A reality of dreams

The journal Sleep has an interesting study on how people with narcolepsy can experience sometimes striking confusions between what they’ve dreamed and what’s actually happened.

Narcolepsy is a disorder of the immune system where it inappropriately attacks parts of the brain involved in sleep regulation.

The result is that affected people are not able to properly regulate sleep cycles meaning they can fall asleep unexpectedly, sometimes multiple times, during the day.

One effect of this is that the boundary between dreaming and everyday life can become a little bit blurred and a new study by sleep psychologist Erin Wamsley aimed to see how often this occurs and what happens when it does.

Some of the reports of are quite spectacular:

One man, after dreaming that a young girl had drowned in a nearby lake, asked his wife to turn on the local news in full expectation that the event would be covered. Another patient experienced sexual dreams of being unfaithful to her husband. She believed this had actually happened and felt guilty about it until she chanced to meet the ‘lover’ from her dreams and realized they had not seen each other in years, and had not been romantically involved.

Several patients dreamed that their parents, children, or pets had died, believing that this was true (one patient even made a phone call about funeral arrangements) until shocked with evidence to the contrary, when the presumed deceased suddenly reappeared. Although not all examples were this dramatic, such extreme scenarios were not uncommon.

This sometimes happens in people without narcolepsy but the difference in how often it occurs is really quite striking: 83% of patients with narcolepsy reported they had confused dreams with reality, but this only happened in 15% of the healthy controls they interviewed.

In terms of how often it happened, 95% of narcolepsy patients said it happened at least once a month and two thirds said it happened once a week. For people without the disorder, only 5% reported it had happened more than once in their life.

Although a small study, it suggests that the lives of people with narcolepsy can be surprisingly interwoven with their dreams to the point where it can at times it can be difficult to distinguish which is which.

If you want to read the study in full, there’s a pdf at the link below.

Link to locked study at Sleep journal (via @Neuro_Skeptic)
pdf of full text.

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Find Your Passion: Follow Your Dreams... And Other Useless Advice

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Quote of the Day: The Dreams of the Future

Planning to plan your future is a waste of time. Has talking about planning ever been useful? Has it moved your life forward?

I think we can agree that’s a big “no”.

For me, I’ve found I’m happiest when I’m doing something…accomplishing something. By “something”, I mean anything that I feel is bettering my life in some way –- furthering a hobby, honing a job skill, learning a bit of knowledge, making travel plans, etc. The problem is that I’ve found it difficult to stop talking about what I’m hoping to accomplish and to actually make strides towards something actually happening.

Forward15: Your Future in 15 Minutes a Day

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How To Be The Master of Your Dreams

Many people all over the globe dream about doing great things but never really get down the achieving them. In my viewpoint, these people aren’t foolish, laggards or cowardly: they merely have yet to find out ways to turn their dreams into reality. Dreams, like fire, are very powerful, but one is better off if the dream is one’s servant rather than one’s master.

Dreams are part of our lives and we cannot wish them away (as they are often in our subconscious minds), but as human beings we would rather fantasize than actually experience the challenges of what living out our dreams might entail. We know that living our dreams means we have to fight failure, frustration, monotony and long days in order to welcome success, jubilation and recognition, and as if our dreams know this, they encourage us to focus on the positive facets of realizing them. It’s as though we have sieves that filter out the difficult tasks and events that could stop us from achieving our goals.

Well, no one is against dreaming here: in fact, dreaming is a pretty important aspect of our lives. We  should all have a vision that results from a dream we wish to attain, and it’s important to develop smart objectives of what we want to achieve in our lifetime. It is here that dreaming comes to our assistance by helping us shape our vision as well as our objectives. Dreams themselves are not bad at all, but they can be detrimental when one is stuck on a vision or objective that clearly cannot work out. For example, imagining that your lover will come back to life after they pass on may help with the healing process in the short run, but it will not bring the dead to life. After some time, that dream had better stop to pave room for other, more realistic dreams.

In the case of dreaming about unrealistic events, dreams become your master, rather than your servant. Dreaming can also become your master if they stop you from taking that initial step in making your dreams come true. If you feel lady luck has to confirm something before you can to forge ahead with action, then you are clearly the servant. Fantasies are your master when you can’t change your dream to accommodate the random challenges that life tosses at you.

There are other ways that your dreams can control you: they master your behavior when you find a pure, unadulterated variation of your goal, and refuse to adjust to it because it is not what you had envisaged. Perhaps an alternative plan has presented itself, but because you are so transfixed on the initial dream, you still insist on following it and ignoring every thing else. Seeking the perfect time, or seeking the ideal situation, is precisely how your dream gets delayed or unachieved.

If you want to turn your life around and become the master of your dream then you must reflect back upon the points above and figure out who the master has been. Is it you or your dreams? If your fantasies have been in control, then you need to find a way to free yourself from their bonds.

To do this, the first thing you need to do is to make decisions, and apply them. Remember that so long as you are unsure about what needs to be done, you won’t have the ability to move forward with your goal. If you wish to move forward, you simply have to choose a direction, and move towards it: any decision you make will spur you into action. At this point, don’t worry if your decisions are disastrous—if your decision produces a bad result, you can always change direction later on.

It’s also important not to over-analyze your vision. We often have a bad habit of focusing on how much cash we might make, or what awards we might get, immersing ourselves in case studies, etc. That in itself is okay, so long as we don’t get stuck there. In over-analyzing dreams, you will procrastinate a lot and fail to realize the goal you had in mind. Instead of analyzing all the “what if?” aspects of recognizing your ambition, make solid choices that will help you achieve them.

When pursuing your dreams, it’s important to not compare yourself with others. You’ll never have the ability to attain the kind of success that someone else has already accomplished, and no-one else will be able to accomplish the kind of success that you might potentially accomplish. Each journey is an individual one, so focus on achieving the success that is only feasible for you.

Ultimately, to win at mastering your dreams, you also need to detach yourself from the outcome and remember that you are just participating in the process. What will come of out of your efforts is not only up to you, as there will always be external factors. What you can control is your own effort in pursuing your goal.

Keep in mind that dreaming is good, but just like anything else, too much of it can be harmful. Daydream in moderation, but don’t let those fantasies keep you from accomplishing your dreams themselves.

If you follow the simple suggestions above, you will undoubtedly help your dreams become reality.

Featured photo credit:  Painting the world. Smiling girl on grass with a paintbrush via Shutterstock

Daniel is the founder of one of the internet's best personal development sites personaldevelopment123.net . He is a young and well educated individual with a real passion for what he does. His areas of specialty are personal development, life improvement, self-help, motivation, relationships, personal finance, and helping others. You can visit his site here or subscribe to his feed.

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How to Not Talk Yourself Out of Your Goals and Dreams

We talk a lot about setting goals, living your dreams, reaching your full potential and even give you some great ways to plan out those goals and dreams. But, I have found that it isn’t the thinking and planning process of goals and dreams that is the hard part, oh, no.

The difficult part of reaching your goals and dreams is following through and not letting yourself talk yourself out of them. That’s a mouthful, so let me clarify.

Call them goal, dreams, projects, whatever. If you are a Lifehack reader then you have a list of them somewhere. These are the things that you want to accomplish or the things that someone else wants you to accomplish.

Even after intense brainstorming, planning, and following through with some of the steps that you have outlined to reach your goals; something happens. Plans change, people quit, things get tough, your idea doesn’t seem so revolutionary anymore; you get stuck and with that your goal starts to fly away to failure.

Don’t get me wrong, failure is a good thing and we must fail and fail often, but what about those things that you truly want to accomplish? What about your “life’s work” that you must do? What happens when those goals go up in a puff of smoke?

There are four reasons we fail to accomplish our goals and reach our dreams:

The goal is more of a “pipe-dream” than you thought and should be thought through more thoroughly. Maybe you don’t have the resources you need to accomplish it or something in your environment or life has changed. Your plan may need some work and you may have to “regroup” on the entire goal/dream/project all together.Your priorities completely changed and the goal isn’t important anymore. Maybe that’s not a complete failure, but the goal is now gone.Your goal/dream/project just sucked and you found out it wasn’t worth doing.Things got too hard to accomplish and you thought your way out of your goals. This is the worst of all offenders.

We have a decent amount of content at Lifehack about how to plan things more effectively and how to deal with priorities and “areas of focus”, let’s look at how not to think yourself out of your goals and dreams.

Sometimes we think too much. So much that we can think ourselves out of a good idea. Not good.

How does it happen?

Yesterday I was doing a bike ride (know about our Fitness Challenge?) and I was about 20 minutes into it. My legs were burning, I was cramping up (not enough water, again), and I was sort of close to home. I reached a slower point in my biking and a thought entered my head, “you’ve done enough and you are spent, just head home”.

I’m working on a personal project that I am extremely excited about and I got to a place in code where I ran myself into a wall. I thought, “I should probably just start over with a different framework” which led to, “I’m never going get this done or make it right.”

This is where most goals stop dead in their tracks. The going gets tough, and we flee from the task at hand.

Stopping “stinking thinking” is somewhat easy. Instead of convincing yourself that failing at your goal is the right thing to do, stop yourself, take a breather and regroup until your thoughts become more positive. Then act.

It only took me about 1 minute to change my tune completely from, “I can’t make this last ten minutes” to “I’ve come this far, push yourself forward.” Once you hit that “positive self-talk”, that’s when you push forward. Don’t second guess yourself and don’t consider alternatives.

Another way to get your positive thinking back is to review your goal and write about it a little bit. This will bring you back to a more positive state as your thoughts can be better organized and will be much clearer on paper (or screen). Once you find the positives, act.

Of course this only works with goals and projects that are good ideas or good for you; the others will be weeded out by priority and planning processes.

Don’t let your negativity get to you and destroy your dreams. Any goal worth anything will be difficult and you will reach the elusive “I can’t do this anymore” moment. Don’t give up. Wait for positive thinking to take over and move forward.

(Photo credit: boy drawing sales report on the wall via Shutterstock)

CM Smith is a technologist, writer, and husband. He holds a degree in MIS and CMPSC from Penn State. CM is also interested in personal productivity, creativity and how to use technology to get things done. Check out his writing at devburner.net or follow him on Twitter.

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Video: Sir Ken Robinson, what’s in the school of your dreams?

Watch as four student reporters hand Sir Ken Robinson a “blank check” and say: Design a learning place of your dreams. It’s a three-part video series — and definitely do watch through to Part 3, where things get a little bit silly.

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Control your dreams (ebook)

Anyone can learn to have lucid dreams, and this ebook tells you how. Lucid dreams are those dreams where you become aware you are dreaming, and can even begin to control the reality of the dream. Adventure, problem-solving and consequence-free indulgence await! And for those interested in the mind, lucid dreams are a great place to explore the nature of their own consciousness. The ebook is written as a sort of travel guide, telling you what you need to take on your journey and what to expect when you start to lucid dream. It finishes off with a quick review of the scientific literature on lucid dreaming and links and references for further reading if you want to continue your exploration of lucid dreaming.

I wrote this with friend, and lucid dreamer, Cat Bardsley. My wife Harriet Cameron provided some beautiful illustrations which you can find throughout the book (and on the cover you can see here). The book is Creative Commons licensed so you can copy it and share it as you will, and even modify and improve (as long as you keep the CC licensing). It’s available on smashwords on a pay-what-you-want-basis (and that includes nothing, so it is yours for free if you’d like).

“Control your dreams” is my second self-published ebook. You can also get “Explore your blindspot” from smashwords (which is completely free, and also CC licensed). The wonderful folk at 40k books published my essay The Narrative Escape last year (and after doing all the formatting and admin associated with these two new ebooks I am more and more in awe of what they did).

Sweet Dreams!

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The dreams and hallucinations of cloistered monks

French sleep scientists have studied a group of monks who have virtually no contact with the outside world and have taken a vow of silence.

The monks are of scientific interest owing to the tradition of having two sleep periods per night interrupted by a 2-3 hour prayer and psalm reading session.

The research group were interested in how the sleep-regulating circadian rhythm adjusts to this two sleep system.

It turns out that the automatic rising and falling of body temperature seemed to sync with the two-period sleep patterns but that the monks still had sleep problems (difficulty sleeping, waking, daytime sleepiness).

This suggests that they were not fully adjusted, even after decades of practice (the researchers report that “They all used several (two to six) alarm clocks”!)

Delightfully, the monks were also asked about their tendency to hallucinate and about the content of their dreams.

Although only ten individuals were studied, the answers are oddly appropriate for members of a silent, closed order.

Six monks had experienced mild (n?=?4, ringing of the cell door at sleep offset or of the alarm clock, feeling that someone hit them briefly in the back, waking-up during the second sleep while mentally singing psalms) and moderate (n?=?2, nightmarish, prolonged feeling of a demoniac presence at sleep onset after Matins) sleep-related hallucinations vs. one control (p?=?.06). Occasional nightmares were more frequent in monks than in controls.

All monks reported dreaming more often after than before the Matins [midnight prayers in between the two sleep periods], and to have conversations in their dreams. These conversations were rare (n?=?3), hard to understand (n?=?2), or frequent (n?=?5). As for prayers, six monks were able to pray while dreaming, although it was rare, whereas two others dreamt of acts of piety, or imagined a disrupted liturgy, and finally two of them dreamt they were never monks.

Link to locked study. Not very charitable really.

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7 Warning Signs That You’ve Given Up on Your Dreams

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Not in your wildest dreams

Scientific American has just started a new series where scientists describe questions which fascinate them but which they don’t think can be answered by science.

The first article is by sleep and dream neuroscientist Robert Stickgold who wonders whether we could ever understand the significance of dreams.

The idea: Dreams often feel profoundly meaningful, bizarre experiences often interpreted over the centuries as messages from the gods or as windows into the unconscious. However, maybe our brains are just randomly stringing experiences together during sleep and investing the result with a feeling of profundity…

The problem: The difficulty in exploring this idea is that how meaningful something is might be too hard to measure. “It’s a bit like beauty — it’s in the mind of the beholder,” Stickgold says. “It’s not like heart rate or the level of electrical conductivity of the skin, which you have outside evidence of. If a person says something is meaningful, you’re not sure how to measure that, and you’re not sure how, if at all, that applies to others. One has to come up with a meaningful definition of meaningful.”

Link to SciAm ‘Too Hard for Science?: The sense of meaning in dreams’.

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