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How Did We Get Here? What is Possible Now? Take the In Person Symposium The Awakening the Dreamer Symposium is a half-day workshop that has been delivered by skilled Facilitators to hundreds of thousands of participants in over 80 countries since Learn Deepen your understanding of where we are as a human family at this time in history. Discover Find your role and contribution to creating a new future that honors and sustains life.
Lead Move into concrete action to develop your leadership in your community and the world. Act Join forces with like-minded people to stand powerfully for a new vision of the future. Look around you, the majority of people are not aware that they can accomplish more and become more, that realization has not taken place within them.
What are your dreams? What do you want to do with your life? And who do you want to be? Move in the direction of your dreams, focus on where you want to go, focus on how you want to live, and focus on who you need to become to make your dreams a reality. We all have dreams deep within us that we would like to make come true, however, the fears and illusions of failure seem to overtake them and confine us to never trying to see what we are truly capable of achieving. Many believe the doubts and fears within them rather than having a firm conviction and belief that they can succeed.
Believe and act as though success is your birthright. Always believe in the best outcome for your actions, be an optimist and act fearlessly on what you want. Researchers woke dreamers at various stages of their REM period and found that those who had been longer in REM claimed longer dreams. LaBerge asked his subjects to signal when they became lucid and then count a ten-second period and signal again. Their average interval was 13 seconds, the same as they gave when awake.
Lucid dreamers, like Alan Worsley, have also been able to give accurate estimates of the length of whole dreams or dream segments Schatzman, Worsley, and Fenwick As we watch sleeping animals it is often tempting to conclude that they are moving their eyes in response to watching a dream, or twitching their legs as they dream of chasing prey. But do physical movements actually relate to the dream events? Early sleep researchers occasionally reported examples like a long series of left-right eye movements when a dreamer had been dreaming of watching a ping-pong game, but they could do no more than wait until the right sort of dream came along.
Lucid dreaming made proper experimentation possible, for the subjects could be asked to perform a whole range of tasks in their dreams. In one experiment with researchers Morton Schatzman and Peter Fenwick, in London, Worsley planned to draw large triangles and to signal with flicks of his eyes every time he did so.
While he dreamed, the electromyogram, recording small muscle movements, showed not only the eye signals but spikes of electrical activity in the right forearm just afterward. This showed that the preplanned actions in the dream produced corresponding muscle movements Schatzman, Worsley, and Fenwick The question about eye movements was also answered. The eyes do track dream objects. LaBerge was especially interested in breathing during dreams. This stemmed from his experiences at age five when he had dreamed of being an undersea pirate who could stay under water for very long periods without drowning.
Thirty years later he wanted to find out whether dreamers holding their breath in dreams do so physically as well. The answer was yes. He and other lucid dreamers were able to signal from the dream and then hold their breath. They could also breathe rapidly in their dreams, as revealed on the monitors.
Studying breathing during dreamed speech, he found that the person begins to breathe out at the start of an utterance just as in real speech LaBerge and Dement a. It is known that the left and right hemispheres are activated differently during different kinds of tasks. For example, singing uses the right hemisphere more, while counting and other, more analytical tasks use the left hemisphere more.
By using lucid dreams, LaBerge was able to find out whether the same is true in dreaming.
In one dream he found himself flying over a field. Flying is commonly associated with lucid dreaming.
The brainwave records showed just the same patterns of activation that you would expect if he had done these tasks while awake LaBerge and Dement b. Although it is not often asked experimentally, I am sure plenty of people have wondered what is happening in their bodies while they have their most erotic dreams. LaBerge tested a woman who could dream lucidly at will and could direct her dreams to create the sexual experiences she wanted.
Using appropriate physiological recording, he was able to show that her dream orgasms were matched by true orgasms LaBerge, Greenleaf, and Kedzierski Experiments like these show that there is a close correspondence between actions of the dreamer and, if not real movements, at least electrical responses. This puts lucid dreaming somewhere between real actions, in which the muscles work to move the body, and waking imagery, in which they are rarely involved at all.
So what exactly is the status of the dream world? It is tempting to think that the real world and the world of dreams are totally separate. Some of the experiments already mentioned show that there is no absolute dividing line. There are also plenty of stories that show the penetrability of the boundary.
Alan Worsley describes one experiment in which his task was to give himself a prearranged number of small electric shocks by means of a machine measuring his eye movements. He went to sleep and began dreaming that it was raining and he was in a sleeping bag by a fence with a gate in it. He began to wonder whether he was dreaming and thought it would be cheating to activate the shocks if he was awake.
Then, while making the signals, he worried about the machine, for it was out there with him in the rain and might get wet Schatzman, Worsley, and Fenwick This kind of interference is amusing, but there are dreams of confusion that are not. The most common and distinct are called false awakenings. You dream of waking up but in fact, of course, are still asleep. He jumped out of bed, went to wash quickly with cold water, and when that woke him up he realized he had been dreaming.
The sequence repeated four times before he finally actually woke up—still in bed.
Ships from and sold by www.farmersmarketmusic.com The Alternative: Awaken Your Dream, Unite Your Community, and Live in Hope Paperback – January 29, Caleb Stanley is a cofounder of The Alternative, a young adult movement reaching thousands in Atlanta. A radical synthesis of the realms of quantum physics, alchemy, shamanism, Buddhism, Kabbalah, mystical Christianity, and the works of C.G. Jung and Philip K.
A student of mine described her infuriating recurrent dream of getting up, cleaning her teeth, getting dressed, and then cycling all the way to the medical school at the top of a long hill, where she finally would realize that she had dreamed it all, was late for lectures, and would have to do it all over again for real. The one positive benefit of false awakenings is that they can sometimes be used to induce out-of-body experiences OBEs. For many people OBEs and lucid dreams are practically indistinguishable.
If you dream of leaving your body, the experience is much the same. Also recent research suggests that the same people tend to have both lucid dreams and OBEs Blackmore ; Irwin All of these experiences have something in common. The UFO abductions are the most bizarre but are similar in that they too involve the replacement of the perceived world by a hallucinatory replica.
There is an important difference between lucid dreams and these other states. In the lucid dream one has insight into the state in fact that defines it. In false awakening, one does not again by definition. In typical OBEs, people think they have really left their bodies. It is only in the lucid dream that one realizes it is a dream. I have often wondered whether insight into these other experiences is possible and what the consequences might be.
The oddest thing about lucid dreams— and, to many people who have them, the most compelling—is how it feels when you wake up. It feels more real, it feels as though you were conscious in the dream. I think the reason can be found by looking at the mental models the brain constructs in waking, in ordinary dreaming, and in lucid dreams. I have previously argued that what seems real is the most stable mental model in the system at any time. In waking life, this is almost always the input-driven model, the one that is built up from the sensory input.
Now consider an ordinary dream.