What goes on in the cranium…

Have you ever had the experience where you’re lying in bed, and you know you should be getting up, but a pleasant dream comes to mind? Let’s say you have entered a crowded room full of beautiful people, who murmur of your arrival to one another in hushed tones. They turn to look at you, admiringly, and their gaze meets your eyes and then travels down to your belt buckle, and then below; whereupon, they all start suppressing laughter and the spell is broken. Yes: your fly is undone. Your social status begins to crumble. Your wife and children start to hold you in open contempt. You become depressed and lose your job. You gamble your life savings away on the horses.

Then you wake up in a cold sweat. It has just been a dream, of course: one that started out pleasantly, but didn’t end that way.

You haven’t had that experience? You mean, it’s just me? But I thought every male…?

Now suppose you could have the wherewithal to say to yourself: “hold it, just a minute: I know this is just a dream. So let’s rerun the tape and have me re-enter the room, properly zipped up and with no ketchup stain on my tie.” Think of the heartburn that could be avoided.

That is the promise lurking tantalizingly behind a report from the Reuters news agency about an experiment conducted by a psychologist at FrankfurtUniversity in Germany in what is called “lucid dreaming.” Lucid dreaming is the experience of dreaming, but at the same time being aware that you are dreaming—and therefore potentially being able to control the plot of your dream.

The study—and, I should say if it isn’t obvious, that I have absolutely no qualification to sound knowledgeable —is based on a finding that when lucid dreaming does occur, it is accompanied by electrical activity called “gamma waves.” Gamma waves are generally associated with high-level thinking and self-awareness.

So the study asked what would happen if gamma waves were induced into dreaming brains by electrodes attached to the scalp. And guess what? The 27 volunteers reported both that they were aware that they were dreaming and that they were able to exercise some control over the outcome of their dreams.

The hope behind the study is that it might be possible to use induced lucid dreaming as a therapy for the recovery from traumatic events that tend to get relived in dreams. And good luck to them, I say. Especially since, with apologies to Freud, Jung and their friends and relations, I haven’t a clue what restorative functions my dreams might be performing for me, never mind any outside assistance.

What does worry me is the extent to which this is another indicator of just how much my thoughts can now be ‘read’ externally. Am I on the cusp of losing their privacy and being held accountable for what they contain? I have always assumed that, as with the Las Vegas slogan, what goes on in the cranium stays in the cranium. I may be thinking “jeepers, that idiot Farnsworthy deserves a pie in the face,” but I like to think that just thinking that is not the same as doing it. In fact, I like to think that just thinking that increases the probability that I won’t do it. I would hate to think that, owing to advances in brain science, the police could charge me with conspiracy to commit assault, or Farnsworthy could sue me for slander just because I harboured those thoughts.

Of course, this worry didn’t start with brainwaves. Back in the 1970s, we had the mood ring—and still do. The theory behind the mood ring is that we can’t control our emotions, which express themselves in changes in body temperature. So (and I should qualify this by saying I have only heard this is true) I can spot a person spotting me in a singles bar and identify when animal magnetism is at work, just by checking the colour of that person’s ring. Same sort of thing with the lie detector, which assumes that our bodies have to work harder to lie than to tell the truth, so that lying is expressed in an accelerated heartbeat. And there is a professor somewhere in California who has made a living studying the minute detail of facial expressions as a key to emotional state.

And now we have the lucid dreams study, which comes on the heels of a Scientific American report in March, 2013 that scientists can now scan the brain and determine what image a person has brought to mind when thinking about another person.

So how much longer will it be, I ask myself, until Farnsworthy accosts me with his smartphone in hand and, with the benefit of his ThoughtExtract app, accuses me of thinking negative thoughts about him? Or until I, with the benefit of my Thought- Protect app, prevent him from accessing my thoughts—at least until version 7.2 of his app overcomes my app, and so on and so on until civilization withers away and dies.

The only way out might be to deliver Farnsworthy a real pie in the face. My defence, of course, would be that I thought I was dreaming. Or that my fly was undone.

dsimmonds@wellingtontimes.ca