De Void couldn’t help but recall the power of archetypes as news of Osama Bin Laden’s death reverberated across the globe — and the way he laid it all out in the chilling videotape seized by U.S. troops shortly after the invasion of Afghanistan.

In it, a jubilant Bin Laden is holding court with his sycophants in Kandahar shortly after 9/11. Flush with sanctimonious pieties, OBL is discussing how the key to the hijackers’ success was sequestering and compartmentalizing information so that not even the agents themselves knew the full scope of the operation. Yet, as early as a year before the strikes, a colleague told OBL he dreamed of a soccer match against America in which the Arab team came dressed as pilots.

One of Bin Laden’s acolytes chimes in about a buddy who shared visions of a plane ramming a skyscraper before 9/11. Yet another added that he’d heard the same dream imagery from others. OBL himself apparently began to quietly freak before the attacks when a subordinate “came close and told me that he saw, in a dream, a tall building in America, and in the same dream he saw Mukhtar teaching them how to play karate.

“At that point,” Bin Laden declares, “I was worried that maybe the secret would be revealed if everyone starts seeing it in their dream. So I closed the subject.”

The American Book of the Dead’s about a writer who starts having prophetic dreams about the coming apocalypse,  as are people across the country – i.e. the collective unconscious is becoming reality. And if dreams are real, so might be fiction.  And once again, reality outdoes fiction.

“We would like to read people’s dreams,” says the lead scientist Dr Moran Cerf….

Dr Cerf makes his bold claim based on an initial study that he says suggests that the activity of individual brain cells, or neurons, are associated with specific objects or concepts.

He found, for example, that when a volunteer was thinking of Marilyn Monroe, a particular neuron lit up.

By showing volunteers a series of images, Dr Cerf and his colleagues were able to identify neurons for a wide range of objects and concepts – which they used to build up a database for each patient. These included Bill and Hilary Clinton, the Eiffel Tower and celebrities.

So by observing which brain cell lit up and when, Dr Cerf says he was effectively able to “read the subjects’ minds”.

Professor Mark Blagrove, a psychologist who runs a sleep laboratory at the University of Swansea, said that according to studies the number of people in Western societies who experienced a lucid dream had increased by between 10 and 40 per cent since the 1980s.

The most recent research suggests that about eight out of ten people will have a lucid dream in their lives.

It appears that “people’s abilities during dreaming are altering” as they become more adept at recognising that they are able to control their dreams, Professor Blagrove said.

Work at centres such as Swansea is slowly building a picture of what might be happening during these dreams and what secrets about the uncharted subconscious they could yield.

Although lucid dreams were identified and named by the Dutch psychologist Frederik van Eeden in 1913 and dreaming groups have been springing up for years, they are still controversial among scientists because they are difficult to monitor and evaluate.

However, in response to recent progress in the field, The New Scientist said in a June editorial that “the study of lucid dreaming has been seen as a fringe activity for too long”.

This leaps out:

There are certain traits that lucid dreamers share: they are creative but also problem-oriented and they tend to believe in personal responsibility rather than society’s responsibility.

What?  So lucid dreamers are more often Randian Republicans?  That needs A LOT more research, as it would seem that those interested in investigating dream-life would be more liberal than conservative.  Also, conservatives tend to be more religious, so how does this relate to someone’s dream life?

This would lend credence to Daniel Pinchbeck’s idea that psychic phenomena is happening at a more-rapid pace.  And if conservatives are getting a window into the psychedelic world of dreams, maybe there’s hope yet.

In the dream, I was with Anne in a sort of bookshop-restaurant where we were looking at books and waiting for lunch. Suddenly, there was a commotion outside. I went out and saw a number of enormous machines in the sky. They were not ordinary UFOs, but different shapes and sizes. I glimpsed a few grays, but for the most part, they were manned by people, both men and women in various sorts of uniforms and all with weapons.

Although they seemed quite cheerful–or perhaps because they were so cheerful–I got the impression that they were here to kill people, and I became frightened. When I turned to go back and get Anne and try to escape, a man taller than me confronted me. He had a gun, which he shot me with. It didn’t hurt me, but left a sort of film on my clothes, like a light dusting of spray paint.

I said, “You can’t kill people. People’s lives are sacred.” He replied, “lives are not sacred unless people make them sacred. The future is sacred.” Then he said, “We are here to make room for the future.”

Much of Strieber’s post-Communion writing seemed more like he was recalling dreams than anything else, which then calls into question Communion. It’s like he started believing that anything that came into his head had the makings of reality. Especially in the book Transformation, where he’s getting abducted at will and traveling to other planets in a landspeeder.  It calls into question everything.  On Amazon, a reviewer says, “I bought the story of Communion, but now I buy NONE OF IT!!” Doesn’t help that at the end of this piece, he “casually” mentions his book Omega Point.

So he strains credulity.  One of the more insane things I’ve seen with Strieber is this sort-of forgotten video:

In this tape Strieber also demonstrates his multi-tone chanting technique, and the method he uses to open the third eye, which has for him been a rich source of visionary experience.

He really does sit in a yoga pose doing insane-sounding multi-tone chanting, which really makes it seem like he’s a lifer, not just someone who’s in it to sell books.

I have dream-like memories of seeing a fleet of UFOs in the hill behind my house growing up – recurring. But I think these were merely dreams. Then again, scientists don’t entirely know what dreams are either.  After the last dream, I woke up with deafening, multi-toned ringing in my ears that didn’t go away for an hour or so.  The closest I’ve come to a UFO experience.

This is the story of a rational, sceptical woman, a mother and wife, who does not remember her dreams. Except once, when she dreamt her horse was dying. She woke so scared she went outside in the night. She found him dead. The next dream told her she would die herself, when she was 48…

Everyone wrestles with the concept of their own mortality, but few so directly explore and confront the subject. When Amy fell seriously ill, as her dream predicted, she went on a search to change that dream, leading her to eminent neuroscientist Mark Solms, and to new understanding of the complexity of our brains. The final confrontation takes us back into her dream with the help of a shaman, revealing a surprising twist to the tale.

Found at Dream Fiction, also interesting.

Situated by two large windows overlooking the grandeur of a parking lot and a hotel sign, I jump start the imagination every morning with dreams. After all, the dream world is filled with imagination, impossibilities made true, distinct personalities, strange animals, and unforgettable worlds.

So, “Inception” is less a Philip K. Dick movie than it is a Douglas Rushkoff movie. The description of the first segment in his Frontline piece is “A look at how corporate marketing ‘culture spies’ track the trend-setting teens.”

Really, the concept of “Inception” is not far-off from what’s already happening. No, we can’t enter people’s dreams to implant information, but information is being implanted regardless via TV and other media. David Sirota has a really excellent post focused on just this: The Deception of Real-World Inception.

The conservative media dreamland, for instance, ensconces its audience in an impregnable bubble—you eat breakfast with the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, you drive to the office with right-wing radio, you flit between Breitbart and Drudge at work, you come home to Fox News. The ideas bouncing around in this world—say, ideas about the Obama administration allegedly favoring blacks—don’t seem like propaganda to those inside the bubble. With heavily edited videos of screaming pastors and prejudice-sounding Department of Agriculture officials, these ideas are cloaked in the veneer of unchallenged fact, leaving the audience to assume its bigoted conclusions are completely self-directed and incontrovertible.

Same thing for those living in the closed-loop of the “traditional” media. Replace conservative news outlets with The New York Times, National Public Radio, WashingtonPost.com and network newscasts, and it’s just another dreamscape promulgating certain synthetic ideas (for instance, militarism and market fundamentalism), excluding other ideas (say, antiwar opinions and critiques of the free market) and bringing audiences to seemingly self-conceived and rational judgments—judgments that are tragically misguided.

Taken together, our society has achieved the goal of “Inception’s” idea-implanting protagonists—only without all the technological subterfuge.

Whole thing’s worth a read.  This isn’t science fiction – the dream world of our imaginations is already being manipulated.  Ideas are being implanted. No one needs to step inside your mind for this to happen.

“Inception” was fucking incredible, but not entirely what I was hoping for. I was hoping for more of a “Matrix”-style exploration of “What is reality?” – if dreams are as tactile as reality, then maybe reality is no different than a dream. The movie does that somewhat, but the rules of the dreamscape are pretty straightforward. You enter a dream, walk around, then wake up, where you don’t have the same kind of manipulation of reality as you do within the dream. Where Philip K. Dick would take this is to suggest that there is no difference between our waking and sleeping worlds – but “Inception” doesn’t really explore these implications.  This is not a polemic about consciousness, it’s a spy movie.

I also think that the world of dreams as portrayed in “Inception” isn’t quite realistic. Put another way, by portraying dreams as another realistic world no different than waking reality, it’s actually a less realistic depiction of what it is to dream. Dreams actually seem to be fairly chaotic. I’m sure most people have the experience in dreams where suddenly the dream is in a totally different locale, about a different subject entirely.  It’s rare when a dream takes on a realistic narrative where I wake up and think – I was just told the plot of a novel (this has happened).

Of course, if you were to lucidly enter a dream, you might have control over this kind of chaos, so maybe that’s moot, but what would have made “Inception” more psychedelic is if the dreams themselves were more unexpected and imaginative. It does that somewhat by showing how Leonardo DiCaprio’s relationship with his wife enters the dream world, but if he’s truly entering his subconscious, we’d also see talking rabbits and other things totally separate from our flat reality.

To do that, though, would have been another movie – and six hours long – so Christopher Nolan stuck with this premise, which is really just a spy movie, where you’re spying on the mind. He calls attention to this very much in the James Bond sequence in the snow at the end. So the movie’s a bit about the fantasy of moviemaking – the inherent unreality of movie fiction. The death bed sequence in the end is reminiscent of this scene from “2001″:

The snowmobile sequence is where the movie actually lost me – you enter the world of dreams and all you get are thugs with machine guns? There’s also a moment where a guy’s shooting a gun – the “forger” steps up to him and says something like “dream bigger” and the machine gun turns into some kind of grenade launcher.  If that’s the case, why weren’t they doing this over and over again? Why couldn’t they “imagine” the thugs away?  Maybe I’m missing one of the core rules about what you’re allowed to do in these dreams.

These criticisms are sort of a nitpick though for a movie that’s hugely imaginative and more entertaining than most movies coming out of Hollywood in last ten years, maybe ever.  I just wished it spent some time covering the mystical implications of the different levels of dreams.  What’s it mean for our waking life – what else can be extracted from the subconscious?  Because if we’re eventually able to enter dreams and all we use it for is corporate espionage, then we’re pretty fucked.

At the very least the movie’s sparking interesting articles like this one:

Inception: peering into the science of dreams

In the movie, the dream-snatchers use a drug called somnacin and a dream machine to upload a scenario into someone’s sleeping mind. One or more of them then go to sleep themselves, hooked up to the machine, and enter the target’s dream.

This fictional dream machine is called a Portable Automated Somnacin IntraVenous (PASIV) 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 be able to record someone’s dream – without the mess and danger (or the fun) of actually sharing that dream.

More:

• The Real Science of Dreaming
• How to Tame Your Nightmares
• Dream Sharing: Science or Fiction
• Inception: Dreams, Waking, and Epistemology