Prospective Memory and Lucid Dreaming 2
In the first post on this subject (http://www.dreamviews.com/attaining-...-dreaming.html) I made what I suspect some might consider a rather outrageous claim:
EVERY TECHNIQUE THAT LEADS TO A GREATER PERCENTAGE OF SUCCESSFUL LUCID DREAMING WORKS BECAUSE IT IMPROVES OR MORE EFFECTIVELY UTILIZES PROSPECTIVE MEMORY.
While I may have engaged in a bit of hyperbole, I’ll present the science and theories that support that conclusion in this post.
First, a brief overview of the phases of the prospective memory cycle.
PHASE 1 – ENCODING
Encoding consists of determining what we wish to remember to do at some point in the future. At times we very deliberately begin a prospective memory cycle. At other times, we may set one with little attention to what we’re doing.
In everyday life:
“I will remember to stop at Safeway and buy cat food on the way home from school.”
In lucid dreaming:
“When I see a dream sign, I will remember to reality check.”
PHASE 2 - RETENTION
Once we’ve encoded a prospective “mission” it’s retained and lies dormant until activated.
PHASE 3- RETRIEVAL
The prospective “mission” can be triggered by the appearance of a “cue.”
In the case of “I will remember to stop at Safeway and buy cat food on the way home from school.” the cue might be seeing the Safeway store on the way home. Time can also serve as a cue, so that the time frame of driving home from school can also serve as a cue.
In the case of “When I next see a dream sign, I will remember to reality check.” the obvious cue would be the dream sign.
PHASE 4 – EXECUTION
Once retrieval is triggered, the prospective memory mission enters our awareness, and we act upon it accordingly.
Now let’s see how various LDing techniques lead to an improvement in, or a more effective utilization of prospective memory.
MEDITATION
In one study, researchers set out to determine what effect the nature of the cue, what they called “valence”, had to do with prospective memory success rates.
They devised a series of experiments in which they asked test subjects to hit a particular key the first time they came across a particular word or phrase over the course of the experiment. They devised two sets of cues for the experiment, “positive cues” and “negative cues.” An example of a positive cue would be “smiling baby.” An example of a negative cue would be “dead baby.”
They found that the prospective memory cycle was substantially more likely to run its full course when the valence of the cue was positive, rather than negative. This seemed logical in that positive cues would be more likely to attract awareness than negative cues.
Looking further, the researchers designed another experiment with three sets of cues… positive, negative, and neutral… “smiling baby”, “dead baby”, “toaster”… for example.
The expectation was that the success rate for the neutral cues would fall between the success rates of the positive and negative cues. However this was not the case. In fact, the neutral cues resulted in a success rate substantially higher than that of the positive cues!
This unexpected outcome led to further research that eventually explained the phenomenon. They learned that the retrieval and execution phases of prospective memory were dependent upon available awareness resources or what I’ll refer to as simply “attention units.”
The reason neutral cues produced a higher success rate was because both negative and positive cues acted as a drain on processing power by sucking up attention units. In other words a certain amount of analytical power became tied up in both positive and negative cues for the simple reason that they were positive or negative.
The conclusions I drew from these experiments with respect to lucid dreaming were firstly that prospective memory function is very sensitive to changes in available "attention units" and secondly that a certain level of available attention is required for prospective memory to function at all. Thus anything that increases or frees up attention can potentially increase the chances of prospective memory triggering lucidity. Anything that decreases attention units lessens the chances for success.
This explains why meditation improves ones LDing success rate. After a hard day at school or in the workplace, our attention units are dispersed in many different directions... at times it's as if we're scattered over the entire universe. Every thought and emotion that runs through our head is sucking up attention units.
Effective meditation techniques allow us to retrieve and consolidate awareness units, thus making them available for use by prospective memory. Given the resulting higher success rate for prospective memory, a higher success rate for lucid dreaming logically follows.
AWARENESS EXERCISES
Awareness exercises also increase the analytical resources required by prospective memory, but do so by way of a different mechanism.
Awareness is largely a function of demand… meaning we go through life with only enough awareness turned on to manage the tasks immediately at hand. However, there are dormant attention units in reserve that can be called upon as needed, for example, when we’re taking a test or faced with an emergency. We’ve all experienced this phenomenon.
Awareness exercises aid prospective memory function because the exercise itself demands that more attention units become active, and as noted earlier, increasing available attention has a positive effect on prospective memory, and hence a positive effect on LDing success rates.
DRUGS AND SUPPLEMENTS
Drugs such as galantamine and certain supplements work by artificially causing more attention units to become available, and so prospective memory is markedly improved. leading to higher LD success rates.
Caffeine and other stimulants would also work, but because they stimulate the entire central nervous system, not just the brain, they’re of little use in LDing.
NIGHTMARES
As many of you know from first-hand experience, nightmares can lead to lucidity. I would argue that on the first appearance of a particular nightmare that’s not likely. But upon waking up from a nightmare a second or third time, the immediate thought becomes, “next time I have that nightmare I’ve got to realize it’s just a dream!” Because of the circumstances, that intention creates a powerful prospective memory encoding. The next time that dream occurs, adrenalin cranks up the available attention units, the nightmare content acts as a cue, and the prospective memory plays out, which leads to the child becoming lucid. (… after which we do whatever we can to remedy the dream situation. My solution was to wake myself up by jumping out the second story bathroom window. )
MARIJUANA
This theory also explains why smoking weed inhibits LDing success. Simply put, pot and similar drugs create their effect by dispersing attention into a pleasant haze. Thus the resources required for prospective memory become unavailable.
SSLD
SSLD is a double threat. Besides being an effective awareness exercise, it further enhances LD success rates by another interesting mechanism.
Experiments have shown that the elapsed time between the encoding phase and the retrieval phase of the prospective memory cycle has an adverse effect on success rates. In other words the longer the time between encoding and the appearance of the cue, the less likelihood of success.
This effect wouldn’t matter that much were the decrease in success rates over time a linear affair, but that’s not the case. Various experiments have shown that very rapid drop offs of prospective memory success rates occur in the first hour between encoding and retrieval.
SSLD, like all DILD techniques relies heavily on prospective memory. Repeating the SSLD cycles is itself a form of encoding prospective memory in that the intention of the act is to remember to wake up in a dream. If the exercise is continued to the very edge of sleep, than the interval between encoding and retrieval is rather short… to the benefit of prospective memory. (Yes, I know SSLD can also be looked at as a WILD techinique.)
WBTB
Obviously the fact WBTB allows us to take advantage of longer, more frequent REM periods has a huge effect on LD success rates, but it also benefits prospective memory by way of shorter time periods between encoding and retrieval.
MANTRAS
Mantras can lead to effective prospective memory encoding, but I think it’s not so much the repetition that works as the fact that in repeating a mantra the encoding resets closer and closer, time-wise, to retrieval. I strongly suspect that saying a Mantra once, just before falling asleep would be at least as effective, and possibly more effective than repeating it over and over, After a certain point mantras tend to go on automatic, which would probably serve to muddle the desired prospective memory encoding.
DREAM SEX
This also explains why inducing a lucid sex dream can be so hard. Horniness sucks up attention units like a sponge sucking up water, essentially turning off prospective memory altoghether... which is probably why I forgot I had a dental appointment the day I spent that afternoon with Shirley Robbinsion.
About now you might be thinking that this prospective memory stuff is interesting, but since you don’t use a prospective memory approach to LDing it hasn’t got a lot to do with you. I would argue otherwise.
With any LDing technique, just the action of lying down in bed with the intention to have a lucid dream activates prospective memory. You are in effect encoding, “I will fall asleep, dream, and become aware I’m dreaming.” It doesn’t matter whether you voiced the thought or not. Given ideal conditions for prospective memory function, that alone, with NO OVERT TECHNIQUE WHATEVER OR ANY TECHNIQUE AT ALL is capable of producing a lucid dreaming experience. The first time I experienced this phenomenon and had an incredible WILD experience, I posted about it to Sageous’s WILD thread. He recognized what had happened immediately and commented that technique had little or nothing to do with the success. I kind of got it then, but now I think I really got it.
Consider this…
What if the conclusions I’ve drawn so far on this subject are right… or even half right?
What if our LDing successes come about mostly when we accidentally harness the power of our prospective memories?
What might happen to our LDing success rates if we learned to knowingly and expertly use our prospective memory to induce lucidity?
It could be another day or two before I’m ready to upload the updated MILD technique I’ve been experimenting with, but I promise I’ll put it up as soon as I can.
Niall
