Some theories

After some of my own research in cognitive psychology (no, it’s not my profession, just a hobby), I’ve developed a simple theory of lucid dreaming.
Daniel C Dennett (Consciousness Explained, 1991) presented his own theory of dreams as amplifications of the ‘white noise’ (my own phrase; I highly recommend the book for those interested – it explains the theory much better) in the brain. That explains the symbolism of dreams and their connection to conscious experience.
Based on that pretense, I would surmise that lucid dreams are actually created during conscious experience. That is, you choose what you dream during the day and the unconscious ‘noise’ is changed by conscious action (As you think about what you’ll dream, you change the background noise to conform more closely to what you want it to become).
That, of course, would make lucid dreams not actually lucid; it would just seem that way. It is a way of protecting the ‘fully unconscious’ dreaming theories.
Anyway, like I said, it’s just a theory. Comments?

– CM

have you actually had a lucid dream? the experience is very different from a normal dream.
you are just talking about dream incubation not the actual full interaction felt during a LD

Hi crash_matrix,

This is very interesting cause I developped from my own the same theory (with the difference that it’s not only dreams which are created from the white noise but all the thoughts).

It works like pareidolia. I made this little experiment:
-first, people were asked to hear three samples of filtered white noise. The filter had changed this white noise so that the sound frequency was about the human voice frequency. They were asked to say if they hear something meaningful, for instance a sentence. They just heard white noise.

  • second, they were asked later to hear the same samples. But before to do this, they had to find in them a precise sentence (this sentence was not choosen randomly, it was a sentence that has been heard before by someone who didn’t participate in the experiment). And everybody heard the three sentences in the three samples.

This can be verified too by people experiencing auditory hallucinations during WILD or SP troubles. Sometimes they hear vibrations (white noise) in their head. Some of them just hear vibrations but some may hear sentences (which are they own thoughts indeed). Thus brain white noise may transforms in certain conditions in thoughts. This hypothesis has been read by an experienced meditation practitionner and she said I was right.

The fact that dreams (or thoughts) are created from white noise doesn’t explain by itself the symbolism of dreams. Could you give more explanation about this? And what do you mean by “conscious experience”?

Of course, it’s obvious that you have never experienced a lucid dream or else you would never have said this. And it sounds like you haven’t read the forum nor LD’ing reports in scientific litterature too. :tongue:

What you describes is not a LD. It looks more like an incubated dream. Now it’s very difficult to incubate dreams. Many people tried this on the forum, nobody found a good method and it’s very rare to manage to have the dream you incubated. Thus LD’ers don’t choose their dream during the day. They just try to induce lucidity and they don’t know what will happen when they will become lucid.

I’ll take a typical example from my LD’s. Let’s suppose I want to reach the quest goal in the Lucid Adventures forum: finding a dream pet. I try to induce lucid dreams by practising one RC during waking life: trying to breathe through my nose closed. Now what happens? In a dream in which I was having a quarrel with my father, I all of sudden realize I’m perhaps dreaming. I practise a RC but I forget to do the one I’ve planned: I stretch my finger. I don’t remember my dream goal and I begin to fly and visit a large town. One minute later, I remember my goal. I want to find a dream pet. I shout: “I want a dream pet!”, but what happens is that a blast of wind carries me along towards a castle. Here I began to have a talk with the owner of the castle. Finally I wake up.

Thus a LD’s content is merely like normal dream’s - now some researchers found differences in ND and LD contents. Many unexpected things happen in them. We don’t choose their content before, but we can take some decisions and modify and control some things in the environment that the dream chosed for us.

But the most important in my eyes is that you missed the main thing in lucid dreaming, that is lucidity: LD’ers have a state of consciousness which can be compared to waking life. They feel present in their dream.

Thus, saying “lucid dreams are not actually lucid; it would just seem that way” is like saying that you are not conscious at the moment you read this very sentence. This is a “metaphysical” argument but the scientific argument has been given by Pr Stephen Laberge around 1980. You should read the Lucidity Institute articles. I’ll just tell you too that the famous french sleep researcher Pr Michel Jouvet (who discovered REM sleep in the 60’s) is convinced that lucid dreaming exists and that it’s not just a normal dream whose content was incubated during day life.

Why would this theory have to be “protected”? Science is not a dogma and it can progress. Freud himself noticed, if I remember well, that in some dreams, dreamers knew they were dreaming. And Jung related some lucid dreams he had. So there is no need to be more freudian than Freud. By the way, many things in a LD are inconscious: you don’t create the dream background. You don’t create the DC’s. You can modify them voluntarily from time to time, but you don’t have a full control on your dream. Lucid dreaming, that is, being aware that you’re dreaming, is not controlling dreams (though it’s often confused and a common beginner question is: “I knew that I was dreaming but I couldn’t control anything. Was this a LD?”

Nevertheless, control is generally associated with LD’ing. When you read LD’s reports from people who said they didn’t control anything, you can find many things they have controlled. For instance, they tried to go through a wall and they couldn’t, but they went against the wall and they try to put their arm through it, hence they controlled at least their movements even if they didn’t get the expected result. But you don’t control anything in a LD, and it’s obviously created by your “unconscious”.

In conclusion, I’m afraid I’ve to say that that this theory is completely wrong: :sad: it’s not very surprising cause what you believe to be a LD has nothing to do with the experience of LD’ing. You should read more litterature about LD’ing and, why not, experience it by yourself. :smile:

No need to get defensive :smile:
Yes, I’ve had 1 lucid and several semi-lucid. They all fall within the logical confines of the theory. But, like I said, it’s just a theory.

– CM

Seems logical to me. Seeing as there is really no free will anyway, it might hold true. Some more actual research needs to be done in the field. It’s so hard to do though. The eye movement stikes me as flawed. If the agreed on a set of eye movements then the test subject might just have incubated them in his dream.

Well, excuse me, I’m going off to bed to have a false feeling of control in my REM period.

tips hat :smile:

I suppose you had too a false feeling of control and free-will when writing this. :tongue: