Daniel Erlacher

Vor genau 10 Jahren war ich für ein Praktikum an der Stanford University bei Stephen LaBerge. Während der vier Monate verbrachte ich einige Nächte im Schlaflabor. Um mir die Zeit zu vertreiben, habe ich ab und an einen NightReport verfasst und an alle geschickt, die in meinem E-Mail-Verteiler waren. Nun will ich das 10-jährige Jubiläum nutzen, um die alten Reports in meinem Blog erneut zu veröffentlichen. Hier nun der fünfte NightReport:

Welcome,

Hi there and who are you?! It is time for another night-report. It is almost like a morning-report, because Nathen kept me up all night long. I can tell that I will be a good daddy. If my child is crying in the night….. No Problemo!!! So, tonight’s topic is about mind, consciousness, you, the rest and the truth….
This topic goes back to Paul Tholey*, but it is apparent connected with lucid dreams, so that you have to think about it sooner or later. Reality? In recent times a lot of movies wanna open our eyes and question reality. X-files, Trueman Show, The Matrix, Existence… what is real and how real is your life? In the most of those movies there is a close connection to dreams. Thus, how real are your dreams? Suppose you are dreaming and I’m one of your dream characters. Well, now assume that I face you and talk to you about that stuff I’m just writing. So, I’m in your dream!!! How would you find out that I’m not real? How do you know that I do not have my own consciousness? How do we know that dream characters we see all night in our dreams have not a consciousness of there own and therefore are not only illusions of our mind? How would you find out that I’m (me as a dream character of your dream) not aware of your dream?
Okay, okay here is one possibility to find it out, ask me (your dream guy from your dream) if I can draw a picture of you?! This would show that I have an own perspective in your dream. Here is another good question. Ask me if I can tell you a word you never heard before! Or, think about a rhyme or poem and tell it to me! Or, just tell me how I came here! Initially, there is the point that you talk to me at all. That you CAN talk to me without knowing what I will tell you. In other words, that we have a kind of conversation. Far before that, that I’m encountering you in your dream or any other dream character. Assume there is something like a unconsciousness and this part of you (probably a part of your brain) puts me in your dream because of an occasion from your waking life. E.g. you know tomorrow is Wednesday and this means a new night report from DAEN, so that’s the reason why your brain puts me in your dream. But what about dream creatures you never saw before in your life? Assume your mind finds a way and we skip the unanswered question about why do we dream about what we dream about?
Let’s focus on the questions you asked me before. Here are the answers: I will show you a picture of you, come up with a totally strange word, which you never heard before, but if you check it in a dictionary you will find it and I tell you a very nice poem or rhyme from 8 lines. These are results from Paul Tholeys studies. Nothing of that proofs really that I have my a consciousness of my own, as dream guy in your dream, but how would you proof it in real life? At least I could show in your dream a bit of memory ability, own perspective, and creativity. Is this psychic… transcendental? Maybe, there is another explanation. Think about how many different characters you can play in your ‘real life’? You can act like me, you can pretend that you are DAEN (which is probably not that hard, all you have to do is to talk big deal of bullshit :) ) . Or you can feel like you felt with 16.
Our mind can mimic an infinite amount of different characters, so that the real question should be: “How can we identify ourselves?”. Multiple-personality-disorder, people lost about this ability and ‘can’ switch between different personalities (voluntary or not). Some of those people have up to 200 different characters. The cause for this disorder is in the most cases a traumatic event e.g. rape, witness of severe accidents, etc. and the victim tries to displace himself… Well, what did we learn tonight? Nothing, which is more than absolutely nothing. For further reading a very interesting link to: Conversation Between Stephen LaBerge and Paul Tholey in July of 1989.

* Tholey, P. (1989). Consciousness and abilities of dream characters during lucid dreaming. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 68, 567– 578.

I’m sorry, but I’m back in lab and this means another part of night-report. Basically, there will be only one night-report per week, Just because I don’t want to bother you too much. Anyway, there is always the “delete-button”… First I want to tell you about the problems we had the last week. The computer program crashed about 5-6 times in one night and to restart the SynAmp (amplifier) takes several minutes, which would be dumb when the dreamer just signal a lucid dream and we would miss this data. Well, today we received an update from the driver for the SynAmp and everything looks fine. I used the time to organize and clean up the lab, what else would you do with your spare-time? And now the big time can start. 4-5 recordings per week with several people for application and different dream subjects and everything under mine control…. almost everything. Meanwhile, I try really hard to understand more about the EEG-signals, but hey, this stuff looks still strange to me.
Okay, okay, okay…Tonights topic is “how do I become lucid?”. That is a good question and a lot of you guys want to know the answer. Well, there are several techniques out there and some of them work and other don’t. I will explain two of them. Basically what we want is that we recognize in our dreams that we dream. The first approach is the ‘Reflection Technique’ (Paul Tholey, one of the pioneers in the studies of lucid dreams. I met him personally at a symposium in Vienna and I could feel his spirit. Unfortunately, he died in the beginning of this year.) what Paul Tholey recommends to do is to ask yourself several times a day if your a dreaming and than you check the world very carefully for abnormalities, e.g. flying cats, talking plants… there is no doubt that you are awake but you have to ask yourself very serious. After a time you will start to ask yourself the same question in your dreams. But in your dreams you will find maybe a flying cat, which is not unusual for a usual dream, but in this moment you know hey there is a flying cat, flying cats are pretty unusual in the waking life. Thus, when I ask myself if I’m dreaming, than I have to answer this question with “yes, I’m dreaming”. After this conclusion your in… or better spoken your awareness is back and you have a lucid dream with every constraints you can imagine or not. It is your world and you are god #1. Paul Tholey recommends to do these reality checks in situation, which are relatively dream like, e.g. you meet somebody who you just thought about. Also you should do this reality checks a couple of times during the day. Actually there is a device to buy at the Lucidity Institut, some advertising ;-). It looks like a little beeper, which starts to vibrate randomly during the day. These vibrations reminds you to make a reality check!
Let’s talk about the MILD-technique from Stephen LaBerge. The abbreviation MILD stands for ‘Mnemonic Induction of Lucid Dreams’. This is one of the most powerful techniques right now (w/o any help-devices). Set your alarm clock two hours earlier than usual instead of 8:00am to 6:00am. Oh wait, better instead of no alarm clock and 12:00am to alarm clock at 8:00am. Hopefully the alarm wakes you from a dream (if not, try again a half an hour later). Keep this dream as vivid as possible in your mind. Remember the dream and go through the whole dream again. Stay awake for at least half an hour (that’s the hard part) and think the whole time about this dream, as vivid as possible. After half an hour go back to sleep and now start to put yourself back in this dream scenario. See yourself in this dream and keep this image as vivid as possible in your mind during the time you fall a sleep. Try to imagine how you would fly through this dreamland. See yourself walk in this dream and fall asleep in the real world. In the next REM stage you will find yourself in a dream, lucid, totally aware of where you are and what you are.
So, that’s it. Another possibility is to buy a NovaDreamer or the DreamLight. Both are a kind of goggle, which you wear during the night. This goggle recognize eye movement and send light signals back in your dreamland. As soon as you see these lights you know, “hey, this is a dream”. 30 days money back guarantee. You find this and much more on the Lucidity Homepage. Believe it or not it’s 2:18am and I take a nap….