"Ричард Фейнман. Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!/Вы, конечно, шутите, мистер Фейнман! (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

that this knocking is coming from outside my dream, and I've invented this
part of the dream to fit with it. I've got to wake up and find out what the
hell it is."
The knocking is still going, I wake up, and... Dead silence. There was
nothing. So it wasn't connected to the outside.
Other people have told me that they have incorporated external noises
into their dreams, but when I had this experience, carefully "watching from
below," and sure the noise was coming from outside the dream, it wasn't.
During the time of making observations in my dreams, the process of
waking up was a rather fearful one. As you're beginning to wake up there's a
moment when you feel rigid and tied down, or underneath many layers of
cotton batting. It's hard to explain, but there's a moment when you get the
feeling you can't get out; you're not sure you can wake up. So I would have
to tell myself - after I was awake - that that's ridiculous. There's no
disease I know of where a person falls asleep naturally and can't wake up.
You can always wake up. And after talking to myself many times like that, I
became less and less afraid, and in fact I found the process of waking up
rather thrilling - something like a roller coaster: After a while you're
not so scared, and you begin to enjoy it a little bit.
You might like to know how this process of observing my dreams stopped
(which it has for the most part; it's happened just a few times since). I'm
dreaming one night as usual, making observations, and I see on the wall in
front of me a pennant. I answer for the twenty-fifth time, "Yes, I'm
dreaming in color," and then I realize that I've been sleeping with the back
of my head against a brass rod. I put my hand behind my head and I feel that
the back of my head is soft. I think, "Aha! That's why I've been able to
make all these observations in my dreams: the brass rod has disturbed my
visual cortex. All I have to do is sleep with a brass rod under my head, and
I can make these observations any time I want. So I think I'll stop making
observations on this one, and go into deeper sleep."
When I woke up later, there was no brass rod, nor was the back of my
head soft. Somehow I had become tired of making these observations, and my
brain had invented some false reasons as to why I shouldn't do it any more.
As a result of these observations I began to get a little theory. One
of the reasons that I liked to look at dreams was that I was curious as to
how you can see an image, of a person, for example, when your eyes are
closed, and nothing's coming in. You say it might be random, irregular nerve
discharges, but you can't get the nerves to discharge in exactly the same
delicate patterns when you are sleeping as when you are awake, looking at
something. Well then, how could I "see" in color, and in better detail, when
I was asleep?
I decided there must be an "interpretation department." When you are
actually looking at something - a man, a lamp, or a wall - you don't just
see blotches of color. Something tells you what it is; it has to be
interpreted. When you're dreaming, this interpretation department is still
operating, but it's all slopped up. It's telling you that you're seeing a
human hair in the greatest detail, when it isn't true. It's interpreting the
random junk entering the brain as a clear image.
One other thing about dreams. I had a friend named Deutsch, whose wife
was from a family of psychoanalysts in Vienna. One evening, during a long