WEEK NINE: LUCID DREAMING

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Lucid dreamers are people with the ability to become aware (or engage their conscious mind), while in the state of dreaming.  Approximately 50 percent of people can report awareness in dreams at least once, and science has documented the existence of these dreams for decades.

In a normal dream, we have a very basal consciousness, we experience perceptions and emotions but we are not aware that we are only dreaming. It’s only in a lucid dream that the dreamer gets a meta-insight into his or her state. Lucid dreaming, it seems, is a state between sleeping and being awake. Scientific research has shown that during a lucid dream, the neural networks of a conscious mental state are visible. 

Researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry , Munich, and Human Cognitive Brain Sciences , Leipzig, conducted a study which looked at the cognitive features and brain activity of people who have lucid dreams. A combined EEG/fMRI scanning approach was used to investigate the phenomenon.

The neuroimaging data from this study showed a network of frontal and prefrontal brain regions—which are responsible for higher cognitive control, awareness and emotional processing—was markedly activated within seconds of the participants reaching lucid consciousness.  The right dorsolateral prefrontal  cortex was one of the main brain areas found to be involved in lucid awareness. This region is thought to have a role in a number of higher cognitive capacities including memory, decision-making and self-assessment. The researchers explained that activity in this area, combined with stimulation in the parietal lobules, is probably what gives lucid dreamers access to their working memory.

Although this seems irrelevant to the assignment at hand, my purpose for this research was to find a viable way for the proposed interface to work, without being reliant on a screen and speaker.  Lucid dreaming, it seems, may provide the answer to this.  The conscious mind, it seems, is too random, dynamic and ever- changing to be able to focus on the interface for a period of time.  If a user was in the state of a lucid dream, however, they could be focused on the interface (or wherever the interface was focused), while still being in a state of awareness. In theory, a person would enter the lucid dreaming state, which would allow them access to the interface, while still remaining aware of their state.  

The difficulty in this, however, is in figuring out how to ensure this does not become virtual reality, or some form of "avatar" type technology- allowing enough of a connection to reality to maintain that it is, in fact, real.

Because of this, I think I have hit a "dead end", and perhaps need to rethink how exactly the user would interact with the interface.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090728184831.htm
http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ciencia/ciencia_consciousuniverse189.htm
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/07/120727095555.htm
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/335866/title/First_brain_image_of_a_dream_created