The Mystery

Waggoner and McCready broaden the approach to lucidity way beyond simply achieving it. They present lucidity not as the result of techniques or the ability to fly when you want to in a dream. Rather, they raise with the reader an inquiry into of the awareness of consciousness and its role in 'waking' and 'dreaming' reality. As a longtime meditator, I realized I can go through this doorway to get to lucidity and that truly, dreaming is about playing with the web of consciousness and its interrelatedness with all that is! Waggoner writes that through his practice of lucid dreaming, he discovered a 'consistent framework of rules and principles beneath lucid dreaming events' and that this 'hidden framework suggested that dreaming and the unconscious actually followed rules and had structure'. Dreaming is not just 'random firing of neurons'. In fact, he explores the idea that there is an intelligent awareness that exists behind our dreams and that thi...

Lucid dreaming refers to realizing within a dream that you are dreaming. It is an ancient spiritual technique (used in Buddhist dream yoga, Taoism, Sufism, and numerous native wisdom traditions). However, the scientific evidence for lucid dreaming emerged in 1980, which makes lucid dreaming a fascinating subject, since this ancient spiritual technique has achieved scientific acceptance and investigation. In the video link below, Robert Waggoner examines the experiments which provided evidence for lucid dreaming, along with the more ancient view of lucid dreaming as a pathway to accelerated spiritual growth. He also examines the use of lucid dreaming by modern day psychotherapists to resolve recurring nightmares in people with PTSD, along with lucid dreaming's potential use in areas such as accessing inner creativity, exploring the unconscious, and spiritual practice. In 1975, Robert Waggoner taught himself a simple technique to lucid dream or become consciously aware of dreaming, w...

Quantum effects in physics have been used by new agers and others to argue for all kinds of silly things concerning consciousness and human behavior, but it has to be said that at least these folks have tried to come to grips with philosophical issues of this science. Quantum information theory in particular, which sees the basic constituents of physical reality as bits of information, carries huge philosophical implications for psychology because the Mind is essentially an information processing system. Yet I can find no mainstream psychology reviews of quantum information theory at all. Even a cursory understanding of this new science suggests that the mind simply cannot be understood in terms of the old mechanical materialist dogmas that holds so many psychologists in thrall and unable to see facts that present themselves before their very eyes. We need to, as the philosopher Daniel Dennett (himself enthralled by mechanical materialism and speaking about religion rather than his fav...

In the modern age, we've lost our reverence for the dream state. But REM sleep is what has made us special. We see glimpses of these other possible worlds in our dreams, and more and more evidence is accumulating, which suggests that REM sleep was absolutely critical to the evolution of the special cognitive capacities that human beings; evidence and therefore, critical to our cultural evolution, and our special creativity. And what REM sleep normally does is it creates this very high cholinergic environment in the brain. And that environment allows for intense creativity because it promotes connections between otherwise disparate ideas. So it creates all kinds of bizarre ideas, but all kinds of creative ideas as well. So, when our ancestors in the upper-Paleolithic acquired greater access to the REM sleep state, both during sleep and during waking consciousness, it helped to fuel the onset of cumulative cultural evolutionary processes. We know that REM sleep is especially importan...

The function of REM sleep dreaming is still unknown. We situate our approach to understanding dream phenomenology and dream function within that part of evolutionary theory known as Costly Signaling Theory (CST). We contend that many of the signals produced by the dreaming brain can be and should be construed as 'costly signals'—emotions or mental simulations that produce daytime behavioral dispositions that are costly to the dreamer. For example, often the dreamer will appear in the dream as handicapped in some way (i.e., no clothes, no ID, no money, is under attack, being chased etc.). The dreamer, during waking life, is then influenced by the carry-over effect of the unpleasant dream content. The informational and affective content of the dream creates a mental set in the dreamer that operates during the daytime to facilitate the signaling of a 'handicapped' Self. The subtle signaling effect might be via display of the intense emotions or physical demeanor that had f...

Similar to many other fields in Psychiatry, understanding sleep and dreams as biological events remain unconsolidated and a work in progress. In 'The Neuroscience of Sleep and Dreams', psychologist Patrick McNamara describes the neuroscience of sleep and dreams while emphasizing on the evolutionary and social significance of the two. Organized into two sections, Part I Sleep and Part II Dreams, McNamara walks through definitions, characteristics, variations and theories of sleep and dreams. He draws examples from human case studies to describe the two phenomena in relation to human anatomy, as well as citing animal studies to explain possible mechanisms. McNamara approaches sleep and dreams as physiological and social functions that can be explained within the paradigm of Darwinian evolutionary biology. In other words, sleeping and dreaming involve fitness 'trade-offs' in our social context, such that one’s 'sleep expression' centers around his or her interactio...

Michelle, what would you like this podcast to be about? What I mean is that there's a realistic Michelle. What it could be, what it's probably going to be and then there's your wildest dreams kind of thing. What it could be. Well, I think to start I would really like the idea of having conversations with dream researchers that are doing really good work for a long time and it would be great to kind of collect or form like a collection of dream researchers and interviews. I've met a lot of people at conferences or visited research labs and it's just I think it would be nice to showcase all of the work that's being done. Because I think outside of our field, not many people really know that dream research is a real field of science and we're making progress.  So, do you think a lot of people still think of dreams as nothing but bizarre flux in the night kind of thing? Well, I think outside of our field maybe people don't realize how much we've learned....