By Stephan Ornes

November 23, 2011

What a dream looks like

Don’t you think it would be cool if you could take pictures of your dreams? You dream something at night and then in the morning when you forget it you see a picture of it? Doesn’t that sound like something that can happen only in a dream? Ya it does. To me, to you, to everyone. But it’s FALSE! We are able to take pictures of DREAMS! A team of researchers from Germany made brain scan images that were taking during specific dreams so that we can understand how the brain combines thoughts and memories to fashion dreams. The dreamer who was chosen for the experiment was capable of dreaming even though he knew that he was dreaming. This kind of activity is called Lucid Dreaming. “His muscles didn’t move, his eyes twitched as they do during normal dreams, and he slept deeply. But on the inside, a lucid dreamer drives the dream and can create an imagined world much different and probably much stranger than reality.” Is how Stephan Ornes describes this. This is how the experiment works in Stephan’s words; “An fMRI scanner tracks the flow of blood through a person’s brain, showing when different regions are active. It’s a loud and clunky device with a narrow tunnel in the middle: A person has to lie down on a flat surface, slide into the tunnel, and remain motionless. The scientists asked the dreamers to fall asleep and dream inside the machine. They weren’t supposed to dream wildly about things like going to the moon or being chased by giant jellyfish. Instead, the participants dreamt about squeezing first their left hand, then their right. Only one dreamer successfully dreamt about squeezing his hands. For that person, the fMRI showed that when he dream-squeezed his dream-hands, a part of his brain called the sensorimotor cortex became active. This brain region helps with movement. When he squeezed his left hand, the right side of his sensorimotor cortex lit up. And when the right hand was being squeezed, the left side of his sensorimotor cortex lit up. That’s not surprising: Scientists already knew that the left side of the brain controls muscles on the right side of the body, and vice versa.” ISN’T IT INSANE? Don’t you wish that you could have pictures of your dreams!!!??? Well get ready because in the future you could be the one dreamer whose dreams come true!

OMG!!!! THAT IS THE MACHINE!!!