Friday, February 5, 2021

Scouting the Territory





- STILL CONFUSED, BUT JUST AS INTERESTED -

So, I've done some basic research on both by just inputting both topics in the Google search engine without any other words. And the results of both topics, kind of made it harder to choose. Lucid dreaming pulled up a lot of results describing how to go about achieving awareness and control of your dreams, the benefits of successfully doing so, and the risks. However, only one scholarly article popped up about the topic being a state of consciousness and uses a sleep study. When I then searched out of body experiences (OBE), a lot of the results that popped up on the first page dealt involved scholarly research that circled around neurology. Both topics are actually really interesting, and so now I'm more confused about what topic to choose. I might just have someone I know pick randomly for me. 

Honestly, when I did further searches on the topics, I found that just going through the who, what, where, why, and how was the most efficient way to find more information. What was also really helpful was randomly picking a website to browse and then searching up the keywords that were related to the topic. So for example, lucid dreaming combined with searches of awareness and consciousness. While OBE had me searching for more specifics using the words spontaneous and induced. Afterward, I changed the Google search engine to Google Scholar to check out the scholarly articles related and inputted the topics without any other keywords and then allowed it to autofill. With this, lucid dreaming was often searched with the words therapy, nightmares, benefits, treatment, frequency, evidence, personality, induction, studies, and consciousness. OBE gave me experience, illusion, seizures, induced hippocampal amnesia, review, psychology, image, virtual reality, meditation, and neuroscience. Depending on which topic I finally choose, there seems to be a good amount of things that I can talk about. 

Through the research I've done so far, there seems to be interested in how lucid dreaming could be beneficial and seems to be approached a little more spiritually. While a lot of people are interested in the neuroscience behind OBE's, their potential, and the more science-based aspects of what happens to a person during an OBE.  Either way, both topics seem to have really fascinating subtopics to look into for the final paper. 

- POTENTIAL RESOURCES -


Since I have yet to choose a topic, I decided to find one article each. Based on this, it's looking like there is going to be a good amount of psychology, physiology, and neuroscience involved in my paper regardless of the topic chosen. Hopefully, I'll able to write the paper clearly and not fumble on the more technical terms.

In this specific scholarly article that I found, researchers in a sleep laboratory of the Neurological Lab at Frankfurt University studied six student volunteers who were trained to lucid dream in order to figure out whether a physiological response occurs during the act. From this one small sample, these researchers were able to find evidence that when you lucid dream, it creates a hybrid state of consciousness that can be measured and differentiated from waking and REM sleep, and that this activity is particularly strong in the frontal areas of the brain. It also provides evidence that when you lucid dream, one is able to shift the electric signals in the brain forcefully and purposefully.

⮟Out‐of‐body Experience and Autoscopy of Neurological Origin

In this article, the authors look into OBE and introduce a new word, autoscopy (AS). The article is a little long, so I briefly skimmed it and found out a general idea of the paper through its abstract. According to the paper, OBE is when a person seems to be awake and is able to see their body and the world from a location that is outside of the physical body. On the other hand, AS is when a person is able to see their body through an extrapersonal space, which means through the space around us via our senses like eyes, ears, nose, but is unable to actually see the physical body. The author specifically mentions that there isn't enough information, study, or testable neuroscientific theory in regards to the two (the paper was written back in 2004), but there seems to neurological evidence that both share important mechanisms and that overall, both could be due to a "cerebral dysfunction of the TPJ [temporo-parietal junction] in a state of partially and briefly impaired consciousness."

- CONTROVERSY? -

Lucid dreaming's controversy seems to revolve around the dilemma between this type of dreaming and natural dreaming. To be specific, whether training oneself to lucid dream will keep you from getting a healthy rest and produce more restless sleep. However, it seems that there may be papers that say otherwise. Another is that there is a possibility that there is a link between lucid dreaming frequency and depression. With there being studies that because of sleep disorders that arise from depression, there is a higher likelihood that one may be able to lucid dream. In addition to that, there are also some that believe that lucidity during dreams is not real and argue against its possibility. 

OBE doesn't seem to have as much controversy as lucid dreaming because there is far more scientific research about it in the fields of parapsychology, neurology, and cognitive neuroscience. Because of the larger-scale investigations into the mechanisms of how it works, there seems to be a more scientific basis behind the phenomenon. Thus, more people are far more supportive of it than lucid dreaming. However, there does seem to be a dilemma between spirituality (i.e. religion) and neurology. And so, if there are any debates it's between the science community and the more spiritual groups.

2 comments:

  1. Michael GoellerFebruary 8, 2021 at 8:29 AM

    This is definitely a promising topic. I saw a Lucid Dreaming podcast the other day. Likely there are others out there, but this one featured interviews with researchers on the topic:
    https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-lucid-dreaming-podcast/id785523907
    It might give you some ideas on what particular aspect of lucid dreaming to focus on. And other podcasts on that topic might give you ideas also. I personally like podcasts because I can listen to them while driving or exercising or doing other things.

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  2. Michael GoellerFebruary 8, 2021 at 8:31 AM

    Here is a different link, if you don't like Apple:
    https://lucidsage.com/

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