on dreams and dreaming… - lawrence poole · scientific evidence on lucid dreaming provides a...

A FINDING FROM LAWRENCE POOLEGestion Consult-IIDC Management Inc.

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On Dreams And Dreaming…

According to Wikipedia’s online definition, a dream is the experience of images, voices,or other sensations during sleep. Well it’s a little more complex than that…

Dreams occur at slower brainwaves states than waking reality and thus dreams mayportray events that are impossible or unlikely in physical reality. Even if dreams are mostoften outside the control of the dreamer, some people report lucid dreaming – that is adream state in which they realize they are dreaming. That state allows them to changethe oneiric aspects reality by controlling components of the dream.

That link between perceiver and perceived is of course supported by the “observer effectin quantum physics” and by all mystical, magical or spiritual worldviews.

The scientific discipline of dream research is oneirology. Many people reportexperiencing strong emotions while dreaming, and having a frightening or highlyupsetting dreams are referred to as nightmares.

Early research reported that strong emotion “propelled” a perceiver through dream butlater science shows how emotion is electrical in nature, and it magnetically attracts“morphic” images (of secondary or tonal quality). Emotion (energy-in-motion) is a bio-chemical correspondence to the electromagnetic force and does indeed “resonate” to awide spectrum of frequencies, each attracting its variances of perceptions.



Dreams have a long history - both as a subject of conjecture and as a source of inspiration(artistic, scientific or otherwise). Throughout history, people have sought and broughtmeaning in dreams. Lately, they’ve been described 1. physiologically a response toneural processes during sleep, 2. psychologically as reflections of the unconscious, 3.spiritually as messages from God or predictions of the future (oneiromancy), and 4.neurologically, as the conscious and subconscious attraction of personal awareness, froman infinite sea of awareness.

Most scientists believe that humans dream with approximately the same frequency. Eventhose who don’t recall dreams report having them if they are awakened during rapid eyemovement (REM) sleep (during the THETA brainwave states).

Dreaming in animals varies from species to species but humans can resonate to DELTAbrainwaves and “lucid dreaming” or participating in the larger creative flow ofconsciousness.

At lower THETA and DELTA waves perceivers consciously participate in creation byresonating to the frequency range as cosmic light (consciousness). When brain slows toØMEGA brainwaves subjective perception collapses to «stop-Time») and reveal theinfinity of Light and Its creating Intent. There is a creating Intelligence outside of theindividual mind. There is a SUPERMIND – the ancients named GOD.

In antiquity, dreams were thought to be part of the supernatural world, and were seen asmessages received from the gods. It was common for leaders to take dream-oracles intobattle to receive their advice and guidance.

In modern times, Nations battle over what they believe or what they see as ideals… theirdreams. It’s the same thing, with different words. History tells us that people dream andbelieve their dreams. Holy books like the Torah (known in Christianity as the first 5books of the Old Testament) and the Koran tell the same story of Joseph - who was giventhe power to interpret dreams and act accordingly.

Some sources report that Joseph, like many other prophets, was described as having astronger affinity to interpret images in dreams, imposed his beliefs rather than turn theindividual inward to self-empowerment.

Beliefs ruled the Middle Ages as they do today. A story from Nevers, called the GoldenLegend, states that one night Emperor Charlemagne dreamed that he was saved of dyingfrom a wild boar during a hunt. He was saved by the appearance of a child, who hadpromised to save the Emperor from death if he would give him clothes to cover hisnakedness.

Self-servingly, the bishop of Nevers interpreted this dream to mean that God wanted theemperor to repair the roof of the cathedral dedicated to the boy-saint Saint Cyricus.



Later in those Middle-Ages, dreams were seen as temptations from the Devil, and thuswere seen as dangerous.

In India, however, scholars such as Charaka (300 BC) gave alternative explanations forwhy we dream. Charaka Samhita explains it as follows : "The cause of dream are seven.They are what you have seen, heard, experienced, what you wish to experience, wereforced to experience, imagined and by the inherent nature of the body, what you fear toexperience."

In the 19th century Sigmund Freud suggested that dreams are a reflection of humandesires and prompted by external stimuli.

The expectation fulfilment theory of dreamsThe founders of Givens* psychology (* asserts that psychological understanding is bestadvanced by acknowledging that we have innate physical and emotional needs and thatnature has given us resources to help fulfill them. These needs have evolved overmillions of years and are our common biological inheritance, whatever our culturalbackground.

It is because these needs and resources are incorporated into our biology that they arecalled 'givens') put forward another explanation for why humans dream. They reviewedthe available scientific evidence and conducted a 12-year program of research thatshowed that all dreams are expressed in the form of sensory metaphors.

Research indicated that instinctive behaviours are programmed during the REM state inthe foetus and the neonate[citation needed]. This is necessarily in the form of incompletetemplates for which the animal later identifies analogous sensory components in the realworld. These analogical templates give animals the ability to respond to the environmentin a flexible way and generate the ability to learn, rather than just react.

Griffin pointed out that one can see this process when, for example, a baby seeks out andsucks on anything similar – analogous to – a nipple, like a finger or rubber teat. Once aninstinct-driven pattern is activated and becomes an expectation, it can normally only bedeactivated by the actual carrying out of the programmed behaviour by the centralnervous system, and this clearly does not give animals the flexibility needed to survive.

"Letting off steam" usually dissipates anger, but if animals were to act out their emotionsevery time they were emotionally aroused, that would be disastrous. So animals neededto evolve the ability to inhibit arousals when necessary and deactivate them later whenthey could do no harm. Griffin hypothesized that that is why animals evolved to dream.

During REM sleep, unfulfilled emotional expectations left over from the day are run outin the form of metaphors, thus deactivating them and freeing up the brain to deal with thenew emotionally arousing events of the following day[citation needed]. Without dreams



fulfilling animals' expectations by acting them out metaphorically, and thereby de-arousing the autonomic nervous system, animals would need a vastly bigger brain.

Griffin's expectation fulfilment theory of dreams states that: Dreams are metaphoricaltranslations of waking expectations. Expectations that cause emotional arousal that is notacted upon during the day to de-arouse the arousal, become dreams during sleep.Dreaming deactivates that emotional arousal by completing the expectation patternmetaphorically, freeing the brain to respond afresh to each new day.

Using dreams in therapyThe expectation fulfilment theory of dreams has introduced a more practical way of usingdream metaphors in therapy. Human givens therapists know that dream metaphors thatclients bring to therapy have therapeutic value because they can often grasp through themetaphor what is worrying their patient. They can then help clients to see moreobjectively what is troubling them.

Depressed people dream more intensely than non-depressed people, and the expectationfulfilment theory explains why Griffin also proposed that hypnosis is most usefullydefined as a direct route to activating the REM state and that all hypnotic phenomenoncan be explained with this insight. Since trance and suggestion play such an importantrole in psychotherapy, this fact is of great significance to psychotherapists andcounsellors.

Supernatural interpretationsThe mysterious and often bizarre nature of dreams has led many to interpret dreams asdivine gifts or messages, as predictions of the future, or as messages from the past.Alternatively, the idea of the "dream world" as real and the "day world" as imagined isanother supernatural interpretation of dreams. Profound dreams believed to have beensent by a deity have led to conversions from one religion to another, for example fromIslam to Christianity, and vice versa.

Oneiromancy, prediction of the future through the interpretation of dreams, holds greatcredence in ancient Judeo-Christianity: in the Tanakh, Jacob, Joseph and Daniel are giventhe ability to interpret dreams by Yahweh; in the New Testament, divine inspirationcomes as a dream to Saint Joseph, the husband of Mary, when the Angel Gabriel spoke tohim in a dream and told him that the baby Mary was carrying was Son of God. After thevisit of the Three Wise Men to them in Bethlehem, an angel appeared to him and told himto take Mary and Jesus to Egypt for their safety. The angel appeared again in a dream totell him when it was safe to return to Israel.

The story of Saint Patrick and his conversion of the people of Ireland also featuresdreaming. When Patrick was enslaved in Antrim he was told by God in a dream that therewas a boat waiting in Wicklow to bring him back to his homeland. Some years laterPatrick dreamt that the Irish were calling him to return and convert them to Christianity.



In Islam, good dreams are considered to be from God and bad dreams from Satan wherephilosophers of a skeptical Western bent (notably René Descartes) have pointed out thatdream experiences are indistinguishable from "real" events from the viewpoint of thedreamer, and so no objective basis exists for determining whether one is dreaming orawake at any given instant. One must, they argue, accept the reality of the waking worldon the basis of faith.

Scientific evidence on lucid dreaming provides a counter-argument to this theory as inthe 1980s lucid dreamers were able to demonstrate to researchers that they wereconsciously aware of being in a dream state by using eye movement signals.

The psychodynamic interpretation of dreamsBoth Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung identify dreams as an interaction between theunconscious and the conscious. They also assert together that unconscious is thedominant force of the dream, and in dreams it conveys its own mental activity to theperceptive faculty. While Freud felt that there was an active censorship against theunconscious even during sleep, Jung argued that the dream's bizarre quality is an efficientlanguage, comparable to poetry and uniquely capable of revealing the underlyingmeaning.

Fritz Perls (Gestalt) presented his theory of dreams following the holistic nature oftherapy. Dreams are seen as being projections of parts of oneself. Often these are partsthat have been ignored, rejected or even suppressed. One aim of gestalt dream analysis isto accept and reintegrate these. The dream needs to be accepted in its own right - notbroken down and analysed out of existence.

The neurology of dreamsDuring a typical lifetime a person spends about 6 years dreaming (which is about 2 hourseach night). Some studies on time sense during dreams have determined that a subject'ssense of time during a dream closely matches their time sense during waking activity. Inother words, if a dream feels like it lasted twenty minutes, these studies suggest it wasindeed about twenty minutes. However, other studies have found this to be inaccurate.

Some neurologists suggest that dreams are ever present excitations of long term memory- even during waking life. The strangeness of dreams is due to the format of long-termmemory, reminiscent of the Penfield & Rasmussen’s (Montreal Neurological Institute)findings that electrical excitations of the cortex give rise to experiences similar to dreams.

In the last half of the 20th century “lucid dreaming” has been the study. “Luciddreaming” is the conscious perception of one's state while dreaming.

This results in a much clearer ("lucid") experience of dream, usually enabling directcontrol over the content of the dream. The controlled experience from start to finish iscalled a lucid dream.



Popular author on the subject - Stephen LaBerge – defines lucid dreaming as "dreamingwhile knowing you are dreaming." LaBerge and his associates call people who purposelyexplore the possibilities of lucid dreaming oneironauts - literally from the Greek fordream explorers. The topic attracts the attention of a diverse and eclectic group, namelypsychologists, self-help authors, mystics, occultists, and creative artists and other leaders.

Lucid dreamers regularly describe their dreams as exciting, colourful, and fantastic.Many compare it to a spiritual experience and say that it changed their lives or theirperception of the world. Some have even reported lucid dreams that take on a hyperreality "more real than real", where all the elements of reality are amplified.

Lucid dreams are prodigiously more memorable than other kinds of dream, evennightmares, which may be why they are often prescribed as a means of ridding one's selfof troubling dreams. Although clear and consistent knowledge is difficult to find amongthe many interpretations of the experience — especially considering its highly subjectivenature — the validity of lucid dreaming as a scientifically verified phenomenon is well-established. Researchers with neurophysiological approach to dreaming have helped topush the understanding of lucid dreaming into a less speculative realm.

There is no universally agreed-upon biological definition of dreaming. The dogma statesthat dreams are associated with REM sleep but the evidence for this is not strong.Subjects awakened during REM sleep usually report having been dreaming but sinceREM sleep is not as deep as non-REM sleep, it would be expected that dreams are betterremembered but not necessarily more common during REM sleep. Some neurologistseven group mental phenomena such as daydreaming under the umbrella of dreaming.

There is debate regarding the distribution of time in a dream corresponding to reality. Itis unknown where in the brain dreams originate — if there is such a location — or whydreams occur at all. The magical theory of dream suggests that a “morphic” universeexists, surrounding the physical universal.

Of [e = mc2] and the world as energy, the morphic universe is the magneticconsciousness attracted to the electric emotion of the subjective perceiver. It is thesource of all creative ideas and a “world” of discarnate intelligence, of heaven and hell…depending on your emotional charge.

The physical law of movement says that each action has an equal an opposite reaction.That law requires us to resonate positive energy in order to attract positive energy.Furthermore, the ONLY WAY to transcend negative energy is with MORE POSITIVE.

That law demanding that we put positive energy-in-motion (positive emotion) is calledthe law of love. It’s practice assures the attraction of a “heaven dream” versus the other.

As soon as a dreamer can attract the other whole world (the morphic resonance), he (she)need no longer stay in this one. And as we know, the next is the world of SPIRIT.

on dreams and dreaming… - lawrence poole · scientific evidence on lucid dreaming provides a...

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