HACKING YOUR DREAMS
What if we could peek inside our brains and see our dreams — or even shape them? Studying memory-specific brain cells, neuroscientist (and ex-hacker) Moran Cerf, found that our sleeping brains retain some of the content we encounter when we're awake and that our dreams can influence our waking actions. Where could this lead us?[1]
Moran Cerf’s TED talk can be accessed here:
http://www.ted.com/talks/moran_cerf_this_scientist_can_hack_your_dreams
Advances in technology are enabling neuroscientists to interact with the brain on a cellular level making possible the mapping of the brain’s response to specific stimuli. Conversely, the brain’s behavioral output on a cellular level can be learned by computer. Feeding this learning back into the brain’s cells enables the computer to “control” the dream. A simple example is a patient suffering from war-related PTSD triggered by the sounds of war in his dreams. The methodology makes possible overlaying the dream sounds with pleasant stimuli. When awake, the anxiety formerly aroused by the dream is reduced and over time may be eliminated entirely. As Cerf says, “Neuroscientists are now giving us a new tool to control our dreams, a new canvas that flickers to life when we fall asleep.”
Note that Cerf says this tool is being given to “us.” So, what are we to do with such a tool and all that the further development of such a tool implies?
Before responding to that question, I want to bring in another development. Major technology CEOs and others are investing heavily in the “next big thing,” which is virtual reality (VR) in its various forms. VR is an immersive technology which “creates” a three-dimensional world that one is immersed in. Programming content for VR will be unlimited. While the impact of VR on the brain is only beginning to be studied, it is already clear that immersive experience has a sizeable effect on reducing pain. The exact neural nature of this effect is not yet clear, but the phenomenon itself is what is prompting huge financial investment. Chronic pain can be relieved by immersive experience in VR.
Now imagine, if you will, computer programming of immersive experience while dreaming. One might say that dreams are already immersive and from the perspective of consciousness, a kind of virtual reality itself. But these ideas are not accurate because consciousness is missing. We already know about lucid dreaming where consciousness is present while dreaming. The new technologies promise that computer-controlled dreaming would make possible “being there” as well.
Ultimately what is being promised is the replacement of what we now call “real” experience with programmed virtual experience.
All of this, and more, is coming about with exponential speed.
In his book, The American Replacement of Nature: The Everyday Acts and Outrageous Evolution of Economic Life,[2] William Irwin Thompson argues that we are in a time where “history is replaced with movies, education is replaced with entertainment and nature is replaced with technology.”
As I noted in an earlier blog post, we are now deep into the robotic replacement of humans. One step along the way, will be the robotic replacement of dreams and as this unfolds dreams will be monetized. You will soon be able to buy the dreams you want. Or, as advertising becomes ever more successful, you will want to buy what others want you to dream.[3]
Be ready!
[1] From advertisement for Moran Cerf’s TED talk. Filmed February 2016.
[2] William Irwin Thompson. The American Replacement of Nature: The Everyday Acts and Outrageous Evolution of Economic Life. New York: Doubleday, 1991.
[3] Russell Arthur Lockhart. Commodification of Desire. In progress.
Hello Mr Lockhart,
Thanks so much for you insightful notions regarding the necessity to respond to our dreams. We are right with you on that.
The reading group i am in is reading Dreams, Bones & The Future.
We dont discuss much or try to determine what you mean but we sure would appreciate some elaboration on page 36 regarding compression. We know information comes to us in dreams, clues, synchronicities, but the notion of new myths born out of the compression of time had us thinking. Any offerings will be appreciated. Regards, mary powers on behalf of your fans in three rivers, mi.
Hi Mary…thanks for your comment and the good news about your reading group. In response to your question, I refer you once again to Heidegger’s concept of “dwell” as one of the antidotes to what Paco called “compressions of time” in “Dreams, Bones, & the Future.”
I also am posting here a further commentary by Paco on your question.
COMPRESSIONS OF TIME: Paco’s Reply to maryb’s blog comment
We don’t really know how the archetypal psyche manifests itself among animals, but we have a long record of its manifestations among humans, in myths, dreams, and so forth. We can safely say that, like molten magma surging up from beneath our feet and solidifying in the open air, the archetypal psyche “seeks” manifestation through the unconscious, then the conscious, minds of receptive individuals, eventually to take manifest form, even if we don’t know what we’re doing. The deep psyche will express itself through us, entering our world of “time and space,” one way or another, and thus be subject to all of the same torsions and perversions that we are.
If it happens that we live in a warm, gentle climate under natural conditions of fecundity and leisure, the state of mind out of which we give birth to mythic images will reflect something of that character. If, however, we consider the state of mind of a harassed modern individual with no time to spare, surrounded by machines and machine processes, whose human functions are being taken over by robots, whose food is artificial, whose values are being chopped like celery in a “food-processor,” whose dominant emotions are a confused jumble of fear, unfocused anxiety and rage—and if these conditions are widespread enough and persist for long enough—then I’m guessing that the new mythic formulations emerging from such conditions will bear at least some of the earmarks of those conditions. In incipient myths will have passed through the “tornado,” in the midst of which their human vessels are tumbling.
My comment, then, about new myths being born out of “untold compressions of time” reflects that assumption. As Jung said in his letter to Sir Herbert Read, “The great problem of our time is that we don’t know what is happening to the world. . . . we have no dominants any more. They are in the future. Our values are shifting, everything loses its certainty . . . our only certainty is that the new world will be something different from what we were used to.”
No one knows what kind of mythic outcomes will emerge from our present psychic state, what will hatch from our harried egg. But there is no guarantee that those outcomes will be deep reflections peace, love and well-being. It could just as easily be a nightmarish future we are creating. In fact, there is much to indicate that will be the case. But I chose the image of a diamond being formed out of coal, at unimaginable pressures, because I found in that image a spark of hope (always a risk)—to recognize that out of the most impossible conditions something beautiful may still emerge.
But so much depends on how we all respond to the pressures of our age—these unholy compressions of time. If we let ourselves be enchained and dehumanized by them, by the pressures and mechanisms of stress on every side, there may be no “diamonds” for our future tiaras. Hence, each person faces a great task.
At the end of his great letter, Jung said, “We have simply got to listen to what the psyche spontaneously says to us. What the dream, which is not manufactured by us, says is just so. . . . There is a fair chance of finding what we seek in our conscious world. Where else could it be?”
I couldn’t agree more.
I hope these ruminations give a little more substance to the image of myths born out of compressions of time.
—Paco Mitchell