Tagdreams

Brain-Computer Interfaces for Manipulating Dreams

“A first-generation commercial brain-computer interface (BCI) is being released by Emotiv Systems later this year. What does the future hold for BCI?

By 2050, and likely sooner, you will be able to buy a BCI device that records all your dreams in their entirety. This will be done in one of two ways. One method would be to use distributed nanobots less than a micrometer in diameter to spread throughout the brain and monitor the activation patterns of neurons. By this point, cognitive science will have advanced enough to know which neural activation patterns correspond to which sensory experiences. This has already been done with cats (using electrodes, not nanobots), where researchers led by scientist Garrett Stanley were able to extrapolate what a cat was seeing merely by monitoring the neurons of its visual cortex.”

(via Accelerating Future)

Lucidipedia

“Just discovered a new lucid dreaming wiki called Lucidipedia. They provide some great resources for lucid dreaming beginners, as well as an opportunity for more experienced dreamers to edit articles and become a part of the conversation. They also are looking for beginner lucid dreamers to blog for them while they take Lucidipedia’s training. If you’re interested, check out this blog post. Lucidipedia also has some downloadable media like a podcast how-to guide. Great material for the democratization of dreaming!”

(Lucidipedia via The Dream Studies Portal)

Crackpot historian Adam Gorightly interviewed at Waking the Midnight Sun

When I first came up with that ‘Crackpot Historian’ title, I didn’t really give it much thought, as these are the types of phrases that sometimes just pop into my head…But what I think I intended to convey was that I enjoy writing about strange and colorful characters-what some would term ‘crackpots’-and that I also fit that category myself, at times. And yes, as you noted, I don’t take myself too seriously-so don’t you, either!

Perhaps the funniest anecdote I have regarding this ‘Crackpot Historian’ business occurred at the 2006 Retro UFO Convention. I had a table set up there with Greg Bishop, author of Project Beta and Weird California. And I made a couple name tags for us. Greg’s read: ‘Greg Bishop-U-fool-ologist’. Of course, I asked him if he minded being jokingly referred to in such a manner and he just laughed. And, of course, my name tag said: ‘Adam Gorightly-Crackpot Historian.’ Anyway, at one point a fellow approached me who started going on about crockpots. I just nodded my head, not knowing how to respond. So I guess now I’m a ‘crockpot historian’, as well! Hail Eris!

Full Story: Waking the Midnight Sun.

Snorting a Brain Chemical Could Replace Sleep

A nasal spray containing a naturally occurring brain hormone called orexin A reversed the effects of sleep deprivation in monkeys, allowing them to perform like well-rested monkeys on cognitive tests. The discovery’s first application will probably be in treatment of the severe sleep disorder narcolepsy.

Full Story: Wired News.

Living in Dreamworld

Nightline had a show on lucid dreaming the other night. Unfortunately, I only caught the second half of it. Since I know some readers (myself included) are working with lucid dreaming, I thought I’d post a link to the article. I also included an exercise from The Dream Studies Portal blog called “Reality Check”. It seems to be working for me. When I remember to do it…

“Somewhere in between the Cinderella school of dreaming and the darker dreamscape of “The Matrix” lies Stephen LaBerge, an expert in a technique called lucid dreaming. He believes that what happens to people in their dreams is as real an experience as what happens in real life. By becoming aware that they’re dreaming while they’re asleep, lucid dreamers say they can learn to consciously control and manipulate the dreamscape, allowing them to live out their wildest fantasies in a virtual reality with no earthly boundaries.”

(via Nightline:ABC News)

(“Reality Check” via Dream Studies Portal)

Experiments in lucid dreaming

Everyone, even coked-out party monsters and meth freaks, must sleep. Even liver-bruising doses of Provigil will only let most people function thirty hours consecutively, and then it’s time to pay dear Morpheus. For those of us who have better things to do then sleep, this is a problem. The past several months, one of my personal projects has been to cultivate lucidity while sleeping in order to make some use of this time. As one Tibetan monk put it, if a man lives one hundred years but remains waking while asleep, ‘it is as though he lives two hundred years’. And the Tibetan monks would be the ones to listen to on this topic, as they have spent about the past two millenia hanging out in the bleakest environment on earth mastering their minds through magick and meditation. One of the technologies to which they have devoted much attention is Dream Yoga.

Full Story: From the Laboratory.

Any thoughts on recurring dreams?

If anyone has any good links, explanations, or theories about recurring dreams, now would be a good time to share them with me. I’ve had a set of recurring themes since I was a kid, but over the past week I’ve experienced the exact same dream three times that I can recall.

Let me just say, I never have nightmares. I think I remember when I was a kid, I had one or two frightening dreams, and once when I was meditating as a teenager I came to quite upset because of some visions. But a full-on terror-inducing nightmare – it’s not me.

But three times in the past week I’ve awoken, completely awake, with a sense of dread, of not wanting to return to sleep. WTF.

All I can remember is that a) a female I know in my personal life accompanies me in the dream (who, I cannot remember), and b) there are a lot of ghouls. (Zombies, ghouls, blood-sucking abominations, whatever. They resemble humans, but host no soul. They come in droves. It’s all about the decay or extermination of everything.)

The first two of these dreams I awoke from, I had perished or been cornered in the same place, after the same chronology of events. This morning, I managed to surpass the point and progress further along what may be a predestined series of tribulations within the dream. However, I still perished. And I still awoke stressed.

Anyone willing to play psychoanalyst or occult theoretician, please feel free to drop some comments to help me out.

🙂

Dream recording project

An ambitious project to build a dream imaging machine is underway:

“In a 100-year timeframe we want to understand human consciousness,” said Rubin.

Rubin and colleagues at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute — one of the world’s richest philanthropies with an endowment worth $11.3 billion — are approaching this ticklish problem backwards. They have bought a 280-acre farm in Ashburn, Virginia, and are building a new kind of research campus.

Reminds me of Until the End of the World

Full Story: Reuters: Wealthy New Lab Aims To
Capture Dreams, Literally

(via Posthuman Blues)

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