Guest Post By Konstantinos Fakinos
Here is a small paper with some terms I collected to a list about conscious dreaming from the work of Claude Rifat, “Conscious Dreaming And Controlled Hallucinations”.
Links to his work are at the bottom of the attached article.
Excerpt:
“This article is written mostly for people who have the basic knowledge of what conscious dreaming is. This means they have some experiences of conscious dreaming, daydreaming, imaginative visualization, these and other relative concepts are considered known and understood.
To start with, I will list first some terms Claude Rifat used to describe phenomena related to dreams, conscious dreams and in general how our biological memory works. Below the list are parts from Claude’s article [in blue text – everything with black text is my comments] which explain the concepts in the list. The study he made is based on scientific research and with personal observations inside dreams. This is important because until then very few scientists of the mind were exploring consciousness from inside, from the perspective of the dreamer. The study had been written since 1976 until 1989.
When we imagine something or having a memory of something, what we do in neurological level is that we activate a specific memory zone in the brain, and what an expert conscious dreamer do, when he build a scenery for example, is that he have learned to activate and stabilize specific memory zones at will.
The intensity of how vivid is the memory of something, means how much is metabolically active that zone. In comparison of exogenous imagination and endogenus [in a conscious dream] we soon discover that in exogenus, in our natural everyday state, we can imagine only to a certain point and in dreams we can have much stronger visualization to the level of materialization with many senses involved. This is controlled by some regulator mechanisms I will explain below, the attenuator, DRP and SBEM which are responsible for the normal function of our consciousness.
Why we see irrational scenes in dreams or without continuous time sequence? This can be explained with MHV, and MCV “box” concepts along with the previous mechanisms the Attenuator and DRP. So when we are awake, consciously or unconsciously we activate some memory zones, some more and some less intense [with different emotional impression and different meaning each-one so they make different connections with different memory zones involved]. When they are activated they can remain active in the memory for some time [as we imprint in our memory the events some remain and some faint, so when we see a dream of something we would not expect we still remember that but for a reason had stayed in memory. Or we see things that are imprinted with our second unconscious attention]. Now, when we are sleeping the logical reasoning and other functions ceases [not completely and with variations in intensity] but the memory areas are still active and informational objects fall into the oneiric scene, somehow like a collection of unrelated events and objects interacting inside a portion of continuous time of an oneiric episode.
It is not so simple though, because maybe it can be with no logical explanation the sequence of images or the dream scenario, so to seem random but sometimes it follows some internal rules from the instincts or emotional centers, the drives or archetypes, to make some kind of coded symbolic message for our conscious self about a specific matter like a solution to a problem, like a different type of thought processor than everyday rational thinking. Even if usually consciousnes or reasoning are not active but other mechanisms could be driving the dream or are active to involve with the dream.