Thread: Interesting Research Article, Possible Science of Precognitive Dreams

Also of interest to us as lucid dreamers are the discussions (in the above research article) regarding correlations between waking experiences and our dreams, one of the purposes of dream journaling. Familiarity with this gives us that additional edge to push us over the hump to lucidity. Marquis d'Hervey de Saint-Denys, a 19th century lucid dreaming pioneer managed to become lucid eventually nightly, seemingly solely through an intimate knowledge of his dreams. Free ebook of his is out there if anyone wants the link.

Anyone enjoying this research as much as I am?? Granted, it is involving dreams which I have a passion for, but I am finding that my mind has become so much more curious about many subjects the more I develop my lucid dreaming practice.

Juicy tidbits from the research article in the OP:

"As a whole, sleep preferentially reactivates memories associated with future rewards (Fischer and Born, 2009) and memories expected to be relevant to future behavior (Wilhelm et al., 2011)." I see signs, of the two studies quoted here, in my DJ entries from this morning. Haven't looked further back yet.

"Whole memories are hardly ever replayed in dreams (Fosse et al., 2003; Malinowski and Horton, 2014), rather elements of experiential memories are associated in visual scenes (Hobson, 1988; Hartmann, 1996; Walker and Stickgold, 2010). Memory trace reactivation in REM was associated with the extraction of patterns in higher order information (Peigneux et al., 2003). Using fMRI, Chow et al. (2013) found brain connectivity during REM to be consistent with the extraction of patterns from past events. REM sleep selectively processes personally-significant material (van Rijn et al., 2015)." The fMRI study is particularly interesting.

"heightened emotional tone strengthens memory associations (Cahill et al., 1996; Hamann et al., 1999)"
emotional content of dreams has a purpose BUT ALSO this concept of integrating emotion should be useful for many lucid dreaming practices such as self talk/affirmations, mantras, MILD, visualizations, etc. This is something I have considered in the past but never experimented with for more than a few days at a time, for some reason. This is despite some successes that I might be able to attribute to those experiments. I always combined the experiments with WBTB and we all know how powerful WBTB is!..so my experiments were inconclusive.

"About 75–95% of dreams depict emotional events, such dreams are largely during REM sleep (Hobson et al., 1998, 2000)" I find the percentage faulty. It is way too high in my experience, likely due to the fact that most people remember few dreams and those dreams that they do remember are likely more emotional. If anyone is great with recall and can attest to 75-95% of their dreams being emotional, please chime in.

"REM dreams are characterized by fear and anxiety (Smith et al., 2004)." This also seems faulty to me personally. My dreams feature very little fear or anxiety. I think these fear and anxiety dreams stand out to the general populace leaving the mundane dreams forgotten. I also wonder if those kind of dreams are more prevalent until you become a lucid dreamer and start getting many semi-lucids and lucids where you know there is nothing to fear or be anxious about in the dream realm…or until you have dealt with those fears and anxieties in some other way in waking life (self development, therapy, etc).

- Probably to be continued. Posting before losing all of this. -

Another interesting (study) - REM, not incubation, improves creativity by priming associative networks

This study shows that compared with quiet rest and non-REM sleep, REM enhances the integration of unassociated information for creative problem solving, a process, we hypothesize, that is facilitated by cholinergic and noradrenergic neuromodulation during REM sleep.

That article is dry...and way over my head.