12 Sep, 2010 0000hrs IST
Dream catchers Scary but true! There are those who claim to be able
to enter our dreams and manage them. Anuradha Varma meets some dream
creators Can you enter a person's dream? In Inception, actor Leonardo
di Caprio, who plays an industrial spy, steals secrets when his
victims are asleep by penetrating their dreams. The dream snatcher can
even sow the seed of inception for an idea. While the movie's fiction,
it may be grounded in fact. The New Scientist reports, "In the movie,
the dream-snatchers use a drug called somnacin and a dream machine to
upload a scenario into someone's sleeping mind. This fictional dream
machine is called a Portable Automated Somnacin IntraVenous device.
A device does already exist that can effectively read someone's mind. A
functional MRI scanner takes snapshots of brain activity, and then the
software recreates images of what the subject was looking at. The
researchers say it has the potential one day to be able to record
someone's dream." It reveals that dreams occur in both rapid-eye
movement (REM) sleep, and non-REM sleep. However, while sceptics
abound, believers back up the theory. Mystic and tarot reader Veenu
Sandal believes she can cure people through their dreams, using the
technique of telementation, beaming out thoughts to positively
influence them. She says, "All thoughts and experiences are stored in
a person's brain. It's like watching television. Sometimes, the person
wakes up and I have to start all over again. It's an invasion of
privacy and I do it only with permission." Entering another's dream
can have interesting results. Recalls Veenu, "A man passed a park
three days ago and saw a couple getting romantic. In his dream, I saw
him embark upon an affair with a colleague." She gets best results
between 1 am and 2 am. Healer and psychic Venugopalan, aka Maitreya,
believes free will plays an important role and an individual can
reject a forced scenario if he wishes, even while dreaming.
Transferring thoughts into a person's mind is about connecting, even
fusing with the other's energy. He says, "If you go deep into a
person's dream, you can program his thoughts." Even Goa-based healer
Patrick Sanfrancesco related, during a talk, how he wove a dream about
cops busting a club, after the parents complained that their son was
turning a compulsive gambler. After three nights of this, the young
man stayed home! Controlling dreams isn't a new trend. In fact,
Tibetan Buddhists use dream yoga to get nearer to the Absolute,
through lucid dreaming, by comparing the illusion to the transitory
nature of life. In a lucid dream, a term coined by Dutch psychiatrist
Frederik van Eeden, one is aware that one is dreaming. In his
Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, published in 1913,
he describes his experiments with dreams. He writes, "I dreamt that I
was lying in the garden before the windows of my study, and saw the
eyes of my dog through the glass pane. I was lying on my chest and
observing the dog very keenly. At the same time, I knew with perfect
certainty that I was dreaming and lying on my back in my bed. And then
I resolved to wake up slowly and carefully and observe how my
sensation of lying on my chest would change into the sensation of
lying on my back." Dream researcher and psychologist at Harvard
University, Deirdre Barrett has recommended, "You can tell yourself at
bedtime that you want to dream on a particular topic — that you want
to be lucid in your dream, realise you're dreaming. People who have
had bad nightmares may want to script a different outcome, a kind of
mastery dream to replace the nightmares." Enjoy more power over your
dreams!
Article taken from times of india:-timesofindia.indiatimes.com/
