Oh My God! I’m Dreaming!

Have you ever experienced super powers? Fallen down a great height and then suddenly discovered yourself flying? This is in fact possible with lucid dreaming — the ability to become conscious mid-dream and thus, control your dream world. It is the most surreal feeling ever. And I recently became obsessed with lucid dreams after I had my first one shortly after I subjected myself to a mini experiment.

I got the inspiration for the experiment from an article on Slate Magazine about how to turn a “night owl” into a morning person. Perfect! I thought. This could potentially be the solution to my continual tardiness in attending 8am classes taught by professors with monotone voices that just didn’t seem worth the effort. So I started by forcing myself to take a 20-minute walk in the morning as soon as I woke up so that the bright sunlight could activate the part of my hypothalamus that regulates circadian rhythms. At night I would do the opposite: avoid bright light before bedtime. But since my dorm room lights didn’t come with fancy dimmer switches, I would always be found wearing sunglasses after 7pm. Then I progressed to the next stage: popping melatonin pills every night that would enhance the effect of the natural hormone, making me drowsy faster. It was soon after this that I started having much more vivid dreams at night.

However, since melatonin only amplifies normal sleep patterns, I would wake up at night sometimes after completing a REM cycle and then go back to sleep and start dreaming again. Without realizing it, I was using a method that is commonly used to induce lucid dreaming, called Wake Then Back To Bed (WBTB). As a result, when I would go to sleep after being disturbed in the middle of the night, I would almost immediately recognize that what I was experiencing was actually part of a dream!

This led me to do some research about lucid dreaming, which is quickly becoming a hot topic in neuroscience and cognitive psychology because it promises to isolate one of the hardest-to-pin-down objects of all time: consciousness itself. I found that not only have scientists demonstrated that it is possible to be self-aware in the REM sleep state (Stanford, Hearne, Ogilvie, etc.) but even new EEG technology has found a unique brain signature in support of this research: a 40Hz spike in brain activity in the frontal lobe during lucid dreams.

What makes this 40Hz finding so intriguing is that it has previously been correlated with waking consciousness — as well as meditation and hypnosis. Waking consciousness is not just one state, either, but continuously shifts around between linguistic and emotional thinking, day dreaming, focused attention, and creative mental states that are almost dream-like in their own right. Therefore, the implications of further studying and analyzing lucid dreams are not only philosophical but also address psychiatry’s aims to heal mental illness, overcome fears and enhance your abilities. 

I, for one, highly recommend trying out lucid dreaming. You don’t even know the half of it till you experience it!

Want to learn more before you have a go at it? Check out some of my recommended readings and techniques for lucid dreaming.

Inception: Fact or Fiction?

When I first saw the movie Inception, it blew my mind away. It had a fantastical, seemingly out-of-this-world premise — the idea that someone could penetrate another's subconscious to extract information or plant an idea. Once I watched it, it was the only thing I talked about for at least the next week, and being the science junkie that I am, I was intrigued to find out more about the possibilities that can be accomplished by dreaming.

Parts of the movie — basically a heist film in which a team of operatives must plant an idea in a businessman's mind — are obvious Hollywood fiction. People enter and control others' dreams, drugs induce REM sleep, people become addicted to dreams and can't separate them from reality. But other parts are more real than you might think. In a radio podcast by The Takeaway, movie critic, Rafer Guzman, and dream scientist, Robert Hoss, try to shed some light on this subject. They explain that influencing another person’s dream actually is somewhat possible, although not in the sense shown in the movie.  Psychological studies carried out by Ullman and Krippner in the ’60s, showed that a person in a distant room could telepathically attempt to influence a subject to dream about a specific target (art print). The results of the experiment were surprisingly statistically significant. But it was conducted in a controlled scientific setting where participants had mutually agreed to attempt to do this rather than just invading someone else’s dream as shown in Inception.

The second, perhaps more interesting concept, is what psychologists call “lucid dreaming” — the ability to become conscious mid-dream and thus, control your dream world. This is a kind of virtual reality where you are present in real life but there is also a second layer of reality in which you are dreaming, although the movie also has levels 3,4,5 (and 6 if you consider yourself sitting in the theater).

Scientific studies, some more reliable than others have indeed suggested that you can control the narrative of your dream once you become aware of your dream state. Some people are even able to share dreams, or engage in the same subconscious experience! But that is a topic to be explored in a whole other blog post.

Another thing that director Christopher Nolan nailed in Inception was the disappearance of "position sense" in dreams. This is a well known characteristic of REM sleep, and allows us to go anywhere in space and time — one reason 99 percent of people fly in their dreams. It is for the same reason that it is not uncommon for people to dream themselves inside another dream. 

So did DiCaprio’s character finally come out of the dream in the end of the movie? Or was he still dreaming? Confused? Check out 6 possible explanations here.