Do We Know What We Think We Know About ... - TheUFOStore.com

Recommendations

Info

CONSCIOUSNESS • BY PATRICK MARSOLEK You’re sitting on the patio of a coffee shop drinking tea and talking with a friend. You see cars driving by. You can hear the chatter of other people’s conversations and enjoy the fragrant taste of your tea. A police car drives by with flashing red lights and sirens wailing. You think to yourself, “What an annoying sound.” Your friend says, almost simultaneously, “That was annoying.” Your friend’s words sound like they came from your own mind. You pause for a moment, and have a strange sensation, a kind of remembering. You feel a rush of energy in your body at the same moment you have an insight. You are dreaming. You take a deep breath, feeling a tremendous surge of energy through your body; and, as you focus on your friend, the dream settles down again with increased sharpness and aliveness. Your friend is looking at you, suddenly quiet, as if waiting for something. You realize she is part of your dream, part of your own mind. She stops talking, a quiet reflection of you. You realize you can do whatever you want. The colors become heightened, more subtle and vibrant. All your senses become more intense. The world around you seems to breathe in connection with your mind. As you realize your freedom, you feel a rushing sensation again; the world pulsates and you begin to float with energy. Suddenly, everything shifts and you find yourself stirring in your bed in the dark, with soft red lights pulsating in the eye mask covering your eyes. You are exhilarated, finding yourself starting to miss your heightened state. Does this description sound like a scene right out of a science fiction movie? It is, and it is also an example of the kinds of experiences that many people have on a regular basis. Have you ever become aware you were dreaming while it was happening? Becoming conscious while you’re dreaming is what is called a lucid dream. Though studies have shown that perhaps only 25 percent of people report having lucid dreams, many more people may have lucid dreams without remembering them. Worldwide, thousands of people are talking about them on blogs and forums, wanting to have them and having them. Those who regularly experience lucid dreaming are able to manipulate their dream reality in amazing ways. They can fly like the characters in the movie The Matrix. They are able to generate whole realities, and even spontaneously visit friends and physical places. Some lucid dreamers report that their dream experiences seem more real than their waking life events, and they feel more themselves while they’re lucid in their dreams. Some report 46 ATLANTIS RISING • Number 95 having profound, spiritual experiences in their dreams that help them remember the meaningfulness of their waking lives. Moviemakers are weaving lucid dreams into their scripts. The movie Inception had a scene much like the one described. In the movie, technicians had learned how to go into dreams with lucidity and manipulate the dreams with stunning accuracy to find information in the sleeper’s unconscious mind. Though the predictability, reliability, and shared experiences demonstrated in Inception are not currently feasible, researchers are finding ways to make lucid dreaming easier. Lucid dreams have entered our cultural mainstream. Lucid dreaming has been acknowledged by Western science for 150 years. It became more reputable in the 1970’s and 1980’s when psycho-physiologist Stephen LaBerge and British parapsychologist Keith Hearne independently validated lucid dreaming. These researchers confirmed that subjects could signal during lucid dreams while EEG monitors verified their mental states as rapid eye movement (REM) phases of sleep. In these studies, dreamers, who realized they were dreaming, were able to move their eyes in very specific, predetermined ways, thus informing researchers who were watching their sleeping bodies that they were conscious. To date there continue to be many studies integrating lucid dreaming with transpersonal When When When When the the the the Stuff Stuff Stuff Stuff of of of of Dreams Dreams Dreams Dreams Becomes Becomes Becomes Becomes More More More More than than than than Real Real Real Real psychology, sports psychology, cognition studies, and the treatment of nightmares. La- Berge continues to study the psychophysiological domains of lucid dreaming, and his research has been valuable to cognitive psychology, leading to advances in mind/brain mapping and linguistic-cognitive studies. There are also tools to help you have your own experience. If you’re an iPhone or Android user, you can download an app for your phone which will play reminders for you while you are dreaming. The app monitors your sleep and, when placed near you on your mattress, plays subtle voice reminders when your brain goes into one of its REM, dreaming cycles. The stimulus is intended to register at a subconscious level, activating an aspect of conscious awareness while you’re in your dream, helping you achieve lucidity. Using another tool, there are several different versions of sleep masks you can wear to help you have a lucid dream. These masks also track your sleep cycles and flash gentle lights into your eyes when you are in a REM sleep cycle. This stimulus is designed to be light enough to not wake you, but strong enough to help you recognize that you are dreaming. It was described in the scene at the beginning of this article. The police car’s flashing lights were the dream experience of the red lights from the mask the sleeper was wearing. The movie Inception played with a similar idea, noting that Subscribe or Order Books, DVDs and Much More!
when dream characters experienced changes in gravity, their physical bodies were experiencing similar changes. Granted, there are mixed reviews as to how effective these technologies really are, but they seem to be helpful for some people. Two entrepreneurs, Duncan Frazier and Steve McGuigan, have started a company called Bitbanger Labs with the intention of producing a Lucid Dreaming Mask. Their kickstarter campaign seems to have tapped into a popular trend. They’ve gone over their $35,000 goal and raised close to $600,000 from 6,500 people. Bitbanger Labs is producing the Lucid Dreaming Mask and will start shipping in August, 2012. LaBerge’s company, The Lucidity Institute, has produced a similar sleep mask. The new model is soon to be released. There is some scientific rationale for cueing dreamers during REM sleep. The lateral prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain involved in logical reasoning and working memory, becomes less active during REM sleep, while other areas of the See Our Great 8-page Catalog Beginning on Page 74 brain, the visual and emotional centers, become more active. Dr. Matthew Walker, the director of the Sleep and Neuroimaging Laboratory at UC Berkeley, thinks the prefrontal cortex is key to lucid dreaming. He suggests that during REM sleep, the activity level in that logicaloriented part of the brain becomes more active, close to waking levels, which brings about lucidity. He suspects researchers will verify something of that sort in the next five years. On the outer edge of science, hinting at what was done in the movie Inception, researchers at UC Berkeley are using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and computational models to decode and reconstruct people’s visual experiences. So far this technology can only reconstruct movie clips people have already viewed, but the researchers say it might pave the way to see inner dreams and memories. The practical applications of this technology would be to better understand the minds of people who can’t communicate— stroke victims, coma patients, or people otherwise disabled. Yet, they are careful to say they are decades away from people Duncan Frazier and Steve McGuigan being able to view another’s thoughts as in Inception or the sci-fi classic movie, Brainstorm. Although Western science has only been studying lucid dreams for a relatively short time, they have been known and utilized by humanity for centuries. The Sufis and the Tibetans have long traditions of lucid dreaming. In the Sufi tradition, the dreaming is practiced in conjunction with spiritual inquiry. For Tibetan monks, lucid dreaming is practiced to rehearse for death, detachment Continued on Page 72 Number 95 • ATLANTIS RISING 47
Page 3 and 4: See Our Great 8-page Catalog Beginn
Page 9 and 10: READER FORUM Continued from Page 6
Page 11 and 12: Object on seabed of Baltic (sonar i
Page 21 and 22: epresent all ages—they are from i
Page 23 and 24: ALTERNATIVE ARCHAEOLOGY • BY WILL
Page 29 and 30: THE OTHER SIDE • BY MICHAEL TYMN
Page 31 and 32: SOUL STUFF Continued from Page 29 o
Page 33 and 34: Jefferson Davis and his Cabinet was
Page 43 and 44: onnection? myth records Enki’s wo
Page 45: ANCIENT MYSTERIES • BY ROBERT BAU
Page 49 and 50: Uranus manity.” Pluto represents
Page 57 and 58: ATLANTIS RISING PUZZLE • BY CARLY
Page 59 and 60: HOMINID Continued from Page 23 Betw
Page 61 and 62: Dwellings carved in the rock, Cappa
Page 63 and 64: SOUL STUFF Continued from Page 31 n
Page 65 and 66: asked to learn more, he had been st
Page 67 and 68: which Steiner had been intuitively
Page 69 and 70: tury blade depicted in contemporane
Page 71 and 72: CAPSTONE Continued from Page 45 whi
Page 73 and 74: meditate, the more conscious you be
Page 75 and 76: EDGAR CAYCE’S STORY OF THE BIBLE
Page 77 and 78: SCIENCE AND PSYCHIC PHENOMENA: The
Page 79 and 80: CROSSING THE EVENT HORIZON Nassim H
Page 81 and 82: ATLANTIS RISING 10% Discount on ord

Do We Know What We Think We Know About ... - TheUFOStore.com

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?