In My Dream, I’m Flying
“I dreamed I was a butterfly looking down on me sleeping. When I awoke, I did not know whether I was a man who had dreamed he was a butterfly or whether I was now a butterfly now dreaming he was a man.” The Taoist sage Zhuangzi, circa 400BC
Last evening, I leaned out my 17th floor balcony to take a photo of Manhattan in the clear evening air. To my right, I could see the New York Skyline. The Empire State building was illuminated by red, white and blue lights. The Freedom Tower at the tip of Manhattan shimmered in the refracted haze. As I leaned further out, I dropped my phone over the railing. Without hesitation, I jumped off the balcony and into the thin night air. Flying downward, I caught my phone before it hit the trees below, then arched my body and flew back up into the evening night. I had no fear because I knew I was dreaming. Not just any dream but one that was as vivid and tangible as waking reality. It was a dream I could control.
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In the 2010 movie Inception, Dominic Cobb is a spy with a twist. Through the art of inception, a dream sharing technology, he obtains corporate secrets by getting into a person’s mind through their dreams. He inserts himself into a subject’s dreams to obtain information while the subject is asleep and is unaware of what’s happening. He is also able to plant information and can create a dream within a dream. The subject wakes up from one dream only to find himself in another.
The movie is complex and prophetic. When it was released, neuroscience believed that the conscious mind of a person asleep and dreaming was inactive. Recent experiments have disproved that belief and shown that it is possible to communicate with dreamers deep in sleep. As we will see, this opens up a number of intriguing possibilities and opportunities when a person is having a lucid dream.
Dreams in Native American Culture
Dreams are an important component of Native American culture. The Mohawk word atetshents — one who dreams” — is also the term for a doctor or shaman. From the writings of Jesuit priests who lived with Indian tribes in the 17th century, we learn that the first activity of the day in an Iroquois village was the sharing of the night’s dreams. Dreams were regarded as messages from the spirits and the deeper self. They could provide guidance for the community as a whole and for specific individuals.
The Iroquois believed that their dreams enabled them to travel beyond the body and transcend the limits of time and space. The dreamer was thought to have visited the future or the past and could enter higher levels to communicate with the departed and spiritual teachers. He could inform the community about the location of game in deep winter and work with animal spirits to provide food for the community. They regarded episodes in dreams as harbingers of the future, which they attempted to prevent or encourage through rituals.
Dreams and Memory
While we are awake, we accumulate information and experiences. For each two waking hours, the brain needs an hour of sleep to analyze and process this information. It does this work throughout the night, stabilizing memories and strengthening skills we have learned while awake. As we sleep, our brain goes through cycles of activity. During dreaming, our eyes make rapid darting motions (REM sleep.)
Neuroscientists believe that the brain engages in memory consolidation during REM sleep. It revisits its experiences from the previous day and replays them, thus preserving the day’s memories. Sleep improves our memories by making them hard to forget. Sleeping also strengthens new skills, extracting patterns from things we learned to do while awake so that we are better at them the next day.
During dreaming, our brains examine the new memories and search for their meaning. It determines which connections to strengthen and then weaves them into a dream sequence. If the dream evokes an emotional response, the brain may decide to store these memories. As a result, when you wake up in the morning, your brain better understands your world than it did before you went to sleep.
I played classical guitar for many decades. When I was learning a new piece, before going to sleep I would repeat the fingering by tapping the notes on the bedsheet. Often when I woke up, I was able to play the piece. With this technique, you can activate the part of your brain that learns whether you imagine the movements while going to sleep or perform them during a lucid dream.
Lucid Dreaming
A lucid dream is one in which you are aware that you are dreaming. The Greek philosopher Aristotle mentioned it in the fourth century B.C.E. Neurologists estimate that 50% of people have had at least one lucid dream, and about 10% of people experience them once a month or more. With training, people can enhance the ability to recognize that they are in a dream in which they can control some aspects.
Originally suspicious of claims about lucid dreams, scientists now know that such dreams occur. Unlike ordinary dreams, a lucid dream feels vivid and real. Lucid dreamers know that they’re dreaming, although the dream may feel like the three-dimensional reality we experience while awake. Generally, the dreamer can control the content of the dream. A lucid dream can be a learning experience for the dreamer. Dreamers report feeling empowered by dreams in which they can control the story and its ending. That experience can also be useful in reducing the terror of nightmares.
Researchers have found some evidence that lucid dreams can help people solve problems that do not require logic or math. This dream state creates new ideas or insights, sometimes with the help of characters in their dreams.
Lucid dreams have some downsides. They’re vivid and exciting and can wake you. You may find it hard to get back to sleep. If you have mental health issues, you probably should avoid lucid dreaming You may lose touch with what is real and what is occurring in your lucid dream.
Communicating with the Dreamer
Scientists have defined sleep as a state in which the conscious part of the brain is disconnected and unaware of the outside world. Yet we now have evidence that people can receive and process complex external information while asleep. Researchers in Germany, the Netherlands, France and the United States have successfully established two-way communication with subjects who were dreaming, using speech and asking questions the sleepers had never heard.
In one experiment, researchers recruited volunteers, including some experienced lucid dreamers and others who remembered at least one dream a week. The researchers waited until the subjects were asleep, then asked the dreamers yes or no questions or to solve simple arithmetic problems. To communicate with the scientists, dreamers used signals such as moving their eyes multiple times to indicate a sum, or in patterns that matched Morse Code. The researchers asked two hundred questions of the lucid dreamers, with nearly 20% of the group answering.
Recording Our Dreams
When we think, our brains create make images composed of 30,000 dots or pixels. These images can be captured in an MRI scan. The technology is crude and the resolution poor, yet it is possible to recognize what the person was thinking. It is also possible to record images from dreams.
Recently, researchers from the Media Lab’s Fluid Interfaces group developed a process they call Targeted Dream Incubation (TDI). A wearable sleep-tracking sensor helps record dreams and can guide dreams by repeating targeted information as sleep begins, a state referred to as hypnagogia. The researchers report that subjects are able to incorporate this information into their dreams. The TDI method promises new understanding of how dreams impact memory, emotion and creativity. The MIT scientists are helping artists create new artwork by augmenting their creativity with this innovative dream technology.
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It’s night again and I’m flying eastward over the West Side Highway. Soon I reach the Whitestone and Throg’s Neck Bridges which are festooned by a necklace of lights. Looking back past LaGuardia Airport, I spot my building and glide across the Hudson River to my apartment in Fort Lee. In a few seconds I’m climbing over my balcony railing and into my bed. Flying is a wonderful experience but it will be morning soon and I need to rest and so I end my dream and fall into a deep sleep. But tomorrow night, when the moon once again hovers above the river, I will close my eyes and …
