Psychologist Jean Piaget believed that we learn about the world by constructing schemas – mental models of things, such as objects, qualities, situations, etc. These schemas are then accessed later to categorize and understand what’s currently going on. For example, you have the schema of a street in your mind, and when you see a collection of buildings on either side of a road, you interpret it as belonging to the street schema, i.e., you can easily recognize its features and understand its similarities to other streets you’ve seen before. Many of these models were built when you were a child and have only been occasionally informed since then. What happens when you learn something new?
Piaget proposed two ways we can fit new information into our schemas. The first is assimilation. This involves fitting information into the schemas that already exist in our mind. For example, a chef has all kinds of schemas for cooking. When they learn a new technique for doing something, they assimilate it into whatever the relevant schema is. No significant changes are made to the schema itself.
The second way is accommodation. This means changing a schema that you already have, or creating an entirely new schema, in order to account for this new information. For example, the chef, who is only acquainted with French cuisine, must create a new schema for Japanese cuisine because their existing schema for French food cannot account for the vastly different methods, ingredients, and recipes.
What you are probably doing right now is accommodation, if you didn’t know about the concept of schemas before. You created a new schema for the concept of schemas and made it reflect all this information.
Accommodation is more common in children for several reasons. When you’re a child, you have more reason to accommodate instead of assimilate – you’re still building your model of the world and you don’t have as many established schemas as an adult might have. You enjoy more of a healthy balance between the two. The brains of children are also more plastic – more able to adapt to changing circumstances or information. Learning is optimal in children and tends to taper off as you get older.
Schemas are key to how we interpret the world, but they can also make us stuck in what we already think.
The Christian Schema
Christians have a particular schema that they use for interpreting information in terms of Christianity. If something does not fit into the Christian schema, no accommodation is done. The schema doesn’t change in response to new information. Instead, the information is either ignored or rationalized so that it can be assimilated. Everything is still commensurate with the Christian worldview.
As we grow up, certain schemas start to matter a lot to us. They’re part of who we are. And so, when something threatens to overturn one of these treasured schemas, our reaction is cognitive dissonance, discomfort. We don’t like the idea that a schema we’ve held onto for years might be wrong.
Christians, many of whom have been Christian since they were children thanks to the brainwashing of their parents, feel profoundly uncomfortable with anything that threatens to overturn their Christian schema. So this threatening stuff is never dealt with in good faith. It’s always dismissed or incorrectly rationalized.
Same goes for the Trump voters. Everything must fit into the existing Trump schema. Anything that doesn’t is dismissed as “fake news”. The schema always comes before the truth. We always rationalize things.
Pinch Yourself
They say you should pinch yourself if you think you’re dreaming. But if you do that, you’ll just succeed in feeling your dream-body and dream-pain, just as vivid and convincing as the real things. Dreams are not like real life, but that doesn’t mean they can’t feel like it.
When you don’t have a schema for dreaming and your only schema is for awakeness, the only schema you’ll have in your dreams is awakeness. You will always assume you’re awake, even when you’re not.
In Somno Evigilabis
Remembering
In the movie Inception, a technique for realizing you’re in a dream is trying to remember what you were doing before now. How did you get here? Of course, in real dreams, you’ll always confabulate some explanation.
“I was just shopping and now I’m at Starbucks because I need another coffee.”
When you try to think back and see if you remember shopping, you’re actually prompting the creation of those memories. Memories of shopping invent themselves. See? Nothing amiss here!
Dream Marketing
When marketing departments create their ads, they’re not aiming to appeal to you. They’re aiming to appeal to the unconscious part of your mind, the part that produces your dreams. You – your consciousness – is something they want to bypass. Why? Because your consciousness is critical and nowhere near as suggestible as your unconscious mind. There’s no such thing as marketing to people. You always market to dreams.
Dreamworld
How is it possible that we can simulate entire worlds in our head that appear just as real and vivid as the real one? Are there such things as dream-atoms that make up dream-objects? Are there dream-photons and dream-quarks? Are there dream-physics and dream-gravity? Or are these things in fact not required for you to experience a physical world? Does your physical schema transcend actual physicality?
Dream Imposition
It’s possible to superimpose your dreams over reality. You hold a real person to what they did in your dreams. Your simulation of them becomes how you see them. They don’t have to actually do anything wrong. Then again, given that dreams are based on our expectations, is that such a leap?
Why are dreams usually unconscious? Why do you forget them so easily after waking up? Because if you didn’t, they would interfere with your waking schemas. You would eventually start confusing dream memories with real memories unless you had the high awareness necessary to separate dreaming definitively from real life.
Somnus
He lies just outside of your awareness. He’s on the brink, the edge between life and death. He’s not quite there, and yet he’s everywhere, all-pervasive. He’s more elusive than you can imagine. To communicate with him, you have to master dreaming. Only with dream consciousness can the dream god be approached.
Somnus is the Liminal God, the god of the In-Between. So often neglected, he rules over our dream lives. His sons, the Somnia, ever-evolving dream-shapes, are the unseen rulers of the human psyche.
What if the secrets to incredible power were hidden just beneath the conscious surface, in dreams? The vast majority of people would completely miss them and believe they never existed. Only those who knew how to navigate the dreamscape would be able to find them. Most of humanity would be desiccated and drained, zombie-like, while a few, having cultivated the power of dreams, would be shining beacons toward which everyone gravitated.
With enough practice, we can impose our will on our own dreams. Is it possible to also impose our will on the real world? Was Jesus a high-level dreamer who had become proficient in dreaming up miracles and transferring them to the real space?
Dreams are still so poorly understood, even by science. Where’s the source? Surely the creator of dreams must possess immense power and skill, to be able to create entire worlds out of nothing. Creatio ex nihilo – creation from nothing – is a power commonly attributed to God. The source of dreams must be on a par with him. It just has a different focus. God focuses on the public world, while dreams are all personal worlds. Does God have a dream counterpart responsible for the creation of dream worlds instead of the physical world?
If God is always awake, always fully conscious, then whence dreams? Why would he create dreams at all? Why create the need to sleep, given that sleep is so alien to him? How would he in fact come up with the idea? Is it in fact necessary to invoke a Dream-God, who is exactly the same as God, but with dream consciousness instead of waking consciousness?
The Bible says God created us in his own image. Doesn’t that prove God has a dreaming side?
God has been known to communicate with people in dreams. Is it in fact Dream-God communicating with them?
God cannot be awake at some times and go to sleep at others, because that would result in an imperfect, broken consciousness. It’s therefore necessary to have two consciousnesses: one awake at all times, the other dreaming at all times.
Dream Logic
There are two kinds of logic: waking logic and dream logic. Waking logic is always the same; it’s consistent, it has a definite structure, it never falters. Dream logic is different; it’s intuitive rather than rational, it changes depending on the situation, it’s adaptive rather than absolute. Dream logic only seems strange to most people because they are used to experiencing waking logic. It does, however, have its own internal consistency.
When dream logic is handled wrongly, it can become disastrous. It’s important to realize that dream logic in “this” situation only ever applies to this situation, not to anything else. It does not apply to “that” situation. When dream logic is applied globally to everything, we end up with bizarre and stupid schemes.
Waking logic is all about locality – direct, literal relationships between things. Dream logic is all about non-locality – indirect, non-literal relationships. Thus, dream logic can connect seemingly unconnected things.