Dream Diary Entry recorded July 11, 2018

I had a dream this morning that I fixed a situation I never was able to fix in real life.

My dad had bipolar disorder, and last night he appeared in a bedroom at a place where several of us were staying. He was all wound up and wanted to tell me some story, but it was mostly babbling. I told him, when he paused from talking and almost bouncing around the bedroom he was using that I thought he needed to calm down, that he was on one of his manic cycles and it was pretty bad, and that he should just sit calmly and take his prescription medicine for it. He seemed deflated, but at least was listening to me. He shook his head and complained, "It upsets my stomach. I have to take Pepto Bismol." I calmly explained that he could take the Pepto Bismol before taking the other medication, and that would help. He was willing to do that, and the dream ended.

Taken from FB and Blogged Here so I Can Tweet It (Ha!)

We are an element in an interconnected network. The state we are in, and what we can take in and put out through our connections to the network, that defines who and what we are, and how we will get from one moment to the next. Our internal state is, curiously, its own interconnected network: a network within a network. There are connections between the two networks, and we are the ones, again, who send out and take in via those connections.

We are our internal state and our connections - but! - We are also our awareness of that internal state and the content coursing along those connections. Certainly, whether this is really "more" or just an obvious consequence of our state and connections may be a puzzle to be solved, or it may be meaningless to ponder. But it does seem to indicate that delightful verb/noun "control," and the idea that in the middle of all of this state/connection talk that seems so deterministic ... there "we" are.

Rather delightful, don't you think? Put it together with the chaotic dynamics story of the butterfly whose wing motion has as much to do with where a huge storm goes as any other force acting on the weather system, and, well, to be brief, never deny the power of each of us ... of you ... to make a difference. It may be difficult to determine precisely, but putting good into the system has always tended to increase the overall wholeness, the good health, of the system.