A few facts about lucid dreaming

A short video I came across about lucid dreaming.  I knew most of the information in the video already, but I thought it was a good, quick overview of the topic.

Instant Induction Hypnosis and Missing Time?

I was watching a DVRed episode of a Discovery Channel show called Deception with Keith Barry that focused on the possibility of spy agencies using hypnosis as a tool for spying.  Barry, a 'mentalist' skilled in the art of hypnosis, explored some possible ways a spy agency may use hypnosis.  In one experiment, he put two hypnosis skeptics into a trance and told them the combination of a safe that had $5000 in it but told them they wouldn't remember the combination until he woke them up and gave them a trigger phrase.  When they first woke up, they were skeptical that they had even been in a trance at all, but he gave them a minute to remember the combination and open the safe and get the $5000.  The minute passed, and neither of them remembered the combination.  Barry said the trigger phrase, and they immediately remembered the combination.  Afterwards they were convinced they had been hypnotized afterall.  The purpose of the experiment was to see if someone could be hypnotized and told secret information that they wouldn't remember until given a trigger phrase.  If they had been captured and interrogated for information by someone who didn't know the trigger though, the person wouldn't be able to divulge the secrets because they wouldn't consciously know that the secret was...and they might not even be aware that they had a secret hidden in their subconscious in the first place.

Barry also experimented with the possibility creating a Manchurian Candidate type of scenario (though not to kill someone).  In his experiment, he programmed someone to go and 'drug' an assassin (actually an actor) in a coffee shop and steal some pictures from him and bring them back.

He also did a mass hypnosis experience by putting most of the people in an audience in a trance and convincing them they had seen a hilarious movie.  But the experiment that most caught my interest was one where he used a hypnosis technique he called instant induction hypnosis.  He was able to walk up to three different strangers on the street and put them in a trance in a matter of seconds without them even realizing what he was doing.  With one guy, he just had him stand still looking at his watch for 10 minutes.  Another guy he convinced to sit on the ground with a beggars sign and beg for money.  Another guy he convinced to go to a ATM and withdraw $60 and throw it in the trash (Barry went and retrieved the money though, and gave it back to the guy).  What was interesting though, is these people didn't recall doing what Barry told them to do.  They had to be shown they had done it.

As interesting as all of that was on its own, what really got me thinking was how easily Barry was able to put those strangers on the street into a trance and then have them do something without having any recollection of it.  Could this explain some of the stories people have told about experiencing missing time (where people cannot account for what happened to them during a certain period of time...here are a few examples here, here, and here)?  The strangers on the street Barry put into a trance didn't even realize he had put them in a trance.  Could something like this be one possible explanation for what has happened to people who claim to have experienced missing time?  In some cases, a missing time experience may also be part of an alien abduction experience.  If a guy on the street could put a person in a trance, then I suppose it's possible an alien could too.  But what if there was no alien?  What if the whole alien abduction experience was a false memory implanted into their mind while they were under a trance?

Why someone would want to implant an alien abduction experience into someone's mind, I don't know.  I don't know why someone would have put them into a trance in the first place either.   But perhaps being temporarily put into a trance could explain at least some of the cases of missing time some people have reported experiencing.

Dreams of Anticipation?

A guy I work with dropped his car off at a shop yesterday afternoon after he got off and then came back to our office because he didn't want to wait at the shop while it was being worked on (the shop is within walking distance of our office).  He was already off for the day, so he decided to just take nap.  I noticed when he had just dozed off, so I decided to shoot a rubber band at him just to mess with him.  He woke up and told me he was dreaming that someone was pulling a tree branch back, and when he felt the rubber band hit him is when the person let the branch go in the dream.  So his subconscious mind interpreted getting hit by the rubber band as getting hit by a tree branch.  But the question in my mind is why was he even dreaming about someone holding a tree branch back?  It's almost as if his subconscious mind knew he was going to get hit by a rubber band and it began preparing a scenario to fit what was about to happen.

Others have probably experienced similar dreams.  A dream where something happening in the dream corresponds to something that's really happening, but it's not necessarily just the single instance that your mind interprets a certain way; it may be that your mind prepares a scenario to correspond with what is about to happen before it even happens.

So in the example I used above, why was he dreaming about someone holding a tree branch back as I was preparing to shoot him with a rubber band?  Was he just randomly dreaming about a guy holding back a tree branch and getting hit by that branch just so happened to be the most convenient way to interpret the impact of the rubber band at that precise moment?  Or was his subconscious somehow aware of what was about to happen?  If so, how did it become aware?  Was it some sort of unconscious telepathy?  Or was his mind just able to somehow sense the movements I was making to prepare the shot?  Could he sense my intention?

I don't know that it necessarily classifies as precognition, but it seems that the subconscious mind may be able to anticipate something that is about to happen and prepare a dreamlike scenario for it.

Psychic Research: Mainstream Science or Not?

The mainstream scientific community has a tendency to shy away from belief in psychic phenomena.  When they do consider it and try to experiment with the phenomena, they oftentimes do so with a condescending approach. They are typically more concerned with trying to debunk it than they are they trying to prove it.  There are some scientists, such as Dean Radin and Rupert Sheldrake, who take a more positive approach to studying psychic phenomena, but Radin and Sheldrake are a rare breed in the scientific community.

However, the opinion of mainstream science on the subject of psychic phenomena hasn't been of much interest to some government agencies.  It's no secret that some law enforcement agencies have consulted with psychics to gain tips on cases they are trying to solve.  And it's has now been known for some time that the U.S. government had secret research projects regarding psychic phenomena that went on for many years.  The Stargate Project, which was a code name for several sub-projects by the U.S. government regarding research on psychic phenomena, existed from the 1970s until 1995.

Obviously there are 'authority' figures in both politics and science that have taken the subject seriously.  So why do the academics typically shy away from it?  Are they afraid they won't be able to come up with a good enough explanation?  Or are they really that closed-minded?  I wouldn't be surprised if, considering many universities are government supported, the government has purposely coaxed the educational establishment to avoid the subject and try to debunk it just to keep the public consciousness away from the subject so they can monopolize on the advantages psychic phenomena could potentially bring.

Although if that was their plan, their plan has failed.  Public interest in psychic phenomena has not waned, and I think interest in the subject is actually booming now.   The government has acknowledged their own research on the subject and you can see many TV shows and documentaries relating to psychic (and paranormal) phenomena in general.

But not mainstream science.  They still aren't that interested  They are still avoiding the subject or trying to debunk it.  It's like these guys are in some sort of Darwinist dark age.

I mean, if the government declassified documents that state they have some sort of partnership with gray aliens  and Larry King interviewed a little gray alien, would the academics still rush to debunk the whole thing?  Would they be like, "Well, the alien is obviously a genetic altered human.  We took a DNA sample and we saw the similarities.  See look here at this picture.  You see how similar that strand is?  Here, let me circle it.  You see it?  You see it?  That indicates it's a genetically altered human.  The whole thing was probably a Soviet experiment from the beginning."

I doubt they would react that way (although I wouldn't be surprised if some did), so why are they so apprehensive about psychic research?  Why are guys like Radin and Sheldrake thought of as mavericks?

I think mainstream science needs more mavericks.

"How" doesn't answer "Why"

I was thinking about consciousness and 'self' today while I was out walking, and it occurred to me that when it comes to neuroscience, scientists may be attempting to answer the question to "why" the brain works the way it does with the answer to "how" it works.

I tend to think our mind consists of at least two levels of 'self'.  The conscious and subconscious, which I tend to think are the 'animal mind' and 'soul mind' respectively.  I say "at least" two levels of self because I'm not totally convinced the subconscious is the soul mind.  The subconscious itself may be part of the physical/animal mind, but the point is, I believe our highest 'self' transcends the physical body and brain.

I think the brain is more of a control panel for our higher self.  This is, of course, not the scientific view, which suggests that everything occurs in the brain itself.  But I think the observed neural activity in the brain is not merely the result of the brain's physical functioning, but the result of that 'neural activity' interfacing with the brain.

Scientists have taught us many things about our limitations.  They've taught us that our eyes can only see an itty bitty little bit of the light spectrum.  There are certain things we can't hear.  They've even taught us that this varies animal to animal.  Dogs don't see as many colors as we do, but they can hear and smell things better than we do.  But despite the limitations we have, scientists seem to ignore these limitations in their experiments.  They only care to study what they can observe.  If they can't observe it, then it must not be.  How ironic?

To get to the point I want to make in this post though, when it comes to the brain, I think scientists may be limiting their answer to "why" the brain works with "how" it works because they cannot observe "why" it works.  To use an analogy, if Person 1 is using a touchscreen cell phone and started moving an object around on the screen with his finger and then asked Person 2 why they object was moving, Person 2 would probably look at Person 1 stupid and answer, "Because your're moving it around."  And yes, that is WHY the object is moving around...because someone is moving it.

But let's say Person 1 who is moving the object around on the screen is invisible.  A Person 3 comes along and asks Person 2 how the object is able to move.  To investigate, Person 2 may get a screwdriver and take the back off of the phone.  After some investigation, Person 2 concludes that the circuit board is what enables the object to move on the screen.  Not only that, it appears that the circuit board is what makes the whole phone function!  But that is HOW it works.  That doesn't answer WHY it's doing what it's doing.

The answer to WHY the circuit board is doing what it is doing is because the invisible Person 1 is instructing it on what to do.  But because Person 2 and Person 3 don't see Person 1, they assume that the circuit board must hold all the answers, including the answer to why.  As a result, the answer to 'why' gets lumped together with the answer to 'how', or they just continue to look at circuit board for many years trying to find an anomaly that may explain - or can be interpreted to explain - 'why'.

If Person 2 and Person 3 limit themselves to only considering what they can observe, then they may never understand that the intelligence - the why - behind the circuit board's operation is the invisible Person 1.

"We have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning." -Werner Heisenberg, theoretical physicist


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P.S. Just to add another point to my post, lumping "how" and "why" together seems to be common in science.  For instance, I googled the question of why the sun is hot.  Here is the first answer to come up:

The sun is hot because the atoms deep inside the sun are undergoing nuclear fusion. Nuclear fusion releases a lot of energy. This energy excites all the other atoms in the sun, and causes them to move about. This is what heat is. So the nuclear reactions inside the sun cause the sun to be hot.

That answer came from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Physics Department.

But why are the atoms deep inside the sun undergoing nuclear fusion?  Why does nuclear fusion release a lot of energy?  Why does nuclear fusion even occur?  What is it that makes the laws of physics what they are?  Why is that the way it 'is'?

I think the answer given to why the sun is hot would be like someone asking a hunter why he shot a deer, and then the hunter answering because he "pulled a trigger on the gun, which ignited a reaction in the chamber, which propelled a bullet toward the deer, which blasted through the deer's heart, cutting off its blood circulation, which caused it to fall over dead."  Imagine getting that answer instead of just getting an answer like, "To eat it."  So in this case we have 'what' happened; the hunter pulled the trigger igniting a reaction that propelled the bullet towards the deer.  As to 'how' the deer died, it was the bullet going through its heart and cutting off its circulation.  But as to 'why' it all happened, it was because the hunter wanted to eat it.

Maybe this is the key difference in religious studies and scientific studies.  Religion wants to know why, but science wants to know how.  Perhaps we could have an even greater understanding of things if we recognize that each question needs to be answered separately.

Tunnels to the Light

Michael Prescott has been writing about Near-Death Experiences (NDEs) on his blog lately, and I was particularly intrigued by his latest posting on the subject where he cites some cases from Kenneth Ring's book Lessons from the Light.

Here is one of the cases he cited:

Then there is the case of a nine-month-old baby boy who suffered a cardiac arrest during an emergency surgical procedure and was without a pulse for 40 minutes. Afterward he was in a coma for three months. Ring reports:

Two years later, when he was five, he was having lunch one day with his father and spontaneously brought up the time "when he had died."

As the mother observed before she related this event to us, neither parent had ever heard this story before. She went on to say, "He had never, ever, been told that he had died. He was never told the things that happened to him."

In any case, as the mother recalled a conversation, it went like this:

He sat down besides his dad, and he said, "Dad, do you know what?" And his dad said "What?" "You know I died." "Oh, you did?" And he said, "Yeah." His dad said, "Well, what happened?" And he said, "It was really, really dark, daddy, and then it was really, really bright. And I ran and ran, and it didn't hurt anymore." And his dad said, "Where were you running, Mark?" And he said, "Oh, Daddy, I was running up there [pointing upward].... And he said he didn't hurt anymore, and a man talked to him. And his dad said, "What kind of words did he say?" And Mark said, "He didn't talk like this [pointing to his mouth], he talked like this [pointing to his head]." Because he couldn't tell you with his little vocabulary that it was through the mind. And he said, "I didn't want to come back, Daddy, but I had to."

Here is another case he cites:

I was hovering over a stretcher in one of the emergency rooms at the hospital. I glanced down at the stretcher, knew the body wrapped in blankets was mine, and really didn't care. The room was much more interesting than my body. And what a neat perspective. I could see everything. And I do mean everything! I could see the top of the light on the ceiling, and the underside of the stretcher. I could see tiles on the ceiling and the tiles on the floor, simultaneously: three hundred degree spherical vision. And not just spherical. Detailed! I could see every single hair and the follicle out of which it grew on the head of the nurse standing beside the stretcher. At the time, I knew exactly how many hairs there were to look at. But I shifted focus. She was wearing glittery white nylons. Every single shimmer and sheen stood out in glowing detail, and once again, I knew exactly how many sparkles there were.

I recommend you go read the whole article.  If you've ever been interested in NDEs or paranormal phenomena in general, I think you'll probably like it.

Below are my comments about his posting.
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One thing interesting to me about the case of the nine month old boy is that at nine months, he wouldn't know how to say much of anything. But during the NDE, he was apparently able to communicate and understand what was being said to him. Not only that, at five, he was apparently able to translate that understanding into words.

Another thing of interest to me are the NDErs who describe how vivid everything was during their experience. I think that is more evidence that the spirit self is our highest self. It seems our brain's interpretations of what we see and hear around us is restricted to the limitations of our eyes and ears. Our spirit self probably soaks up all the vivid information we see and hear, but humanity doesn't seem to know - or has forgotten - how to access all of this detailed information. During an NDE though, it seems that spirits no longer confined to the limitations of body are able to fully experience a larger spectrum of reality. I don't know if I would go so far as to say that we are spirits 'trapped' in human bodies; I think it may be that experiencing life in a human body is an intended part of development, or we may have just forgotten how to access the full spectrum our spirit self is able to observe.

I sometimes wonder if the bio-magnetic energy fields around us are either our spirit selves, or an effect given off by our spirit selves. I also wonder if the 'electrical' currents flowing through our brains are not the result of 'brain activity' itself, but the result of our brain being operated by those 'electrical' currents. In other words, perhaps the brain is like a set of buttons, and the 'electrical' currents are like a set of fingers. If so, then it makes sense that the physical body would cease to operate once the 'fingers' move away from the 'buttons'.

Astrology: A Very Long History

I'll admit, I've never been that interested in astrology.  When I was younger, I thought the whole thing sounded silly.  Even now I don't take it too seriously, but I do find the concept behind it more interesting.  Over the years I've come across a lot of things that have piqued my curiousity about it, whether it be personality profiles based on it, or accurate predictions made with it.  I'm also intrigued by how ancient people such as the Maya were able to make such a complex and accurate calendar based on astrological observations.  I've been thinking about it more lately because I've been thinking about cycles of time (I wrote about that the other day).  I also know that the sun and the moon effects us and the earth itself.  So with all that in mind, I've been considering how other stars and planets may effect us also.

No one is denying that stars and planets move through the sky.  But not everyone thinks the movement of the stars and planets has any real effect on us or society.  It occurred to me though that belief in astrology may be the oldest 'religion' (for lack of a better term) there is.  Typically, you can trace the origins of a religion to someone.  But, you can't really do that with astrology.  You can trace the various types of astrology back to specific regions, but you can't really trace it to any one person.  It's almost as if astrology in one form or another is as old as recorded history.  It's like it was just sort of 'there'. So where did it really come from?  Who was the first astrologer?  Who was the first person to notice all the movements of all the heavenly bodies and record what they thought it all meant?  And why did they think it meant what they said it meant?  How many different people figured it out?

I figure it began by one of two ways:

• It was taught to early man by an angel, demon, or alien.
• Someone merely observed how the stars moved at night, then recorded whatever events occurred afterwards and associated the observed movements with what events occurred (or didn't occur).

Now let's just assume for a moment that the latter is true.  Are the movement of heavenly bodies actually connected to the events that occur?  Or are they merely unrelated events that someone erroneously connected to the movement of stars?  What if there really was no connection between the movement of the stars and what events occurred?  

What if there was no connection, but a connection was created and entered into the collective sub-conscious. What if the collective sub-conscious causes events to happen in a certain way at a certain time based on the position of the stars?  In other words, what if the movement of the stars have nothing to do with the events that occur, but thousands of years of belief in astrology have resulted in people unconsciously causing the events to occur anyways?  Could it be so embedded into the collective subconscious that even people that don't know anything about astrology still unconsciously contribute to causing events to happen based on the position of the stars?  Is this why religions such as Judaism, Islam, and Christianity condemn astrology?  Are these religions trying to free the collective subconscious from the belief that the movement of stars has some real significance?  Are they trying to tell us that our lives aren't dictated by the positions of stars?  Are they trying to break the cycle?

But then I'm also reminded of how the sun and moon effect us.  So I begin to wonder again if the other stars and planets can have a subtle effect on us to.  

I'm still not sure what I believe.  But it gives me something else to ponder.  

Reality that you can't see

Reality is only what your mind perceives it to be. What you consider to be existence occurs in your mind. Your eyes don't really see, they just transmit light signals to your brain. Your ears don't really hear, they just transmit sound waves into your brain. Everything is interpreted in your brain. What's interesting is that our view of reality can be shaped by what our mind is told to think. For instance, hypnotists can hypnotize people and tell them that upon waking up, they won't be able to see someone. In some cases, the hypnotist will tell them they won't be able to see him/her (the hypnotist). Here is an example:

Here is another example. In this one, the girl not only seems to think the hypnotist is invisible, he has also convinced her that a stuffed monkey is alive and talking to her.



In one case I've heard about, a hypnotist told a man that his daughter would be invisible. When he woke up, he not only couldn't see his daughter standing in front of him, but he could read the inscription on a watch being held behind her back. Pretty amazing huh? Like I said in my recent article A Quest for Truth, the subconscious mind will believe whatever it is told. If it is told that someone is invisible, then the mind will no longer process the light waves bouncing off that person. Instead, it will process the light waves coming behind that person. So the reality around you does exist, but reality as you know it is only how your mind perceives it. So the next time you want a break from reality, just remember, the reality you think you know is all in how your mind perceives it anyways!