Dreams are like reality. Why dreams seem real. People with amnesia have the strangest dreams

How to find yourself in a dream? How to control your sleep? How to do whatever you want in a dream? Find out 3 effective ways How to immerse yourself in lucid dreams!

What are lucid dreams?

Lucid dreaming¹ is different from regular topics that a person understands the fact of being in a dream. He is able to control the course of events, go beyond the scenarios set by the subconscious².

Lucid dreams are remembered to the smallest detail, in it you can control yourself and your actions, clearly see objects, and also experience sensations.

I must admit that in dreams they are very realistic, sometimes much brighter than in reality!

Lucid dreaming is abbreviated as lucid dreaming.

This is available to everyone!

All people can enter into lucid dreams. Only most of them are unaware of this ability.

Here are 2 main signs that a person is in the OS:

  • such a dream is surprisingly well remembered;
  • very often these are nightmares.

This happens because people do not know how to control their emotions, and in unfamiliar conditions they succumb to panic. Fear causes vivid sensations and provokes the appearance of “monsters” and other dream projections.

You could say that a person looks in the mirror, doesn’t recognize himself and gets scared, shows himself scary figures and gets even more scared!

At the same time, lucid dreams in such cases are very fast: fear forces the brain to concentrate³ on the desire to get out of sleep.

You can try to remember such cases in your practice: you can probably find something similar in your memory. This means that you have experienced an unrecognized OS!

Why do people develop this ability?

There are two main motivating factors that encourage you to practice lucid dreams ideas. This is curiosity and power.

One of these qualities is the reason for the desire to control oneself in a dream.

Wasps have enormous potential for human life. Lucid dreams will help:

  • engage in self-development and knowledge of the depths of the psyche;
  • study ;
  • have an interesting and enjoyable time;
  • much more that everyone discovers for themselves.

There is only one problem - the unknown. People don't know how to become aware and what to do in a dream.

Brain training for lucidity in sleep

The first thing you need to do is train your brain. Only with certain skills can you find yourself in the OS.

This article lays the foundation, a condensed concentrate of such training, since 100% OS requires an individual methodology.

1 way

1. The practitioner lies down, closes his eyes and relaxes the muscles of the body, “passing” his attention over them.

2. The person concentrates on his breathing. Inhale-oh and you-exhale. You need to focus your full attention on this process. Breathing should be calm and ordinary.

This needs to be done every day. You may fall asleep, and there is nothing to worry about: with practice, concentration will increase.

As a result, your concentration will begin to be maintained even after you fall asleep. This will give you the opportunity to become aware of yourself in a dream!

You can proceed as follows:

  • simultaneously with the breathing process, you can think about what you want to see in a dream (it will appear in it);
  • When you fall asleep, you send a firm thought that you will now become aware and will be able to control your sleep.

Method 2

One of the most famous authors on the topic of lucid dreams, Carlos Castaneda, claims: in order to control yourself in a dream, you need to see your hands there. This method is really effective and has helped many people in mastering the operating system.

3 way

The practitioner needs to sleep on his left side. As he falls asleep, he thinks intently about traveling through his past.

The brain remembers everything that happened and will happen to you. This method, as it were, “closes” the mind in itself, awakening it in a dream. The author of the article claims that this method has worked for him at least 20 times.

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Notes and feature articles for deeper understanding of the material

¹ Lucid dreaming is an altered state of consciousness in which a person realizes that he is seeing a dream and can, to one degree or another, control its content (Wikipedia).

² Subconscious is a term used to designate mental processes, occurring without their reflection in consciousness and in addition to conscious control (Wikipedia).

³ Techniques for developing concentration

⁴ Carlos Cesar Salvador Aranha Castaneda is an American writer and anthropologist, ethnographer, esoteric thinker and mystic, author of 12 volumes of best-selling books dedicated to the presentation of the shamanic teachings of the Yaqui Indian Don Juan Matus (

Dreams are one of the last phenomena not fully studied by our civilization. We've spent millennia trying to understand why our minds create such strange images in our dreams. On this moment Science seems to be on the verge of understanding what happens when we dream, why we dream, and what it all ultimately means. As it turns out, there are truly strange connections between reality and surreal pictures of the dream world.

10. Loneliness makes dreams more frequent

Each of us dreams, but not in the same way. This fact was discovered by Patrick McNamara in 2001 when he was studying the idea that social relationships influence dreams. His team surveyed 300 university students who were rated according to their attachment status - how comfortable they felt in intimate relationships and how often they tried to avoid relationships. According to their attachment, they were divided into two groups - “self-confident” and “unconfident”.

McNamara found that unconfident students dreamed almost every day, and they remembered their dreams in greater detail than confident students. Interestingly, the dreams of the insecure group were also more painful and intense.

Because of temporal lobe(part of the cerebral cortex) is important for both the development of attachment and the phase REM sleep, increasing the frequency and intensity of dreams may serve to “fill the void” for people not in a relationship. In any case, you are provided with night activity.

9. Video games cause lucid dreaming


Lucid dreams are dreams during which a person realizes that he is in a dream. When a person realizes this, he can control what happens in a dream - he can fly, have sex, have sex while flying - anything can be done in a dream. Unsurprisingly, this is what many people want to achieve at night. Many books have been written on this topic, the authors of which claim that they can teach anyone how to induce lucid dreams. As it turned out, everything is simpler - all you need to do is play video games.

Jayne Gackenbach from Grant MacEwan University believes that the feeling of control environment and spatial orientations that a person experiences while playing are related to how a person perceives the dream. This makes it easier for gamers (compared to non-gamers) to take control of their sleep patterns.

She also found that gamers had far fewer nightmares - when they were threatened by something in their dreams, they attacked the threat and, instead of running away, turned the encounter into a competition.

8. Animals remember their dreams


The oldest question about why we sleep has finally been answered thanks to rats. Matthew Wilson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that when rats were trained to run in circles, their brain activity followed a strict pattern. Wilson later examined the brains of rats while they slept and found that half of the rats repeated the same brain activity during REM sleep - the rats ran in circles in their dreams.

The two images of brain activity were so close that the researchers were able to compare them and confirm that the rats were running in circles during their sleep. This indicates that the rats' brains remembered information by replaying actions. It should be noted that the actions were scrolling through their heads at the same speed as in reality. Wilson believes that one of the main purposes of dreams is to consolidate memories. For the same reason, people are better at remembering something they learn right before they go to bed.

Perhaps for the same reason the following happens...

7. The dreams of people with amnesia are very strange.


If dreams help memory, then what happens to people with amnesia? Answer: a person has no idea what he is dreaming, but he still dreams about something. There are several various types Memory: Amnesics typically cannot remember new declarative or episodic memories—facts or temporary information (such as when and where the person learned the fact). However, when amnesiacs were asked to play Tetris, they dreamed about it - despite the fact that they had no memory of the game by the time they went to bed.

The moment amnesiacs fell asleep, they were awakened and questioned about what they had seen. Three out of five said they saw “falling, turning blocks” but did not understand the context of their memory. Considering that one of the main purposes of dreams is to preserve memories, amnesiacs must constantly see such strange images. Even in the strangest dreams healthy people may notice several familiar objects, but for those suffering from amnesia, it seems that dreams appear out of nowhere.

6. Strange dreams are sorting


Research on amnesia sufferers and Tetris prompted Dr. Robert Stickgold, the study's author, to come up with another hypothesis about dreams: why they are so strange. He learned that people with amnesia remember events, and although they cannot consciously recall them, the brain still replays the experienced events during sleep.

According to his theory, weird dreams (like when you were in a restaurant with your fifth-grade gym teacher and sat on jelly chairs and your dog was the waiter) are caused by the brain trying to make some connections between different stimuli. The brain finds the memory "file" associated with your dog and compares it with what you know about the exerciser to see if they are worth keeping together. Dr. Stickgold says your brain is “looking for cross-references – does this relate to this. Sometimes it’s connected and sometimes it’s not.”

Another study found that the degree of dream strangeness increased with increasing activity of the right amygdala- an area of ​​the brain associated with the formation of memories. This supports the idea that the stranger the dream, the harder the brain tries to find a connection.

5. Dreams can predict the future


As a disclaimer, we will look at both sides of this statement.

In the 1960s in medical center Maimonides Medical Center, located in New York, has conducted several paranormal studies. One study tested the ability to see the future. The subjects were divided into two groups: participants in the first group were awake and concentrated on a specific image. The second group was sleeping at that time. The researchers then woke up members of the second group during REM sleep and asked them to describe their dream. Strangely, most people in the second group described the images that were “sent” to them.

Another example also comes from the 60s - after heavy rain, a rock dump collapsed, resulting in several thousand cubic meters of rock and mud covering a school in the village of Aberfan, Wales. More than a hundred people died as a result of the tragedy. Psychiatrist John Barker went to Aberfan and asked local residents if they had dreamed of something like this before it happened. More than 30 residents claimed that they foresaw a disaster in their dreams. There are many similar studies, some of which are even published in peer-reviewed medical journals. How could so many people see tragedies in their dreams before they happened? It is believed that even Abraham Lincoln dreamed of his assassination.

On the other hand, there may be a simple explanation for this: Law large numbers. Richard Wiseman describes it perfectly:

“First, let's pick a random person from the UK, let's call him Brian. Next, let's assume a few facts about Brian. Let's say Brian dreams about something every night from the age of 15 until he is 75. There are 365 days in each year, so during those 60 years of dreaming, Brian will have 21,900 dreams. Let's also assume that a tragedy like Aberfan only happens once in a generation and assign a date to it. Now, let's assume that Brian will only remember one dream about such a tragedy in his entire life. The odds of Brian having a tragic dream the night before something like this happens are 22,000 to one. However, there is a catch. In the 1960s, there were 45 million people living in Britain, meaning that one in 22,000 people, or about 2,000 people on that night, could be expected to have a dream related to a tragedy. This principle is known as the Law of Large Numbers and is that given a large number of repetitions (possibilities), even unlikely events can occur.”

In other words, when many factors come together, there is a chance that something not expected will happen. This is one of those hypotheses that is difficult to prove, but perhaps someday in the future we will receive irrefutable evidence that predictions about the future can be found in dreams. Who knows?

4. You dream more often than you think


Contrary to popular belief, we don't only dream during REM sleep - we dream about something during all five stages of sleep, but REM dreams are the most vivid. So, even though REM sleep occurs every 90 minutes, we can have more than a dozen dreams per night.

Why don't we remember them? Those dreams are just boring. People are more likely to remember dreams if they are strange or unusual in some way. Other dreams often consist of realistic activities, such as ironing clothes or checking the mailbox. Our brains, like the rat brains in point 8, spend a lot of time repeating previous actions in order to store them in memory and extract something useful from them.

However, crazy dreams - especially those during which you wake up - are no worse remembered than if you saw something truly strange in life, for example, a naked man running down the street. You don't remember hundreds of other people you pass on the street, but a nudist is memorable because of his shocking weirdness.

3. Dreams can be changed with the help of smells


It is well known that external stimuli such as light, smell or the sound of an alarm clock can intrude into a dream, but certain factors can actually completely change the quality of the dream and turn pleasant dream into a nightmare or vice versa. Smells, for example, greatly influence what a person dreams.

During the study, scientists let participants fall asleep, after which they introduced various smells into their noses through a tube - smell rotten eggs, roses or nothing (as a control group). Study participants were then woken up and asked what they were dreaming about. Participants who were exposed to the smell of rotten eggs reported that the emotional background of their dreams was greatly impaired, even if the dream had nothing to do with the smell. For example, one of the participants said that he dreamed of a Chinese woman who suddenly began to feel strong disgust towards him - the theme of the dream changed almost immediately.

2. Nightmares can affect your mood


Excited? Are you suffering from depression? You may be having nightmares. By at least, this conclusion was reached after a study in which 147 students were asked to fill out a questionnaire every morning for two weeks to measure the frequency of their nightmares. At the end of two weeks, students took the EPQ-RS and POMS-BI - tests that assess a person's psychological state.

Researchers have found a strong connection between the number of nightmares a person has and their psychological state while awake. The more nightmares you had, the worse they got. psychological tests. Naturally, the problem with this research is that Feedback It's even more likely that people who suffer from depression for other reasons are more likely to have nightmares. In truth, in any case, it turns out that nightmares can cross the boundaries of sleep and wakefulness. Creepy.

1. Dreams are a dose of schizophrenia


While we're talking about creepy things, dreams are believed to be very similar to the state of delirium experienced by schizophrenics, right down to the areas of the brain that become activated. In other words, the schizophrenic’s brain simply forgets to turn off the sleep state during the day. From another perspective, this means that every night we dream, we are actually entering a state of schizophrenia - nightly madness.

Fantastic (illusory) dreams can be caused by weak connections in the brain - the brain tries to extract something specific, but in response it receives a mash of incoherent memories, which give rise to a strange dream. They happen to everyone. However, in the case of schizophrenia or similar diseases, weak connections can be activated at any time, due to which patients, even in a waking state, experience the same sensations as healthy people during illusory dreams.

Basically, don't go to bed.

In one of the earliest experiments our research group conducted, we tested the traditional idea that the perception of time in dreams is different from the perception of time in reality. According to the technique we developed, we asked subjects to make an eye movement during a lucid dream, then after a 10-second pause (counting: one thousand one, one thousand two, etc.) to make a second eye movement. We found that in all cases the estimate of the time interval in the lucid dream coincided within a few seconds with its estimate in the waking state and was thus quite close to the real time between signals. From this it was concluded that the estimate of time in lucid dreams is very close to real ones, that is, it takes almost the same amount of time to perform any action in them as in the waking state.

This conclusion may come as a surprise, since many of you may have lived years and even lifetimes in a dream. I believe that this effect is achieved in dreams by the same stage trick that creates the illusion of the passage of time in the cinema or theater. If the lights go out on a screen, on a stage, or in a dream, and the clock strikes midnight, and a few moments later the bright morning sun shines through the window and the alarm clock rings, we assume (we pretend without realizing that we are pretending) that many hours have passed, even if "we know" that it only took a few seconds.

The method of using the eyes to signal a person in a state of lucid dreaming has demonstrated a strict correspondence between the change in direction of gaze during sleep and the actual movement of the eyes under closed eyelids. Researchers who did not use lucid dreamers in their experiments had to rely on the likelihood of a correspondence between the subjects' eye movements and their reported sleep actions. As a result, they tended to obtain only weak correlations between eye movements during sleep and during waking hours. The reason for the strong connection between eye movements in sleep and in the waking state is that we use the same visual system our body. One of the most bright examples The connection between physiology and sleep activities is sexual activity during sleep. In 1983, we undertook a study to determine the extent to which sexual activity during lucid REM dreaming was reflected in physiological parameters.

A woman was chosen for the experiment because women were more likely to report orgasm in their dreams. She observed various physiological indicators that are usually affected by sexual arousal: breathing, heart rate, vaginal muscle tone and amplitude of vaginal pulsations. In the experiment, she was required to give a special signal with her eyes in the following situations: when she realized that she was sleeping, when sexual activity began (in her sleep), and when she had an orgasm.

According to her, she fulfilled the conditions of the task exactly. Analysis of the recordings revealed a significant correlation between what she did in the dream and all but one physiological indicator. During the 15 seconds that she defined as orgasm, her vaginal muscle activity, vaginal pulsation amplitude, and respiratory rate reached their highest levels of the entire night, and were significantly higher than during the rest of the REM period. The heart rate, contrary to expectations, increased very slightly.

After this, we conducted similar experiments with two men. In both cases there was a sharp increase in breathing, but again no significant changes heart rate. It is noteworthy that although both dreamers reported pronounced orgasms in their lucid dreams, neither of them ejaculated, unlike the usual for teenagers." wet dreams", which are often not accompanied by erotic dreams.

Activities during sleep directly affect the brain and body

From the experiments described above, it follows that the events in which you become a participant in a dream have an effect on your brain (and, to a lesser extent, on your body) that is in many ways similar to that of similar events in reality. Additional Research confirm this conclusion. When lucid dreamers hold their breath or breathe faster during sleep, this is directly reflected in their real breathing. Moreover, changes in brain activity caused by the transition from singing to counting (singing involves more right hemisphere, and when counting - left) in the waking state, are almost exactly reproduced in lucid dreams. That is, for our brain it makes no difference whether this or that action is performed in a dream or in reality. This finding explains why dreams seem so real. To the brain they are indeed real.

We continue to study the relationship between human activity in dreams and his physiology in order to obtain detailed diagram interactions between mind and body during dreams, for everyone physiological systems, measurable. Such a scheme could provide great support to experimental sleep psychology and psychosomatic medicine. Indeed, the direct influence of dream activity on physiology makes it possible to use lucid dreaming to improve performance. immune system. Anyway, physiological effects, caused by dreams, show that we cannot distance ourselves from them, as from the illegitimate children of our imagination. And although our culture tries to ignore dreams, the events experienced in them are as real as in real life. And if we want to improve our lives, it would be right to do this with our dreams.

Social values ​​and lucid dreams

You can often hear complaints from people interested in lucid dreams, to isolation, because, as one of them writes, “I can’t talk to anyone about this: everyone thinks I’m crazy and looks at me like I’m crazy when I try to talk about what I do in my sleep.” Our culture does not provide for any social support for those who study various states consciousness. This aversion is probably rooted in the behaviorist approach in psychology, which views all animals, including humans, as “black boxes” whose actions depend entirely on external influences. The contents of an animal’s “consciousness” are considered immeasurable, and thus not subject to scientific research.

When a person dreams about something, the same activity is observed in his brain as if these events were happening in reality. Whatever he does in a dream: jumping, running, dancing - his brain understands it as if the person was doing these things in reality.

This conclusion was made by researchers at the Institute of Psychiatry in Munich. They studied the brain activity of dreaming people. The task was not easy - to get more accurate results, experts have long been looking for volunteers who can control their dreams.

The neurophysiology of dreams is not an easy task. Firstly, we often forget what we dreamed. Secondly, how to correctly compare brain activity with events occurring in a dream? To do this, the volunteer must simultaneously be in deep sleep and report to the experimenter the events occurring in this dream. The phenomenon of controlled sleep helps solve this problem. Its main feature is that the dreamer realizes that he is dreaming and can, to some extent, consciously control his actions in a dream. Only long, hard training allows you to achieve the ability to control your dreams.

So, the researchers asked six volunteers who practiced dream control to take part in the experiment. They must dream about how they squeeze their right or left hand. If the practitioners fell into the desired, controlled sleep, then they had to give a sign - eye movement. Of course, special equipment scanned the brain activity of the dreamers.

Under the conditions of this experiment, only two volunteers managed to see controlled dreams. However, thanks to another pair of participants, the researchers were convinced that activity in the motor cortex, which is responsible for the left or right hand, during the movement dreamed by the volunteer, was exactly the same as if these actions took place in reality. Hence the proof: a dream is not a movie. Its perception involves not only visual analyzer, but also the entire human brain.

Then why don't we actually jump, run, or clasp our hand during corresponding sleep? Researchers say that during dreaming, the area of ​​the brain that is responsible for making decisions is silent. That is why the activity of the motor cortex, which is directly responsible for movements, is not realized. As a consequence of this, dreamers who are able to control their dreams clearly understand that they are dreaming. Therefore, it is possible to say that the human brain does not distinguish between dreams and reality only to a certain extent.

The authors of these studies did not stop there and in the near future want to analyze the activity of the human brain during more complex movements - while the dreamer is running or flying. For this purpose it will be involved a large number of subjects who are able to control their dreams.

The "movies" that people watch while they sleep are sometimes called virtual reality, parallel world, entertainment for the brain, mini-death But the questions remain: where does consciousness get plots for dreams and why does it need these inventions? Moreover, if this is not just fiction, but something more? What other tasks are solved by the body during sleep, besides the obvious physical rest?

As it turns out, the simplest part of the answer is purely physiological. Experiments show that the need for sleep at this level is determined primarily by the higher part of the nervous system - the cerebral cortex, which controls all processes occurring in the body. Cortical cells get tired quite quickly. And as a means of self-defense, protecting them from exhaustion and destruction, inhibition acts as a nervous process that delays their activity. When it spreads throughout the cerebral cortex, a state of sleep occurs. And during deep sleep, inhibition goes down to some lower departments brain

During seven to eight hours of sleep at night, the brain enters a state several times. deep sleep, each lasting between 30 and 90 minutes, with the ten to fifteen minute intervals between them called REM sleep episodes. By the end of the night, if the person is not disturbed, the duration slow sleep decreases, and the number of REM sleep episodes increases. Dreams during these episodes are accompanied by bursts of electrical impulses. This is where the actual anatomical details end. They don't tell us anything about the connection between dreams and reality.

The mysterious world of dreams has attracted philosophers since the times of Ancient China and Ancient Greece. Enough to remember famous story about the dream of one of the founders of Taoism, Zhuang Tzu, retold, for example, by Borges:

The equation of dream and reality plays an important philosophical role in Taoism: life should be treated as a dream, but sleep should also be treated as reality.

Beautiful philosophical illustrations to the problem of the relationship between reality and dreams were invented by the founders of philosophical voluntarism, Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) and Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844–1900). The first called history a boring and incoherent dream of humanity, and the second considered sleep a rest from the cruel clarity of reality. Schopenhauer is the author of many vivid aphorisms that illustrate both his attitude towards dreams and his attitude towards life: “A dream is a piece of death that we occupy in advance, preserving and renewing with it the life that has been exhausted during the day” or “Life and dreams - pages of one book” , reading them in order means living, flipping through them at random means dreaming.” That is, daydreaming (and therefore imaginative thinking itself) is something like a waking dream, with open eyes.

Sigmund Freud (Sigismund Schlomo Freud, 1856-1939) began not only to consider dreams as something that has direct relation to the functioning of the brain during wakefulness, he suspected that dreams are some kind of encrypted messages from the subconscious to the conscious mind. However, the methods used by the father of psychoanalysis for such decoding seemed to many, and not without reason, to be completely arbitrary and worthy of little trust. It may seem that Carl Jung (Carl Gustav Jung, 1875-1961) went even further in the interpretation of dreams, but the role that he attributed to them is completely different. For him, sleep is not an individual, but a collective unconscious experience, that is, using the usual Marxist-Leninist dichotomy of the subjective and objective, a dream, subjective in Freud, turns out to be objective in Jung.

The psychedelic hobbies of the late 19th century were reflected not only in the teachings of philosophers and psychologists. The meaning of images born in the imagination when consciousness is asleep has become increasingly interesting and ordinary people. The English writers of the sixties, Colin Wilson and Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), called for stepping beyond the boundaries of everyday experience and plunging into the wrong game of hallucinations. And with the advent of Carlos Castaneda in literature, a new motive arose: this line can be made thin and insignificant. To do this, it is enough to first learn to carry some small objects from reality with you into your dreams - at least coins clenched in your fists. The whole point is simply to remember them in a dream, unclench your fists and look at the coins


Now the practice of lucid dreams is gaining more and more new fans, although there are still no strict methods for studying them or even establishing their existence. But they interact in bizarre ways with new cults emerging and new versions of old ones. Castaneda himself claimed to reconstruct traditional Mexican practices that existed during Toltec times. But many of his followers found in them many similarities with Buddhism, in which the interpretation of a dream is devoid of any meaning, since the dream itself is completely controlled by the dreamer. According to Buddhist philosophy, sleep is the primary experience of meditation and the only way to break through to true reality - the reality of true existence.

In Buddhism, the question of true existence is resolved ambiguously, by many different ways. Thus, according to Satprem (Bernard Enginger, 19232007), Buddhism presupposes an endless ladder of mutually intersecting and simultaneously existing realities. This idea, surprisingly, finds quite unexpected support in modern physics. In one interpretation of the equations of quantum mechanics, proposed in 1956 by Hugh Everett III (1930–1982), quantum effects are explained by the presence of different layers of reality and interference between them. Its main idea can be formulated as follows: the present is determined not only by the past that really was, but also by the one that could have been. This means that the possible past is also, in a certain sense, real.

Everett expressed these ideas in his dissertation work, which was sharply negatively received by the physicists of his time. He went into military engineering and never studied physics again. However, the idea did not die: over time it was picked up and acquired many more modern variations. In one of them, proposed relatively recently by the Moscow physicist Mikhail Borisovich Mensky, true existence is the complete wave function of the Universe, in which there is no difference between what actually happened and what could have happened. This division is produced by consciousness. When consciousness sleeps, this distinction is erased. Psychology merges with physics, and dreams with reality.


It is not surprising that, starting from a certain time, it was no longer shamans and ethnologists who began to erase this line, but graduates of physics universities. One of them, MIPT graduate Vadim Zeland, in his book “The Rustle of Morning Stars,” identifies Everett’s multiple Universe (referred to as the Multiverse in literature) with the endless Buddhist ladder of intersecting realities. “The brain does not store the information itself, but some kind of addresses to information in the space of options,” Zeland outlines his theory. Dreams are not illusions in the usual sense of the word. We all go into the space of options every night and experience virtual life there.”

The main problem of this virtual life, in his opinion, is its separation from the one that takes place consciously. He, like Castaneda forty years earlier, needs to learn not to forget, when falling asleep, what he wanted to do in a dream, and when waking up, not to forget what he dreamed. The proposed recipe is quite simple: you need to train your mind to ask yourself more often, “Is this really happening?” “The most surprising thing,” writes Zealand, “is that such a simple method works.” Sooner or later, a person will be able to “catch” the moment of sleep by asking a key question out of habit.

It is very important to learn not to forget about safety precautions. According to the author of “The Rustle of Morning Stars”, it also exists here: a dream is a journey of the soul in the space of options, and having felt unlimited freedom, the soul can lose caution and “fly to God knows where.” In case of “non-return”, death is stated in a dream.

Another adherent of the practice of lucid dreams, also a graduate of the Moscow Physics and Technology Institute Gennady Yakovlevich Troshchenko, considers the belief that you can do anything in a dream to be naive. A dream leaves an imprint on real life, because as a result of a person’s actions in the dream world, the physical and biochemical structure of his brain can change - only in real life. Therefore, if we are to explore the Multiverse through lucid dreams, then do not forget about prudence and the possibility of waking up in a completely different reality from which the dream began.

This extreme “objectivist” point of view is not shared by everyone. Most psychologists are still inclined towards more traditional “subjectivist” theories. “I think that dreams are a movie for our consciousness,” explained British professor Jim Horne, who has been studying sleep for many years at the Loughborough Sleep Research Center, in his popular articles. They entertain our brains while we sleep.” He disputes any possibility of being cured in a dream or even receiving it in a dream. positive emotions: “Many of us believe that dreams are good for mental health, they help resolve internal conflicts and in some way “heal the soul”. But no serious evidence can be given to support this attractive theory of Freud and others. In fact, dreams can even harm a person. For example, depressed people tend to see sad and scary dreams, which can only worsen the sufferer’s condition the next day.” So it’s better not to dream at all, or at least try to forget them as quickly as possible.

Of course, anyone can object that sometimes people do things in their sleep. important discoveries, something like insight descends on them. Thus, Dmitry Ivanovich Mendeleev (18341907) saw his periodic table, and the German chemist Friedrich Kekule, having seen in a dream a snake biting its own tail, guessed the cyclic structure of the benzene molecule. And it’s impossible to count all the composers who saw this or that work of theirs in a dream, which all that remained was to be written down on paper when they woke up. But even in this case, Jim Horn and his associates have an objection: it is almost impossible to verify all these stories. Moreover, all of the listed heroes recalled a dream they had in their youth, already being very old people.

Needless to say: the prospect of building your own City of the Sun, visiting different parts of the world or living through the most varied, even unimaginable, situations without leaving the confines of your own bed is very tempting. Almost every person has managed to feel “controllable” at least once in their life. own sleep(or maybe this is just an illusion?), but you usually only hear about the fact that this process is “put on stream” from the authors of books and methods. In the meantime, there is a debate among philosophers and ordinary people about whether it is possible to fly in a dream and how often, others are trying to derive practical benefits from dreams.

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