By Bill Murphy/Science Correspondent © 2013 UC Berkeley neuroscientists addressed that question in a paper published September 22, 2011 in the online journal Current Biology. The team consisting of Shinji Nishimoto, An T.Vu, Thomas Naselaris, Yuval Benjamini, Bin Yu and Jack L. Gallant at the university developed a system to capture activity in the visual…
By Mary Ziemer © 2013 For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. —1 Corinthians 13:12, King James Version The word ‘lucidity’ implies ‘clarity’ but what if we also see the lucid state…
By Maria Isabel Pita © 2013 People would be disturbed to see a cat with its whiskers clipped off. Whiskers are part of a cat’s sensory perceptions, a vital part of how it collects information and makes sense of it. Our dreams are similar to cat’s whiskers, and when we cut ourselves off from the…
By Bill Murphy, Science Correspondent © 2013 Whether you‘ve entered a state of lucidity or are having a free form dream without achieving self-awareness, you‘re still sensing the world outside of your body. And that means you are responding to the stimuli in a limited manner. After you fall asleep you may pull up the blanket…
As a sports science student in Germany, Mark Hettmanczyk, knew he had only modest skills as a swimmer. Well, even that statement might seem too generous. According to Mark, his swimming coach told him, ‘Mr. Hettmanczyk, you are a stone. You will never be a good swimmer.’ But Mark had one skill the swimming coach…
By Ed Kellog III, Ph. D. 2013 © 2014 Many cultures believe that some acts, such as meditating and healing, have as much as a seven-fold enhanced effectiveness in lucid dreams, as compared to the same acts performed in waking physical reality. Tibetans have even developed a series of dream yoga practices to take advantage…
By Mary Ziemer © 2013 Beloved gaze in thine own heart The Holy tree is growing there…. —William Butler Yeats Yeats’ plea to his beloved—to gaze into her own heart and look upon the Holy tree growing there— echoes the call to the heart of the ‘Lucid Surrender’ experience. Like the roots of a…
By Rory Mac Sweeney © 2013 “My new project, The Mutual Dream Experiment, seeks to encourage people to explore the nature of reality by allowing a means in which to investigate the process of shared dreaming. There is a consensus among people who really tune into their dream life that the possibility of exchanging information…
By Ryan Hurd © 2013 For the last six months, I have been advising a tech start-up called SHADOW, which is currently building software for tracking and recording dreams. It‘s been fun influencing this project from the ground up, all the while thinking about how useful a free, open-source digital dream journal would also be…
By Maria Isabel Pita © 2014 ‘A cellular anthropologist is a code finder who looks for clues to spiritual and social life hidden in our molecular structures.’—Sondra Barrett Excerpt from my dream journal, November 22, 2013: Back on a street of the town where I confronted the black magicians, riding in a…
By Al Moniz almo@cape.com © 2014 Waking Life is a well-known movie that seems to be about, or at least prominently feature, dreaming. I have even heard it described as a movie about lucid dreaming. I myself would say that it is a movie that takes place entirely in a dream state (or rather –…
By Joan C. Harthan, PhD © 2014 I was so pleased when I received Lucy’s email, passing on Rebecca’s suggestion that we have the theme of Laughter and Lucidity for this edition. It immediately brought to mind a lucid dream I had in 2005 and I was compelled to get tapping away on my keyboard…