Tag Archives | Dreams

LSD Dream Emulator: The Japanese Mind-Simulation Video Game

By on January 4, 2013 in News 3

The best late-night console game of all time? Lovely Sweet Dream (LSD) Dream Emulator was released in Japan in 1998 by Playstation. There is no way to win or lose, and no defined tasks  – except to explore one’s subconscious, set to a trip-hop-jazz soundtrack:

There are many strange environments in this world, and one way to travel through them is by foot. Bumping into people, animals, or special objects usually results in a stranger dream. The number of “days” are kept track of. As the player progresses, the pattern on walls and the form of the player may transmute. Occasionally the player may come across a man in a gray trench coat, commonly referred to as the “Gray Man” or the “Shadow Man”. He walks in one direction only. Getting too close to him will make the screen flash, the man will disappear.

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How To Engage In Lucid Dreaming

By on October 17, 2012 in News 10

A series of simple methods (and a few advanced ones) to take control of your dreams:

The risk here is that you’ll experience sleep paralysis, a completely normal phenomenon that prevents your body from moving during sleep. Except you’ll be awake, which can be somewhat frightening. The extra caveat is that during sleep paralysis the brain can play tricks on you, inducing strong feelings of fear and causing hallucinations of dark and scary figures approaching you.

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Foods To Eat To Enhance Your Dreams

By on September 28, 2012 in News 11

Are you wasting one third of your life by not living it to its fullest? What is the ideal diet to fuel lucid dreaming, vivid and intense dreams, and increased recall after waking up? World of Lucid Dreaming has the answers:

A double-blind study revealed that participants who took a daily 250mg B6 supplement reported a significant increase in dream content – as measured in dream vividness, bizarreness, emotionality and color. One of the roles of vitamin B6 is to convert the essential amino acid tryptophan into serotonin and niacin. This helps the body regulate appetite, sleep patterns and mood. Low levels of tryptophan are also linked with poor dream recall.

When you’re ready to begin the dream-intensity challenge, take your vitamin B6 supplement and then fuel the fire with plenty of tryptophan-rich foods such as:

Chicken (4 oz) gives 0.41g tryptophan
Soybeans (1 cup) gives 0.39g tryptophan
Turkey (4 oz) gives 0.38g tryptophan
Tuna (4 oz) gives 0.38g tryptophan
Venison (4 oz) gives 0.36g tryptophan
Lamb (4 oz) gives 0.35g tryptophan
Salmon (4 oz) gives 0.35g tryptophan
Halibut (4 oz) gives 0.34g tryptophan
Shrimp (4 oz) gives 0.33g tryptophan
Cod (4 oz) gives 0.29g tryptophan

I realize that list is a little meat-heavy, and if you’re a vegetarian it doesn’t give many options.

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MIT Scientists Successfully Control Rats’ Dreams

By on September 5, 2012 in News 8

Our dreamtime seems to be ripe for tinkering. Via io9:

Researchers working at MIT have successfully manipulated the content of a rat’s dream by replaying an audio cue that was associated with the previous day’s events, namely running through a maze (what else). The breakthrough furthers our understanding of how memory gets consolidated during sleep — but it also holds potential for the prospect of “dream engineering.”

Wilson and his team trained a group of rats to run through a maze using two distinct audio cues…and…recorded their neural activity. Later, while the rats were sleeping, the researchers once again recorded the neural activity of their brains [and] confirmed that the rats were dreaming of their maze navigating exploits from the day before.

But when the researchers played the audio cues from the experiment, they noticed a very interesting thing: the rats would dream about the section of the maze previously associated with the audio cue.

… Read the rest

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Nightmarish Weapon Of The Future: DARPA’s Robot Worm

By on August 25, 2012 in News 23

Created by researchers at MIT and elsewhere with support from the Pentagon’s experimental DARPA unit, the meshworm’s movment appears eerily organic– it slithers along by morphing and contracting portions of its body. Its design enables it to travel silently and to withstand physical trauma undamaged.Imagine waking at night to find one crawling across your floor:

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Dutch Businessman Constructs To-Scale Replica Of Noah’s Ark After Dream

By on August 2, 2012 in News 9

After a nightmare of God drowning your country, would you even risk not building a new Noah’s Ark based on the biblical dimensions? Via CNN:

A Dutchman has built a replica of Noah’s Ark to biblical proportions, following a dream his homeland would be flooded. Johan Huibers, a wealthy businessman, used the ancient measurement of the cubit — the length of a man’s arm from elbow to fingertips — to build the vessel to the dimensions specified in the book of Genesis.

The finished craft…has just been opened to the public on the Merwede River in the Dutch town of Dordrecht. Huibers has filled his ark, which will operate as a “Bible museum,” with life-sized plastic animals and an aviary of live birds to give visitors more to interact with.

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Program Dreams With Your iPhone

By on April 18, 2012 in News 4

SigmundIf this app works, how long before others start to “program” your dreams in ways you may not want? From CNN:

Harvard PhD student Daniel Nadler is trying to bring a really rudimentary version of the movie “Inception” to life with a new iPhone app that aims to help you “program your dreams.”

Called Sigmund, the 99-cent app builds off of pre-existing sleep science to help people “program” the content of their dreams from a list of 1,000 keywords. After you select one to five words from the list, a sorta-soothing, sorta-robotic female voice reads the words you select during the deepest moments of your sleep cycle – the REM cycles – when you’re most likely to dream vividly. In a sleep study that was the basis for the app, 34% to 40% of participants’ dreams were memorably altered by the suggestive readings, he said.

“Obviously what goes on in the sleeping brain is not entirely remembered so it could actually be a higher incorporation rate,” he said.

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Alien Abductions Likely Are Vivid Dreams, Reports Sleep Study

By on April 10, 2012 in News 35

imagesFindings suggest that aliens encounters are a form of vivid dreaming that can be coached. An alternate interpretation would be, it is possible to contact aliens through the dreamworld. Life’s Little Mysteries writes:

Researchers say they have conducted “the first experiment to ever prove that close encounters with UFOs and extraterrestrials are a product of the human mind.”

In a sleep study by the Out-Of-Body Experience Research Center in Los Angeles, 20 volunteers were instructed to perform a series of mental steps upon waking up or becoming lucid during the night that might lead them to have out-of-body experiences culminating in perceived encounters with aliens. More than half experienced at least one full or partial out-of-body experience, and seven of them were able to make contact with UFOs or extraterrestrials during these dream-like experiences.

One participant recalled making a successful attempt to separate from his body: “I [then] tried to find aliens.

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Scientists Develop Device To See Inside Dreams

By on December 16, 2011 in News 19

valerie-and-her-week-of-wonders-1970-3Suspect that your spouse is enamored with another? For a fee, you’ll be able to get a recording of their dreams to playback and double check. The Telegraph reports:

The secret world of dreams has been unlocked with the invention of technology capable of illustrating images taken directly from human brains during sleep.

A team of Japanese scientists have created a device that enables the processing and imaging of thoughts and dreams as experienced in the brain to appear on a computer screen.

While researchers have so far only created technology that can reproduce simple images from the brain, the discovery paves the way for the ability to unlock people’s dreams and other brain processes.

A spokesman at ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories said: “It was the first time in the world that it was possible to visualise what people see directly from the brain activity.

“By applying this technology, it may become possible to record and replay subjective images that people perceive like dreams.” The scientists, lead by chief researcher Yukiyaso Kamitani, focused on the image recognition procedures in the retina of the human eye.

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