With having so many vivid and lucid dreams, I often find myself debating as to whether or not I dream in colour or not. When reflecting on my dreams I do feel that I’ve seen what my mind ran through like that of my normal vision, but is it that way or is it in black and white and how can I properly assess that?

Now I further wonder about the impact that colour does or does not have on REM sleep, whether maybe it’s included or avoided when rapid eye movement sleep kicks in. Why and or how does that play a factor?

I’m forever mulling this over, is the dream world the real world and we are the exaggeration thereof, or is it the reverse? While you’re sleeping other worlds continue, everyone else can do their own thing…

But have you ever imagined how to dissect this? It comes almost into religious theory as you go further and examine the separation between a dream and between reality. Life around the dreamer continues while they sleep, or does it? Analyzing this proves complicated and problematic. On the simple, rational plane there is the understanding that a person sleep is “recharging,” but if that’s not the case how does this work exactly?

What’s surreal about lucid dreaming, and the fact that it’s at the forefront of my research, is the role you can play within your own mind. Whether it’s all from your own p.o.v. or some sort of omnipotent focus, we all should aspire to know more about this.

Frederik van Eeden came up with the term “lucid dreaming” in his life during the late 1800′s/early 1900′s and since then tests and investigations have backed it up.

From what I can tell, lucid dreaming has two ways of being defined. The first is abbreviated to D.I.L.D. (DILD); dream initiated lucid dream… Meaning a normal bout of sleep has conjured up a dream and somehow you take hold of it from the get go. The other which has been abbreviated to W.I.L.D. (WILD) is a wake initiated lucid dream which happens whilst a dream continues on from being awake and a wake, almost to a day dreaming sort of stage. In their mind everything continues as normal, they may opt towards turning off an alarm, or conducting a simple task, and to them this seems completely real. It is in actual fact though just their dreams. When they awake, the individual is shocked to feel those results come forth, they were actually just dreamin?

Now I read and write a lot about the subject of dreams, I’ve studied it endlessly and enjoy nothing more than the discussions I have with people about what occurs during dreams and sleep. I do feel there’s a lot more to where our mind wanders when we sleep and I intend to prove so. I will prove it. Trust me, the dream world and reality are an inexplicable blur, neither of which can be properly justified. Whilst sleeping we view the world through a truth that the physical form cannot comprehend. My research will, I hope, explain all the questions that people may have.

How can dreams happen in real time if the length always seems to vary? This is one of the many areas of the dream world that I’ve been trying to quantify in my work, and is something I’m striving to explain.

David Eagleman’s book Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives (Vintage)

This is what Publishers Weekly had to say about the book

“Starred Review. A clever little book by a neuroscientist translates lofty concepts of infinity and death into accessible human terms. What happens after we die? Eagleman wonders in each of these brief, evocative segments. Are we consigned to replay a lifetime’s worth of accumulated acts, as he suggests in Sum, spending six days clipping your nails or six weeks waiting for a green light? Is heaven a bureaucracy, as in Reins, where God has lost control of the workload? Will we download our consciousnesses into a computer to live in a virtual world, as suggested in Great Expectations, where God exists after all and has gone through great trouble and expense to construct an afterlife for us? Or is God actually the size of a bacterium, battling good and evil on the battlefield of surface proteins, and thus unaware of humans, who are merely the nutritional substrate? Mostly, the author underscores in Will-’o-the-Wisp, humans desperately want to matter, and in afterlife search out the ripples left in our wake. Eagleman’s turned out a well-executed and thought-provoking book. (Feb.) ”

Emily Blunt reads a passage from David Eagleman’s book

The Guardian provided a very interesting passage from the new David Eagleman book, read by the actress Emily Blunt.

Actor Emily Blunt reads from Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlife, neuroscientist David Eagleman’s first work of fiction

Do dreams solve problems?

This is an age old question which we will forever question. According to one study, your sleep is actually a period in which your main finishes off thoughts and “trains.” So after a long day and period (however old you are), when you rest your head on that pillow, one opinion suggests that your brain sifts through issues and plays them through in your head. Sometimes to improve sharpness and awareness in your general day to day life.

For example, maybe you have doubts about yourself or whether your partner is cheating on you or not. Your dream may in actual fact have an eventuality play out where you find out that your partner is cheating on you, and your brain supposes/assessses how you behave in response to help work things out in your real life.

I applied to Stanford University because I wanted to refine my clinical understanding of lucid dreaming: the ability to become conscious during dreams and affect their content.

This isn’t new-age nonsense, either. It’s been tested in the strictest of lab settings.

Dr. Stephen LaBerge of Stanford was considered the world’s foremost researchers in the science and practice of lucid dreaming, and he had pioneered proving its existence. How? It turns out that eye movement, unlike the rest of the skeletal muscular system, is not inhibited by REM sleep. Subjects could memorize horizontal eye patterns (e.g. left-left-right-right-left-right-left) and repeat the patterns upon becoming lucid, which researchers could observe, all while recording brain activity with an  EEG to confirm that the subjects where, in fact, in a dream state. Tibetan monks have been practicing lucid dreaming for thousands of years, but it was considered fringe speculation until it was captured in a controlled environment.

There are now dozens of studies that explore the incredibly cool world of lucid dreaming and hint at applications (search “lucid dreaming” here on PubMed).

I recently had dinner with former PayPal employee Mark Goldenson, who was a researcher in both Stephen LaBerge’s lab and Phil Zimbardo’s psychophysiology lab at Stanford, and the conversation convinced me that sharing the basics was worth a post.

For those interested in experiencing lucid dreaming, here are a few simple training methods, including:

Step 1) Develop dream recall -

Have you ever thought that you didn’t dream on given nights, or perhaps not at all? If I were to track your REM sleep, as I have mine on even “dreamless” nights, you quickly realize that this isn’t the case. Undeveloped recall is to blame.

Put a pad of paper next to your bed and record your dream immediately upon waking. Immediately means immediately. If you get dressed first, or even stare at the ceiling for a minute, dream recollection will be nil. Expect that you might not get more than a few lines for the first week or so, but also expect to get to multi-page recall ability within 2-3 weeks. This alone will make you look forward to going to bed.

Step 2) Identify dream cues and/or do reality checks -

Some people, like Mark, can use their dream log to identify common dream elements that recur from night to night. Water seems to be particularly common. These elements are then used for “reality checks”: asking yourself if you’re dreaming when you see these cues during waking hours, and then testing.

Testing entails doing something like trying to fly (not recommended) or looking at your environment for clear indications of dream state. The latter is my preference, and I typically skip the dream log and default to a few simple tests at set action (every time I check the time or walk through a door, for example).

Since working memory can only hold around 7 +/- 2 bits of information, and you are constantly creating your dreamscape in real-time, there are a few things that change if you look away and then look back at them:

a. Text (e.g., written signs)
b. Digital clocks/watches. Fascinatingly, analog clocks appear to keep accurate dream time, which, in my case, also corresponds to real time passing.
c. Complex patterns

For the last category, I like to look at wall brickwork or floor patterns, look away, and look back to see if their orientation (e.g. horizontal vs. vertical) or tile/block size has changed, asking “am I dreaming?” If there are changes, guess what? You are either on some strong hallucinogens or you are dreaming. If you’re dreaming and answer in the affirmative, it is at this point that you will become lucid.

Step 3) Induce lucidity –

MILD

There are a number of techniques that help induce lucidity. One such technique tested by LaBerge, referred to as Mnemonic-Induction of Lucid Dreaming (MILD), involved — in my case — waking up in the middle of the night, setting the intention to lucid dream for 10-15 minutes, then going back to bed. I have found this to work best when I wake 5 hours or so after going to sleep (not just to bed). Here is a longer description from LaBerge’s FAQ.

I have also found duration of sleep to be an important variable. It will often be easiest for novices to achieve lucidity if they sleep to excess — more than 9 hours (think Saturday or Sunday mornings) — and then use the snooze button to wake every 10-15 minutes for another hour. This juxtaposition of waking and sleep blurs the lines and seems to make the lucid state easier to achieve.

Ancillary Drugs

Three drugs, in my experience, also seems to assist with induction: huperzine-A (200-400 mcg), melatonin (3 mg), and nicotine (standard patch). I don’t suggest combining them.

Huperzine-A is an acetyl-cholinesterase inhibitor, tested in Chinese clinical trials for  treating Alzheimer’s, and will increase the half-life of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine at the synapse. This is my preferred tool if I’m using chemical assistance. Melatonin is involved with setting circadian rhythm and its release is controlled by the pineal gland and suprachiasmatic nuclei (SCN). Dreams on melatonin tend to be more colorful and more chaotic, as is also the case with nicotine. Nicotine is my last choice, as it is addictive and can cause total insomnia if you don’t time it properly. If you happen to be quitting smoking and will be using the patch regardless, be sure to put it on immediately prior to bed so the blood nicotine levels (and stimulant effects) peak well after you’ve fallen asleep. Mistime it and you’ll be one grumpy bastard the next morning.

Step 4) Extend lucidity duration

This is where things get a little strange, or even cooler.

The first few times you achieve lucidity, you will likely be so excited that you will wake yourself up. Two effective techniques for extending lucidity are spinning (a la a  piroutte in place) and looking at your hands. Both techniques, I believe, originated with  Carlos Castaneda, but LaBerge was the first to test them and quantify the effectiveness of spinning vs. hand rubbing:

…the odds in favor of continuing the lucid dream were about 22 to 1 after spinning, 13 to 1 after hand rubbing (another technique designed to prevent awakening), and 1 to 2 after “going with the flow” (a “control” task). That makes the relative odds favoring spinning over going with the flow 48 to 1, and for rubbing over going with the flow, 27 to 1.

Source: Lucidity Institute

Step 5) Once you’ve flown all over and had sex with every hottie you can think of…

Try to explore memory and performance. Indulge in the flying and sex binge, as all newbies do — no reason to rush that phase, of course — but then expand your carnal horizons in other directions.

Have fun and sweet dreams…

I decided today to look over this set of experiences because I’m really curious about it. A little while ago I had read that those exposed to colour television had dreamt in colour, but those exposed to black and white television and black and white images were only really dreaming in black and white. So what does this mean? Do our dreams rely on the media we digest to grow?

What were dreams like to the older generations prior to television? They must have been in colour, in theory, correct? But all the media they were exposed to was black and white at best, so what’s the eventuality here?

This is something I’ve often wondered about. The concept of dreams is so vast an interesting that I’ve wondered how it connects to our real lives. You often hear people hypothesize about what’s real? Our real lives or our dreams. Wouldn’t you love to know?

For the past twenty years I’ve been looking into this with a huge amount of passion, examining all that I could because it’s important for me to find out. I would love to be the woman who managed to showcase to the world what dreams are and what they mean, and I will do.

There’s a huge array of tests I’ve conjured up, and a great number of students I’ve had jump on the bandwagon. If anyone is to prove this, it’s me.

So I’m wondering, how can we measure dreams? Really.

People often remark on whether they dream in colour or in black and white… Now I’m wondering how that translates. If you dream in black and white, how are you unaware that you’re dreaming? The world is obviously different, it has to be more surreal and unexpected. I mean after all, you’re viewing things quite differently to how you “experience” them…