only” or “most important,” probably is better associated with “preliminary,” as in, “Before we can get to the good stuff, we need to deal with this preliminary bullshit.”

But the modern mindset, taking its cue from Descartes, elevated the left hemisphere past “first” to “only” and “most important.”

The result?

The left hemisphere dominates.

And it’s damn awful at comprehending reality. It grasps fragments and pastes them together in a workable framework to get us through daily life, but that’s about it.

Yet we think it’s telling us everything we need to know and everything it tells us is true. That’s a major hallucination.