Lecture I: Psychology

Abstract

Just as psychotic patients can be trained, through psychotherapy, to recognize then' hallucinations and delusions as fabrications, so can nonnal people leam to recognize their dream hallucinations and delusions for the cognitive miscreants that they are. This rare and evanescent state is called lucid dreaming. In the sleep lab, a pre-ananged sequence of voluntary eye movements indicates a subject's awareness that he is dreaming, while he is dreaming. This dream double-mindedness occurs spontaneously and is quite common in children of 9-10 years of age after which it declines in spontaneous incidence. But il can be inculcated at least until the age of 40, by simple pre-sleep autosuggestion. After age 40, lucidity declines with many other delights of life. With a notebook and pen on the bedside table as a task reminder and recorder, you can tell yourself just before going to sleep that you are going to look for and recognize bizaneness as a sign that you are dreaming. As soon as you notice discontinuity and incongruity in your mental content you will know that you are dreaming. That will allow enough of you to wake up enough to watch the dream evolve. You may even want to intervene, change the plot, and enact pleasurable behaviors like flying and love-making. Ursula "Voss and her colleagues have recently demonstrated that young subjects, who are trained to signal their dream lucidity via voluntary eye movements, have a significant increase in the 40 Hz EEC activity of their frontal lobes. They also show an increase in the EEG coherence of their frontal and occipital lobes. These findings suggest that lucid dreaming is more like waking than non-lucid dreaming. Consciousness clearly changes its qualitative as well as its quantitative character when underlying brain activation is globally or regionally altered. Lucid dreaming is as evanescent as it is rare. Subjects note that they may lose their power to observe as they are pulled back down into the dream. Or they may wake up altogether. In that case they are no longer dreaming but can have recall. And having assured recall by awakening it may be possible lo retum, directly, to the same dream plot that the dreamer has temporarily exiled! As if we didn't know it already, this proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that dreaming is as much a psychodynamic process as it is an organic one. The argument is thus in favor of an and/or rather than an either/or approach to the brain mind. The brain-mind, it would seem, can change itself. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved)