Helpful Hints for Budding Dream Scientists

“Dreaming states provide interesting PET scans in which the cortex is perceptually activated in a manner consistent with the similar EEG to the waking state, and the intensity of the dream experiences. One feature different in dreams is the lower activity of the inferior frontal cortex, which may reflect the uncontrolled nature of dreams....REM sleep PET scans parallel the awake brain in activation of the visual cortex and frontal lobes.”

----Chris King, from his paper Fractal and Chaotic Dynamics in Nervous Systems

“In this chapter, the idea is given that all limitation and evil is an exceedingly rare accident; that there can be no night in the whole of the solar system, except in rare spots, where the shadow of a planet is cast by itself.  It is a serious misfortune that we happen to live in a tiny corner of the system, where the darkness reaches such a high figure as 50 percent.

The same is true of spiritual and moral conditions.”

----Crowley, commentary on chapter 37 of The Book of Lies.

“The DNA in a particular cell is not totally active. It has been determined that as little as 1% of DNA in the cell nucleus is active.  The nervous system, interestingly enough, has the highest percentage of operating DNA of any cell system in the body, of up to at least 10%”

----Iona Miller, Helix to Hologram

“Jouvet later implanted electrodes into cats’ brains and managed to trigger REM phases by electrically stimulating the pons. He also found, to his surprise, that higher-order brain regions had no function in REM whatsoever. Even animals in which all nerve connections from the pons to the cerebral cortex had been severed fell into REM sleep. The REM center appeared to reside in the pons, which lies in the brain stem, an old, primitive brain region that bears responsibility for basic functions such as breathing and heartbeat.

But how did the pons control REM and non-REM states? Did dreams have nothing to do with the brain’s emotional centers? If not, where did dreams’ fantastic visions and delightful story lines, their chase scenes and terrors, their sexual exploits and tensions, come from? In the 1970s, building on Jouvet’s results and their own extensive work in sleep labs, J. Allan Hobson and Robert W. McCarley of Harvard Medical School presented two complementary theories: the reciprocal-interaction and the activation-synthesis models. According to the former, REM sleep and the dreams related to it are turned on and off by a tug-of-war between special networks of neurons in the pons.

The neurophysiologists determined that so-called REM-on neurons used the neurotransmitter (a messenger chemical) acetylcholine to send impulses to various brain regions, triggering arousal. Acetylcholine caused neurons to fire not only in the pons but also in parts of the cortex and in the limbic system, the emotional center of the brain. According to the researchers’ activation-synthesis model, dream images arise randomly from neurons that fire in these various regions. The sleeping brain tries to do with these signals exactly what it does in its waking state with sensory inputs: make sense of them.”

----Gerhard Klosch and Ulrich Kraft, from a recent Scientific American article.

”RG: Somewhere in the book Cheney says that when Tesla would write out a blueprint or a diagram, it was as if he were tracing an image that was already there.

PL: Oh yeah. He’d do it through lucid dreaming. He would, in a sense, dream up the engine, forget about it, come back, and then discover where it was wearing. You know, where the parts were wearing out. Now, that’s inner visualization and a half! And that was the secret of why he did so many inventions.

RG: Wait a minute. You’re saying that he would dream of the engine, one he hadn’t built yet, and then he’d...?

PL: Set it in motion, come back, see where the machine had worn out over time. All in his head. Yeah.”

----Paul Laffoley, from his interview with Paranoia Magazine.