This would be another example of how i go from one tidbit to an entirely new tidbit, both of which seem completely unrelated. This tactic has been useful in the development of plots and characters and ideas in my books. I pay attention to my dreams and often use them in my work.


I fell asleep researching and working on my book Supernatural Hypocrisy: The Cognitive Dissonance of a God Cosmology.

I was aggravated for hours about my vision issues–none of my contacts or reading glasses seem to work well for my computer work or reading…unless I take out the contacts and wear a previous pair of glasses from years ago. The more things change, the more things stay the same?
(Weirdness).
Anyway,

I wake from a dream that I was at the eye doctor, and he was checking my eyes with a light, and he said. “Just look over there at that mant.”

“Mant?” I asked.

“Yes, the mant. Look at the mant.”

I didn’t want to admit I had never heard that term, (I am both consciously and subconsciously a word-whore…or, in the professional terminology, logophile). So I just looked at something over in the general vicinity he indicated; but then I was afraid the new prescription wouldn’t be any better than the old one.

So I said, “Okay, maybe you can point to what I should be looking at, because I don’t know what a mant is.”

The assistant and the doctor both frowned at me, perplexed, as if there were something terribly wrong with my brain.

And I woke up.

Being the Curious-Jae I am, I had to look up “mant” because I always secretly hope my subconscious mind will give me something interesting…
I could find nothing except:

• an acronym for Mantech International on the stock exchange,
• an abbreviation for some type of chemical,
• a film within a film, called “Mant!” ¹

…and then there was this:

It seems there was a gentleman named Richard Mant. A churchman and writer, Mant, in 1839, wrote a commentary on the whole Bible.

Now the obvious question for me was, had I, at some time during my research for my book, heard of this Richard Mant, skimming over some page, and it got lodged in my brain somewhere, jiggled loose by my recent renewal of work on a religiously-themed book?

Or, like the spiritual adherents of the modern age might assume, was I being TOLD something from Higher Self or channeling it from someone else in the noosphere or Great Cosmic Ether?

Or…was it just a coincidence?

I was sidetracked from those questions by the word noosphere. And here, see it happened again, whatever this thing is that happened…While typing this, the world noosphere just came right out automatically, and I thought–is that the right word? (I always do that with interesting or out of the ordinary words). So, as always, I looked it up to be sure.

It seems that noosphere refers to the “collective consciousness” of human beings. This noosphere concept has more to it than might initially meet the eye. For instance:

 

It emerges through and is constituted by the interaction of human minds. The noosphere has grown in step with the organization of the human mass in relation to itself as it populates the earth. As mankind organizes itself in more complex social networks, the higher the noosphere will grow in awareness. This is an extension of Teilhard’s Law of Complexity/Consciousness, the law describing the nature of evolution in the universe. Teilhard argued that the noosphere is growing towards an even greater integration and unification, culminating in the Omega Point, which he saw as the goal of history. The goal of history, then, is an apex of thought/consciousness.²

And there was this passage:

“In The Gone-Away World, a novel by Nick Harkaway, Earth is devastated in a war fought with “Go-Away Bombs” — weapons which erase the information content of matter, causing it to disappear from reality. The fallout of these bombs, called “Stuff”, subsequently draws information from the noosphere, “reifying” human ideas and thoughts into physical form and creating a fantasy landscape of monsters and horrors.” (Wikipedia)

It actually sounds like a book I’d enjoy reading, because it’s such a creative premise.

…I won’t even go into the content of a PDF file entitled “Akashic Field Evidence” ³–though it might be fascinating to look at more closely.

Further along, I saw, “The noosphere concept of ‘unification’ was elaborated in popular science fiction by Julian May in the Galactic Milieu Series.” I have two books by Julian May and have been hoping to sell or give them away to someone who can follow this style of writing. It was a fantasy of sorts that had way too much alien jargon for me to wade through. I was always lost, and didn’t understand what was happening, and everyone who knows me, knows that I NEED to understand what’s happening.

So, another set of apparently disparate ideas, springing from a dream I had, and spurring me to investigate further.

Welcome to my life.

---

¹. Mant! trailer http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_kTbWDxITw) about some radioactive mutation of man and ant…
² http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noosphere
³http://www.stanislavgrof.com/pdf/Akashic%20Field%20Evidence.PDF