The Mystery

Defining Lucid Dreaming Lucid dreaming is the awareness that one is dreaming while still in the dream state. Dr. Matt Walker explains that during REM sleep, the brain paralyzes voluntary muscles to prevent acting out dreams, but the eyes and inner ear muscles remain active. This allows researchers to use eye movements as a form of communication with lucid dreamers. For instance, specific eye movements can signal different actions within the dream, providing scientific evidence that the brain's activity during lucid dreaming matches the dreamer's reported actions. Achieving Lucid Dreams Achieving lucid dreams involves techniques like mnemonic induction and reality testing. Walker describes the mnemonic induction technique, which involves rehearsing the intention to remember and control dreams before bed. Reality testing, another method, involves performing reality checks during the day, which eventually carry over into dreams, helping to achieve lucidity. Scientific Evidence Sci...

Routinely Psychotic: REM-Sleep Dreaming REM sleep accounts for the hallucinogenic, emotional , and bizarre experiences with a rich narrative. REM sleep is a state characterized by strong activation in visual, motor, emotional, and autobiographical memory regions of the brain, yet a relative deactivation in regions that control rational thought. MRI scans be used to predict with significant accuracy the content of your dreams by matching images of brain activity to baseline templates. Dreams are not a wholesale replay of our waking lives. Daytime emotions, however, do have some influence over the emotional themes of our dreams. Dreaming As Overnight Therapy REM sleep helps us divorce emotion from experience. We can therefore learn and usefully recall salient life events without being crippled by the emotional baggage that those painful experiences originally carried. Dreaming about difficult life events helps people gain clinical resolution from their despair. Like a master piano tuner,...

The recent discovery of quantum vibrations inside neurons in the brain supports a controversial theory of consciousness. The theory–which implies the brain is connected to the universe at a quantum level–was first proposed in the 1990s, but it suffered extensive criticism. One major point against it was that the brain was thought to be too 'warm, wet and noisy' for coherent quantum processes. Recent evidence, though, from researchers led by Anirban Bandyopadhyay has found the proposed quantum vibrations inside microtubules within brain neurons. These microtubules are components of cell scaffolding–they help provide our cells with their structure–that are around 25µm in length. Other research has also found evidence of quantum coherence in living cells. It has been found in our sense of smell, in the parts of bird’s brains responsible for navigation and in plant photosynthesis. Hameroff and Penrose explain that their theory suggests…  “…consciousness derives from quantum vibrati...