|
This was from yesterday's New York Times - an article called
'Living Your Dreams, in a Manner of Speaking'. It talks a little
about the concept of lucid dreaming, but also focuses on a new
movie being written and directed by Jake Paltrow called "The Good
Night".
Living Your Dreams, in a Manner of
Speaking
Established sleep researchers say lucid dreaming is occasionally
reported by subjects, though it is difficult to validate
scientifically. “Yes, lucid dreaming exists,” said Dr.
Rodney Radtke, the medical director of the Sleep Disorders Center
at Duke University. “Yes, people certainly can, within their
dream, realize ‘this is just a dream’ and continue to
participate.”
“Do I believe that someone could
potentially alter or interact with their dreams in such a way that
they could change the dream? Yes,” he said. “Do I think
that you could essentially design a dream — ‘Oh, I want
to go to Honolulu and have this big hunk hit on me’?
It’s a bit of a stretch. But I can’t say it can’t
happen.”
He added: “Only in New York or
California do they worry about this stuff.”
Stephen LaBerge, a psychophysiologist and the founder of the
Lucidity Institute (lucidity.com), conducts lucid dream research
and
teaches people to do it.
“It’s kind of fun to do the
impossible,” Dr. LaBerge said. “Fly. Dream sex.
That’s what everybody likes to do. There’s also the
possibility of creative problem-solving, overcoming nightmares and
anxieties, learning more about yourself.”
A student at Stanford University, where
Dr. LaBerge conducted much of his research, wrote in The Stanford
Daily: “In one of my earliest experiences with lucidity, I
announced to an auditorium full of people that I was their god
(wasn’t I?). When they did not respond deferentially, I used
telekinesis to send one of them flying across the room.”
It can be particularly appealing to those
who have nightmares, as it allows them to realize while still
asleep that they are just dreaming.
Interest in these potential real-world
benefits and the otherworldly freedoms of lucid dreaming — as
well as the questions it provokes about the precarious nature of
reality — has spurred the invention and evolution of
seemingly wacky dream aids. There are masks with lights and sounds;
Orwellian devices that announce THIS IS A DREAM! in the middle of
the night; and pills.
At the Hawaii gathering next month,
attendees will be able to check out Dr. LaBerge’s
NovaDreamer, a mask meant to light up during REM sleep and cue the
person entangled in the sheets that he or she is dreaming. It is
based on the notion that people can make a plan while awake and
then execute it in their dreams. A light or sound is meant to
remind them of their goal of lucid dreaming without actually waking
them up. Participants may also take part in experiments with an
herbal version of a drug that impacts acetylcholine, a
neurotransmitting compound that affects memory.
As bizarre as these things may sound,
there is a scientific rationale for cueing users during REM sleep.
“REM-sleep dreams are much more visual,” said Matthew
P. Walker, the director of the Sleep and Neuroimaging Laboratory at
the University of California, Berkeley, and a former assistant
professor of psychology at the Harvard Medical School. “They
have a strong narrative that runs through them. They’re
hallucinogenic.”
There are several reasons for this,
including that the lateral prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain
involved in logical reasoning and working memory, becomes more
inactive during REM sleep, while other areas of the brain, like the
visual and emotional centers, rev up.
Scientists, however, are still trying to
discover the difference between the dreaming brain and the
lucid-dreaming brain. The leading candidate, Dr. Walker said, is
the lateral prefrontal cortex. He thinks that during REM sleep, the
activity level of this logic-oriented part of the brain begins to
rise back to waking levels, and when it does, an invisible switch
is flipped and the sleeper gains lucidity. “In the next five
years, I think somebody will demonstrate that,” he said.
Lucid-dream researchers say there are
myriad mental exercises a person can do during waking hours to try
to become cognizant while dreaming. One technique involves
performing various reality checks many times a day — such as
looking at the numbers on a watch, looking away, and then looking
at them again to make sure that night has not suddenly become day.
The theory is that if a person does this regularly while awake, he
or she will likely repeat it while dreaming and will recognize
inconsistencies — if, say, the watch is melting in a
Dali-esque way. Then the sleeper will think: “This looks
surreal. I must be dreaming.”
more after the jump
In “The Good Night,” the
would-be lucid dreamer performs a series of reality checks: he
flips a light switch on and off (light in dreams is not usually
nuanced); looks in a mirror (reflections in dreams are often
obscured); and stares at his hands (in dreams one’s hands may
be elongated or have fewer fingers).
Keeping a dream journal is also said to
promote better recall and to train people to identify signs that
indicate they are dreaming — chatting with the deceased,
floating cars, talking skeletons. Again, the idea is that when
people are sleeping, they will recognize these things as signs they
are dreaming and they will become lucid.
Waking up half an hour earlier than usual,
staying awake for 30 to 60 minutes and then going back to sleep may
also induce lucid dreams, Dr. LaBerge has found. Dr. LaBerge honed
his own lucid-dreaming abilities by writing his dreams down
immediately after waking and telling himself he intended to
remember and recognize his dreams.
Psychologists who study lucid dreaming do
not know why some people need more help triggering full lucidity
than others, though they agree that adept lucid dreamers are
excellent at remembering dreams. Dr. Gackenbach said they tend to
have strong visualization and spatial skills. They can look at a
machine and envision how the parts work inside, she said, or sew a
dress from scratch and know exactly what the finished frock will
look like. Many practice meditation.
Of course some professionals, particularly
psychoanalysts, think orchestrating one’s dreams is not a
critical goal.
“We distinguish between the manifest
content of the dream — the dream as you remember it —
and the latent content of it,” said Dr. Edward Nersessian, a
clinical professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College
and a training and supervising psychoanalyst at the New York
Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. “Whatever you manage or
do not manage to do with the manifest content isn’t really
that relevant. That’s like a screen behind which lies all
sorts of answers which you have to go digging for.”
When then asked if lucid dreaming was a
dangerous enterprise, he chuckled gently and said: “If people
who do it think it calms their anxiety, I’m all for
it.”
go read the entire article here |
Consciousness 
