Want to Find Your Mind? Learn to Direct Your Dreams
New Scientist: “Am I awake or am I dreaming?” I ask myself for probably the hundredth time. I am fully awake, just like all the other times I asked, and to be honest I am beginning to feel a bit silly. All week I have been performing this “reality check” in the hope that it will become so ingrained in my mind that I will start asking it in my dreams too.
If I succeed, I will have a lucid dream – a thrilling state of consciousness somewhere between waking and sleeping in which, unlike conventional dreams, you are aware that you are dreaming and able to control your actions. Once you have figured this out, the dream world is theoretically your oyster, and you can act out your fantasies to your heart’s content.
Journalistic interest notwithstanding, I am pursuing lucid dreaming for entertainment. To some neuroscientists, however, the phenomenon is of profound interest, and they are using lucid dreamers to explore some of the weirder aspects of the brain’s behaviour during the dream state (see “Dream mysteries”). Their results are even shedding light on the way our brains produce our rich and complex conscious experience. Read the rest of this article 
Proving Psychic Phenomena
Can our mind really display extra-sensory abilities beyond the five senses? One expert set out to define and prove the validity of such psychic powers as precognition, clairvoyance, psychokinesis, out-of-body experiences, and telepathy.
Neuroscientist Diane Hennacy Powell, a former Harvard Medical School professor, attempts to logically answer long-standing questions about the possibilities of psychic phenomena, and the relationship between our brain and consciousness, in her book, The ESP Enigma: The Scientific Case for Psychic Phenomena. Extra-sensory abilities can be explained, she says, by applying the theories of Einstein and quantum physics. She also provides empirical data developed over the past few decades from several well-designed and rigorously supervised experiments that reinforce the existence of such phenomena.
Largely ignored by scientific field experts because of a lack of a viable theory to explain the mechanisms, and because the data associated with it defies the traditional model of consciousness, psychic phenomena have developed a stigma and researchers tend to ignore the possibility of existence. However, Dr. Powell concludes that modern physics consistently explains how these abilities can exist and how they work. She points out that Dean Radin’s book, Entangled Minds, contains detailed information about the abundant studies that have shown highly statistically significant evidence for ESP. In fact, she says, there is more evidence for ESP than there is for the use of aspirin to prevent strokes or heart attacks.
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The Healing Power of Interpreting Your Dreams
Dream consultant Mary Grandy likes to give helpful advice on how to remember your dreams and how they can positively impact our daily lives.
While most people find it hard to remember upon awakening what they’ve just dreamed, Mary says it can be done. “The subconscious mind is easily programmed; if you really want to remember your dreams just tell yourself you want that information and it will provide it,” she said.
Mary believes that our dreams are connected to our paths in life, and that it would serve us to look at the messages from our subconscious minds to help us better understand what is going on with important current issues and help us make better informed decisions.
“It’s like there’s a river of knowledge that runs through our body and at night when asleep, we are in that river where we can see things that we shut off in our waking world. At night we tap into the wisdom. People do it in the daytime too… people daydream. Those that do are often very wise people,” she said.
Recording your dreams immediately upon awakening is the key to remembering the important details. Catching the tail end of the dream then working backwards will help with collecting more information and lead you to remembering the earlier scenes. Repeatedly recording them helps turn it into a subsconscious habit and the task becomes easier over time.
Brenda Ferrimani learned about the healing power of dreams when she began to experience a recurring nightmare. What she learned is that all dreams — even nightmares — happen for the purpose of health and wholeness, and stopping to pay attention to them can help people heal and grow, and that they are the root to all of life’s hardships and setbacks, as well as the key to peace and clarity. Now an acclaimed artist who paints her dreams, Brenda realizes that interpreting and understanding her nightmare gave her new perspectives about her unhealthy perceptions, and that she had the power to make the changes necessary to rid herself of the recurrent nightmares.
Interpreting our dreams can be our own best form of therapy because they can carry important indications of what is blocking us from going in a desired direction by helping us to recognize our fears, facing them, then overcoming them to diminish the power they have over us. Some believe that the very act of analyzing one’s own psyche through dreams can bring subconscious desires to life. By eliminating our fears, which are the very blocks that keep us from consciously creating our dreams, can we then begin to achieve heartfelt goals.
Dream interpretation can be difficult because they most often appear as metaphors, but we are our own best analyzer, since no one else can completely understand what is happening in our lives, and books can give only a general guideline for interpretation. Sharing dream themes with others, however, can help them gain knowledge and insight into their own inner workings and build and strengthen important connections with their own circle of family and friends.
Related articles: Listen to Your Dreams