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throwaway2331 | 4 years ago

I think this is what happens during sleep (a part of it).

There have been times where I've been unable to "fall" asleep, but stayed in my bed, completely unaware of my surroundings or anything else except what's going on inside my mind.

It feels like my thoughts were starting from a single point, then randomly branching off into multiple directions (one after the brisk "completion" of the other), and each path had a certain "feel" to it -- as if my brain was testing things it had "learned" or "inferred" (and the mental models it had collected), or even things it wasn't too certain about or even guessing -- simply to see how it would "feel" when thought.

It's like your mind has a complex array of filters/gates that decide how an input will be processed -- and these filters are constantly changing, rearranging, and growing more complex as you grow; so during sleep it feels like the mind is in a loop, constantly throwing very simple things that have collected in memory, into the "mix"/filters to see what happens (will those filters adjust, a la conditioning and adjusting weights like in a neural net? Will some new and palpable way of looking at things be found? Are some thoughts/paths no longer needed? Should other thoughts/paths be prioritized?).

I think our minds hold onto all the inputs we've gotten during the day, and then process them at night, is what I'm trying to say. I imagine this is one of the big reasons why we sleep so much as we do (compared to hunger-gatherers, and primitive tribes): we have so much sensory input that gets collected during the day (including our thoughts, albeit the thinking we do during the day serves the same end: forcing our heads to deal with new information to figure out what to do with it).

And then you have meditation, that basically forces you to clean out the "volatile memory," so it doesn't interefere throughout the day. Basically telling your mind, "I don't need to incorporate this shit into my thinking. It's not vital. Dump the memory onto the disk, and we'll deal with it later, but not now!"

I've noticed that sleep completely changes my train of thought.

On any given day, I'll have a certain "mindset" or overarching "feeling" for the day. If I stay up for a day or two, that feeling will remain. And no matter what I do, that feeling rarely changes throughout the day. BUT, when I go to sleep, it's completely different. I always wake up with a new "train" of thought. Like when I was awake, the train was going on a certain rail line, but during sleep it was moved to a different one.

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tkam|4 years ago

Related to this: Since when I was young, maybe around six or so, on nights before special days I looked forward to a lot (like my birthday), I was desperate and agonized over the realization that my current self (what you call "train of thought") would end once I fell asleep, so this current longing that I had would never actually be fulfilled. This made me really sad, and it felt like my current "self" would die and get replaced the next morning by a somehow related "self", that was in it's essential emotional state very new and in that regard definitely separate. I continued to have this feeling from time to time (maybe 2-3 times per year, less later on) until well into my twenties, when it somehow receded. I have not talked about this often, but when I did, I never found anybody that could relate.