Scientific American has an interesting interview with Deirdre Barrett, assistant clinical professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School and author of The Committee of Sleep: How Artists, Scientists, and Athletes Use their Dreams for Creative Problem Solving-and How You Can Too
So how can you problem-solve in a dream?
Although any kind of problem can make a breakthrough in a dream, the two categories that really crop up a lot are things where the solution benefits from being represented visually, because the dreams are so vivid in their visual-spatial imagery, and when you’re stuck because the conventional wisdom is just plain wrong.
You may have heard the example of August Kekulé and the benzene ring, which represents both these themes. He was thinking that in all nonchemical molecules, the atoms were lined up in some kind of straight line with 90-degree side chains coming off it. Once he knew the atoms in benzene, he was trying to come up with arrangements of them that were straight lines with side chains and it just wasn’t working. Then he dreamt of the atoms forming as a snake, eventually reaching around with the snake’s tail in its mouth. It seems exactly related to the fact that the prefrontal lobes that control censorship are, on average, much less active during dreams.
If you want to problem-solve in a dream, you should first of all think of the problem before bed, and if it lends itself to an image, hold it in your mind and let it be the last thing in your mind before falling asleep. For extra credit assemble something on your bedside table that makes an image of the problem. If it’s a personal problem, it might be the person you have the conflict with. If you’re an artist, it might be a blank canvas. If you’re a scientist, the device you’re working on that’s half assembled or a mathematical proof you’ve been writing through versions of.
Equally important, don’t jump out of bed when you wake up—almost half of dream content is lost if you get distracted. Lie there, don’t do anything else. If you don’t recall a dream immediately, see if you feel a particular emotion—the whole dream would come flooding back. [In a weeklong study I did with students that followed this protocol] 50 percent dreamed of the problem and a fourth solved them—so that’s a pretty good guideline, that half of people would have some effect from doing this for a week.
Scientific American: How Can You Control Your Dreams?
(via Kyle)
Maze of Death by Philip K. Dick.
Inception seems to owe more than a little to Philip K. Dick’s reality-bending sci-fi yarns. In Maze of Death, which takes place in a world in which god seems to be an objectively real entity, several down-and-out misfits are assigned to work on a harsh, mostly uninhabited planet. But after losing radio contact with their employer they find themselves stranded without even knowing what their assignment is.
Japanese author Haruki Murakami is a master of writing surreal, dream-like novels. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World revolves around a “calcutec,” who uses his brain as a type of encrypted storage. Companies hire him to store securely store trade secrets. Until, of course, something goes wrong.
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami
Neuromancer by William Gibson.
I thought of Inception initially as a Dickian film, but my friend Ian pointed out it’s actually more of a Gibsonian film. Neuromancer, Gibson’s first novel, is a heist story taking place in virtual reality. Inception fans should feel right at home.
The first study suggested that people who frequently played video games were more likely to report lucid dreams, observer dreams where they viewed themselves from outside their bodies, and dream control that allowed people to actively influence or change their dream worlds – qualities suggestive of watching or controlling the action of a video-game character.
A second study tried to narrow down the uncertainties by examining dreams that participants experienced from the night before, and focused more on gamers. It found that lucid dreams were common, but that the gamers never had dream control over anything beyond their dream selves.
Live Science: Video Gamers Can Control Dreams, Study Suggests
(via Theoretick)
Reality Sandwich is running an excerpt from Ryan Hurd‘s new e-book on sleep paralysis Sleep Paralysis: A Dreamer’s Guide (disclosure: that’s an affiliate link, but I haven’t read this book, only the excerpt):
Psychologist Jorge Conesa-Sevilla has put forward an ecopsychological hypothesis about SP/HH. Ecopsychology is the study of the mind in association with the natural environment. Conesa-Sevilla suggests the uncanny state of mind may be triggered by geological anomalies, and points out that cultures living in the “Ring of Fire,” the geomagnetically unstable areas of Central America, the Pacific Coast of the US, Southern Alaska, Hawaii, and Indonesia, have a much more developed vocabulary for sleep paralysis and its accompanying hallucinations than anywhere else in the world. [12] Many of the indigenous peoples of these territories are dreaming cultures that pay attention to, and actively invite, the “dreaming arts” such as lucid dreaming, reverie and trance states. [13] Given that geomagnetic effects have been shown to alter consciousness, Conesa-Sevilla’s hypothesis is not so unlikely. Similarly, archaeologist Paul Devereux has noted that SP is one state of consciousness among many that “transgress” the normal boundaries of mental imagery (without straying into psychosis), and may be responsible for some mental events interpreted as hauntings. [14] In both of these theories, then, the Stranger can be seen as emerging from local environmental conditions, as well as from the dreamer’s own mind and cultural upbringing.
Reality Sandwich: Sleep Paralysis Visions: Demons, Succubi, and the Archetypal Mind
(via Plutonica)
I’ve experienced sleep paralysis twice in my life. I was familiar with the phenomena of sleep paralysis and both of my experiences had heavy “occult” undertones since that was what I was into at the time. They were still scary, but not in the way that they would have been if I hadn’t been aware of sleep paralysis and didn’t have a positive framework for encounters with strange entities in mind when it happened.
I haven’t had an experience like this in many years.
Sleep has long been known to improve performance on memory tests. Now, a new study suggests that an afternoon power nap may boost your ability to process and store information tenfold — but only if you dream while you’re asleep.
“When you dream, your brain is trying to look at connections that you might not think of or notice when [you're] awake,” says the lead author of the study, Robert Stickgold, the director of the Center for Sleep and Cognition at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, in Boston, Massachusetts. “In the dream…the brain tries to figure out what’s important and what it should keep or dump because it’s of no value.” [...]
“If you’re not good at something, and you dream about it, you seem to get better at it — especially if the information can be used in different situations,” says Michael Breus, the clinical director of the sleep division for Arrowhead Health, in Glendale, Arizona, who was not involved in the study.
CNN: Naps boost memory, but only if you dream
(Thanks Bill!)
See also: The Tetris Effect
(Above: Allan Hobson)
In [Allan Hobson]‘s most recent review paper in Nature reviews Neuroscience , he compares the dream state to that of proto consciousness. As per him, proto consciousness is made up of raw emotions and perceptions while secondary consciousness is made up of awareness about perceptions and emotions and meta cognitive processes. He now endows dreams/REM state with some functional significance. He believes that dreams provide and opportunity for inbuilt genetic scripts and schema to be played out and fine tuned against external real-world scenarios. In this view dreams would still be significant as they provide a window to out internal scripts that are present from birth. He doesn’t put this across in so many words and this is my interpretation, but that is what I could sort of intuit.
The Mouse Trap: Dreaming as delirium, protoconsciousness or epiphenomenon?
Bill Whitcomb and Michael Skrtic’s new book, Selections from the Dream Manual, with an introduction by Antero Alli, is available for pre-order from Immanion Press.
Immanion Press: Selections from the Dream Manual
You can preview more of the artwork here.
As strange as the name sounds, exploding head syndrome is actually a rare and relatively undocumented sleep phenomenon. While sleeping or dozing, a person with the condition hears a terrifically loud sound in their head, such as a bomb exploding, a clash of cymbals or a gun going off.
“It’s usually described as a loud bang or pop that occurs in the first third of the night,” says Dr. Neil Kline, sleep physician and representative of the American Sleep Association in Wilmington, Del. “It’s a sensory phenomenon. The individual senses that some type of explosion has occurred nearby, but ultimately realizes it’s in their head. It’s not associated with pain or with any disorder that we know of and there are no physiological medical consequences that are associated with it.”
Read More: MSNBC: Loud crash at 3 a.m.? It may be your exploding head
(via William Gibson)
See also:
Wikipedia entry on Exploding Head Syndrome
Sleep paralysis
In a paper published last month in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Dr. J. Allan Hobson, a psychiatrist and longtime sleep researcher at Harvard, argues that the main function of rapid-eye-movement sleep, or REM, when most dreaming occurs, is physiological. The brain is warming its circuits, anticipating the sights and sounds and emotions of waking.
“It helps explain a lot of things, like why people forget so many dreams,” Dr. Hobson said in an interview. “It’s like jogging; the body doesn’t remember every step, but it knows it has exercised. It has been tuned up. It’s the same idea here: dreams are tuning the mind for conscious awareness.”
Drawing on work of his own and others, Dr. Hobson argues that dreaming is a parallel state of consciousness that is continually running but normally suppressed during waking. The idea is a prominent example of how neuroscience is altering assumptions about everyday (or every-night) brain functions.
New York Times: A Dream Interpretation: Tuneups for the Brain
(Thanks Bill)
Can this possibly be true?
A team of Japanese scientists have created a device that enables the processing and imaging of thoughts and dreams as experienced in the brain to appear on a computer screen.
While researchers have so far only created technology that can reproduce simple images from the brain, the discovery paves the way for the ability to unlock people’s dreams and other brain processes.
A spokesman at ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories said: “It was the first time in the world that it was possible to visualise what people see directly from the brain activity.
Full Story: the Telegraph
Reminds me of the movie Until the End of the World
(thanks Bill)
“Today I want to talk about lucid nightmares using the metaphor of frightening Near Death Experiences (fNDEs). Both of these states of consciousness are under-reported, most likely due to the taboos I explored in Part I of this series.
In general, Near Death Experiences have been compared to lucid dreams for decades. In both of these ‘altered states,’ the dreamer/visionary undergoes a conscious journey into unknown territory. The journeyer often sees white light, goes through a tunnel or vortex, and meets with ancestors or recently deceased family members. Seeing images of the divine, and having conversations with unseen ‘entities’ is also a strong pattern in both NDEs and lucid dreams.
REM Intrusion or Otherworldly Journey?
The difference, of course, is that NDEs occur after a serious brush with death. And, also, lucid dreamers interpret this class of experience as ‘a dream’ while people who have a NDE interpret their experience as ‘real.’ Interestingly, some neurologists have suggested that NDEs may be due to REM intrusion into waking consciousness. In my mind, this neurological perspective does not reduce a NDE to a biomechanical glitch.
Instead, this material layer complements the imaginal experiences. NDEs are psychologically real, and have been shown in many studies to change people’s views of reality and positively mark their lives forever, REM intrusion or not. But not everyone has a good time in their NDE. The white light, the life review, feelings of love and acceptance…. these are the most common reports, but others have decidedly frightening NDEs. Bruce Greyson and Nancy Evans Bush first collected anecdotes and established a typology back in the 1980s.”
(via The Dream Studies Portal. See also: the entire series of posts on “Lucid Nightmares”)
Lucid dreams used to be a topic within psychical research and parapsychology. Perhaps their incomprehensibility made them good candidates for being thought paranormal. More recently, however, they have begun to appear in psychology journals and have dropped out of parapsychology-a good example of how the field of parapsychology shrinks when any of its subject matter is actually explained.
Lucidity has also become something of a New Age fad. There are machines and gadgets you can buy and special clubs you can join to learn how to induce lucid dreams. But this commercialization should not let us lose sight of the very real fascination of lucid dreaming. It forces us to ask questions about the nature of consciousness, deliberate control over our actions, and the nature of imaginary worlds.
Full Story: Susan Blackmore
(via Bruce Eisner)
“A first-generation commercial brain-computer interface (BCI) is being released by Emotiv Systems later this year. What does the future hold for BCI?
By 2050, and likely sooner, you will be able to buy a BCI device that records all your dreams in their entirety. This will be done in one of two ways. One method would be to use distributed nanobots less than a micrometer in diameter to spread throughout the brain and monitor the activation patterns of neurons. By this point, cognitive science will have advanced enough to know which neural activation patterns correspond to which sensory experiences. This has already been done with cats (using electrodes, not nanobots), where researchers led by scientist Garrett Stanley were able to extrapolate what a cat was seeing merely by monitoring the neurons of its visual cortex.”
(via Accelerating Future)
“Just discovered a new lucid dreaming wiki called Lucidipedia. They provide some great resources for lucid dreaming beginners, as well as an opportunity for more experienced dreamers to edit articles and become a part of the conversation. They also are looking for beginner lucid dreamers to blog for them while they take Lucidipedia’s training. If you’re interested, check out this blog post. Lucidipedia also has some downloadable media like a podcast how-to guide. Great material for the democratization of dreaming!”
(Lucidipedia via The Dream Studies Portal)
When I first came up with that ‘Crackpot Historian’ title, I didn’t really give it much thought, as these are the types of phrases that sometimes just pop into my head…But what I think I intended to convey was that I enjoy writing about strange and colorful characters-what some would term ‘crackpots’-and that I also fit that category myself, at times. And yes, as you noted, I don’t take myself too seriously-so don’t you, either!
Perhaps the funniest anecdote I have regarding this ‘Crackpot Historian’ business occurred at the 2006 Retro UFO Convention. I had a table set up there with Greg Bishop, author of Project Beta and Weird California. And I made a couple name tags for us. Greg’s read: ‘Greg Bishop-U-fool-ologist’. Of course, I asked him if he minded being jokingly referred to in such a manner and he just laughed. And, of course, my name tag said: ‘Adam Gorightly-Crackpot Historian.’ Anyway, at one point a fellow approached me who started going on about crockpots. I just nodded my head, not knowing how to respond. So I guess now I’m a ‘crockpot historian’, as well! Hail Eris!
Full Story: Waking the Midnight Sun.
Nightline had a show on lucid dreaming the other night. Unfortunately, I only caught the second half of it. Since I know some readers (myself included) are working with lucid dreaming, I thought I’d post a link to the article. I also included an exercise from The Dream Studies Portal blog called “Reality Check”. It seems to be working for me. When I remember to do it…
“Somewhere in between the Cinderella school of dreaming and the darker dreamscape of “The Matrix” lies Stephen LaBerge, an expert in a technique called lucid dreaming. He believes that what happens to people in their dreams is as real an experience as what happens in real life. By becoming aware that they’re dreaming while they’re asleep, lucid dreamers say they can learn to consciously control and manipulate the dreamscape, allowing them to live out their wildest fantasies in a virtual reality with no earthly boundaries.”
(via Nightline:ABC News)
(“Reality Check” via Dream Studies Portal)
Everyone, even coked-out party monsters and meth freaks, must sleep. Even liver-bruising doses of Provigil will only let most people function thirty hours consecutively, and then it’s time to pay dear Morpheus. For those of us who have better things to do then sleep, this is a problem. The past several months, one of my personal projects has been to cultivate lucidity while sleeping in order to make some use of this time. As one Tibetan monk put it, if a man lives one hundred years but remains waking while asleep, ‘it is as though he lives two hundred years’. And the Tibetan monks would be the ones to listen to on this topic, as they have spent about the past two millenia hanging out in the bleakest environment on earth mastering their minds through magick and meditation. One of the technologies to which they have devoted much attention is Dream Yoga.
Full Story: From the Laboratory.
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