Dreams on the Cave Walls

There's a great essay over on the Dream Studies Portal about the prehistory of lucid dreaming. It seems that many of the kinds of designs found on the walls of paleolithic caves, from spirals and grids to monsters and sex organs, are the kinds of images that are said (by Eliade) to occur in connection with shamanic trance states, but they also occur to the modern, and perhaps prehistoric, dreaming mind, suggesting that our earliest ancestors may have been practitioners of dream-work. Having fallen to sleep to hypnogogic visions of radiant grids dancing in my head, I can identify with the suggestion that this kind of imagery is perhaps somehow hard-wired into our nervous systems. However, I am also sure that many of these kinds of images have appeared in my dreams, whether or not I have been lucid or in any shamanic trance kind of states, and perhaps there is something endemic about the geometrical and fantastic to our experience of reality itself.

The other alternative seems to suggest that we are really just disembodied brains floating in space. All things being equal, science suggests that reality is very, very unlikely to create a universe as complex, organized, and well, as pleasantly skinned as our own. Chances are that we exist in a much more chaotic manner, sans bodies, and more frequently than not, that monstrosity in your nightmares is more real than you are!

The biggest challenge is that is just as highly improbable that time only moves in one direction, and sooner or later someone will find out that it doesn't. Personally I already think that this is the case, for how else could we explain ancient artifacts that defy our concepts of history, such as ancient carvings of dinosaurs, prehistoric metal spheres, and batteries from the dawn of time? I suspect that time is just a subjective paradox, the deeper we look into the past (or the future for all you sci-fi fans), the more we are likely to find ourselves and our desires reflected in that distant eon. I'm almost surprised someone hasn't found a prehistoric car yet.