REM Sleep & Astral Projection

[David Warner]

Ap Friends,

I started to question the stages of REM sleep with astral projection. I wanted for clarification exactly when does REM sleep occur.

My question is that can REM occur within the first 15-30mins of sleep and bring on the out of body experience? As I've read on-line on research states that REM starts within 70-90 minutes after the physical body has traveled through stages 1,2,3,4 to get to stage 5(rem sleep). If this indeed is where lucid dreaming occurs and science associates obe activity in stage 5, so what do you label someone being able to fully conscious project within 15-30mins.

Also someone that is sleeping through out the night. Gets up to goto the bathroom, raid the fridge for a midnight snack then heads back to bed and experiences the obe within 10mins of sleeping. Would this be considered the first stage or 5th stage (rem sleep).

Your input is welcome.

Tvos[/list]

[AndrewTheSinger]

Hey Tvos,

Yeah, it can happen during the first minutes of sleep, specially if you've been sleep deprived, your brain will throw you right into the REM sleep to compensate the loss of the past days.

This cycle you mentioned from 1-5 repeats itself 4-5 times throughout the night, after that you'll only have REM sleep, no more 1-4. So if you wake up after having had a certain amount of sleep, it is most likely that you will be thrown into REM sleep as soon as you fall asleep again.

[AndrewTheSinger]

I've had forgotten that the duration of the Non-REM stages and the REM stage varies along the night. During the first cycles you'll spend a lot of time going from 1-4, and then a short time on REM. By the morning before you wake up you will be spending most of the time on REM sleep, if not all.

[David Warner]

AndrewTheSinger,


So I guess we are all but lucid dreaming then..:) I am starting to question the process of the vibrations, cataleptic state that renders the physical body immobile. With the REM state as you suggested taking effect immediately upon sleep,  what really separates the lucid dream and the obe distinguishing from the two. Besides the obviously, precognitive obe's, validations, and seeing the body what else is there two really separate the two?

Tvos

[AndrewTheSinger]

The 'sleep paralysis' or 'cataleptic state' occurs as a result of the transition Beta - Alpha, and Low Alpha brainwaves. It's really the first stages of sleep, the 1-4 cycle is a journey from beta (alert) to alpha (relaxed), then theta (asleep) to delta (deep sleep, coma).  

There have been studies proposing that the Obe experience happened during the REM stage, so, neurophysiologically there would be no distinction between Obe and dream.  But some say otherwise:

http://www.astralpulse.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=4817&highlight=delta+obe

[AndrewTheSinger]

Check out this website, everything on sleep:

http://www.holistic-online.com/Remedies/Sleep/sleep_home.htm

[blade5x]

The 'sleep paralysis' or 'cataleptic state' occurs as a result of the transition Beta - Alpha, and Low Alpha brainwaves. It's really the first stages of sleep, the 1-4 cycle is a journey from beta (alert) to alpha (relaxed), then theta (asleep) to delta (deep sleep, coma).  

There have been studies proposing that the Obe experience happened during the REM stage, so, neurophysiologically there would be no distinction between Obe and dream.  But some say otherwise:

http://www.astralpulse.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=4817&highlight=delta+obe

Uhh... I've induced all my sleep-paralysis in the morning after getting atleast 5 hours of sleep. You have sleep paralysis in REM stages so you don't act your actions that you perform in your dreams in your bed.

[greatoutdoors]

TVoS,

The following is an article from US News, the May 5, 2006 issue. I tried to PM you and send it as an attachment, but can't find the "Send" button. So, I'm doing it the easy way.

This is pretty interesting:


Health & Medicine

What Dreams Are Made Of
By Marianne Szegedy-Maszak

Technologies that reveal the inner workings of the brain are beginning to tell the sleeping mind's secrets

Strange images appear from long-forgotten memories. Or out of nowhere: You're roller-skating on water; your mother flashes by on a trapeze; your father is in labor; a friend dead for years sits down at the dinner table. Here are moments of unspeakable terror; there, mo¬ments of euphoria or serenity. Shakespeare wrote, "We are such stuff as dreams are made on," and 300 years later, Sigmund Freud gave the poetry a neat psychoanalytic spin when he called dreams "the royal road to the unconscious." The movies that unfold in our heads some nights are so powerful¬ly resonant they haunt us for days -- or inspire us. Mary Shel¬ley dreamed of Frankenstein before she created him on paper; the melody to "Yesterday" came to Paul McCartney as he slept.

Everybody dreams – yet no one, throughout history, has fully grasped what the dreaming mind is doing. Art the nightly narratives a message from the unconscious to the conscious mind, as Freud believed? Or are they simply the product of random electrical flashes in the brain? Today, researchers aided by powerful technologies that reveal the brain in action are concluding that both schools of thought hold truth. "This is the greatest adventure of all time," says Harvard psychiatrist and dream re¬searcher J. Allan Hobson. "The devel¬opment of brain imaging is the equiva¬lent of Galileo's invention of the telescope, only we are now exploring inner space instead of outer space."

Mind-brain dance
The dream re¬searchers' new tools, functional mag¬netic resonance imaging and positron emission tomography (PET) scanning, have been used for some time to capture the waking brain at work – making deci¬sions, feeling frightened or joyous, cop¬ing with uncertainty. And those efforts have shown clearly that psychology and physiology are intimately related: In someone suffering from an anxiety disorder, for example, the fear center of the brain – the amygdale – "lights up" as neurons fire in response to images that trigger anxiety; it flickers in a minuet with the center of memory, the hippocampus. Scanning people who are sleeping, too, suggests that the same sort of mind-brain dance continues 24 hours a day.

"Psychology has built its model of the mind strictly out of waking behavior," say Rosalind Cartwright, chair of the department of behavioral science at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, who has studied dreams for most of her 83 years. "We know that the mind does not turn off during sleep; it goes into a different stage." Brain cells fire, and the mind spins. Problems find solutions; emotional angst seems to be soothed; out-of-the-box ideas germinate and take root.

The door between the kitchen and the garage was split, so you could open the top half without opening the bottom half. It was the only safe way of doing it, because we had a rhinoceros in the garage. The garage was a lot bigger, though; it was also sort of a basement, and led underneath the rest of the house. My mother was cooking dinner, and I went into the bathroom where my brother Stuart was. The rhinoceros punched a hole in the floor with his horn.
- Madeline, third grade

What to make of young Madeline's dream? To Freud, had he met her, Madeline's rhinoceros horn would al¬most certainly have symbolized a penis, and the animal's violence would have been an expression of normal but threaten¬ing sexual feelings toward her brother – or perhaps of a fear of men in general. Freud saw dreams as deeply buried wishes disguised by symbols, a way to gratify de¬sires unacceptable to the conscious mind. His ideas endured for years, until scientists started systematical¬ly studying dream content and decided that actually, some¬thing less exotic is going on.

"Dreams do enact – they dramatize. They are like plays of how we view the world and oneself in it," says William Domhoff, who teaches psy¬chology and sociology at the Universi¬ty of California – Santa Cruz. "But they do not provide grandiose meanings." Domhoff bases his view on a study of themes and images that recur in a data¬bank of some 16,000 dreams – including Madeline's – that have been collect¬ed as oral narratives and are held at Santa Cruz. (The narratives can be read at www.dreambank.net.)

Post-Freudians might argue that the monsters lurking in children's dreams signal a growing awareness of the world around them and its dangers. Young children describe very simple and concrete images, while the dreams of 9- and 10-year-olds get decidedly more com¬plex. A monster that goes so far as to chase or attack might represent a person who is frightening to the child during wak¬ing hours. "Dreaming serves a vital function in the maturation of the brain and in proc¬essing the experi¬ences of the day," says Alan Siegel, professor of psychology at UC-Berkeley and author of Dream Wisdom.

Nonsense
Physiolo¬gy purists, who would say that Madeline's brain is simply flash¬ing random images, got their start in 1953 with the discovery of rapid eye movement sleep. Using primi¬tive electroencephalograms, researchers watched as every 90 minutes, sleepers' eyes darted back and forth and brain waves surged. Then, in 1977, Harvard psychia¬trists Hobson and Robert McCarley re¬ported that during sleep, electrical ac¬tivity picked up dramatically in the most primitive area of the brain – the pons – which, by simply stimulating other parts of the brain, produced weird and dis¬connected narratives. Much like people looking for meaning in an inkblot, they concluded, dreams are the brain's vain attempt to impose coherence where there is none.

Or maybe that's not the whole story, either, said a young neuropsychologist at the Royal London School of Medicine 20 years later, when his findings hinted that dreaming is both a mental and a physical process. Mark Solms showed that dreams can't be explained as sim¬ple physical reactions to flashes from the primitive pons, since some of the most active dreamers in his study had suffered brain damage in that area. On the other hand, in those with damage to regions of the brain associated with higher-order motivation, passion¬ate emotions, and abstract thinking, the nightly movies had stopped. That seemed a sign that dreams might indeed express the mind's ideas and motiva¬tions. "It is a mistake to think that we can study the brain using the same con¬cepts we use for the liver," says Solms. "From my perspective, dreaming is just thinking in a very different biochemical state," says Deirdre Barrett, who teaches psychology at Har¬vard and is editor of the journal Dreaming. The threads can be "just as complex as waking thought and just as dull. They are overwhelmingly visual, and language is less impor¬tant, and logic is less important."

I am a traveler carrying one light bag and looking for a place to spend the night. I...discover a hostel of a sort in a large in¬door space big enough to house a gymna¬sium. I find a spot near a corner and pre¬pare for bed. I think to myself "Luckily, I have my high-tech pillow." I take out of my bag a light, flat panel about 8 by 10 inch¬es and the thickness of a thick piece of card¬board. "It works by applying a voltage," I say." There's a new kind of material which fluffs up when you apply a voltage. "On the face of the panel is a liquid-crystal display with two buttons, one labeled "on "and one labeled "off. " I touch the "on" button with my index finger, and the fiat panel magically inflates to the dimen¬sions of a fluffy pillow. I lay it down on the ground and comfort¬ably go to sleep.
Chuck, scientist (from Dreambank.net)

If Chuck's experience is an example of logic gone to sleep, no won¬der dreamers so often wake up shouting, "Eureka!" Indeed, his¬tory is filled with ex¬amples of inspiration that blossomed dur¬ing sleep and eventu¬ally led to inventions or works of art or mil¬itary moves. Exactly what happens to in¬spire creativity is un¬clear, but the new technology is providing clues.

Crazy smart
Brain scans per¬formed on people in REM sleep, for example, have shown that even as certain brain cen¬ters turn on-the emotional seat of the brain and the part that processes all visual inputs are wide awake-one vital area goes absolutely dormant: the systematic and clear-thinking prefrontal cortex, where cau¬tion and organization reside. "This can explain the bizarreness you see in dreams, the crazy kind of sense that your brain is ignoring the usual ways that you put things together," says Robert Stickgold, associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard and director of the Center for Sleep and Cognition at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. "This is what you want in a state in which creativity is enhanced. Creativity is nothing more and nothing less than putting memories together in a way that they never have been before."

Putting memories together is also an essential part of learning; people integrate the memory of new information, be it how to fie shoelaces or conjugate French verbs, with existing knowledge. Does dreaming help people learn? No one knows-but some sort of boost seems to happen dur¬ing sleep. Many studies by sleep researchers have shown that people taught a new task performed it better after a night of sleep.
A study of how quickly dreamers solve problems supports Stickgold's theory that the sleeping mind can be quite nimble and inventive. Participants were asked to solve scrambled word puzzles after being awakened during both the REM phase of sleep and the less active non-REM phase. Their per¬formance improved by 3 2 percent when they worked on the puzzles coming out of REM sleep, which told researchers that that phase is more conducive to fluid reasoning. During non-REM sleep, it appears, our more cautious selves kick into gear.

Indeed, PET scans of people in a non-REM state show a decline in brain en¬ergy compared with REM sleep and increased activity in those dormant schoolmarmish lobes. Does this affect the content of dreams? Yes, say re¬searchers from Harvard and the Boston University School of Medicine.

Since people should theoretically be more uninhibited when the controlling prefrontal cortex is quiet, the team tracked participants for two weeks to see if their REM dreams were more social¬ly aggressive than the ones they report¬ed during non-REM sleep. The REM dreams, in fact, were much more likely to involve social interactions and tend¬ed to be more aggressive.

I had a horrible dream. Howard was in a coffin. I yelled and screamed at his morn that it was all her fault. I kicked myself that I hadn't waited to become a widow rather than a divorcee in order to get the in¬surance. I woke up feeling miserable, the dream was so icky. Barb (from Dreambank.net)

To many experts, Barb's bad dream would be a good sign, an indication that she would recover from the sorrow of her divorce. A vivid dream life, in which troubled or anxious people experience tough emotions while asleep, is thought to act, in the words of Cartwright, as "a kind of internal therapist."

The enduring and vexing question is: How much of value do dreams say? Despite all the efforts to quantify, to meas¬ure, no one has an answer yet. But dreams have played a role in psy¬chotherapy for over a century, since Freud theorized that they signal deep and hidden motivations. "A dream is the one domain in which many of a pa¬tient's defenses are sufficiently relaxed that themes emerge that ordinarily would not appear in waking life," says Glen Gabbard, professor of psychia¬try and psychoanalysis at Baylor College of Medicine.

Sometimes, dreams can be a helpful diagnostic tool, a way of taking the emo¬tional temperature of a patient. The dreams of clinically depressed people are notable for their utter lack of activ¬ity, for example.

Might there be a physiological reason? Erie Nofzinger, director of the Sleep Neuroimaging Research Program at the Uni¬versity of Pittsburgh medical school, has studied PET scans of depressed patients and has found that the difference be¬tween their waking and sleeping states is far less dramatic than normal. On the one hand, he says, "we were shocked, sur¬prised, "and amazed at how much activi¬ty" there was in the emotional brain of healthy people during sleep. In depressed patients, by contrast, the vigilant pre¬frontal cortex, which normally is not ac¬tive during sleep, worked overtime. Never surrendering to the soothing power of dreams, the brain is physically constrained, and its dream life shows it.

Healing power
Is it possible that dream¬ing can actually heal? "We know that 60 to 70 percent of peo¬ple who go through a depression will re¬cover without treat¬ment," says Cartwright, who recently tested her theory that maybe they are work¬ing through their troubles while asleep. In a study whose re-suits were published this spring in the journal Psychiatry Research, she recruit¬ed 30 people going through a divorce and asked them to record their dreams over five months. Depressed patients whose dreams were rich with emotion – one woman reported seething while her ex-husband danced with his new girlfriend – eventually recovered without the need for drugs or extensive psy¬chotherapy. But those whose dreams were bland and empty of feeling were not able to recover on their own.

I've sat straight up in bed many times, re¬living it, re-seeing it, rehearing it. And it's in the most absurd ways that only a dream could depict.., the one that comes to mind most, dreaming of a green pool in front of me. That was part of the radarscope. It was a pool of gel, and I reached into the radarscope to stop that flight. But in the dream, I didn't harm the plane. I just held it in my hand, and somehow that stopped everything.
Danielle O'Brien, air traffic controller for American Airlines Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001 (in an interview with ABC News)

Many clinicians working with trauma¬tized patients have found that their nightmares follow a common trajectory. First, the dreams re-create the horrors; later, as the person begins to recover, the stories involve better outcomes. One way to help victims of trauma move on is to encourage them to wake themselves up in the midst of a horrifying dream and consciously take control of the narrative, to take action, much as O'Brien appears to have done in her dream. This can break the cycle of nightmares by offering a sense of mastery. "If you can change the dream content," says Harvard's Bar¬rett, author of Trauma and Dreams, "you see a reduction in all the other post-traumatic symptoms."

Cartwright recalls helping a rape vic¬tim who came in suffering from night¬mares in which she felt an utter lack of control; together, they worked to edit the young woman's dreams of being in situations where she was powerless-of lying on the floor of an elevator with¬out walls as it rose higher and higher over Lake Michigan, for example. "I told her, 'Remember, this is your con¬struction. You made it up, and you can stop it,' "says Cartwright, who coached the woman to recognize the point at which the dream was becoming fright¬ening and try to seize control. At the next session, the woman reported that, as the elevator rose, she decided to stand in her dream and figure out what was happening. The walls rose around her until she felt safe.

A window? A royal road? A way for the brain to integrate today with yes¬terday? While definitive answers re¬main elusive, the experience of dream¬ing is clearly as universal as a heartbeat and as individual as a fingerprint-and rich with possibilities for both scientist and poet.

GETTING THE MESSAGE
Dreams may be reveal¬ing, but only if you can remember them. Even the most sophisticat¬ed dream chroniclers, notes Harvard researcher Robert Stickgold, typically can recall only about 15 minutes of their nightly two-hour movie. But dream recall is a skill that can be learned, says Alan Siegel, author of Dream Wisdom. Here's how to practice:

•   Keep a notebook by your bed, and record every dream-no matter how brief-immediately upon waking, even if it's when you're groggy at 3 a.m.
•   Prep before sleep by re¬viewing the day's events in your own mind or with a family member.
•   Rest quietly for a few moments before getting up so that images have a chance to resurface. It may help to assume your sleep¬ing position.
•   Record any image, feel¬ing, idea, or fragmentary narrative, no matter how garbled or weird or mun¬dane it may seem. People tend to feel that their dreams are unimportant, but treating even frag¬ments as legitimate will help more detail stick. When you write a dream down, don't make any ad¬ditional associations – stick to the facts.
•   Don't attempt to organ¬ize the dream or edit it, even if it seems illogical.
•   After you've finished de¬scribing a dream, note any feelings or associations that come to mind on the back of the page. For example: "I woke up terrified." Or: "It reminded me of my old childhood house."
•   Some people find re¬membered dreams to be more vivid if they draw them or describe them into a tape recorder.
•   Try giving yourself a pep talk before you go to sleep. Say, "When I wake up, I'll remember." - M.S.M.


Frankenstein and Mary Shelley
Can man create life? A talk on evolution that considered the possibility so disturbed Mary Godwin that she went to bed and dreamed up Frankenstein. She and three other writers, including her soon-to-be-husband, Percy Shelley, were staying at Lake Geneva in Switzerland during that summer of 1816, entertaining one an¬other by telling and competing to write the best ghost stories. Shelley's vivid dream, in which she saw a "hideous phantasm of a man stretched out" and a scientist using a machine to try to bring him to life, inspired hers. She began to write the next day. - Betsy Cluema

Joseph and a Word From God"
When Joseph discovered that Mary was pregnant during their engagement, he was "just crushed," says Father Gerald Kleba, a Roman Catholic priest in St. Louis who wrote the his¬torical novel Joseph Remem¬bered. Assuming that she had committed adultery, Joseph fig¬ured he would have to leave her. But an angel visited him in a dream, according to the Bible, and told him not to be afraid. Mary had conceived through the Holy Spirit and would bear a special child. That "huge aha moment" shaped the rest of Joseph's life, says Kleba, and still speaks to many Christians of the power of faith. - B.Q.

Paul McCartney and "Yesterday"
"I woke up with a lovely tune in my head," Paul McCartney re¬called to his biographer, Barry Miles. "I thought, 'That's great. I wonder what that is?" He got up that morning in May 1965, went to the piano, and began playing the melody that would become "Yesterday." At first, lacking lyrics, he improvised with "Scrambled eggs, oh my baby, how I love your legs." While he really liked the tune, he had some reservations: "Be¬cause I'd dreamed it, I couldn't believe I'd written it." Today, with more than 1,600 covers, the song holds the Guinness world record for most recorded versions. - B.Q.

Saddam and His Winning Strategy
Saddam Hussein used his dreams to guide policy, some¬times to the befuddlement of his closest advisers. The dictator's personal secretary told U.S. military investigators in an in¬terview in 2003 that Hussein would sleep on difficult prob¬lems and report the solutions the next morning. One time that his dream got it right: During the Iran-lraq War of the 1980s, Hussein dreamed that the Irani¬ans would launch an offensive through a large marshland, so he ordered more troops there. His generals thought the move illogical but acquiesced. The Iranians attacked there, and the Iraqis prevailed. – B.Q.

Jack Nicklaus and His Grip
In the summer of 1964, Jack Nicklaus was in a slump: "It got to the point where a 76 looked like a great score to me," the golfer told the Cleveland Plain Dealer. One night, during the Cleveland Open, he dreamed he was hitting the ball with a dif¬ferent grip – and it worked bet¬ter. So he tried it the next day, shot a 68, then a 65, and ended the tournament tied for third place. For the year, he shot about a 70 average, the lowest in professional golf. 'Tin almost embarrassed to admit how I changed my grip this week," he told the reporter at the time. "But that's how it happened. It's kinda crazy, isn't it?" – B.Q.

[David Warner]

GreatOutdoors,

Thank You for adding the info. on dreams to this discussion!

Thats a lot to read but enjoyable. Too bad they didn't touch up on lucid dreaming or the obe, but I guess thats a whole different terriority..:)

Tvos

[greatoutdoors]

It was a long post and I apologize for that.
:redface:
But it is interesting reading, and right on topic.

[David Warner]

Greatoutdoors,

Definitely and Thank You for adding the post.

Interesting information indeed!

Tvos

[-E-]

Very interesting article, thanks for posting it, there really are so many mysteries when it comes to the sleeping mind.

[Kazbadan]

Hey, you said that you were to send taht long post message to tvos in private message...glad you dindt! great article! thanks

[greatoutdoors]

Thanks folks! I always worry about posting too long, but that one seemed worth sharing.

IMO I believe dreams are perhaps a pathway to ... great things? (I don't know how to phrase it exactly). :confused: I believe OBE's may be much the same thing. They are, in effect, tools. If we can learn to use them properly, who knows what we can achieve!

[jub jub]

Hi TVos,

I was taking a short cat nap at work during my lunch break one day and I experienced a short OBE, probably about 5 seconds long. It startled me so much that I awoke. I'm pretty sure I was no where near stage 5 but was merely relaxing!

[David Warner]

Jub Jub,

The best time to have obe's are in class, early in the morning when the professor is putting you into a catatonic state... Yes, I've had this happen to me on occasion, drifting off and then out into the classroom.

Tvos

[blade5x]

I seem to have some kind of barrier for OBEs when taking naps. I'll get to a state where pretty much I hear going on around get's played in detail in my head. But I don't seem to get further than that. I took a nap for 30-40 minutes today and must have been in that state for atleast 25 minutes. I don't know if I can have an OBE from there, as I'm only familiar with having one after inducing SP, something that doesn't seem to happen to me when I take naps.