The parts of the brain involved in dreaming

Scientists have identified the parts of the brain that are involved in dreaming.  Dreams don't just happen in REM sleep and changes in brain activity offer clues to what the dream is about.

Lucid Dreams Produce Gamma Brainwaves

The Neurological Laboratory in Frankfurt discovered that lucid dreamers produce gamma brainwaves that operate at at 40Hz.

I've had a few lucid dreams which occurred before ever doing gamma brainwave entrainment. I don't think I have noticed any more of them since I've started doing gamma brainwave entrainment. What has everyone else's experience been?

A Data Analysis of Dreams

FiveThirtyEight discusses results of a dream analysis study from 1950 and a new study from 2013. Apparently, the majority of dreams were "bad dreams" in both the 1950 and 2013 studies.

I do not find that to be my experience with dreams. I would say the majority of them are weird - not particularly good or bad. It's rare for me to have a good or bad dream and even more rare to have a great dream or a nightmare. It would be interesting to see the dream distribution of people that have more good dreams than bad or neutral dreams to see if there is anything in common amongst those people.

Scientists Predict Images in Dreams

Japanese scientists were able to predict what images people saw in their dreams using MRI scans, according to BBC News.  They accomplished 60% accuracy.

Who knows, this could eventually lead to a machine that we could hook up to and report what we saw in our dreams.  It could be an interesting way to jog the brain to remember the dreams from the previous night.

Lucid dreaming can be used as a tool for learning

Recent research from Yale University suggests that lucid dreaming can be used as a tool for dreaming.

I've had two or three lucid dreams myself, but it is not something I can easily have happen on demand.  When it has happened, learning something is not the first thing on my mind, but enjoying the experience is.  It's an amazing feeling to have control over a dream but to also have experience the sense of touch as well.

It was a Dark and Stormy Morning...

This post is about a personal experience from this morning that was so intense and interesting enough that I thought I would share it. I woke up around 3 a.m. this morning, feeling a bit warm. It was then that I noticed the sound of the storm, though from my waking senses it had sounded like a bad remake of the thunder sound. I was close to an hour later when the thunder and lightning intensified, with the thunder so loud that I thought my house would explode at any minute, as it was directly overhead. As for the lightning, it was bright enough to still see it's flashes even though my eyes were closed. Finally, in the 4 o'clock hour, I started to fall asleep. That's when the real weirdness started.

The following is disjointed writing, as I wrote it this morning before taking off to work to make sure I would remember it for this evening. I'm good enough to hold the dream memories in my head for quite a while, sometimes forgetting about the dream until the middle of the day. Anyway, here we go:

Lucid dream - I woke up, but I was not in my room, but in a hotel room instead. I look out the window and see that I am the first floor of a hotel, as I look out directly on to a street and sidewalk. The sky was a brilliant orange and purple. There were a number of billboards, including one with an ad for a radio station, but not one in the waking world. I could see cars driving, even on a distant road that was curving around a hill. It may have been sunset as opposed to sunrise.

Another lucid dream, continuation of the dream above, or maybe this part came first - woke up to a radio. Saw two clocks as opposed to just my one. What looked like a small clock turned into or turned out to be a boombox. Tried to find a local radio station on the radio (after trying to remember the station number) and think I found it, but am not sure, as I did not recognize the song on the radio or the artist (but then, that station has been playing music I do not recognize lately).

After this (I slipped out of the dream) I seemed to focus on going back to look at those billboards from the first dream. Not sure if this focus was from within the other dream or from the waking world. I was able to do it easily. Also saw more of a cityscape, but it did not match the city I live in, even though I saw a billboard with an ad that mentioned the city. I would've likened it to more like Seattle, based on some of the structures I saw, but it probably didn't match that city.

Another dream in a hotel, down in the lobby, an ex-coworker was working the bellhop desk. Then I was in the elevator, trying to remember my floor, then remembering it was the 12th floor, and selecting that.

In one of these dreams, where I realize it was a dream, I am still in the dream, yet hear the AC from the waking world.

Later, I had a more normal dream that looked like a sitcom. Don't remember much except an excited discussion, something about knife throwing and a competition, then a group of big biker looking like guys coming in and starting to sing acapella.

I seem to remember trying to see my hands in front of the clock shades from a window, but am not sure if it was in the dream or waking world. I tend to think the dream world, as there was a bit too much light for that time in the morning.

These dreams went by pretty quickly. Ten minutes or so would pass, I wake up, go back into sleep, and dream again. The combination in the number of dreams, as well as the lucidness of them (which I have had before, but rarely), and the fact that a number of these were about waking up (and I've had those dreams before, including dreaming about waking up from a dream), not knowing what was real and what was a dream, made me feel a bit crazy. My brain definitely felt a bit off when I woke up this morning.

Tips for Remembering Dreams

There are a few tips that I have found useful in remembering my dreams and thought I would share them here.

• Keep a journal near your bed - this is a suggestion I've seen numerous times and it is helpful, as many times you will start to forget the dream once you wake up. If not a paper journal, having a computer, laptop, or netbook close can work as well, but if you have to wait for it to boot up, you could lose the dream.


• Meditate - I have found that meditating tends to give me more vivid dreams, which makes them easier to remember. The results of meditation can also help you on focusing on remembering a dream and not get distracted by the mind's random chatter. I've also noticed, since meditating, that I can forget that I had a dream, and then suddenly remember it hours later out of nowhere.


• Go over the dream before waking up - This one is a bit tricky and takes some practice. I have found this particularly helpful when I come out of the dream state and into consciousness in the middle of the night or before I am ready to get up, but want to remember the dream. Keeping my eyes closed, I go over as much of the dream as possible, generally in chronological order, to try to help cement the dream in my mind, so that I can recall it later when I've woken up and write it out in a journal.

I hope these tips help you remember your own dreams.

7 Ways to Better Recall Your Dreams

A Reader's Digest article titled 7 Ways to Better Recall Your Dreams has some good ideas, though I am not sure that all of them really help with recall.

Incubating an idea is better for guiding dream content than remembering the dream.

Connecting the dots, as stated in the article, is better for interpreting dreams, but I usually find that having hunches about a dream's meaning work better than trying to analyze them or looking them up in a dream dictionary.

And finally, changing the outcome is better suited for trying to have a lucid dream.

I have used the other tips for dream recall. I don't really write them down immediately after waking up, as I am better at holding the dream in my head (and sometimes I will remember it later in the day), but I think meditation has helped with dream recall.

Review of Conscious Dreaming by Robert Moss

Over the years, my ability to recall dreams has improved. I will also get a sense of when a dream is just a dream, when it is filtering out stuff that's happened in my life the past couple of days, or when there is a message in the dream for me. I've also had at least one out-of-body experience and two lucid dreams.

I've never really cared for dream dictionaries for dream interpretation. They may help sometimes, but usually I feel that they are off the mark for me. I've also felt that there are more to dreams, something spiritual about them, but have never found anything that mirrors my feelings about dreams.

I borrowed the book Conscious Dreaming, written by Robert Moss, from a friend. I have to say that I have mixed feelings about the book.

On one hand, there are a lot of nifty ideas in the book that interested me. If I were to describe what the basic idea of conscious dreaming is, it is like a lucid dream, but instead of trying to control and change the dream, you interact with it and the characters in the dream.

On the other hand, Moss' writing feels very scattered and disconnected at times, mentioning other dream ideas, but never strengthening them to the idea of conscious dreaming. He does not go into enough detail on bringing about conscious dreaming and makes it sound as if it is very easy to do. I can't even have a lucid dream at will and even then, it can be difficult to stay in a lucid dream at first once you realize you are dreaming.