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When you dream, you drift off to a shadow realm where nothing is real, and what goes on in a dream, stays in a dream or does it? Practical dreaming might seem impossible. But, the dream state can be powerful, and there are ways to channel its elusive influence. Ever since high school, bizarre and uncommon dream states such as lucid dreaming have fascinated neuroscientist Emma Peters, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Bern in Switzerland…….Continue reading….
By: Elizabeth Rayne
Source: Popular Mechanics
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A dream is a succession of images, ideas, emotions, and sensations that usually occur involuntarily in the mind during certain stages of sleep. Humans spend about two hours dreaming per night,[2] and each dream lasts around 5–20 minutes, although the dreamer may perceive the dream as being much longer. The content and function of dreams have been topics of scientific, philosophical and religious interest throughout recorded history.
Dream interpretation, practiced by the Babylonians in the third millennium BCE and even earlier by the ancient Sumerians, figures prominently in religious texts in several traditions, and has played a lead role in psychotherapy. The scientific study of dreams is called oneirology. Most modern dream study focuses on the neurophysiology of dreams and on proposing and testing hypotheses regarding dream function.
It is not known where in the brain dreams originate, if there is a single origin for dreams or if multiple regions of the brain are involved, or what the purpose of dreaming is for the body or mind. The human dream experience and what to make of it has undergone sizable shifts over the course of history. Long ago, according to writings from Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt, dreams dictated post-dream behaviors to an extent that was sharply reduced in later millennia.
These ancient writings about dreams highlight visitation dreams, where a dream figure, usually a deity or a prominent forebear, commands the dreamer to take specific actions, and which may predict future events. Framing the dream experience varies across cultures as well as through time. Dreaming and sleep are intertwined. Dreams occur mainly in the rapid-eye movement (REM) stage of sleep—when brain activity is high and resembles that of being awake.
Because REM sleep is detectable in many species, and because research suggests that all mammals experience REM, linking dreams to REM sleep has led to conjectures that animals dream. However, humans dream during non-REM sleep, also, and not all REM awakenings elicit dream reports.To be studied, a dream must first be reduced to a verbal report, which is an account of the subject’s memory of the dream, not the subject’s dream experience itself.
So, dreaming by non-humans is currently unprovable, as is dreaming by human fetuses and pre-verbal infants. Dream study is popular with scientists exploring the mind–brain problem. Some “propose to reduce aspects of dream phenomenology to neurobiology.” But current science cannot specify dream physiology in detail. Protocols in most nations restrict human brain research to non-invasive procedures.
In the United States, invasive brain procedures with a human subject are allowed only when these are deemed necessary in surgical treatment to address medical needs of the same human subject. Non-invasive measures of brain activity like electroencephalogram (EEG) voltage averaging or cerebral blood flow cannot identify small but influential neuronal populations. Also, fMRI signals are too slow to explain how brains compute in real time.
Scientists researching some brain functions can work around current restrictions by examining animal subjects. As stated by the Society for Neuroscience, “Because no adequate alternatives exist, much of this research must [sic] be done on animal subjects.” However, since animal dreaming can be only inferred, not confirmed, animal studies yield no hard facts to illuminate the neurophysiology of dreams.
Examining human subjects with brain lesions can provide clues, but the lesion method cannot discriminate between the effects of destruction and disconnection and cannot target specific neuronal groups in heterogeneous regions like the brain stem. Lucid dreaming is the conscious perception of one’s state while dreaming. In this state the dreamer may often have some degree of control over their own actions within the dream or even the characters and the environment of the dream.
Dream control has been reported to improve with practiced deliberate lucid dreaming, but the ability to control aspects of the dream is not necessary for a dream to qualify as “lucid”—a lucid dream is any dream during which the dreamer knows they are dreaming. The occurrence of lucid dreaming has been scientifically verified.“Oneironaut” is a term sometimes used for those who lucidly dream. In 1975, psychologist Keith Hearne successfully recorded a communication from a dreamer experiencing a lucid dream.
On April 12, 1975, after agreeing to move his eyes left and right upon becoming lucid, the subject and Hearne’s co-author on the resulting article, Alan Worsley, successfully carried out this task. Years later, psychophysiologist Stephen LaBerge conducted similar work including:
- Using eye signals to map the subjective sense of time in dreams.
- Comparing the electrical activity of the brain while singing awake and while dreaming.
- Studies comparing in-dream sex, arousal, and orgasm.
Communication between two dreamers has also been documented. The processes involved included EEG monitoring, ocular signaling, incorporation of reality in the form of red light stimuli and a coordinating website. The website tracked when both dreamers were dreaming and sent the stimulus to one of the dreamers where it was incorporated into the dream. This dreamer, upon becoming lucid, signaled with eye movements; this was detected by the website whereupon the stimulus was sent to the second dreamer, invoking incorporation into that dreamer’s dream…. “
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