Thread: The Full Moon And Dreaming

Originally Posted by penny

There's a full moon coming up this Thursday 7th Sep 2006. It's called the Harvest Moon. Dream activity and especially lucid dreaming becomes much more intense during this period. Let me know if you notice any increase or whatever in your abilities over the next few days.
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Please explain this to me, I dont know much about the phases of the moon.

The current moon if you look at is becoming fat. It is waxing ie. it is getting bigger. During this period as the moon waxes to full like a big pizza pie, all living things experience an acceleration in growth. Our hair and nails grow faster during this period. It's true. Certain aquatic creatures spawn during the full moon. The moon controls the tides of the ocean and, as we are like the earth and formed of 70% water too, it also controls our own personal tides in which our hormones swim.
Womens periods are usually the same length as the month of the moon, which is why they are known as " moons".
It has long been known that Emergency rooms in hospitals notice a marked rise in the influx of accidents during a full moon. It's what is known as lunar madness. This is where the term " looney" comes from, as to do with the moon. La Lune.
The moon in Tarot is connected to our unconscious, the unseen side of our psyches buried deep within ourselves. Dreams are our quickest route to that unseen land. In there lie our deepest fears, insecurities and drives.
We can harness the power of the moon for dreaming. My dreams become even more intense coming up to and during the full moon. Quite often they are prophetic.
Many ancient cultures worshipped the moon. She represents fertility and magic. The moon is the earth's dreaming buddy.
The full moon is especially good for lucid dreaming. In fact the waxing moon in general is good for lucid.
Watch the moon and watch your dreams. It really does have a pull.

Good explanation, Penny. I've been starting to keep track of if my LDs coincide with the full moons for the last couple months, but so far I haven't found anything noteworthy.

I do hope the full moon boosts my dreaming..
I'm getting the hang of lucidity i think.
Well almost..

One question, anybody know if there is anything
relating lunar eclipses to dreams? or sleep or anything
really.. Just interested.

Do new moons also have any effect on dreaming? Or is it only full moons?

Also - if anyone here lives in australia i'm pretty sure the full moon is on the 8th

The Phases of the Moon.

The times given are in Universal Time which is basically Greenwich Mean Time (GMT).

If the moon exerts enough gravity to drag the entire ocean around planet (causing tides), and we are 70% water, how could it not have an effect on us? I find it quite funny when people dismiss the effects of moon cycles as "New Age". Its science!

I find that my senses and emotions are heightened around full moon - so full moon probably is a good time to LD (and a bad time to make big decisions like quitting your job&#33

Well I can say for sure that the moon affects people's emotions: my mum is bloody loony tonight! I never noticed the correlation with the moon before, hmm...

The only thing that has worked for me, to increase my LD, has been to orient my bed position North-South (head at the north). I read about it in a book.

I've never noticed any correlation between the phases of the moon and my LD.

I had an LD last night, and the Full Moon is in 2 days... I'm not sure if there's any correlation, though. Though I'd like to think there is.

*cough*pseudoscience*cough*

Yeah, I'm with Raylin.

On the 70% water thing:
The moon's effect on the tides isn't really remarkable--the only reason its noticeable is because the ocean is such a large body of water. In our bodies, the effect is negligible because of the smaller scale. Can you jump higher on the full moon? Maybe, but not enough to make a difference. Other variables play a much greater role.

Psuedoscience pretty much nails it on the head.

There may be some effect that the moon has on us, with the way light patterns are and our circadian rhythms are synchronized, but what would a full moon have anything to do with the "tides" effect on our bodies? A full moon doesn't mean the moon is closer to the earth, just that it's on the opposite side of the earth than the sun. By that logic, a new moon (or a waning gibbous, etc) should have the same effect as a full moon. Tides get higher and lower, but not in correlation with the moon's phases, as far as I know.

Originally Posted by Raylin

*cough*pseudoscience*cough*
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LOL, you're right.

On the other hand, it's not like we're discussing the velocity of a tennis ball bouncing off a wall. Let's ask a scientist how to best achieve a lucid dream: "duhhh, uhh, I have no bloody clue." Why do people dream: "Well, errrr ummm to solve problems, maybe?"

How is science supposed to research something as ephemeral and subjective as dreaming?

Exactly.

You can't expect the same kind of precision you get in the physical sciences for dreaming. You can follow the scientific method to a t, and still drive straight into fruitcake-ville. It's happened many times before. That's why anything practical you can read on dreaming is labelled pseudoscience. What she's saying may not have the precision of Einstein's theories, but at least it's more precise than "Duhhh, uhh"

For the record, for a thing to be true, you don't need to know why it works. Gravity for example. We have NOOOO clue what it is. But we can measure it. There's one good way to find out if there's something to this moon thing - find out for yourself!

CV

But you CAN give scientific theories as to how lucid dreaming works and how to achieve lucid dreams. That's what Stephen LaBerge is doing. It isn't as clear-cut as other subjects, but that doesn't mean it can't be scientifically explained and rationalized--that's how WILD works: It plays with known variables to trick your mind into jumping into an REM phase immediately. All lucid dreaming methods can be scientifically validated, so its not too far out there to expect that a new method for LDing explain the how and why of its inner workings.

True, if these techniques work, then they work. If telling somebody they work makes them work, then why question it? Well, for one thing, loading up the discussion with pseudoscience will turn a lot of common people off to it (or maybe on to it, scarily enough) because they hear people talking about it and assume it's a lot of new age crystal power stuff. There's a definite benefit to being critical and logical about how you think of lucid dreaming, which is that it then becomes much more legitimate and acceptable to a wider audience, which is one of the ultimate goals, is it not?

Thought I'd toss this in:
"Add to that the common misconception that because the human body contains a lot of water, consequently it should influence us the same way. The fact is that water in the ocean can flow freely over great areas, it flows from other places in the ocean and therefore more water can be accumulated in one place. But water does not flow freely in the body. Most of it is tied up in the cells. And lunar gravity has no significant influence on this. It is so weak a force that it corresponds to only going up to the third floor of any building, and a lot of us do that every day."
-Dr. Bjørn Franck Jørgensen, Director of the Copenhagen Planetarium

Originally Posted by Tsen

But you CAN give scientific theories as to how lucid dreaming works and how to achieve lucid dreams. That's what Stephen LaBerge is doing. It isn't as clear-cut as other subjects, but that doesn't mean it can't be scientifically explained and rationalized--that's how WILD works: It plays with known variables to trick your mind into jumping into an REM phase immediately. All lucid dreaming methods can be scientifically validated, so its not too far out there to expect that a new method for LDing explain the how and why of its inner workings.
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If you ask people in Psychological circles (i.e. at a university, where "science" supposedly happens), they would all tell you that Steven LaBerge, if they'd ever heard of him, is pseudoscientific or on the margins. Remember the old quip that psychology is biology (and biology chemistry)? "Ok, so he associates his loony theories with really old studies on sleep cycles. Who cares."

I'm not saying this as a slight to LaBerge - I don't care about him - I'm saying ask anyone, it's pseudoscience. It's not because what he says doesn't work again and again - ask a tarot reader, they will tell you the same thing. His results aren't precise enough to resemble the physical sciences. And, well quite frankly, because so-called scientists are snobs: they often define what kind of research and results are called science and what is called pseudoscience. Dream theory is in the gutter of psychology right now, it's not faddish. Study it at the risk of everybody's respect but a couple of New Age nutjobs. In their eyes, we are those nutjobs. Sad but true.

So he found a few dream tricks that work but that aren't very new at all, that doesn't make it science. You strike stone and flint you get a spark, it works, but it doesn't explain anything. You can validate that stone + flint = spark millions of times, and still be light-years away from explaining one single thing. A thing that works is closer to the world of practical guides than academia.

Researchers don't look for things that work, they look either for NEW, INTERESTING things that work, then place them within a larger framework of understanding. They make connections. We understand dominant and recessive genes and then bam, we get get DNA. We understand gravity on earth, then bam we get Newton's laws.

The problem with dreaming is that we don't understand jack squat about it. No clue. How are you supposed to put a thing that works in any framework of knowledge?

I think this guy's work should be labelled science, but alas.

PS I've heard of studies that indicated that the brain is more active on full moons, people are more agitated etc.

Yeah, good luck explaining that with gravity, if it's even true. Sugar pills could pretty much explain all that away, but who knows, maybe it's true.

There's a full moon coming up this Thursday 7th Sep 2006. It's called the Harvest Moon. Dream activity and especially lucid dreaming becomes much more intense during this period. Let me know if you notice any increase or whatever in your abilities over the next few days.[/b]

that's wright,yesterday the moon was full
and I dad 3 lucid dreams .they were long not short!!!! and I had a good controll

The Moond, like the Earth, has Gravity: A Magnetic Field.
All energy basically is Electromagnetic fields. Human and animal body's and especially Brains (where the Mind is ''generated'&#39 are all places where alot of Electric/Energetic activiity takes place and thus our Brains and nervous system are little electrical circuits that emit an electromagnetic energy field around it. Like little coils.

I can Imagine the Magnetic field from the moon, as it is also strong eough to move the Earth's oceans, is able to slightly interfere with our Brain's and Body's ElectroMagnetic fields as it moves closer to and further away from us. That may be a good explanation why our brains at some phase of the moon will be ElectroMagnetically interfered with so that it will make more Female Hormones causing Monthly Menstruation and Hormones that cause Nightly Sleep and Dreaming. All as the moon differs in distance from us, the Magnetic field it radiates strengthens and weakens, possibly slightly regultaing our Brains, Minds and Bodies, as it does with the Oceans.
So that just may be the methaphysical explanation to this allthough it's merely my Speculations.

Originally Posted by Raylin

*cough*pseudoscience*cough*
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*cough*cynic*cough*

maybe its just the amount of light anyone else think so?

Gotta go to class soon, so I'll keep this short.

Violet, you've obviously never looked at Stephen's findings. They're definitely concrete, and your ignorance of them doesn't make them less so. Lucid Dreaming is a scientifically validated phenomenon, and is not considered pseudoscience by anybody past a high-school level education in psychology. Ask your psych teacher at school, they'll know exactly what it is (that or they haven't been keeping up with the field). The psychology teacher at our school did an entire lesson on lucid dreaming.

I didn't have any Lucid Dreams last night. But the Lunar Eclispe was spectacular. I'm on (EST) and I caught it around 6:15a.m. It was a pretty big and orange looking.