Perhaps David Collier’s terrifying “somnambulistic telepathy” in The Morpheus Conspiracy is more real than most would think!
Excerpted from Nightmare Scenario by John Cloud, TIME, July 9, 2012
“Recently, researchers have begun to discover not only that we can learn to have fewer nightmares but also that we can change their content. Because the No. 1 complaint of veterans returning from Afghanistan and Iraq is insomnia—and because so many veterans have nightmares about what they saw in combat—the Department of Defense (DOD) has poured millions of dollars into the study of dreams.
One new theory is that dreams and nightmares aren’t a secondary symptom of mental illness but rather a primary psychological problem. In other words, dreams themselves may cause mental illness, not the other way around.
There’s also the phenomenon of lucid dreaming—being able to realize you’re dreaming and then control the dream as it occurs. From a fellow nightmare sufferer in New York, I had heard about a way to train yourself to dream lucidly—an approach that combines psychological and physiological techniques to enter bad dreams as they occur and rewrite them. It sounded silly, as if someone were trying to turn the movie Inception into real life. But it was also a really cool idea.
If dreams are random physiological events, why can we control their content with IRT (imagery rehearsal therapy)? Imagery rehearsal therapy is simple: you begin by imagining a dream you would like to have. The dream doesn’t have to be some optimistic reverie about puppies and sunshine. You can imagine any dream you want–boring, anodyne, even gloomy—just not your nightmares. You then write down the new one, and every day, you take a few minutes, preferably with eyes closed, to think about that dream.”
Read the entire TIME article
