Long ago, I had an interest in lucid dreaming but I became too busy.  Recently, I thought that I would take another look at it.  So, instead of going back through my library of more serious works, I picked up a 'pop' book on the subject by the scientific pioneer of the technique, Dr. Stephen LaBerge [Lucid Dreaming: A Concise Guide to Awakening in Your Dreams and in Your Life, Boulder CO, 2004] - a slim and expensive little book at £19.99, albeit with a useful CD in the back.  Why not try the quick way in before deciding to devote too much time to it (or so I thought)?  I used to dream a lot but scarcely at all in recent years (although, of course, we dream all the time in our sleep so 'not dreaming' just means 'not remembering the dream').  The first stage in the technique is simply to relearn the remembering of a dream.  

On the first night, I followed some very simple instructions - largely a matter of advising oneself in advance that one should remember a dream and then to question what is dream and what is reality before going to sleep.  Sure enough, it worked.  I woke next morning having experienced a most elaborate dream story involving a house in France and my faked claim to have painted a picture which, of course, I had created in fact in my dream (and it was a master work, believe me).  Other now forgotten but perfectly cogent (within the logic of dream) elements made it a true narrative with emotional content.  In short, while not lucid (I could not control the dream), on this first night I not merely dreamed a dream I remembered for some time afterwards, but I distinctly recall being aware that it was a dream - the first stage towards true lucid dreaming.  So, onward with more experimentation ... I have a little psychological experiment in mind involving Second Life.

Meanwhile, on the subject of virtual reality, you might note http://www.newscientisttech.com/article.ns?id=dn12136&feedId=online-news_rss20 and wonder ... just think about what it suggests in conjunction with my reference to lucid dreaming technique.  Perhaps, that just thinking movement might enable you to travel through a virtual existence on the internet while the memory of it can be used to recreate that world in a dream in which you can exist without any technology at all.  If thoughts can bend perception in the mind so that a new reality is created for the body within the mind on the one hand and if thoughts can move pixels and data within a preconstructed alternate reality on the other, then maybe the fantastic notion of downloading mind into the matter of networks and constructing, through sheer will, new worlds is not so fantastic after all.  Is this perhaps what will be meant by magic in the future?   Will pure will re-order matter, albeit as information within the closed world of the network?  Yet we will still not achieve immortality.  Shoot the brain or the heart in our material bodies and we die.  Pull the plug and remove the cable and our new selves sleep (probably without the ability even to dream) and then ultimately die when the system degrades.  Many conundrums appear surrounding existence and essence ... but these further thoughts are not for today ...

Tags: psychology
Current Location: Tunbridge Wells
Current Mood: contemplative