you can use dreaming for more relaxing if you try or for feeling refreshed at the morning or even for therapy, but dreaming is the first step to expand your consciousness, to become aware of the existence of other realities and subuniverses. Okay, for the last thing you have to train a lot, but in this way you can live several lifes at the same time and can collect more experiences than the most other people will ever have.
Last but not least it is the next step in our evolution to become aware that we live in a huge network of realities, selves and planes.

Hm, as it happens every 90 minutes as a natural learning consolidation process, I don’t know whether it would be very useful to start trying to control it at will!

Hypnosis and meditation, which are both forms of focused attention, do engage the right hemisphere you’re absolutely right. But these states are useful more for ‘learning’ rather than for ‘creating’ I think, so you can still write and create art without specifically switching hemispheres!

Thanks so much for replying with that info. I think I’m going to order a copy of Rossi’s book this week. It sounds quite interesting. I wonder if people could apply his theory to perform that type of hemispheric switching at will. I’m sure there are many artists, musicians, and writers who would love to be able to shift their brain into a state dominated by the right hemisphere rather than the left. I know it can be achieved via certain types of brain/mind technology, and other techniques such as meditation also seem to trigger heightened right-brain activity in many people, but it would be very useful to be able to shift the dominant state back and forth at will.

Kris

There is Ernest Rossi’s book called ‘The Twenty Minute Break’ (1991 Palisades Gateway Publishing) in which he recounts the research which shows how the brain switches from left neo-cortical functioning to right neo-cortical functioning about every ninety minutes lasting for about twenty minutes.
This ultradian rhythm lasts throughout the 24 hour cycle and it is following this switchover that dreams occur at nighttime.

Also in the book which explains the expectation fulfilment theory, Dreaming Reality: how dreaming can keep us sane or drive us mad (2006 Human Givens Publishing) expands on the importance of Silberer’s
almost overlooked research on the autosymbolic effect which occurs at sleep onset whereby the leftbrained thought can be observed being converted into rightbrain metaphor.

- Silberer, H. 1951 Report on a method of eliciting and observing certain symbolic hallucination phenomena. Organization and Pathology of Thought, transition and commentary by Rapaport, D. Columbia University Press, 195-233″ and

- Silberer (1909) Bericht uber eine Methode, gewisse symbolische halluzinations – erscheinungen hervozurufen und zu beobachten, Jarhbuch psychoanalit. psychopath. Forsch., 513. 114, 176, 460-61, 499, 645-8″ [sorry I've only got the german language reference for this!])

Hope this helps

Eleanor

“The strange thoughts and awareness of dream-like events or weird thought processes are what happens when your brain performs a ‘hemisphere switch’ from the left to the right in order that you can switch off and go to sleep.”

-and-

“We do a mini hemispherical ’switch’ from left brain to right brain so we can process this information from the left brain to the right (knowledge is contained in patterns).”

I’m just curious about the science behind those comments and where the information about the hemispheric switch came from. If Eleanor happens to read this and could direct me to the book/article/research paper about it, I’d be very grateful. I study the mind/brain for a living so I’m always interested in things of that nature.

-Kris

I’d disagree as well. When I was remembering 90%+ of my dreams, I would say that the greater half were most certainly out of the ordinary, usually greatly so.

Interesting theory though.

-Hatter

“The waking state of a subject after taking hallucinogenic compounds – is this experience accessing the REM state of mind?” – if the nature of the REM state has been correctly assessed then, yes, drugs are certainly a way of accessing the REM state! That is what hallucinations are, either stress induced in psychosis, or artificially induced with drugs – it’s waking reality processed through the dreaming brain.