Transporting messages into lucid dreams
Reading time: 10 mins
Hi! Long time no see. Haha remember I promised last time that the next edition would have a distilling of this paper with multiple concepts? Guess what, this is not that edition. To come clean, I did try. I tried reading the review paper a few times but every time I came across a particular voltage clamp graph, I’d stop. It happened more than thrice, and by that time I lost all interest and motivation. I did try using my own advice of searching Google—only to get more confused lol. So here I am bringing a new edition, sharing with you something I believe is COOL. Have you guessed it from the GIF?
If you haven’t watched Inception, featuring Leo, here’s a spoiler. In the movie a select group of people can manipulate their dreams, go from one dream to the next, and come out of them. A top-of-sorts called a totem helps the people keep track of the ‘dream world’. Well, more or less. The film was ‘mind-bendy’ in a lot of ways but it might not be that far away from the natural world. For you see, we can manipulate and can ‘be manipulated’ in our dreams too.
Dreams have fascinated people for millenia. A quick Wikipedia search (look here) will tell you just how far back in time they were significant. Lucid dreaming, the state in which dreams can possibly be controlled and manipulated was in fact referenced as early as 415 A.D, as a form of therapy. It was only much later, in the 1960’s, that Celia Green suggested lucid dreaming may be accompanying Rapid Eye Movements (REM) sleep. Believe it or not, today scientists communicate with lucid dreamers via REM movements.
A lot of making sense of information occurs when we are asleep. Some scientists have even suggested dreaming may be a way of understanding and consolidating information. I believe studies such as the subjecting smokers to the smell of smoke immediately followed by the smell of rotten eggs, that ultimately made smokers smoke less, proves this point. One, being that sleep is in fact when some associations can take place and two, conditioning (learned behavior) during sleep has implications on our waking life.
In a recent study (read about it here, you won’t be disappointed) , scientists managed to ‘get into’ lucid dreams people were experiencing. In a way at least. There is no way to physically enter a dream of course or form mind-connections yet. The five senses however still receive inputs from the outside world. So the eyes can still ‘sense’ flashes of light during a lucid dream, the ears may ‘hear’ faint noises and so on. Some subjects that signed up for the study in fact said often these ‘external stimuli’ integrated with their dreams. For instance, a person said the audio stimulus from the outside in fact presented itself as a radio broadcast in their dream. Hold that thought for a second though. Lucid dreams can be manipulated. Okay. Moving on. What’s more, lucid dreamers may be able to interact with the outside world too. When the subjects were asked simple math questions either over audio or using Morse code (the people exposed to Morse code) were pre-trained, some answered correctly using REM patterns (these were practiced too). The number of subjects that responded ‘favorably’ may look tiny but the scientists are pretty sure the responses were not random. Here’s a Twitter thread that questions it and a response from the scientist who worked on the project (gotta love Twitter interactions ;P). Read the entire thread for a discussion if you fancy it?
A lot of people over Twitter mention this study taking us closer to Inception, the movie of course. I, for one, don’t think that is possible. Ehem people, get a grip, we can’t even read CONSCIOUS minds yet (which would be creepy). What makes you think we can experience collective dreams haha (wait anything collective in COVID times seems funny :’)). Wouldn’t that be mega-creepy tho (you know, definitions of privacy and shiz change too..yada yada)? If it was indeed possible that is.
I learned that lucid dreaming can be practiced. Which made me question if I myself experienced a lucid dream before. I don’t know. Does an alarm clock ringing in your dream (with a literal image) and in reality constitute a lucid dream? Probably not. I’d never know. Unless a scientist stumbled across this and called me in to perhaps monitor it? Who knows?
Also learned some individuals also experience lucid dreaming more frequently than others. Some, not once in their lifetimes. Others experience frequent lucid dreams due to conditions, and other-others (is this still English?) under the influence of drugs, perhaps.
Resources
The first in line has to be the paper reveal tweet.
The second has to be this video from PBS sourced from the thread. Don’t have enough time? Read the transcript here.
The LUCID DREAMING Wikipedia article next. Because heck, history, context and cooler facts.
Fresh Finds
While reading the Wikipedia article I discovered apparently people experiencing lucid dreams experience time as we do in real life?! Anyway, Stephen LaBerge studied this during his doctoral work *which reminds me I still don’t know what I want to do a fricking PhD in* and here’s an article from Wired that features the man himself. It’s long, but I’m going to read it (hmph).
Lucid Dreaming: This Retreat Can Train Your Nighttime Visions
Brand India by Ravinder Kaur at Aeon magazine.
Which also reminds me I have a PDF in my downloads of a book titled ‘Holy Science’ by Banu Subramaniam. Must read that someday. Moving on.
I’ll also read Sarah Zhang’s We’re just rediscovering a 19th-Century Pandemic Strategy for The Atlantic.
Funding the needy, or funding terror? by John Beck for Rest of World. When I read this I was surprised and simultaneously not so much at the lengths of deception. Also questioned if surveillance of transactions was a legit idea but maybe they aren’t. Privacy etc.
Ending with two editions of Newsletters I follow Twitter vs. Koo, from Keeping Up With India and Deciphering Sounds Through Skin Vibrations, from Synapse.
That’s all for this time. See you soon-ish?
Love,
San