Thursday, May 15, 2014

Brain zaps trigger lucid dreams (science)

Bahar Gholipour (LiveScience.com, May 11, 2014); Amber Larson (ed.), Wisdom Quarterly
What is a dream but an astral journey to Wyrd? (dreamingdog.multipy.com)
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Dream Dancer (Josephine Wall)
Lucid dreams, in which people are aware of and can control their dreams, are rare.
 
But now scientists have found they can induce this [magical] state of mind in people by zapping their brains with a specific frequency of electricity.
 
"I never thought this would work," said study researcher Dr. John Allan Hobson, a psychiatrist and longtime sleep researcher at Harvard University. "But it looks like it does."
 
The Monroe Institute: Explore consciousness
 
The results showed that when the inexperienced dreamers were zapped with a current of 40 Hertz, 77 percent of the time these participants reported having what were described as lucid dreams.

"They were really excited," said study researcher Ursula Voss, of J.W. Goethe-University Frankfurt, who designed the experiments. "The dream reports were short, but long enough for them to report, 'Wow, all of the sudden I knew this was a dream, while I was dreaming.'
 
Dream waves
(Bruce Rolff/shutterstock/livescience.com)
A lucid dream can be thought of as an overlap between two states of consciousness -- the one that exists in normal dreaming, and the one during wakefulness, which involves higher levels of awareness and control.
 
"If I'm aware, if I'm self-reflective, if I'm thinking about myself, about my past and future, that's normally a waking function," Voss said.

In lucid dreaming, we transfer elements of waking consciousness into the dream, she said.
 
Such overlap is also reflected in the brain waves that researchers can detect using electroencephalography, or EEG... More
 
"Waking Life"
(Waking Life) Dreaming on purpose and with a conscious objective (by Richard Linklater)

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