By Link Daniel
Original Publication Date: January 21, 2021
Despite this kind of outward progress that we have made in the world, we stand at the beginning of another revolution that lies inside ourselves. As previously eluded, the brain’s next great frontier is itself. To ultimately understand the nature of reality we need to have tools that will enable us to explore the mind. As we create machines that will accelerate our understanding of the brain, we must not forget to go beyond the brain and into the mind in order to discover the true nature of reality.
In our quest toward revolutionizing the mind sciences, we are standing in history at a moment similar to when Galileo began looking through the telescope. Many centuries ago, Galileo had ordered the telescope from the Netherlands to investigate upon the nature of reality and discover the very principles that laid the foundation for modern day science.
In order to start this journey, we need to have better tools and technology that will enable its exploration. Meditation is a great ally. It is available to anyone at no cost, yet despite its many benefits few people practice regularly and therefore never quite reap the benefits of it. As attention spans get shorter and people keep getting pulled from one thing to another, few are unwilling to make the investment it takes to get to the life-changing benefits.
Lucid dreaming is the night time version of the day time practice of meditation and it represents a fantastic laboratory to explore the nature of our own mind. In the West, lucid dreaming has been recognized since the 1970s when researchers Stephen LaBerge and Keith Hearne almost around the same time scientifically proved lucid dreaming. Through pre-agreed eye movements, they were able to send a signal from the dream world into the material world at the moment when they became lucid. While the West likes to pride itself on being first, when it comes to lucid dreaming, the East had explored lucid dreams for many centuries long before it was confirmed a scientific endeavor in the Western world.
In Tibetan Buddhism, dream yoga, an even more encompassing concept for lucid dreaming, had been explored for centuries before it peeked the interest of scientists in the West. Indeed Tibetan Buddhists have a long history of exploring the mind and may hold many answers to our questions of what constitutes the nature of reality. Similar to meditation, with practice lucid dreaming is also available to anyone at no cost. It is also endogenous in that it does not require anything external to be used or put into the body in order to experience it.
Psychedelics have been going through quite a few volatile decades, as the surge of interest that had peaked in the 1970s was stifled by regulatory pressure to ban the various substances that produce the psychedelic effect. It was thanks to people such as Ram Dass that the movement lived on. These days there has been somewhat of a renaissance in the psychedelic field and resurgent interest in scientifically investigating the benefits of psychedelic substances further. Unfortunately, due to regulations around the world, they are still inaccessible for most people. As psychedelics gain broader acceptance in society, they will still require to be consumed under medical supervision. They hold a lot of promise and it is good that they are being investigated further as potential tools to heal people.
Ideally therefore we need to create a technology that would resemble a lucid dream in its nature. We need to make it available in such a way that anyone can experience it without sleep and training to become an oneironaut, who is someone that regularly experiences lucid dreams. As with the telescope we can use it without being consumed by it. As the brain computer industry continues to increase its capability to simultaneously map more neurons, it will become possible to create a synthetic version of lucid dreaming as a technological medium.
As brain computer interfaces allow us to interact with more neurons in the brain, that is millions instead of thousands now, we will be able to create virtual dreams. As we develop virtual dreams and create them into a medium similar to film or virtual reality, the unlimited energy and spirit of human imagination will make them more real than reality. Instead of wearing a headset, it will feel as if we are experiencing that reality as we experience waking reality. Virtual dreams will adopt the best properties of all other media that we have today and we will constantly improve upon them. Later on we will be able to share virtual dreams and allow them to be experienced by others. Eventually, virtual dreams will become a multiplayer game in a virtual world.
Therefore, we need to create brain computers that are powerful enough to usher in this era of virtual worlds, in which virtual dreams become the medium through which we communicate with others and experience an alternative reality.
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