Brain hemispheres sleep non-symmetrically?

Yesterday I was having a non lucid dream of swimming in the river. The dream was not extraordinary but the way that I woke from it was. I slowly awoke and opened one eye. The open eye saw my room and I am sure this was reality, not the dream. My closed eye remained viewing the dream for about 15-20 secs. My field of vision was vertically split between reality and a dream. The open eye was viewing my static bedroom surroundings while the dream continued to move and develop. The only way I can explain this was that one brain hemisphere remained dreaming while the other was awake. For the record, my left was the open one seeing my real surroundings. So my right brain had awoken first?

From what I understand, the way the hemispheres divide on your vision is not by each eye, but rather by each half of your field of vision. In other words, anything to the left of center in your field of vision (no matter which eye you're using, or if you're using both), is "seen" by the right hemisphere, and anything to the right of center would be seen by the left hemisphere.

However, I'm no expert, and have done no extensive research into this, so I may be wrong.

thats really interesting I never heard of it before. I don't know about the hemispheres being divided though, thats hard to say. I don't know if one hemisphere capable of dreaming alone. However if anyone knows what hemisphere area dreaming takes place in versus the eye that was dreaming, maybe we can break this problem down some more.

thats pretty awesome

I've never had split vision like that, but I get de-ja-vu something chronic in my dreams, mostly dreams of adventure when I'm escaping bad guys on a film or somthing, I so often think that I've had the dream before. Odly enough this has never been a dream-sign for me becuase my curiosity invites me to continue and see how much more I recognize.

i knwo what your talking baout. Ive experinced that beofre, mostly when I was younger. I think its beacse you are still dreaming and you are on the verge of waking up, so your in a wierd inbetween zone, where both a happening. i dotn knwo much about it.

Once upon a time there was an experiment taken on people with Epilepsy. Apparently, an epileptic fit starts in one part of the brain, and 'spreads' to other parts. The doctors thought that if they physically cut the two hemispheres of the brain, then they could stop the fit spreading to the whole brain.

I believe the part of the brain that joins the hemispheres, and the thing that the doctors cut is called the corpus collosum.

Anyhow, they performed experiments on the patients after the operation. With a board going vertically across the face, so that the eyes are seperated, the patient was shown certain objects on either side of the board. When shown a hammer to the left eye (right brain) the patient couldn't name the object by word, but knew how to use it and demonstrated with their left hand.

So what Im trying to say is, maybe your corpus collosum wasn't working when you woke up?

Fascinating!

It seems then...until we have any further insights... that the Right half of the brain may be the seat of Dreaming.

Incidentally, the Surat Shabd Yoga people insist that one listen to the Sound in the Right side of the head, and never on the left. Here is the Website for that, if anybody is interested: http://santhakar.tripod.com/santmat/shabd-1.html

Oh, I once had a dream in which I tried to hold off waking up... refusing to wake up and dragging my feet, even my fingernails trying not to wake up. What happened was the Dream Scene slowly broke down into a Descriptive Narrative of Words. Now that I think about it in this Left Brain, Right Brain perspective, it seems that the Dream from the Right Hemisphere may have leaked over into the Left Hemisphere to become Words -- the speciality of the left half of the brain.

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Originally posted by latency
I've never had split vision like that, but I get de-ja-vu something chronic in my dreams, mostly dreams of adventure when I'm escaping bad guys on a film or somthing, I so often think that I've had the dream before. Odly enough this has never been a dream-sign for me becuase my curiosity invites me to continue and see how much more I recognize.

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That happens to me quite often. I always wonder if I'm seeing characters from a previous dream, either from that night or another, which I don't remember; or if these are just false memories which are only real in the dream world.

yeah that happens often to me too, its quite odd really

I think TygrHawk is right about how the images are divided. I had a dream like this about a week ago. This is taken
This is taken directly from my dream journal:

...things really fell apart and became very fuzzy and I yelled "Increase lucidity now!" but things continued to deteriorate. It got so bad that the only real pavement that could be seen was a focussed strip that looked grainy as the road does when you look out of the front of a moving car. Even this started to look as if it were underwater, but I struggled as hard as I could to concentrate on stabilizing the dream. Suddenly, my dream became a split screen where the left half of my visual field went to another dream that featured a zoomed, blurry closeup of LEGO pegs :!: :holyshit:! After stuggling for a moment, I surrendered to the dream on the left and the image zoomed out, showing a grey LEGO platform. As it zoomed it became perfectly clear...

...It is very significant that the LEGO field appeared on the left side. This indicates that the right hemisphere of my brain had come up with its own dream, even as my left hemisphere was floundering with the parking lot. This is funny because they left side contains the ego, which in this case wanted to stay in the dream, and the right side is the side that recognizes and creates change. The left and right occipital lobes see the right and left sides of your visual field respectively...

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Originally posted by LewisM
Anyhow, they performed experiments on the patients after the operation. With a board going vertically across the face, so that the eyes are seperated, the patient was shown certain objects on either side of the board. When shown a hammer to the left eye (right brain) the patient couldn't name the object by word, but knew how to use it and demonstrated with their left hand.

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This is the very experiment I remember hearing about, except the way I remember it they split the field of vision down the middle instead of left eye / right eye.

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Originally posted by TygrHawk
From what I understand, the way the hemispheres divide on your vision is not by each eye, but rather by each half of your field of vision. *In other words, anything to the left of center in your field of vision (no matter which eye you're using, or if you're using both), is \"seen\" by the right hemisphere, and anything to the right of center would be seen by the left hemisphere.

However, I'm no expert, and have done no extensive research into this, so I may be wrong.

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From Michael Talbot's "The Holographic Universe"
Introduction - http://god-online.org/holographic.htm

"Even after removing as much as 90 percent of a rat's visual cortex (the part of the brain that receives and interprets what the eye sees), he (Karl Lashley) found it could still perform tasks requiring complex visual skills. Similarly, research conducted by Pribram revealed that as much as 98 percent of a cat's optic nerves can be severed without seriously impairing its ability to perform complex visual tasks.


Such a situation was tantamount to believing that a movie audience could still enjoy a motion picture even after 90 percent of the movie screen was missing, and his experiments presented once again a serious challenge to the standard understanding of how vision works. According to the leading theory of the day, there was a one-to-one correspondence between the image the eye sees and the way that image is represented in the brain. In other words, when we look at a square, it was believed the electrical activity in our visual cortex also possesses the form of a square. Although findings such as Lashley's seemed to deal a deathblow to this idea, Pribram was not satisfied. While he was at Yale he devised a series of experiments to resolve the matter and spent the next seven years carefully measuring the electrical activity in the brains of monkeys while they performed various visual tasks. He discovered that not only did no such one-to-one correspondence exist, but there wasn't even a discernible pattern to the sequence in which the electrodes fired. He wrote of his findings, "These experimental results are incompatible with a view that a photographic-like image becomes projected onto the cortical surface."


Once again the resistance the visual cortex displayed toward surgical excision suggested that, like memory, vision was also distributed, and after Pribram became aware of holography he began to wonder if it, too, was holographic. The "whole in every part" nature of a hologram certainly seemed to explain how so much of the visual cortex could be removed without affecting the ability to perform visual tasks. If the brain was processing images by employing some kind of internal hologram, even a very small piece of the hologram could still reconstruct the whole of what the eyes were seeing. It also explained the lack of any one-to-one correspondence between the external world and the brain's electrical activity. Again, if the brain was using holographic principles to process visual information, there would be no more one-to-one correspondenee between electrical activity and images seen than there was between the meaningless swirl of interference patterns on a piece of holographic film and the image the film encoded."