Altered States of Everyday Life - Daydreaming, Dreams, VR, Music, Pain and Relief

Imagine that you are looking through a window.

Light is still reaching your eyes. Your body remains supported by the chair. Breathing continues. The heart continues. Proprioceptive information is still participating in where your body is, while interoceptive signals continue to emerge from within it.

Then something else becomes prominent.

A memory.

A conversation that has not happened yet.

The answer you could have given yesterday.

For a few seconds, the room has not disappeared, but it no longer organizes experience in quite the same way.

Then you return.

Nothing needed to leave the body. Nothing needed to abandon reality.

And yet the configuration through which that Body-Territory perceived itself has changed.

Perhaps this is where we should begin talking about altered states of consciousness: not only with trance, psychedelics or extraordinary mystical experiences, but with transformations that happen every day.

Daydreaming.

Dreaming.

Music.

Virtual reality.

Pain and relief.

Insight.

Awe.

Different phenomena, certainly. Different mechanisms as well.

But perhaps they allow us to ask the same question:

What changes when the spaces, movements, Qualia and attentional priorities that participate in perceiving “I am” are reorganized?

Consciousness 5D: three spatial dimensions, Movement and Qualia

In the BrainLatam Consciousness 5D hypothesis, the first three dimensions refer to material spatiality.

Transductions, processed stimuli and representations are not imagined as abstract objects floating on a mental screen. They are materially located within the three-dimensional Body-Territory.

A visual stimulus is transduced.

Auditory information is transduced.

Pressure against the skin participates.

Proprioception participates.

Interoception participates.

Respiration, circulation, ionic gradients, neural activity, muscular tension and metabolic processes participate in the configuration in which that event exists.

BrainLatam then adds another dimension: Movement.

Movement is not “four-dimensional space.” It is a dimension of its own: the transformation of those materially located spaces and processes — what increases, decreases, returns, synchronizes, diverges, gains priority or enters into a new relation.

And another dimension is Qualia.

Qualia is not “five-dimensional space” either. It is another dimension of the model: the experiential quality or prominence through which a process can be lived as pain, warmth, red, pleasure, fear, familiarity, strangeness, relief or vastness.

Thus:

three material spatial dimensions + Movement + Qualia = Consciousness 5D.

This formulation is a BrainLatam theoretical proposal, not an established five-dimensional model in mainstream neuroscience. It is intended to preserve the materiality of conscious experience while refusing to reduce it to only one physiological scale. BrainLatam publications develop representation as material configuration, Movement as the material history of the Body-Territory happening, and Qualia as what stands out, weighs, pulses or colors experience. (brainlatam)

This also remains compatible with Alfredo Pereira Jr.’s Triple-Aspect Monism insofar as living materiality, dynamic information and sentience are treated as inseparable aspects of one reality rather than separate worlds. (ANPOF)

What is not in attention has not necessarily ceased to participate in “being me”

Now imagine a faint pain in your foot while you are reading this sentence.

It may already be changing the way you distribute weight.

Perhaps muscular tension has already changed slightly.

Perhaps your posture has changed.

Within the BrainLatam model, the stimulus did not need to become the focus of attention before it could participate in the material configuration through which you perceive yourself as being.

It was already there.

What can change is its ability to recruit the attentional channel.

BrainLatam uses attentional channel operationally, not as the name of an anatomical tube or single brain structure. It describes the distribution of functional priority within a Body-Territory in which many processes are occurring simultaneously. Qualia may participate in experience without necessarily monopolizing that priority. (brainlatam)

And attention can do more than select.

It can amplify.

The orchestra provides a remarkable experiment

Imagine an orchestra playing.

Cello.

Bassoon.

Violins.

Percussion.

All are physically present in the acoustic scene.

Now deliberately follow the cello.

The bassoon did not disappear.

The cello did not physically become louder.

But its representation can become more prominent for the listener.

Hausfeld and colleagues tested this principle with real polyphonic music and EEG. Participants listened to pieces containing bassoon and cello while selectively segregating an instrument or integrating the musical scene. During segregation, the representation of the task-relevant instrument could be reconstructed better than that of the irrelevant instrument. The authors interpreted the result as a consistent top-down enhancement of the relevant instrument representation. (PubMed)

Something similar had already been demonstrated for speech. When people listened to two simultaneous speakers, Mesgarani and Chang found that neural representations in non-primary auditory cortex preferentially preserved salient spectral and temporal features of the attended speaker. (Nature)

This distinction is crucial.

Attention does not need to create the stimulus. It can amplify the neural representation and functional weight of something that was already being processed.

In BrainLatam terms, we go one step further as a hypothesis: that representation may already be participating in the configuration of being me before it becomes the dominant object of focal attention.

The neuroscience evidence supports selective attentional amplification. It does not, by itself, prove the broader BrainLatam claim about every unattended process participating in conscious Being.

That distinction matters.

Attention can create a recursive amplification loop

Suppose the faint pain becomes stronger.

It recruits attention.

Attention increases its relative prominence.

The amplified representation becomes harder to ignore.

It recruits more attention.

A possible loop appears:

representation → attention → amplification → increased salience → more attention.

Something similar can happen with fear.

With a memory.

With an intrusive sound.

With pleasure.

With an unresolved sentence.

With a notification.

Or with a magnificent piece of music.

This is one way to understand attentional capture without claiming that the captured representation became objectively more important in the external world.

It became more important inside the organization of the current experience.

And therefore:

What attention amplifies may occupy more reality within experience without becoming more true outside it.

This is why one of the recurring principles of this series remains important:

feeling confirms the experience, not the truth of the interpretation.

Attention can also recruit Stone, Scissors or Paper

BrainLatam uses Stone–Scissors–Paper as a metacognitive language for functional modes, not as three anatomically established connectomes. Stone is associated with speed, habit and execution; Scissors with comparison and analytic cutting; Paper with widening the field through fruition and metacognition. (brainlatam)

Once a representation acquires greater attentional gain, it can favor one of these modes.

A sudden pain may recruit Stone:

move the hand.

withdraw.

protect.

A disturbing statement may recruit Scissors:

who said this?

what evidence supports it?

what distinction am I missing?

And Paper may broaden the field:

what else was happening in my body?

what disappeared from attention?

how is my breathing?

which alternative representation was already present but had lost priority?

No mode is inherently correct.

Stone protects.

Scissors distinguishes.

Paper expands.

The problem begins when amplification makes one configuration so dominant that the others become temporarily difficult to recruit.

Daydreaming: the outside world remains, but another representation gains priority

In 2026, Ishtiaq and colleagues investigated self-induced daydreaming using fNIRS together with physiological measures and pre- versus post-meal conditions. The work is included in the W40/2026 NIRS selection. Their paradigm showed that daydreaming episodes could be studied in relation to prefrontal hemodynamics and bodily signals rather than relying only on retrospective descriptions. (Wiley Online Library)

This does not establish a universal fNIRS biomarker of daydreaming.

But it gives us a useful image.

While an internally generated representation becomes prominent, the organism has not ceased receiving the external world.

The distribution of priority has changed.

And perhaps that is why a few seconds can sometimes seem to contain yesterday, tomorrow and somewhere that is not physically in front of us.

Time may depend on relations among spaces in Movement

The Earth rotates.

Its spatial relation to the Sun changes.

From recurrent movement we construct day, morning, afternoon and night.

Inside the Body-Territory, however, there are many more simultaneously changing spaces and rhythms.

Respiration.

Heartbeat.

Posture.

Pain.

Images.

Memory.

Expectation.

Auditory rhythms.

Interoceptive signals.

Within the BrainLatam hypothesis, lived time emerges from relations among spaces in Movement.

This is not a claim that consciousness generates physical time.

The proposal concerns experienced temporality.

A memory is a representation of something past participating materially now.

An anticipated future is a representation of something not yet happened participating materially now.

Both can modify breathing, posture, attention and Qualia in the present.

Past and future have not physically collapsed into one cosmological instant.

But their representations can participate in the same present configuration.

The present becomes relationally denser.

Contemporary neuroscience provides partial points of contact without proving this model. A 2024 review and meta-analysis, for example, found relationships between individual alpha frequency and perceptual temporal windows — the intervals within which nearby stimuli can interact or fuse perceptually. (PubMed)

BrainLatam extends the question:

If materially represented spaces move at different rhythms and acquire different attentional gains, can the relations among them change how duration, sequence, past and future acquire Qualia?

Dream and VR: the Body-Territory remains here

Denzer and colleagues approached something adjacent to dreaming through immersive VR.

Healthy awake participants encountered either realistic or deliberately dream-like bizarre events. The bizarre condition changed subjective reality experience and increased the contribution of a specific EEG microstate, C′, associated in that study with suspension of disbelief and perceptual reality monitoring. (Wiley Online Library)

VR did not turn wakefulness into dreaming.

But it showed that reality monitoring can change while a person remains awake.

The physical floor remains beneath the body.

Proprioception continues.

Vestibular information continues.

Yet visual representation describes another space.

The Body-Territory must relate them.

Transcendence therefore need not mean leaving the body.

It may begin when the habitual organization of “me, here, now” is no longer sufficient to describe the experience being produced.

Music can change which time occupies us

Music gives this model an everyday laboratory.

A 2024 review proposed musical experience as a particularly useful field for studying absorption, mind wandering and creative thought because music can temporarily reorganize mental and bodily states. (PubMed)

Rhythm outside the body meets rhythm inside it.

Attention moves between an instrument and the whole.

A memory appears.

Movement is anticipated before it occurs.

Three minutes may disappear.

A pause may feel enormous.

The clock has not stopped.

The relations carrying temporal Qualia have changed.

Pain and relief: Qualia can belong to the direction of change

Consider pain rated four out of ten.

Now compare:

8 → 4

with

1 → 4.

The final number is identical.

The Movement is not.

Desch and colleagues showed that pain relief has motivational value and that agency, uncertainty and dopaminergic mechanisms can modulate how relief is experienced. (eLife)

This does not mean pain should be produced to create pleasure.

It means that the organism is sensitive to direction.

In Consciousness 5D terms, Qualia may belong not only to a state but also to a perceived transformation.

Something that was mobilizing me is no longer doing so in the same way.

Relief becomes difference felt.

Insight and awe: when another configuration becomes dominant

An insight can arrive with almost no obvious external change.

Nothing new seems to have entered.

Yet relations among existing representations suddenly reorganize.

Then comes:

Aha.

Research by Salvi and colleagues found that insight experiences can influence memory for information occurring around them, supporting the idea that the Aha! moment is not phenomenologically trivial. (PubMed)

But once again:

the Qualia of certainty is not proof of truth.

Awe may push the same principle in another direction.

In 2026, Carbone and colleagues combined immersive VR with EEG to investigate awe, using both linear and nonlinear measures of brain activity. The study makes aspects of an experience often described as transcendent experimentally approachable without establishing a unique neural marker of transcendence. (ScienceDirect)

Perhaps what changes in awe is not simply stimulus intensity.

A representation of vastness may recruit attention so strongly that the habitual representation of the self loses relative dominance.

The self does not disappear.

Its scale changes within the field.

How many times can one present contain?

Daydreaming, dreaming, VR, music, pain, relief, insight and awe do not need to share one neural mechanism.

But they may illuminate the same architecture.

Material representations exist within the three spatial dimensions of the Body-Territory.

They are in Movement.

They possess or acquire Qualia.

Some recruit attention.

Attention may amplify them.

Amplification can change what receives priority next.

And that priority may recruit Stone, Scissors or Paper.

The stimulus does not begin to exist when attention finds it.

Within the BrainLatam model, it may already participate in the perception of Being.

What changes is how much of the next moment it can organize.

Perhaps this is also why altered states can alter time.

Not because the present vanished.

But because different representations of past, present and possible future became simultaneously available, with different rhythms, different Qualia and different attentional weights.

The Sun and Earth give us movements from which we construct days.

The Body-Territory contains many more spaces in Movement.

And when their relations change, perhaps what changes is not only what we experience.

It may also change the time in which we experience ourselves existing.

Transcendence, then, may be less about leaving reality and more about discovering that the previous configuration could no longer contain all the relations now participating in Being.

And when we return?

The room may be the same.

The body is still here.

But the next encounter no longer finds exactly the same configuration.

The Being — the continuity of perceiving Being — crossed the change.
The being that changed can perceive what was changed.

And this is where Metanoia begins.

Commented References

Ishtiaq, A., Mohy-Ud-Din, Z., Al Aishan, A., Naseer, N., Khalid, S. G., & Gul, J. Z. (2026). AI-Driven Hemodynamic Detection of Self-Induced Daydreaming With EMG-Based Physiological Triggers During Pre- and Post-Prandial States Using fNIRS and EGG. CNS Neuroscience & Therapeutics, 32, e70899. DOI: 10.1002/cns.70899.
What this reference represents: provides a recent experimental example in which self-induced daydreaming is studied in relation to prefrontal hemodynamics and bodily physiology. It supports treating internally oriented experience as something occurring within an embodied physiological configuration, without establishing a universal daydreaming biomarker. (Wiley Online Library)

Denzer, S., Diezig, S., Achermann, P., Mast, F. W., & Koenig, T. (2024). Electrophysiological (EEG) microstates during dream-like bizarre experiences in a naturalistic scenario using immersive virtual reality. European Journal of Neuroscience, 60(8), 5815–5830. DOI: 10.1111/ejn.16530.
What this reference represents: shows that dream-like bizarreness introduced into immersive VR can modify subjective reality experience and EEG microstate dynamics while participants remain awake. It allows us to approach altered reality monitoring experimentally without equating VR with dreaming. (Wiley Online Library)

Hausfeld, L., Disbergen, N. R., Valente, G., Zatorre, R. J., & Formisano, E. (2021). Modulating Cortical Instrument Representations During Auditory Stream Segregation and Integration With Polyphonic Music. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 15, 635937. DOI: 10.3389/fnins.2021.635937.
What this reference represents: provides one of the clearest experimental foundations for the Blog’s discussion of attentional amplification. In polyphonic music, attention enhanced reconstruction of the task-relevant instrument representation without physically increasing that instrument’s sound. (PubMed)

Mesgarani, N., & Chang, E. F. (2012). Selective cortical representation of attended speaker in multi-talker speech perception. Nature, 485, 233–236. DOI: 10.1038/nature11020.
What this reference represents: foundational evidence that selective attention changes the cortical representation of competing speech streams. It supports distinguishing the physical presence of a stimulus from the attentional gain assigned to its neural representation. (Nature)

Samaha, J., & Romei, V. (2024). Alpha-Band Frequency and Temporal Windows in Perception: A Review and Living Meta-analysis of 27 Experiments (and Counting). Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 36(4), 640–654. DOI: 10.1162/jocn_a_02069.
What this reference represents: synthesizes evidence relating alpha-band frequency to temporal windows of perception. It provides an empirical point of contact for the BrainLatam question about temporal experience, but does not prove the broader hypothesis that lived time emerges from relationships among material spaces in Movement. (PubMed)

Palhares, P. T., Sas, M. I., & Gonçalves, Ó. F. (2024). Music and states of consciousness: A narrative review of the broader significance of music to understanding absorption, mind wandering and creative thought. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 167, 105920. DOI: 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2024.105920.
What this reference represents: positions music as a naturalistic field for investigating temporary changes in absorption, mind wandering and creative thought. It helps connect altered consciousness to ordinary culturally shared experiences rather than only exceptional states. (PubMed)

Desch, S., Schweinhardt, P., Seymour, B., Flor, H., & Becker, S. (2023). Evidence for dopaminergic involvement in endogenous modulation of pain relief. eLife, 12, e81436. DOI: 10.7554/eLife.81436.
What this reference represents: demonstrates that pain relief has motivational value and that its experience can be modulated by agency, uncertainty and dopaminergic mechanisms. It supports the idea that the direction of change can matter to experience rather than only the final intensity of a state. (eLife)

Salvi, C., Keller, N., Cooper, S. E., Leiker, E., & Dunsmoor, J. (2024). Aha! and D'oh! experiences enhance learning for incidental information—new evidence supports the insight memory advantage. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, 24(3), 505–516. DOI: 10.3758/s13415-024-01184-x.
What this reference represents: shows that insight experiences can modify memory for information occurring around the Aha! moment. It supports treating insight as a meaningful reorganization of experience while preserving the distinction between the feeling of certainty and the truth of the conclusion. (PubMed)

Carbone, F., Bondi, E., Pizzolante, M., et al. (2026). Brain response to awe experiences in virtual reality: an integrated linear and nonlinear EEG analysis. NeuroImage, 338, 122075. DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2026.122075.
What this reference represents: brings awe into a measurable VR-EEG paradigm and demonstrates that linear and nonlinear EEG analyses provide complementary information about brain changes during awe. It makes transcendence-like experience experimentally approachable without reducing awe to an EEG signature. (ScienceDirect)

Pereira Jr., A. (2023). Introdução à Metafísica do Monismo de Triplo Aspecto. ANPOF.
What this reference represents: provides the ontological basis for treating living materiality, dynamic information and sentience as jointly necessary aspects of conscious experience rather than independent worlds. BrainLatam’s Consciousness 5D remains its own extension and should not be attributed directly to Pereira Jr. (ANPOF)

BrainLatam (2026). Um mesmo evento — metabolismo, movimento e consciência; Nem toda respiração é igual; Deepfakes, Signos e Qualia; and related Consciousness 5D publications.
What this reference represents: these texts develop the BrainLatam-specific architecture used here: materially located representations in three-dimensional Body-Territory, Movement as an additional dimension, Qualia as another dimension, and consciousness as “a movement that perceives itself Being within the metabolism produced.” These are conceptual BrainLatam propositions, not claims that mainstream neuroscience has independently validated a five-dimensional consciousness model. (brainlatam)

BrainLatam (2026). Biosemiótica e Corpo-Território; Economia da atenção — quando nossas emoções são transformadas em lucro; and related attentional-channel publications.
What this reference represents: defines the attentional channel operationally as functional priority rather than an anatomical structure, distinguishes Qualia from attentional capture, and presents Stone–Scissors–Paper as a metacognitive map rather than three established neural connectomes. The external auditory-attention literature above provides independent evidence for the narrower claim that attention can selectively amplify neural representations. (brainlatam)

W40/2026 - Latent Heat, Homeostasis and Metanoia