The Mystery

While we are mostly unaware of our nightly dreams while we dream, Tim Post has trained countless individuals around the world to attain dream awareness in dreams. Remarkably, 'lucid' dreamers can learn to consciously reshape their dreams while dreaming and give rise to profound dream experiences. Tim gives an insight into the emerging science of lucid dreaming and unveils the potential power of using lucid dreams to enhance psychological development and overall well-being. Now, in these REM sleep dreams — that will be true for our lucid dreams as well — we are provided with this fully immersive, three-dimensional, multi-sensory hallucinatory experience. So, it feels like almost being absorbed into your imagination. You own this dream body that you can use and move around with, not just to look at your dream surroundings, but, for example, to touch the dream ground, its texture, its hardness. That’s how real our dreams are each and every night in REM sleep. It’s incredible. You ...

Dreamlike vividness and immersion are qualities of imaginative activity that we can also experience during wake, for example when day-dreaming or when absorbed by a work of art. According to Thompson, it is not the salience of the imagined stimulus, but the attention that we accord it that determines what comes to the fore of dream consciousness. And dreaming, both lucid and non-lucid, is a trainable skill: Western lucid dreaming techniques as well as Tibetan practices of dream yoga can change the way the dreamer attends and attunes to the dream world. Lucidity during the practices of dream yoga, instead of being a strange state of paradoxical co-existence of dreaming and wake, is, on the contrary, an opportunity to train attention to be aware of, explore and sustain the dream state all the while recognizing its oneiric, immaterial nature. In other words, dream yoga is a means of observing and recognizing the spontaneous imaginative activity of the mind. Instead of a dissociation, Thom...

Discussion of dreaming and sleep-related conscious phenomena has been largely absent from phenomenology and embodied mind discourse. Insights about the nature of consciousness in cognitive neuroscience mainly come from studying an awake and alert subject, interacting with his/her environment. While dream science is quite a vibrant field, enaction and embodiment have rarely been applied to oneiric phenomena. Thompson covers quite a vast territory, discussing hypnagogic experiences (images and sensations happening at sleep onset), dreams, lucid dreams (dreams during which the dreamer is aware of the fact that it is a dream) and 'dreamless' sleep, and as well as out-of-body experiences. To account for the multiplicity of possible ways of being in a dream, Thompson distinguishes between the dreaming self and the dreaming ego, where 'the dream ego is like an avatar in a virtual world; the dreaming self is its user'. The balance between the two can be thought of as a degree o...

The source of consciousness has been a fundamental mystery since the beginning of time. As we advance in our understanding of the universe and ourselves, a new picture is emerging. It is becoming clear that there is a fundamental field of information that is the source of all the material world and that permeates everything. Nassim Haramein presents these new results in the exploration of the source of consciousness and demonstrates some of the technologies that are emerging from them. For almost two decades physicists have been looking for the source of dark matter and dark energy. The current conventional equations only predict 4% of the mass of the universe, the rest being an unknown substance described as dark matter and dark energy. Haramein has applied his holographic equations to the universal scale and was able to predict the exact critical mass of the universe without the help or the need to incorporate dark matter and dark energy as part of the new emerging physics. Despite t...

We're getting closer to incorporating consciousness as an integral part of the scientific picture of the 'physical world'. Not only celebrated physicists of the 20th century such as Max Plank, John Wheeler, David Bohm, Niels Bohr, Erwin Schrödinger argued that consciousness is a fundamental property of our Universe but the new pleiad of scientists such as John Hagelin, Sir Roger Penrose, Stuart Hameroff, Guilio Tononi, Christof Koch, Donald Hoffman, Robert Lanza embarked on their quest to put consciousness on the new solid scientific footing and dimensionality. Naturalism with its Newtonian mechanics and classical interpretation of reality is valid only within its domain of applicability, namely human perceptual reality, whereas quantum theory paints a drastically different picture. As Max Plank once said: "Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of Nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve....

Theory of mind is the ability to attribute mental states — beliefs, intents, desires, emotions, and knowledge — to ourselves and others. Having a theory of mind allows us to understand that others have unique beliefs and desires that are different from our own, enabling us to engage in daily social interaction as we interpret the mental states and infer the behaviors of those around us (Premack & Woodruff, 1978). After its first identification in 1978, a large body of research in this field has accumulated, studying the developmental pathway, neural basis, and deficits of the theory of mind. We aren’t born immediately knowing that others have unique beliefs and desires that are unique from our own. It turns out that there are several developmental precursors (or skills) that infants need to develop their theory of mind later on (Westby & Robinson, 2014). These skills include the ability to comprehend the concept of attention, understand the intentions of others, and the ability...

Hobson writes that the 'hard problem' can be seen as a residue of Cartesian dualism, which considers brain and mind to be qualitatively distinct entities. As such it is indeed 'hard', if not impossible, to explain how consciousness could arise from brains. Yet there is no similar difficulty seen in the literature when it comes to integrating consciousness components such as perception, memory and emotion. Hence, Hobson argues, consciousness may thus be no more and no less than the simultaneous combination of all of these components. The key move in accepting and advancing this idea is to specify dual aspect monism as the concept best adapted to a new view of the brain-mind has a unified system with two components, one objective (the brain) and one subjective (the mind). Hobson's theory of the brain in waking, sleeping, and dreaming contends that both the brain and the mind are physical and therefore subject to the same basic rules and regulations as other materials....