Office Culture Reconsiders the Siesta

Our culture is a sleep-deprived culture. While that is obvious to many, it is helpful every once in a while to call out the larger dynamic, the water we swim in.

Read more

Lucid Dreaming Radio and Dream Theater

Two great dream events to point you to today. The first is an interview with the editor of the Lucid Dream Exchange on Coast to Coast Radio. Veteran lucid dream educator Robert Waggoner provides a balanced history of lucid dreaming research, and then discusses the distinction between lucid dreams, control dreams, and precognitive dreams.

Here’s the link for the online radio station Coast to Coast. I believe you need to register to listen for free.

Read more

Dreams Influenced by Smell

Here’s a great piece of dream research that just hit the wires:

In a study of 15 healthy German women, smells in the dreamer’s environment effected their dream content. Specifically, the smells (rotten eggs for some, and roses for the luckier subjects) boosted the negative or positive emotions of dreams.

The researchers asked the women to assess the content of their dream on an emotional “coloration” scale that measured the tone of their dream. They were asked to rate the positive or negative coloration of their dream on a scale of 0 to 3. Zero was no coloration and 3 was strong coloration.

Read more

September’s Moon Dreaming Post

Listen to Miles Davis’s classic Moon Dreams while you read!

Today, the day after the full moon, I looked back into the research on the Moon’s Effect on Dreams done by the College of Metaphysics in Missouri. When I first blogged about their lucid dreaming and moon proposal this past February, I was skeptical because the research program did not seem to have any experimental controls in place.

Read more

Exploring Imageless Lucid Dreaming

Below is a segment from my paper on imageless lucid dreaming that I”m presenting next week as part of the online Psiber-Dreaming Conference. I use visual art to help describe these lucid spaces that are difficult to put words to. Read more

India’s Courts Convict on Untested Brain Scan Technique

According the New York Times, India’s courts have blasted into new territory this week by admitting brain imagery data to convict a suspect of a crime. The only problem is the method has not been verified by any scientific journal on the planet.

As a modern update to the lie detector test, The Brain Electrical Oscillations Signature test actually is fairly straight-forward. It’s based on the EEG machine, which measures the brain’s electrical activity, muscular tension, and eye movements. The makers of the machine claim that the processed imagery can provide proof that a suspect experienced the crime or if he is merely imagining it.

Read more

Calling All Dream Warriors

I had a really unsettling moment this week when I realized I”ve been unconsciously living out my life according to the plot of A Nightmare on Elm Street III: Dream Warriors.

As I was reminded in this hilarious post about the 1987 horror movie, the main character Kristen leaves her hometown to study dream research after suffering from realistic nightmares starring, you know, Freddy. She then returns home, and begins working in a psychiatric hospital to help others who have powerful but destructive imaginations. That’s when the nightmares begin again….

Read more

PsiberDreaming Conference Schedule Up

The list of presenters and topics has been finalized for the 2008 online PsiberDreaming Conference. If you are still wondering if this two week event is worth $40 (or $25 for students), this list may help.

Some featured presenters include near death researcher PMH Atwater, author Robert Moss, ex-government Psi researcher Dale Graff, and dream researcher Kelly Bulkeley. Also, Beverly D”Urso, who is one of Stephen LaBerge’s first lab subjects, is presenting on how to increase lucid dreams.

My presentation is on October 2 – the title is The Construction of Self from the Void of Imageless Lucid Dreaming. This is the first time I have presented material from my MA thesis on lucid dreaming since my defense, and it includes a radical method for uncovering the spontaneous (and sometimes deeply weird) dimensions of lucid dreaming.

Read more

My Lucid Dreaming Knol

Always experimenting with new online publishing venues, I just wrote my first knol. Knol is Google’s attempt to out-wikipedia Wikipedia. So far it has not attracted too much attention, but I found this newborn article directory site to be pretty user-friendly. I like that that the author can control how collaborative the knol can be, from wiki-style groupthink to hands-off-this-is-mine.

I also like that Google is interested in verifying the identity of authors who write a knol. They even offer to call you at your home to verify your credentials. So this is a great way to get the word out if you are a freelance writer or otherwise looking to build your name or expertise.

Read more