Lucid Dreaming: The ultimate experience

Imagine if you could instantaneously travel anywhere you wanted. Create any object you could imagine. Do everything you ever thought possible or impossible.

How? Lucid dreaming is the answer.

True to our blog title, I think lucid dreaming would be a nice way to ‘push the edges of reason’ after our previous posts on polyphasic sleeping.

Today, I had my first lucid dream. A lucid dream is a dream in which you know you are dreaming and are able to control it. People have claimed to be able to create anything they wanted and to be anywhere they wanted in these dreams. Like polyphasic sleeping, the research seems to be few and far between. The best start for a person interested in lucid dreaming is to start a dream journal. I tried this, but gave up quickly due to lack of results (mainly my impatience). Since I have heard about it a few years ago, this is one of those things which has been, well, like a dream of mine. It was intriguing and after reading about many others’ experiences with lucid dreaming, I was envious to say the least.

To give you a short story of what happened in the dream: I was jumping down long flights of stairs in my dorm building because there was an earthquake and I wanted to leave, and I noticed that I was falling rather slowly. I also noticed that the lights in the stairwell were reflecting very oddly off the walls and seemed too dim. The logical side of me said, “Hey! You’re dreaming!” At that point, I decided that if I was really dreaming, I could walk through a wall if I wished to. So I did. From there, it was an exploration of the most vivid and colourful dream I have ever had in which I had almost full control. I also had powers of telekinesis! In short, it was the most glorious and exhilarating experience in my life. I just wish I had more time before the maid in my room woke me up.

Most mammals, if not all, dream. It occurs in the REM stage of sleep. Many people just don’t remember their dreams and very few actually lucidly dream on a regular basis. However, there are many suggested techniques to help you gain lucidity on a regular basis. One famous researcher, Stephen LaBerge, was able to have several lucid dreams a night, after a few years of practice that is. If you feel interested in reading more, check out this forum.

A scared atheist.

A resolution was just passed in the UN Human Rights Council which urges a global prohibition on the public defamation of religion.

The resolution was formed by the group of Islamic countries on the UN Council and did not make specific mention of any other religion besides Islam!

If we allow these people to keep gaining ground, we will witness the death of our freedom. This is a direct impingement on all of humanity’s freedom of speech. I do not condone hate speech against anything, but when I am not allowed to speak out against irrationality, I will give up hope for this world.

We need to be pushing back these fundamentalist views! Europe and America, get your act together and give me back my freedom! The “Human Rights Watch said the resolution could endanger the basic rights of individuals.”

I do not care what laws you impose on your own society, provided a member is allowed to leave whenever they wish (this is rewarded with the death penalty in many Islamic countries), but please, do not stop me from printing cartoons in my own country.

Why I Am Not Apathetic

I write this blog as I think about an apathetic friend of mine. She is content with letting people believe whatever they want to believe. I do not share her opinion. We both draw a line. She draws it at the point when another person’s beliefs are openly causing harm to somebody else (a suicide bomber for example). However, I draw the line when another person’s beliefs start to change the way I have to live my life and how I am treated.

Scientism?

I have recently heard this word being used in a negative connotation: “Scientism“

“Scientism is a term often used today as a pejorative to describe someone of holding the view that science has primacy over all other interpretations of life such as philosophical, religious, mythical, spiritual, or humanistic explanations.” – wikipedia.com

I heard it on a video of a discussion about religion where a person involved in the Templeton Foundation was talking about it negatively. The wiki gives a little bit of history and claims that it was used awhile ago and was not initially a pejorative. It only recently became a word used in a negative way.

Buddhism and Rationalism

I’ve been reading into Buddhism recently. It started with an interest in meditation as something to help with the polyphasic sleep. Suby’s sister had given him a book called “Buddhism, Plain and Simple,” which he loaned to me when I first expressed the interest. I never knew how much I didn’t know about Buddhism!

Disbelief

Let me be perfectly clear: I am an atheist. I deny the existence of supernatural intelligences, and I think organized religion is a foolish waste of time.

I’m not usually so direct. I think the vast majority of atheists subscribe to “If you don’t bother me, I won’t bother you.” We’re not out to destroy religion, we just don’t want to get any on us. The problem is that the vast majority of this country underestimate the reach of religion. There are some obvious bits, such as ‘God’ on our currency and in our pledge, that I think most people could point out, but what I’m talking about goes deeper. Ideally, I would be able to live my life with only an intellectual knowledge of religion, with no personal contact. That means no acts of violence, no wars carried out in the name of a god. It means no one would say “Bless you!” to me when I sneeze. It also means no random acts of kindness or charity if those acts were motivated only by a religious belief. If the only reason you’re nice to me is that a figment of your imagination wants you to be – well, I can do without the kindness, thanks.

I recognize that religion is closely integrated in our history so we’ll never be able to purge it completely. I’m not going to lose sleep over silly details. I just want to see an increase in awareness of what religious people are doing to those of us who do not share their faith. And I wanted to get this in the open so that anyone reading my later posts knows where I’m coming from.

Of Post Length and Editors

It has been brought to my attention that my posts tend to be overlong. From now on I’ll try to trim them down to a smaller size and then keep my longer article-style posts separate.

Also, I haven’t posted in a few days because my editor has been wonky.

Polyphasic Sleep, Day 12

I have now tried the polyphasic schedule for twelve days. I would have hoped I’d be better adjusted by now, but I’m really not. Yesterday I had the worst oversleep so far. It was only about two hours, but what made it so bad is that it was completely not my fault. I did everything right and still I overslept. All of the other times I had made some poor judgment before the nap and set myself up for the failure. I can’t say that it means much unless it keeps happening.

Suby is not going to be around for the next several days so now I really am on my own. For the last few nights he’s been hanging out with me and helping me wake. When he’s around I can afford to sleep with earplugs in. On the plus side, a very close friend of mine – who knows more about sleep physiology than I do – showed me several flaws in that disheartening article I linked to before. It doesn’t refute the argument, but it does discredit the author a bit. I would very much like to see another source with science in it. Over at the Polyphasic Sleep Group on Google there’s a post with several informative links, including the one above, but the other links are testimonial style: the original post on everything2, as well as several other first-hand accounts. Some are positive. Some are negative. All are untrustworthy. I will continue to search for scientific perspective on this.

Dvorak Keyboard Layout

I have other things to talk about besides polyphasic sleep. One of those other things is the Dvorak Keyboard Layout.

Strong Arguments Against Polyphasic Sleep

Well, Suby beat me to it while I was working on this post. Like he said, check out this webpage for a strong and very interesting case against the viability of polyphasic sleeping. The author, Poitr Wozniak, seeks to uncover some of the many myths about polyphasic sleep and how it works.