The Science of Sleep - LoRe (Lessons of Royce)

THE SCIENCE OF SLEEP

(From Royce's Footnotes)

I have had the fruitful opportunity to receive a lecture on the technicalities of sleep, conducted at my company  - Tropicana office tower.

The speaker is a sleep doctor, or sleep specialist, which can also be your GP or Ear, Nose & Throat specialist. There is the American Board of Sleep Medicine - http://absm.org/ to understand the collective of Sleep scholars in the field of Somnology.

R.E.M - Rapid Eye Movement

There are 5 stages of REM sleep and we begin our sleep by entering heavier, uninterrupted sleep at the start and progress into longer alternating intervals of light REM sleep and Deep (Non-REM sleep).

TOOLS OF THE TRADE

(PSG)
http://www.webmd.com/sleep-disorders/guide/polysomnogram

EEG (electroencephalogram) to measure and record brain wave activity

EMG (electromyogram) to record muscle activity such as face twitches, teeth grinding, and leg movements; it also helps in determining the presence of REM stage sleep.

EOG (electro-oculogram) to record eye movements; these movements are important in determining the different sleep stages, particularly REM stage sleep.

EKG (electrocardiogram) to record heart rate and rhythm

Nasal airflow sensor to record airflow

Snore microphone to record snoring activity

SLEEP DISORDERS

These are just some of the known / common sleep disorders that people experience, but equal to the variety of minds out there, surely there are also more types of sleep disorders that remain unrecorded and undiscovered.

Approved Solutions

I personally am an advocate of natural remedies such as the healing art of scent.

Aromatherapy

The allopathic medical community would recommend Melatonin supplements, of course, you should seek professional medical advice before going for these.

Melatonin Supplement

Hope this information helps you get a better quality of sleep at night.

Good Zzz's to you.

Prompted Writing: Tell a story set in a place where the landscape reworks itself nightly.

Working Title: When All Was One

0.1. One. Many. Humongous. INFINITE.^1000

Our existence expanded from the smallest of pinprick of vibration into a massive cataclysm of exploding energy.

The blossom of energy thrust itself forward at the speed of light and left a stream called Time.

The next few seconds, we were One no longer, but disintegrated into many impossible divisions, with such force that we are still expanding as you are reading this.

In those first billion nights, our universe was but a swirling mess of  cross-elemental marriages between Protons and Electrons, turning us into unions called Hydrogen.

It was always night then, for we were the stars.
We had only the consciousness that we prefer to stick together than not, and so, clusters of our Hydrogens gathered and exploded in constant Hydrogen bombs (which was a form of copulation).

Each night was a dance of creation and destruction, and to us back then, each night was a billion years.
Then suddenly the dance...changed. We created unions called Helium, then more complex unions came from our reshuffling.

EONS.

We have mastered the dance of creation and destruction. We gathered in such masses, and with such closeness, that we were called the planets

Gigantic clouds that danced to destruction pressed against themselves so tightly that they tore through the stream of time, falling into a sucking black abyss.

Other Clouds danced to creation, releasing massive waves of energy which formed the light of our universe.

The most basic of our dances is called Gravity. The pulling together. We find similarity, direct and complimentary, and attempt to regather in the semblance of our past One-ness.

Warning: Over doing Gravity will cause everyone to trip on each other and implode into a Black Hole or fall outwards to trip on all surrounding Clouds and spill their essence as a Supernova.

Our Music is Electromagnetic, a system that governs our steps at every level, pushing, flowing, repelling...it compels our motion.

Finally, Our gathering was called Mass. clusters of us so tightly gripped that we formed a one...not quite the One we used to be, but at least partially fulfilling our desire to unite.

And there is one of our largest mass, a Galaxy, milky swirls of glitter parading down the streams of time.
Night was our state for we are the stars.
In our dance, the light shall ever blaze as the glory that was once One.

Those Eyes of Blue Skies

Those Eyes of Blue Skies  


Light refracted in those clear blue eyes, seemingly to capture the exact hue of patchy cerulean sky above our heads. Those pair of lash-framed pools smiled, fleeting hints of secret knowledge danced in its depths. They seem to be focused on something in the distance and then back at my own deep brown irises, smiling right into the core of me. Transmuted into an old and familiar ache that begins to thump...thump...thump, somewhere much lower than where my heart should be, and simultaneously in my throat as well.


I held his gaze a moment more than I dared. Mentally chastising myself, I tear my sight away to find sudden interest in the floor. Side by side, two pairs of footsteps walking down a busy street, indistinguishable from the cadence of city-dwellers going about their lives, only separated by my own  mental bubble of 'Us'.


A fleeting taste of disgust creeps inside my throat.

'Weak.'

The thought came unbidden. A statement. It just felt like I shouldn't be so weak from a simple look! Do I not have any sense left in my head? Has all my past experiences not thought me anything?

He stops by the cold grey marble tables at the cafe, just as the light of day faded. With a twinkle in his now darker blue eyes, he announced that he will get us both Chai Lattes. I smiled, nodded and I kept my shroud of mystery as tightly as I could, betraying nothing in my expression.

The quicksands of time had robbed us of 2 years and it was the last day that I could still see him face to face. I stared at his back, scanned his leather jacket, willing a hole to sear through it as he waited in line. Perhaps if my wishes began to come true, I could wish us together...

I held the brown corrugated cup in my hands; Steam wafted in the air; a busker sat across the street strumming his guitar and a breeze blew twirling leaves onto the ground.

We were talking and I wanted to hold him like that in my head forever. Spirited, smiling...warm...

"Hey?" he asked.

His voice broke through my reverie.

"Hmm? Oh sorry, you were saying?"

I smiled gently to reassure him. He probably knew what was going on in my head, but tried to cheer me up anyway.

He was always trying to get me to see the brighter side of things... and I even saw it sometimes... but only through his eyes.

I absentmindedly tugged on my left earlobe again. A tell-tale habit of mine when I felt insecure. I took a deep sip, felt my heart climb up my throat again and said :

"I'm going to miss you."

yet the unsaid words hung in my mind.

{[ I still love you ]}

We locked eyes for a moment, the briefest moment; but to my bared soul, it was a silent eternity, sinking into the depths of those eyes...

************

My lids swept open and my pupils dilated in shadow-streaked darkness. (Inhale.)

A dream of a memory, one year past.

It had seemed so real, but leaked away as soon as I tried desperately to grasp it. Like slipping quicksand through fingers, only the sensation is left when you close your palms.

364 days and a quarter make up one year, but a year means very little when you've left your heart to drown in someone else's eyes. I regain an empty calm, staring out the barred windows into the abandoned night.

Awaiting the dawn to paint the skies, the color of his eyes.

Theories on the Spirit World and Ghosts

This was a reply to a fellow mystic whom discussed a few ideas about hauntings. As a psychically sensitive person who has lived in a haunted house before, I feel that my personal experience on the matter is relevant and based on careful thought :Royce Tan

Hey, Thank you for the reply. I too have lived in a haunted house with a few family members. My observation is similar to yours, true hauntings rarely cause harm to the ones who experienced it.

The thing I question is, Why do only specific individuals experience the hauntings personally and almost never on an equal scale. Meaning that if the spirit were a single purposeful entity trying to communicate with us via exerting equal spiritual force on all living souls within the vicinity, should we not all receive equal amounts of it's energies and therefore experience the same thing?

In simpler terms = if a singer stood in front of us, singing for us, would we not all hear the same song? yet spiritual experience is always individual and unique, some smelling things, hearing things, seeing things. Different experiences within the same haunted location. This further supports my theory that the area has a Dimension/space-time anomaly, that leads us to perceive different strange things in very individualized ways.

The individualized ways such as hearing, seeing and feeling are again indicative that it isnt' the Singer (spirit) with the intention of communication, but the Listener (the haunted) that has the subconscious intention to 'hear' the transposed and dislocated Sounds (ghostly experiences) recorded in that space.

I am still unsure if the land is 'recording' these energies or if the land simply has a weaker boundary between different Times, allowing us to sense past or future Living people in the same location yet physically in a different time.

I've always wondered how come mediums can connect to a person from the past in the present yet have their timelines run parallel. I'm a psychic precognitive dreamer (I dream of the future) so I always saw it as connecting to my future self. Ghosts to me are leftover energies of the past because I think the original bulk of the soul & energies have moved on. This for me explains why ghosts fade in and out, they seem to be stuck on repeat and bound to certain geographical locations. It's like leaving a recording of your soul upon the land which acts as a giant recorder. You hear the sounds and occasionally see the video replay but the actual person is already gone.For me these vibrations that are picked up, are not so much significant of the 'ghosts' intentions but rather, your mind is attuned to that particular energy and that's why you pick it up.perhaps the message of the spirits is dependent on your 'mental channel' It;s like when you tune into a certain radio channel. It's not so much what the radio is trying to tell you,the radio station is going to keep playing with or without you, but rather, what your mental receiver is trying to listen to. With this, I think you have a very direct link to your subconscious and your senses are actually indicative of what Your subconscious intentions are, rather than the spirits.

I formulated this whole idea because if the Spirit world does exist as an unseen dimension side by side with ours, then it must be bound by certain laws of physics as well. Energies cannot be created or destroyed, simply transmuted into another form. The resulting conversion of such energies are usually able to be observed.

Yet, we assume that when we die, part of our energies gets turned into a 'Spirit" which is usually undetectable within the physical dimension, yet able to exert force and presence once in a while. This idea is weak to me because the transmuted energies disappear and then reappear only during a haunting. Where is the potential energy stored in between that? Energy for the most part is visible when active as fire, light, electric. When it is dormant like tension, chemical and potential energies, they need to be stored in something physical ; like a spring coil, food or ball at the top of a slide.

Spirits would need to have the power to store energy in nothing or perhaps another dimension, then the power to transmute that energy out of nothing and over to our dimension or directly into our perceptions. If a Soul is only one third of a Full human (Body + Mind & Soul) , then a full human should be three times more powerful and able to transmute invisible energies across dimensions to other people.

Reiki and Absent/spiritual healing could be indicative of that power, so maybe it is possible for energy to be stored in certain wavelengths that are undetected by us. Such as microwaves, infrared and electromagnetic fields. But if this theory applies then we should be able to "haunt" fellow humans much more effectively than spirits.

Sorry for the rant, but I just love considering the world of spirits.
Hope this is another interesting read :)

Virtues and Vices

Last night I had a dream... I lived in a world where everyone is born as a killing machine. Each person had skills that were meant for killing, and the world was filled with disgusting bloodthirsty creatures. I ran across the walls, defying gravity, the sweat prickling across my brow.
My fingers shot forth like spikes right into the horned beasts ribs and pierced its heart. It felt like a responsibility. It felt like my duty to just keep killing and growing in strength. For what purpose, I do not know, but I just had to kill.

I woke up to another dreary day.... Responsibility....
I remember many years ago my dad was the one that thought me that word. I had ran away to play with my cousin, to the bowling centre. I remember that split second where I had to choose between calling my dad and letting him know that I wanted to stay longer and risk him ordering me to go home, or I could just turn my phone off and I can play some more. I stared at the phone for a few more seconds, and I switched my phone off.

Needless to say, My dad tried calling me forever and then found me in the bowling alley. I was scolded like mad as he was worried that i had been kidnapped or something. That day, he taught me that responsibility meant that I had to put my commitments to others first, before my own playful desires.

It's a good lesson I've learnt. Now I try my best to consider others before myself. To put down my Pride. One of my deadliest sins. Shaza told me about the 7 heavenly virtues that i meant to fight the 7 deadly sins. Found this on Wiki


I love the Latin words, this is the 7 sins and virtues chart.

Virtue	Latin	Gloss	(Vice)	(Latin)	Virtue's Meaning
Chastity	Castitas	Purity	Lust	Luxuria	Abstaining from sexual conduct according to one's state in life. Embracing of moral wholesomeness and achieving purity of thought through education and betterment.
Temperance	Temperantia	Self-Control	Gluttony	Gula	Constant mindfulness of others and one's surroundings; practicing self-control, abstention, and moderation.
Charity	Caritas	Will, Generosity	Greed	Avaritia	Generosity. Willingness to give. A nobility of thought or actions.
Diligence	Industria	Persistence, Effort	Sloth	Acedia Tristitia	A zealous and careful nature in one's actions and work. Decisive work ethic. Budgeting one's time; monitoring one's own activities to guard against laziness.(The Vice "Acedia" is more commonly known as "Sloth")
Patience	Patientia	Peace	Wrath	Ira	Forbearance and endurance through moderation. Resolving conflicts peacefully, as opposed to resorting to violence. The ability to forgive; to show mercy to sinners.
Kindness	Humanitas	Satisfaction	Envy	Invidia	Charity, compassion, friendship, and empathy without prejudice and for its own sake.
Humility	Humilitas	Bravery, Modesty	Pride	Superbia	Modest behavior, selflessness, and the giving of respect. Giving credit where credit is due; not unfairly glorifying one's own self.

The Dream of 8 Powers

For the night of 10th Jan and 12th Jan 2010. I had the most amazing dreams.

The dream on the night of 10th Jan was a dream of 8 powers.
I was in a warehouse where they kept powerful relics that endowed its wearer with superpowers. I was looking at the items when someone invisible attacked me from all sides. A zipping noise suggested that I couldn't see him because he was moving too fast.

My eyes darted around the room when it fell upon an item that looked very much like a shiny white headphone.It was called Sonido. This headgear will make you move faster than the speed of sound.

As soon as I put them on, I could see the guy who was attacking me with his knife. He tried to take a swipe at me, but I was moving faster than him now. I blocked his attack and grabbed onto another item. A purple kimono robe with gold scripts running down the lapels.

Putting it on gave me the powers of invincibility, strength and walking through walls.

I must have taken a few other items because I escaped from the slasher easily, knowing that I now possessed 8 different powers. Powers that I wanted to exploit! nyehehehe

I stepped into the entrance of the classiest chinese restaurant that you have ever seen, but the waiter wouldn't allow me to enter. I just looked at him and said:

"Number 5~" (echoes)

It was mind control, and he let me walk in immediately. I began taking food off other people's table , but everyone was under my influence, no one noticed me stealing their food. I was feeling so excited by the rush of power.

Just behind the restaurant, there was a rave party in session. For some reason, I was very annoyed as I couldn't get in, my powers were somehow drowned as I walked closer to that place. Someone there must have had a nullifying ability. I was so pissed that I stood back and concentrated with all my might.

"EIGHT!"

The earth trembled as I clenched my fists as hard as I could. People stopped dancing and began screaming. My heart filled with the glee of vengeance and fear that my powers were corrupting me.

I woke up as the world began to crumble.

Battle with Demon

As the dream consumes me, My mind opens. When I go under, reality is suspended.

I stood in front of the white wall station of the Zoo. The colours were washed out, like someone had bleached my vision.

My family walked with me to the gates of the guard house. They went through, as the guard with the beady eyes looked at me, frowning, staring, he shut the gates on me as I tried to step through. The gates slammed into my face and I was caught on the border.

That was when I knew something was wrong with the Zoo.
*Flash*

I was walking into the room where all visitors had to stay a night before they could enter the Zoo. It had a window that looked out into the compound. The Savannah winds blew dust against the windows. There was no signs of life at all for a zoo.
*Flash*

My mom ran in the next morning, panicking that she'd forgotten something. Whatever it was, I looked up at the ceiling, and there was a hole in the roof. I simply told her, I could get it. I just knew it at that moment, I could fly to wherever I wanted.

I rose out of the building like it was completely natural. Rushing through the city with no horizon. I could not see a single inch of sky. I needed to see the sky. I wasn't flying high enough. Everytime I tried to go higher, there was another glass building in my vision. I realised that my imagination wasn't strong enough. I couldn't imagine blue skies and a horizon!

With that, the buildings gave way. and all I saw was a skyline of blue. The dark buzzing blue of a blank computer screen. The glass of the buildings showed me flying full speed, but in slow motion. I was swathed in billowing white cloth and the reflection was an absolutely beautiful lady.

*Flash*

I was back in the room, with the object retrieved, but nobody was there. There was something wrong here. I looked at the neatly manicured sheets and the laundered towels.; the neat pillows and the fake air of welcome. It was a trap for everyone who came to the Zoo. That's why everyone had to stay overnight. No one was supposed to actually get into the Zoo.

I looked behind me at the doorway. I hear someone call me out. I walked out and then at the doorway is a doll. A doll wearing something frilly and old. Then its head expands and contracts and opens its fangs. mouth. Teeth. Fangs. It screams at me! The eyes black holes of shadows, swirling spinning. It wants to eat me.

I stepped back in fear. and the fear expanded in my throat. It was a real demon! This was a dream. My dream, and what I think is real , becomes real. I knew I was talking directly to the demon through the dream, and the demon was angry.

I couldn't let this demon win. I had enough of it. I looked it straight in the eyes. It screamed at me. I shouted "That is enough! No more!" hands shot out of the ground to hold it in place. Fangs with spit shot at me, but it shrank a little. "You are but a demon! You have no power over me, no right to torture me. I am not afraid!"

*flash*

Accents

I dreamt I was back in KL already. I stood in front of Meng Tien (One Academy). The familiar scene of art students carrying their god-help-them huge folio bags filled my vision. There was a group talking in front of me.

Shidios perhaps? but no one stood out, and their identities kept shifting. There was a girl, (Jade Bourne I think) who was speaking to them. She had the very strange Anglo-Aussie accent that was obviously forced. I realized she went a full year later than me to Australia, yet she picked up the accent faster than I. I struggled with the decision to speak in my Malaysian slang or with the tampered Aussie tone. To be seen as an unchanged man who didn't learn anything, or to be seen as pretentious and fake?

I couldn't decide, so I woke up.

Dream Divination: I probably fear what other's will think of me after my long absence from home. The shidios are having a photoshoot and they still found a way to include me. I struggle to identify with the Royce that is still the mamak-loving Malaysian boy and the striving Career man who is trying to forge a life in Australia.