Lucid Dreaming

Dr. LaBerge did some interesting studies in the LI Labs. Prior to sleep, subjects were instructed to move their eyes in a specific sequence of motions upon achieving lucidity. This could be directly observed in the lab and provided a way for the test subjects to communicate with the outside world during sleep paralysis. It's one way to "diagnose" the difference between lucid and lon-lucid states... in a non-lucid state the subject wouldn't be aware of the capacity to communicate with the outside world.
 
osmosis said:
Knowing you're dreaming is awareness of the fact that you are dreaming.



Mental states are not on/off switches, one can be in more than one at the same time. Becoming aware of dreaming is simply the dream state with a bit of conscious awareness thrown in. Neural firing patterns indicative of dreaming and being awake would therefore be found, and specifically, there would be increased activity in the Reticular Formation, the gating mechanism I alluded to in the previous post.

This would be measurable from sophisticated equipment, which was the point I was trying to make.
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Not that the reticular formation is that clearly anatomically defined, but the functional properties normally ascribed to it does not include awareness, unless you equate awareness with wakefulness. I don't have a pure neuroscience textbook avalible at my current location, but according to "Cognitive neuroscience" by Gazzaniga et al, the reticular formation could primarily be seen as a set of motor and sensory nuclei which participate in arousal, respiration, cardiac modulations and pain regulation, mainly ANS system tasks it seems like. Damage/lack of oxygen supply to the reticular formation is also means that you're likely to go into a coma.

It seems more like you are talking about consciousness as a state, which is necessary for any subjective experiences at all, ie. to allow for phenomenal consciousness.

So much conceptual confusion and it seems like we're all too lazy for definitions, hehe.
 
Piggy said:
He pulled a gun on me. I tried to make the gun disappear, and it wouldn't. He smiled. It was chilling in the irrational way that dream-things can be. He looked at me and said, "I know it's a dream, too".
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Is anybody else having lucid dreams just because of this thread? In a dream last night a couple guys are helping me get my truck out of a sand dune, (I'm a lousy driver when dreaming) when I was suddenly aware I was dreaming. I say out loud, "This is a dream." I remember the above post, and ask one of the guys, "Do you know this is a dream?" He shakes his head and replies, "Nah."

I was worried because a tire was shredded and on the rim, but realize this is only my 'dream truck', and my real truck 'up there' is fine.
 
Major Billy said:
Is anybody else having lucid dreams just because of this thread? In a dream last night a couple guys are helping me get my truck out of a sand dune, (I'm a lousy driver when dreaming) when I was suddenly aware I was dreaming. I say out loud, "This is a dream." I remember the above post, and ask one of the guys, "Do you know this is a dream?" He shakes his head and replies, "Nah."

I was worried because a tire was shredded and on the rim, but realize this is only my 'dream truck', and my real truck 'up there' is fine.
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Way cool. :cool:
 
Major Billy said:
I was worried because a tire was shredded and on the rim, but realize this is only my 'dream truck', and my real truck 'up there' is fine.
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Way cool. One question though, where was the Swedish Bikini Team when all of this was transpiring?
 
Wow... Thanks to this thread, I've had my first ever lucid dream, last night.

It was kind of bizarre... I was in my friend's van, with him driving, and we were barreling down a road on the side of a mountain. I remember looking over the edge out of his window and seeing clouds below us, like the whole thing was floating in the sky. He was telling me about how a lot of people had died on the road when they turned the wrong way at a fork in the road ahead of us, and when he reached it, he turned that way, and we went falling off the cliff. When we went over, I started screaming like crazy, and he just turned to me and said, “Don’t worry man, we’ve got plenty of lives left,” and I realized I had already died twice before, in different ways. Then I just realized I was dreaming… it was an incredibly cool experience.
 
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Congrats! Were you able to control/change it? Did you notice the scene become more vivid & detailed once you achieved lucidity?
 
Ive been able to control my dreams since I was a child. I learned that if I went to sleep in the dreamworld, I'd wake up in real life. So now I have different sorts of dreams. The lucid ones are great. I have certain checks that I do. I check that I feel my body warm and lying down but I could be flying or standing in a street somewhere (in the astral?) with the wind in my hair. Then there are the ones when my eyes fly open in the dark and I see stuff - spooky.
 
I don't seem to get them anymore :( When I did, there were two kinds - one where I would just become aware I was dreaming and (so it seemed) be able to control what I was doing, and another version that seemed a hell of a lot more realistic, to the point where I thought I was dreaming, but couldn't be sure! In fact, it seemed to me that my eyes were open and I was seeing the room around me, but with weird funky nightmarish stuff being overlaid on top of that. It could just have been particularly "hires" dreaming though I suppose, but the incident I'm thinking of incorporated sleep paralysis, which I understood to be your mind being semi-conscious but your body still immobile. And at the same time I can see weird serpenty stuff going on in a (non-existent) hole in the ceiling, and can sense something in the room and am utterly terrified.

Come to think of it, maybe it's a good thing I've stopped...
 
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