LUCID DREAMING LITERATURE

Lucidity*Flashes newsletter

• February 2014: “Sleep is the best meditation.”; Dreaming and Awakening; Lucid Dreaming Induction: The State of the Art 2014; Introducing N2D2.

Excerpts from  NightLight

• NL1.1: “How to Remember your Dreams”: practical hints on developing the art of dream recall—the first step to learning lucid dreaming.
• NL3.2: “Other Worlds: Out-Of-Body Experiences and Lucid Dreams” by Lynne Levitan and Stephen LaBerge. Discussion of a laboratory study comparing OBEs and lucid dreams.
• NL4.2: “A Thousand and One Nights of Exploring Lucid Dreaming” by Lynne Levitan. A summary of selected research carried out in NightLight.
• NL5.2: “Testing the Limits of Dream Control: The Light and Mirror Experiment” by Lynne Levitan and Stephen LaBerge. To what extent can we influence dreams in the directions we desire? Do we have more or less control over our experiences in dreaming than in waking life?
• NL5.3: “Lucid Dreaming Research: Past and Future” by Stephen LaBerge. A review of laboratory studies on lucid dreaming at Stanford University and a proposal for future research.
• NL6.2: “A Fool's Guide to Lucid Dreaming” by Lynne Levitan. Three common failures of lucidity and how to overcome them.
• NL6.3: “An Hour of Wakefulness Before Morning Naps Makes Lucidity More Likely” by Stephen LaBerge, Leslie Phillips, and Lynne Levitan. Getting up an hour early, staying awake for 30-60 minutes reading about lucid dreaming, doing MILD briefly, then taking a morning nap is an effective way to induce lucid dreams.
• NL7.1: “Adventures with the NovaDreamer” by Keelin. A creative dreamer's experiences and adventures using the NovaDreamer to induce lucid dreams.
• NL7.3-4: “Diary From Lucid Dream Camp” by Keelin. The further adventures of an admitted dreamer at the first annual lucid dreaming workshop: Consciousness: Dreaming and Waking at Stanford University.
• NL7.3-4: “Prolonging Lucid Dreams” by Stephen LaBerge. Two techniques effectively prolong lucid dreams, increasing the relative odds of staying in the dreamstate by 30-50 times.

Excerpts from   Lucid Dreaming

• Contents: Chapter outline of LaBerge's 1985 classic,   Lucid Dreaming
• Chapter 8: “Dreaming, Function, and Meaning” Why we have dreams and what do they mean? Contemporary theories of dreaming.
• Chapter 9: “Dreaming, Illusion, and Reality” Curiosities of dreaming consciousness: Out-of-body experiences, dream telepathy, and “mutual” or “shared” dreams.

Excerpts from   Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming

• Contents: Chapter outline of the contents of   Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming (1990) by Stephen LaBerge and Howard Rheingold
• Chapter 6: “Principles and Practice of Lucid Dreaming” shows you how to retain your lucidity, prevent premature awakenings, awaken when you wish, and guide your dreams intelligently.
• Chapter 10: “Overcoming Nightmares” helps you use lucid dreaming to face and overcome fears and inhibitions that may be preventing you from getting the most out of your life.

Research Articles and Abstracts

• “Lucid dreaming: Evidence that REM sleep can support unimpaired cognitive function and a powerful methodology for studying the psychophysiology of dreaming” by Stephen LaBerge. Commentary in a special issue on dreaming in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2000).
• “Varieties of Lucid Dreaming Experience” by Stephen LaBerge and Don DeGracia. The meaning of “lucid dreaming.” How do lucid dreams relate to “astral projection” and OBEs? Variations in lucid dream initiation. Perceptual variations. Emotions. Volition and action. Termination of lucid dreams.
• “Lucid Dreaming: Psychophysiological Studies of Consciousness during REM Sleep” by Stephen LaBerge. Lucid dreaming physiologically verified. Physiological characteristics of lucid dreaming. Psychophysiological relationships during REM sleep. Implications for research on sleep and cognition.
• “Validity Established of DreamLight Cues for Eliciting Lucid Dreaming” by Stephen LaBerge and Lynne Levitan. A controlled study demonstrating the validity and effectiveness of the DreamLight lucid dream induction device.
• “Dreaming and Consciousness” by Stephen LaBerge. Abstract of paper presented at the  Toward a Science of Consciousness Conference (Tucson, April, 1996).
• Frederik van Eeden's 1913 article, “A Study of Dreams” in which the term “lucid” dreaming is first used. Thanks to Lucidity Institute member Blake Wilfong (blake@phoenix.net) for making this classic available.

EXPERIMENTS IN LUCID DREAMING

Comparing Lucid and Non-Lucid Dream Content. Some scientists seem to assume that lucid dreams are “too different” from non-lucid dreams to use lucid dreamers to study, for example, mind-body relationships during REM sleep. With an aim towards understanding the extent to which lucid dreams differ from non-lucid dreams in other ways than (obviously) whether or not the dreamer knows it is a dream at the time, we have designed the following simple study. In short, we are asking for four dream reports via email; Two of these reports should be lucid dreams, and two should be non-lucid dreams.
The Best Sleep Posture for Lucid Dreaming: A Revised Experiment Testing a Method of Tibetan Dream Yoga. An experiment investigating sleep posture and nasal laterality (an ancient Yogic technique for influencing states of mind), combined with the extraordinarily powerful napping technique of inducing lucid dreams.

LUCIDITY INSTITUTE MAILING LIST

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AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT...

Bedar, the Watchman, caught Nasrudin prising open the window of his own bedroom from the outside, in the depths of night.
“What are you doing, Mulla? Locked out?”
“Hush! They say I walk in my sleep. I am trying to surprise myself and find out.”Nasrudin is a mirror in which you see yourself. Want to see more?

http://www.lucidity.com/

Future Earth: 2025

Future Earth 2025 takes us on an extraordinary CGI journey into the future offering a vision of what the world might be like if we continue to deplete one of our primary resources - water. Los Angeles consumed by raging firestorms, Rome under attack from billons of locusts, Washington DC flooded, massive dust storms engulfing Las Vegas, nations suffering drought as rivers dry up, forcing conflicts over water. Just the stuff of apocalyptic Hollywood movies?

Its estimated the world's ever growing population will need 50% more water in the next 20 years.Future Earth 2025 creates credible disaster scenarios based on changing weather and rain patterns, and uses the testimony of world leading scientists and engineers to project the future, and explore how these disasters can be diverted by adopting new technologies and making changes to the way we live. Future Earth 2025 is produced by UK based Darlow Smithson.

 http://www.cbc.ca/passionateeye/episodes/future-earth-2025

Why Pluto is No Longer a Planet

Let’s find out why Pluto is no longer considered a planet.

Pluto was first discovered in 1930 by Clyde W. Tombaugh at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff Arizona. Astronomers had long predicted that there would be a ninth planet in the Solar System, which they called Planet X. Only 22 at the time, Tombaugh was given the laborious task of comparing photographic plates. These were two images of a region of the sky, taken two weeks apart. Any moving object, like an asteroid, comet or planet, would appear to jump from one photograph to the next.

After a year of observations, Tombaugh finally discovered an object in the right orbit, and declared that he had discovered Planet X. Because they had discovered it, the Lowell team were allowed to name it. They settled on Pluto, a name suggested by an 11-year old school girl in Oxford, England (no, it wasn’t named after the Disney character, but the Roman god of the underworld).

The Solar System now had 9 planets.

Astronomers weren’t sure about Pluto’s mass until the discovery of its largest Moon, Charon, in 1978. And by knowing its mass (0.0021 Earths), they could more accurately gauge its size. The most accurate measurement currently gives the size of Pluto at 2,400 km (1,500 miles) across. Although this is small, Mercury is only 4,880 km (3,032 miles) across. Pluto is tiny, but it was considered larger than anything else past the orbit of Neptune.

Over the last few decades, powerful new ground and space-based observatories have completely changed previous understanding of the outer Solar System. Instead of being the only planet in its region, like the rest of the Solar System, Pluto and its moons are now known to be just a large example of a collection of objects called the Kuiper Belt. This region extends from the orbit of Neptune out to 55 astronomical units (55 times the distance of the Earth to the Sun).

Astronomers estimate that there are at least 70,000 icy objects, with the same composition as Pluto, that measure 100 km across or more in the Kuiper Belt. And according to the new rules, Pluto is not a planet. It’s just another Kuiper Belt object.

Here’s the problem. Astronomers had been turning up larger and larger objects in the Kuiper Belt. 2005 FY9, discovered by Caltech astronomer Mike Brown and his team is only a little smaller than Pluto. And there are several other Kuiper Belt objects in that same classification.

Astronomers realized that it was only a matter of time before an object larger than Pluto was discovered in the Kuiper Belt.

And in 2005, Mike Brown and his team dropped the bombshell. They had discovered an object, further out than the orbit of Pluto that was probably the same size, or even larger. Officially named 2003 UB313, the object was later designated as Eris. Since its discovery, astronomers have determined that Eris’ size is approximately 2,600 km (1,600 miles) across. It also has approximately 25% more mass than Pluto.

With Eris being larger, made of the same ice/rock mixture, and more massive than Pluto, the concept that we have nine planets in the Solar System began to fall apart. What is Eris, planet or Kuiper Belt Object; what is Pluto, for that matter? Astronomers decided they would make a final decision about the definition of a planet at the XXVIth General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union, which was held from August 14 to August 25, 2006 in Prague, Czech Republic.

Astronomers from the association were given the opportunity to vote on the definition of planets. One version of the definition would have actually boosted the number of planets to 12; Pluto was still a planet, and so were Eris and even Ceres, which had been thought of as the largest asteroid. A different proposal kept the total at 9, defining the planets as just the familiar ones we know without any scientific rationale, and a third would drop the number of planets down to 8, and Pluto would be out of the planet club. But, then… what is Pluto?

In the end, astronomers voted for the controversial decision of demoting Pluto (and Eris) down to the newly created classification of “dwarf planet”.

Read more: http://www.universetoday.com/13573/why-pluto-is-no-longer-a-planet/
 http://www.universetoday.com/13573/why-pluto-is-no-longer-a-planet/#ixzz362ZrUYtc