Dreaming And The Logical Brain..

Sounds like an excellent title for a book eh?:)

Hey all.

Is the logical part of the brain mostly disabled whilst dreaming, does anyone know?

The reason I ask is that I'm a pretty logical thinker now and have been more so the older I get ( all those episodes of Star Trek watching Spock paid off;) ).

Now, I'll use a dream I had the other night as an example, I was playing cricket in the back yard... with my mother of all people ( lol @ that for a start ) and I saw a large Snake go past me, now I know we don't have snakes in New Zealand but anyway I ended up running into the house to call the cops and I ran into a small Tiger in my room as well.

At this point I would have thought that my logical brain would kick in and have said " hang on, we don't have snakes in NZ and WTF is a tiger doing in my room?"
You'd think that they'd be pretty bloody obvious dream signs wouldn't ya?:)... but for some reason my brain just took it all as normal and the dream continued.

After I woke up and thought about this dream I was really annoyed that I'm such a logical thinker, yet I just don't seem to be able to click to this when I'm dreaming and become lucid.

This is most annoying and happens frequently.

The one and only time my logical brain did kick in is mentioned in my Intro in the noobies forums where I meet my late father and my logical brain said hang on he's dead he can't be here, you must be dreaming.

Comments? Ideas?

hey,
I always have weird dreams that I just seem to accept. The way to get around this is to use dreamsigns that occur in both your dreams and reality. for example, if you always dream about a certain person or a specific environment then use these to perform reality checks in waking life. If you don't see tigers or random objects that don't fit in while you are awake you will never RC in your dreams. If however you RC using specific locations or people you will remember to perform RCs the next time you dream about them.
hope this makes sense
Ubik :)

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Originally Posted by AndyNZ

Sounds like an excellent title for a book eh?:)

Hey all.
Is the logical part of the brain mostly disabled whilst dreaming, does anyone know?
Comments? Ideas?[/b]

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Hi! :)

In short we have a left and a right hemisphere of the brain. The left, logical thinking brain is less active when in REM. The right hemisphere becomes more active.
It is more complicated than that but if others elaborate on that then cool, if not I will add more when I get some more time.

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In short we have a left and a right hemisphere of the brain. The left, logical thinking brain is less active when in REM. The right hemisphere becomes more active.
It is more complicated than that but if others elaborate on that then cool, if not I will add more when I get some more time.[/b]

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Well this is wrong, one both side of your frontal lobe is deactive whilst sleeping, and finally your brain isn't split into logic left thinking brain and right unlogical brain. Left/Right brain crap is not taken seriously in the field of neurology. A good example is people who have only one side of their brain working if your really young then the working side can cope with doing the work of both hemispheres, read this http://www.rense.com/general2/rb.htm . Also I don't trust when you say the left brain is less active during REM as all the neurological papers on REM say that their both active the same amount.

Well techniquely speaking if I was to stop your left brain from working your personality would not change drastically and you would stay logical. A really good scientist working on savant disorder, done a test where he fired maginetic pulses into a person left hemisphere to see if savant behaviour would appear. Nothing happen except the person was slower to think.

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Is the logical part of the brain mostly disabled whilst dreaming, does anyone know?[/b]

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I don't know what you mean by logical part, but here http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.f...p;dopt=Abstract . Your prefrontal cortex is knocked out, where the I function (self awearness) is during sleep.

P.S. In the future will won't need to learn we just need to put on a thinking cap http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/s498832.htm , when these come out I am going to buy one.

An article I havn't fully read yet says the following:

Beyond that, this concept shed a powerful light on what caused REM dreams--the vivid, bizarre, and colorful dreams that provide much of the fuel for psychoanalysis. Among other things, it indicated that dreams, like much of the brain, are activated in REM sleep by floods of nerve impulses coming up from the brainstem that release the stimulant acetylcholine. The typical REM-sleep dream is strange because this process calls forth choppy, chaotic bits of internal information that are poorly "synthesized" or stitched together. The dream registers in the dreamer's awareness because the brain is highly active at the time. The dream gets accepted uncritically as reflecting reality because the dreamer's critical faculties lack the serotonin and norepinephrine they need for proper judgment. And the dream is mostly or entirely forgotten because this same chemical shortfall disables memory.

It was from the harvardmag site but seems to be down. Luckily i downloaded it :). It describes research into REM sleep by Allan Hobson and Robert McCarley. No idea how accurate it is because as ive said, i havn't read it all.

edit:
google cache of the article:
page1
http://209.85.135.104/search?hl=en&q=c....html&meta=
page2
http://209.85.135.104/search?hl=en&q=c....html&meta=

[In order to become lucid in a dream] we must arouse the critical faculty which seems to a great extent inoperative in dreams, and here, too, degrees of activiy become manifest. Let us suppose, for example, that in my dream I am in a café. At a table near mine is a lady who would be very attractive - only, she has four eyes. Here are some illustrations of the degrees of activity of the critical faculty:

1. In the dream it is practically dormant, but on waking I have the feeling that there was something peculiar about this lady. Suddenly, I get it - "Why, of course, she had four eyes!"
2. In the dream I exhibit mild surprise and say, "How curious that girl has four eyes! It spoils her." But only in the same way that I might remark, "What a pity she had broken her nose! I wonder how she did it."
3. The critical faculty is more awake and the four eyes are regarded as abnormal; but the phenomenon is not fully appreciated. I exclaim, "Good Lord!" and then reassure myself by adding, "There must be a freak show or a circus in the town." Thus I hover on the brink of realization, but do not quite get there.
4. My critical faculty is now fully awake and refuses to be satisfied by this explanation. I continue my train of thought, "But there never was such a freak! An adult woman with four eyes - it's impossible. I am dreaming."

~ Oliver Fox, Astral Projection

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Originally Posted by Ubik

hey,
I always have weird dreams that I just seem to accept. The way to get around this is to use dreamsigns that occur in both your dreams and reality. for example, if you always dream about a certain person or a specific environment then use these to perform reality checks in waking life. If you don't see tigers or random objects that don't fit in while you are awake you will never RC in your dreams. If however you RC using specific locations or people you will remember to perform RCs the next time you dream about them.
hope this makes sense
Ubik :)[/b]

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Hmmm, not sure I entity picked that up.
To me a dreamsign would be something that can't logically happen, and all my dreams are so incredibly different and varied it hard to pick anything out, but generally most things that happen in my dreams are out of reality so to speak.

To be honest I haven't started practicing RCing in daily life as yet and by the sounds of it, hoping that my logical brain will kick in when I'm sleeping and go "hang on that's not right" obviously isn't going to cut it. Bugger...
I was thinking of carrying a card around that says " are you dreaming right now" and check that on and off through out the day... would that suffice as a type of RC?

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Originally Posted by Jess

[In order to become lucid in a dream] we must arouse the critical faculty which seems to a great extent inoperative in dreams, and here, too, degrees of activiy become manifest. Let us suppose, for example, that in my dream I am in a café. At a table near mine is a lady who would be very attractive - only, she has four eyes.[/b]

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Jess. yeah well that makes total sense and is basically what I referred to as the logical side of the brain working whilst dreaming.
Logic says a person with 4 eyes can't exist so it must be a dream.

But how does one arouse the critical faculty if it does get subdued whilst asleep?

That's the hard part.

Take your pick from the many techniques out there.

Reality checks, MILD etc.

Gah!... this sure ain't easy.

The last few days I've woken up shouting profanity saying " bloody brain, god it was so obvious it wasn't real why didn't you pick up on it.. ARGH!"