Published 11:00 25 Oct 2017 GMT

Lucid dreaming: Our guide to hacking your subconscious

In many ways, dreaming represents ultimate freedom: a state in which the borders between the rational and irrational blur, and the mind begins revealing itself to itself. The laws of time and physics no longer apply, and our ego exists in a series of disorganised vignettes. We all enjoy the feeling of waking up from a pleasant dream, but the vast majority of the time we're completely helpless, at the mercy of our own subconscious. Night by night, the dreams you experience could be euphoric or confusing, scary or sexual. It's a total lottery. But the good news is that there is a way to hijack control over your sleeping wits and actually impose your own conscious will upon your dreams. A lucid dream is one where the sleeping person is aware that they are dreaming, and thus they are able to exert control over the narrative, environment and characters that inhabit their own mindscape. The concept sounds mystical but you don't have to be a zen monk. Lucid dreaming is a natural and scientifically-verified phenomenon, and anyone can do it if they know how and have time to practice. Interested? Then read on to learn about the techniques that'll give you total command over the land of Nod. But first, we need to address the neuroscience behind lucid dreaming. Even today, scientists are largely uncertain about why we dream, and the study of dreams is hampered by their inherent surrealism and varying interpretations, which makes objective qualification difficult. The most common theory is that dreams are a form of mental inoculation: a way for our subconscious mind to prepare us for the unforeseeable future by running distressing or bizarre scenarios to ascertain our response. The first scientific research regarding the nature of lucid dreams was conducted in 1968 by British psychologist Celia Green, who postulated that lucid dreaming only occurred during REM (rapid eye movement) sleep; a stage of sleeping in which brain activity is still high. In 1985, psychophysiologist Stephen LaBerge conducted an intense investigative study into the nature of lucid dreaming; analysing neurological activity in lucid dreamers. In one experiment, LaBerge discovered that lucid dreamers do not experience the sense of time dilation. Lucid dreamers were capable of counting out ten seconds while in a REM state, and signalled the beginning and the end of the count with a pre-arranged eye signal measured with electrooculogram recording. The eye signals were concurrent with the passage of time in reality. LaBerge eventually went on to found the The Lucidity Institute, an organisation dedicated to research into lucid dreams, and developed the MILD (mnemonic induction of ludic dreaming) technique. In LaBerge's own words, "Although the events we appear to perceive in dreams are illusory, our feelings in response to dream content are real. Indeed, most of the events we experience in dreams are real; when we experience feelings, say, anxiety or ecstasy, in dreams, we really do feel anxious or ecstatic at the time ... If we were to vividly imagine a detailed sequence of movements, say, walking around the room, it is probable that motor areas of the brain would be activated in the same pattern as involved in actually walking. However, they would presumably be less activated than when walking. Otherwise, what would prevent us from actually walking when we imagined doing so?" [[heroimage||http://cdn.junglecreations.com/wp/junglecms/2017/10/GettyImages-134574243-min.jpg||Above the clouds]] Therefore, lucid dreaming is the effect that conscious thought has on a paralysed body, and someone who is cognisant of their own dreaming is therefore able to navigate their own dream space. The first step towards lucid dreaming is to make your sleeping self aware that you are dreaming, and there are a number of ways to do this. The first is to take time out during the waking hours to make sure that you aren't dreaming. This might feel a little silly at first but the mere fact that your consciousness has conditioned itself to question reality means that you'll find lucid dreaming easier. Secondly, it's possible to induce lucid dreaming by wavering between deep sleep and wakefulness. When you go to bed, try setting an alarm for five hours time. When the alarm goes off, try to stay awake for around five minutes, and then settle back to sleep. You should be feeling groggy at this point, and when you return to a sleeping state, lucid dreaming will be much easier for you. Then there's the MILD technique. In this instance, the subject must repeat to themselves: "the next time I'm dreaming, I will remember that I'm dreaming." This conscious mental effort to induce a lucid dream actually has an effect on our unconscious mind, and makes lucid dreaming easier. Dr Denholm Aspy, a researcher at University of Adelaide's psychology department, has himself determined that the MILD technique is the most effective. "The MILD technique works on what we call 'prospective memory' - that is, your ability to remember to do things in the future," Dr Aspy states: "By repeating a phrase that you will remember you're dreaming, it forms an intention in your mind that you will, in fact, remember that you are dreaming, leading to a lucid dream." Once your sleeping self is mentally prepared to begin lucid dreaming, you pick up on inconsistencies or irregularities within the world of the dream; little details that all add up to a feeling of unreality. For example, you might notice that the world is black and white, or that clocks do not accurately tell the time. You might find it hard to recognise numbers, or note that there is a distinct lack of object permanence. One you have recognised that you are indeed dreaming, you can begin to assert a degree of autonomy over the dream narrative. At first it might be quite hard, and you may find yourself going directly from a sleeping state to a waking one, but if you persist multiple times then eventually you'll be able to dream about whatever pops into your head, and I do mean anything. Getting to that point can be discouraging, but trust me on this one: it's 100 per cent worth it.

uncategorised4 min(s) read

Published 14:36 28 Oct 2017 GMT

This is what your dreams really say about your personality

Tom Wood

For centuries, the phenomenon of dreaming baffled people. Ancient civilizations used to believe that the worlds we experience in our sleeping states were real places that could only be accessed through dreams; stories from the Bible and other old texts speak of people who could interpret dreams as predictions of the future; and, due to the popularity of Sigmund Freud's theories on the unconscious, we've come to believe that certain dream scenarios might hold hidden truths about a person's thoughts. As we still don't fully understand the purpose of dreams, there's a lot of speculation around what they actually mean (if anything at all). Some people believe that dreams are only physiological stimulations, acting as the brain's way of sifting through recently-processed information in order to decide what's important or not. Other people, however, think that dreams are actually psychologically necessary, and that we could learn a great deal from them. If we assume that the latter option is true, and that dreams are the key to a person's innermost thoughts and feelings, what exactly do certain scenarios say about a dreamer's personality? Here are some commonly-occurring features of dreams, and what they might say about you:

1. Houses

Often, the houses we see in our dreams are familiar to us - perhaps they're our childhood homes, or somewhere we've stayed while visiting relatives. However, sometimes, the house will be a complete fabrication of our imaginations, and its appearance represents the human psyche. Bedrooms can represent intimate thoughts and feelings, while basements or excluded areas can signify things that have been ignored by the dreamer in their waking life.

2. Nudity

Many of us will have experienced dreams where we show up naked for work or school, and it's often interpreted as a sign that the dreamer is anxious about something. However, it also implies that the person feels vulnerable or exposed in a certain situation, and could be an indication of paranoia.

3. Being chased

Whether it's by a supernatural being or someone you know in real life, being chased in a dream is another indicator of anxiety. A lot of the time, the thing chasing the person can be a clue about something they're running from in real life (metaphorically, of course - unless you frequently find yourself legging it from your angry boss). This dream scenario is commonly reported because it's easily remembered, and often people will wake from the dream in fear.

4. Babies

If you have a baby, it shouldn't be particularly surprising if you dream about them. However, for those who do not have babies, dreaming of small children can represent the desire for something new. If dreamt of in a negative context, though, babies can signify one's own vulnerability.

5. Hands

Even when we are physically present in our dreams, we are very rarely conscious of our own bodies. However, if you do happen to see your hands, their state could give away a lot about your personality. If you find yourself washing your hands, you may be feeling guilty. Or, if your hands are tied up, you may be feeling frustrated with something.

6. Sex

A lot of the time, dreaming about sex - especially with a particular person - normally indicates a literal sexual desire that is present in the conscious mind, too. However, sometimes sex is symbolic of intimate connections with other people, and an awareness of oneself.

7. Food

A symbol of nourishment and energy, dreaming of food and eating could indicate that you have a craving for new information or experiences. However, it could also just mean that you're hungry.

8. Death

This is something that normally appears in nightmares - but it's not always a bad sign. Dreaming of death, especially your own, could simply be an indication that you need a change in life, or that a significant change has recently happened.

9. Faulty machinery

Being unable to properly operate a phone or a computer is not often the main focus of a dream, it does frequently occur in many of our nocturnal visions. There's actually a logical explanation for this, too: as the language centre of the brain is shut down while we sleep, it's difficult for us to process information such as phone numbers or the time on a clock.

10. Water

If you find yourself dreaming about water, its physical state and quality could help you decipher your unconscious emotions. A turbulent sea may suggest fear or anxiety, whereas a tranquil lake could indicate a sense of contentment and calmness. How you approach the water is also indicative of how capable you are of managing your emotions. If you've had a strange dream recently, or keep seeing the same things crop up every time you fall asleep, it could be worth investigating. Then again, it could just be coincidence.

uncategorised3 min(s) read

Published 16:32 24 Aug 2017 GMT

People used to dream in black and white before color TV

Tom Wood

Last night, I had a dream that Noam Chomsky's comments about 9/11 were deeply related to the color wheel used by painters. In the dream, this seemed as obvious as night and day. Yet the following morning, no trace of it made rational sense. Our dreams are the most obscure things about our internal lives. Materialist science says that dreams are nothing but information being processed by the sleeping brain, manifesting as random images, and depth psychologists like Carl Jung argue that they offer profound insights into our problems. The problem of what our dreams mean is unlikely to be solved anytime soon, but some of the mysteries around dreams just get deeper and deeper. For example, the bizarre fact that prior to colorized television, most people around the world dreamed almost exclusively in black and white. It's scientifically proven. In the 1940s, around three-quarters of all people were dreaming in black and white. This was true until the 1960s, when color TV become common. By 2001, less than 20 percent of all people claimed to dream in black and white. The reason? It's childhood exposure to color TV. Your grandparents will dream in black and white more often than you do. Your children, on the other hand, may have an absolutely tiny number of dreams that aren't in color. Personally speaking, I always dream in color, and it's insane to think that's because I've grown up with TV and the internet. It just brings up so many more questions. Like, what about people who have never seen TV at all? We see in color, so why do we only dream in color if we've grown up with colorized TV? It's really a conundrum. The only possible explanation seems to be that our screens have far more influence on our subconscious than we would like to believe. The subconscious, the dream world, and our exposure to technology are all profoundly intertwined. But to what extent? Is growing up with the internet changing other parts of our brains we don't even understand? Will audio, video and the lightning-speed of Twitter and Snapchat change the way we think and dream entirely? The way we process information in our brains evolves alongside our technology. The more advanced our technology gets, the more certain parts of our subconscious minds change to adapt to it. It's a really spooky thought, and at first glance, it seems impossible. Could our screens really have such a major effect on us? Well, if they change the way we dream, then yes, absolutely. And what are our dreams, then? If they merely process information, then it makes sense that colorized information would lead to colored dreams. And yet, that still doesn't make sense for the simple reason that, as I said before, we see normally in color! It's all in the subconscious, clearly. Technology affects our subconscious thinking, in dreams and in ideas that float deep beneath the surface, technology is changing us. Perhaps Carl Jung was right, and we truly are led by our subconscious into our waking beliefs, and if we are ignorant of our subconscious, we are just letting the deep waters beneath our surface souls direct our lives - and we call it fate. What will 3-D television do to our dreams? Virtual reality? We will almost certainly find out. It is, for that reason alone, an insanely amazing time to be alive.

science & tech3 min(s) read

Published 15:09 24 Feb 2019 GMT

New study finds it's possible to learn a different language in your sleep

Tom Wood

Remember those school days where you would sit at home agonising over your French homework, just wishing there was an easier way to memorise all those new words? There are so many things that all of us tried in order to cram all that new vocabulary into our heads: post-it notes, flash cards, endless repetitions of the same "j'aime aller à la piscine" - it all just blurred into one wordy mess in the end.

At some point along the way, you may have heard someone - jokingly - tell you to sleep with your textbook under your pillow. That way, you'd "absorb" the language in your sleep.

Of course, that idea is ridiculous... but not completely impossible.

As some Swiss researchers have recently discovered, there is actually a way of teaching people a new language in their sleep. However, it's a little more sophisticated than simply sleeping on a book.

sleeping woman

[[imagecaption|| Credit: Pexels]]

The team, led by Katharina Henke, Marc Züst, and Simon Ruch from the Bern Institute of Psychology, theorised that they could teach people new words by playing them while a subject was asleep. And they were correct! ... Sort of!

According to a summary of the study published in Current Biology, "Sleep-formed associations translated into awake ones" amongst the subjects of the test. In other words, things told to the volunteers while they were taking a nap had been stored in their brain in some capacity and could be accessed when they were awake.

However, it wasn't as if volunteers for the study came away speaking fluent French/Spanish/Klingon after one nap with a pair of headphones on.

In a paper published on the study, the researchers explained that what we understand about the way the sleeping brain functions is still fairly limited, and so it is impossible to fully understand how the brain learns while it is not fully conscious.

"Learning while asleep is a dream of mankind, but is often deemed impossible because sleep lacks the conscious awareness and neurochemical milieu thought to be necessary for learning," they said. "Current evidence for sleep learning in humans is inconclusive."

Still, that did not stop them from going ahead with the tests.

sleep

[[imagecaption|| Credit: Getty]]

"To explore conditions under which verbal learning might occur, we hypothesized that peaks of slow waves would be conducive to verbal learning because the peaks define periods of neural excitability," they said.

Then, they went on to explain how exactly they set about teaching people a new (made up) language:

"While in slow-wave sleep during a nap, a series of word pairs comprising pseudowords, e.g., “tofer,” and actual German words, e.g., “Haus” (house), were played to young German-speaking women and men. When the presentation of the second word of a pair (e.g., “Haus” of “tofer-house”) coincided with an ongoing slow-wave peak, the chances increased that a new semantic association between the pair had been formed and retained.

"Sleep-formed associations translated into awake ones, where they guided forced choices on an implicit memory test. Reactivations of sleep-formed associations were mirrored by brain activation increases measured with fMRI in cortical language areas and the hippocampus, a brain structure critical for relational binding. We infer that implicit relational binding had occurred during peaks of slow oscillations, recruiting a hippocampal-neocortical network comparable to vocabulary learning in the waking state."

Basically, the scientists were able to teach people new words during a certain period of sleep, and - though the test subjects could not recall the exact definition of a word when awake - individuals involved in the experiment demonstrated that they were able to learn even when their brains were not fully conscious.

So, while we're not yet at the stage where we can take a powernap and wake up multi-lingual, we have discovered the basis for sleep-based learning, and that's an incredibly exciting prospect.

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uncategorised3 min(s) read

Published 14:32 10 Dec 2017 GMT

7 Facts about dreams that'll blow your mind

Tom Wood

Have you ever woken from a ludicrously whacky dream a thought to yourself, "How the HECK did my brain come up with that?" Like, you were walking around inside a giant plastic nose with your colleagues, all wearing tuxedos and looking at the nasal walls like it was artwork. Or maybe you have the same recurring dream where you're sprinting through a jungle that's got a zillion snakes hanging from the branches and slithering all over the ground, and you just have to keep running. Dreams are weird, and even though there's a lot of research based on this phenomenon of sleep, there is still much that we can't explain. But here are some things we do know, and some of it sounds pretty freaky, to be honest. Have a look, and learn something new about how and why we dream up some of that crazy weird stuff we do.

1. You can't walk in your dreams

According to Men’s Health sleep advisor W Chris Winter, MD, your brain has difficulty recreating the physical feeling of your feet hitting the ground when you're sleeping. He says that if you were to look down while dreaming, you'll probably see yourself flying or just floating (you creep you).

2. The "strangers" in your dreams aren't strangers at all

Many scientists believe that the random people in your dreams are probably people you've encountered before. Even if you feel like you've never seen them in your life, the theory is that you've probably walked past them on the street or seen them on some kind of commercial or something. It looks like our subconscious stores their images for whatever reason.

3. You probably dream up mutant people

Just like walking, your brain also struggles to recreate hands and faces as they should be when you're unconscious, says Winter. The people in your dreams are probably missing fingers or have deformed hands and faces. Really – if you look closely at someone in your dreams, Winter says they'll probably look blurred or have their noses/eyes/mouths in slightly different spots or even completely absent (*shudders*).

4. Your dreams get wilder later in the night

Research has shown that when you first doze off, your dreams are pretty logical and are basically just you going through everything that happened in your day and making sense of it. But later on, and especially right when you wake up, that's when your dreams get really weird because your mind is now free to think about anything and everything unbridled.

5. You can control your dreams

Yes, this means you can fight off nightmares too. All you have to do is think of whatever recurring nightmare you have when you're awake, but imagine it with a happy ending. Alternatively, you can try your hand at the thing called lucid dreaming, which is when you train your brain to stay conscious during dreams. Sounds weird, but it really can work.

6. Not everyone dreams in black and white

A British study found that it's mainly just older people who dream in black and white, contrary to popular belief that everyone does. They believed that it's because older generations watched black-and-white TV for a portion of their lives, which is why they struggle to dream in colour sometimes.

7. It's possible to have dreams within dreams

Inception-like dreams are actually quite common, and often people have a "false-awakening" when they think it's time to start the day, but only realise they're still dreaming after stepping into the bathroom and purple goop starts coming out of the taps.

Think you'll have trouble sleeping tonight after learning all that? Never fear, at least you know that you can control what your unconscious dreams up – if you really put your mind to it.

uncategorised2 min(s) read

Published 10:19 21 Sep 2017 GMT

Experts reveal what dogs are really dreaming about

Tom Wood

Oh, to be asleep. To ride on those most emollient waves that gently swaddle and soothe us against the aggressive mundanity of reality. To clamber atop the highest mountain, and swim beneath the deepest seas, impervious to the day to day frustrations that so plague our waking moments. Can there be any greater pleasure after a long, exhausting day than to slip quietly into a world of dreams? Of course, not every night's sleep is so tranquil. Anyone who has experienced the spine-tingling horror of a night terror could tell you as much, and there are other nights when we might not dream at all, as we plunge into exhausted darkness. While our understanding of human dreams, their function and what they say about the individual is ever evolving, we had - until now - perhaps consigned the dreams of our pets to more simpler confines. You might have assumed, for example, that your pet dog is merely dreaming about running through endless fields, or chasing cats, and their own tail. However, according to People.com, a Harvard expert might have the real answer, and it is beyond your wildest imaginations. Dr. Deirdre Barrett is a Clinical and Evolutionary Psychologist at Harvard Medical School who has long been fascinated by dreams. Though maintaining that any assumptions made about the nature of animals' dreams are speculative, Barrett had the following to say about dogs' experience of dreaming; "Humans dream about the same things they’re interested in by day, though more visually and less logically. There’s no reason to think animals are any different. Since dogs are generally extremely attached to their human owners, it’s likely your dog is dreaming of your face, your smell and of pleasing or annoying you." As for the meaning behind your pet's leg movements while they sleep, Barrett says; "They may well be dreaming they’re running. Common sleep-walking doesn’t occur during dreaming sleep, but a much more vigorous “REM behavior disorder”— a spontaneous version of what Jouvet’s experiments did, is accompanied by dreams, so the more pronounced and fast the movements, the more likely they’re acting out a dream." If you were concerned about the quality of your pet's dreams, or indeed your own, Barrett has some advice on that front, too; "The best way to give ourselves or our children better dreams is to have happy daytime experiences and to get plenty of sleep in a safe and comfortable environment. It’s a good bet this is also best for pets’ dreams." Naturally, dog owners everywhere are pretty excited - and somewhat overwhelmed - at the thought that their beloved best friends might actually be dreaming about them as they slumber peacefully. After all, I'd be willing to bet that many of those same owners have happy dreams about their faithful hounds every now and then, how nice it is to think that the feeling may very well be mutual.