The Mystery

Do you dream? Often, it’s difficult to remember our dreams. The vivid worlds we come up with in our subconscious most often disappears as soon as we wake up. Yet, with some practice, dreaming can be a true adventure, and these adventures can have positive effects on your overall well-being. Lucid dreaming is when you 'wake up' while you’re dreaming and are conscious and aware of what is happening in this dream world. In this book summary, you’ll learn how to lucid dream, and how life in this dream state can enrich your life while you’re awake. In this summary of Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming by Stephen LaBerge and Howard Rheingold, you’ll also learn;     - how practicing a skill like jump shots in your dreams will actually improve your game; and     - why you should be asking your waking self 'Am I dreaming?'.     - how to stay asleep by being active in a dream; We all dream. However, very few people can actually 'wake up' within a dream. Lucid dreaming

The most rigorous scientific study of dream psi ever took place at the Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York. Over the course of several years, Psychologists Montague Ullman and Stanley Krippner ran hundreds of in-house and at-home dream sessions with thousands of volunteers. Experiments usually involved trying to predict random images chosen by computer and displayed overnight in a locked room at the dream lab. Each day volunteers attempted to dream of tomorrow’s picture then recorded their impressions for Ullman and Krippner to cross-check. In 2003 when British psychologists Simon Sherwood and Chris Roe performed a meta-analysis of all the Maimonides dream psi results they found that the overall hit rate was associated with odds against chance of 22 billion to 1. “In his work at the Dream laboratory at Maimonides Medical Center, Montague Ullman, along with psychologist Stanley Krippner and researcher Charles Honorton, produced compelling evidence that accurate precognitive

Receiving direct knowledge or perception of the future, Precognition, is another common psi ability with a long-standing history. Precognition is usually achieved through prophetic dreams, during deep meditation, or spontaneously received as images in the mind’s eye. The existence of this paranormal ability, however, once again goes against the Newtonian grain and strikes close to the heart of people’s conceptions of time and free will. Because if precognition is real, then the future must in some sense be pre-written and determined. “Time is not at all what it seems. It does not flow in only one direction, and the future exists simultaneously with the past. The distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” - Albert Einstein “Both in common experience and in physics, time has generally been considered to be a primary, independent and universally applicable order, perhaps the most fundamental one known to us. Now, we have been led to propose th

Dreaming is the most universal and most regularly occurring, as well as a perfectly natural and physiological (as opposed to pathological), altered state of consciousness. Thus, any plausible (empirical or philosophical) theory of consciousness should also describe and explain dreaming as a major state of consciousness. Most theories of consciousness, however, do not consider dreaming at all or at least do not discuss the results of dream research in any detail.  Dreaming presents a particularly difficult challenge for externalist, embodied, and enactive types of theories of consciousness. They all anchor the existence and nature of consciousness to something in the world external to the brain, or to some kind of brain-world relations that, at least partly, reside outside the brain. By contrast, the empirical evidence from dream research shows that full-blown, complex subjective experiences similar with or identical to experiences during wakefulness, regularly and universally happen du

It always goes back to René Descartes. Descartes said that each of us consists of a non-physical mind inside a physical body. The mind, which in his view is the person, is in a different dimension to the body, as it does not exist in physical space (he would say, ‘mind is not extended’, although it connects with the brain in a definite location, the pineal gland). This aspect of Descartes’ view was jettisoned, but the core template of ‘little true self in big extraneous self’ was retained. However, instead of a non-physical mind, the inner, true self came to be regarded as the brain. This view has been paradoxically called ‘Cartesian Materialism’ by Daniel Dennett (the paradox being that Descartes was no materialist). Because this core dual structuring of the self was retained, many of the conundrums of Descartes’ philosophy have been retained as well, albeit recast in terms of the brain: Does the brain have direct contact with, and therefore reliable knowledge of, reality, or is our k