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The Star Larvae Hypothesis
Nature's Plan for Humankind
Part 3. Space Brains

Lucid Dreams, the Great Awakening

Dreams remedy sleep's otherwise impoverishing effects on the brain. Dreaming with intent extends conscious will into the unconscious.

Sleep would seem to be a brain-impoverishing condition, because it paralyzes the body, or at least it minimizes gross motor activity and so minimizes sensorimotor feedback. But the remedy to any impoverishing effects seems to be contained in sleep itself. The paralysis impasse looks to be surmountable, because sleep contains within it an arena for activity. In The Infant Mind Richard Restak observes,

"Six months into the pregnancy, eye movements and breathing are linked: rapid eye movements, combined with irregular, jagged breathing. This pattern will persist throughout childhood; during periods of eye movements the breathing becomes irregular and jerky. Dreams disturb the sleep, disturb the breathing . . . this is our explanation in children and adults. But what can we say of the fetus? Does it dream as well? . . . . Indeed, what could the fetus be dreaming of? No neuroscientist, unaided by input from some Higher Authority, could ever begin to answer that question."

Higher authorities aside, this observation suggests that more is going on during fetal sleep than just dozing.

When it occurs in fetuses, REM sleep—the stage named after the rapid eye movements that accompany dreaming—challenges conventional psychodynamic explanations of dreaming. The prevailing psychodynamic theories describe dreams as exercises in conflict resolution, wish fulfillment, or the "sifting through" of mental residues. Such psychological processing in the mind of a fetus might have little or no significance, if it can be imagined to occur at all. Another theory explains REM sleep in fetuses without relying on psychodynamics. This theory proposes that dreaming is not concerned primarily with psychological processes, but with neurophysiological ones. In this theory dreams have the job of maintaining neural networks, particularly sensorimotor feedback loops, that are not adequately exercised during waking hours. The medium—brain circuitry—is the message in this model of dreaming.

If dreaming has the potential to mitigate the neurological impoverishments of sleep, then native extraterrestrials should have little to worry about in the way of sleep-induced neurological impoverishment.

Their juvenilized brains should be adept at dreaming, because a typical three-month-old infant spends about 40 percent of its sleeping time in the REM state, in contrast to a adult brain, which spends only about 20 percent of its sleep time in REM. But the prospect of spending a large fraction of one’s life in REM sleep might not be one that many space settlers would find inviting, given the tumult of typical dream experience. Feelings of relief are common enough when waking from dreams.

But the buffeting meted out by dreams can be prevented. Lucidity is available to tame the bully. Becoming lucid—aware—during dreams and to take command of events is a capacity that apparently anyone can develop. Lucid dreams, in which the dreamer knows that he/she is dreaming, would seem to be an intersection of sleep and wakefulness, a merger that weightless brain enrichment is likely to encourage.

Sleep researcher Stephen LaBerge, working at Stanford University, not only has documented the existence of lucid dreaming, but also developed training methods that help sleepers trigger the experience. The adept lucid dreamer, exercising intent, can manufacture experiences to order in the dream world. LaBerge’s training method involves equipping the trainee with special goggles that signal him or her with a colored light when the trainee is in the REM phase of sleep as determined by an EEG monitor. Using agreed-upon eye movements as a code, the dreamer can signal back to the outside world about events that occur in dreams. The EEG monitoring equipment verifies that the subject remains asleep during the communication.

LaBerge offers an attractive pitch: "Lucid dreamers are often overjoyed to discover that they can seemingly do anything they wish. They have, for instance, but to declare the law of gravity repealed, and they float. They can visit the Himalayas and climb to the highest peak without ropes or guides; they can even explore the solar system without a space suit." The world of lucid dreaming amounts to a vast virtual-reality video game obedient to the dreamer's will.

Propitiously, perhaps, it turns out that avid video gamers develop a knack for lucid dreaming. Researcher Jayne Gackenbach, a psychologist at Grant MacEwan University in Canada, reports, "If you're spending hours a day in a virtual reality, if nothing else it's practice. Gamers are used to controlling their game environments, so that can translate into dreams." Gackenbach's research on lucid dreaming proficiency in video gamers is summarized HERE.

NEXT > Omnipresent Virtualities

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