Mysteries of the Mind

Mysteries of the Mind

The mind is one of the most complex things of the human. In fact, there any many, many things that scientists’ have yet to discover about the brain, many of which may never be explained.

Lucid Dreaming: A lucid dream, in simplest terms, is a dream in which one is aware that one is dreaming. Lucid dreams can start two different ways. The first is a dream-initiated lucid dream (DILD). Your dream starts out normal, but then you eventually conclude it is a dream. The other is a wake-initiated lucid dream (WILD). This occurs when the dreamer goes from a normal waking state directly into a dream state, with no apparent lapse in consciousness.

There are different ways to try to have lucid dreams. However, being attempting lucid dreaming, scientists say to keep a “dream journal” to help you remember your dreams. Doing so will result in a higher chance of realizing you are in a dream, in which case you can control it.

One of the most common things people think of is the pain test. Many people think that if they pinch themselves, they will realize they are dreaming. However, when dreaming you mind can make your body perceive pain, even though the body is not experiencing the physical stimulus. This applies for other sensation, such as pleasure, heat, cold and many other “waking world” experiences.

Another test is to look at text or a digital watch (remembering the words, or the time on the clock). In dreams, the text or time will probably change randomly at the second glance or contain strange letters and characters.

Other tests include flipping a light switch (light level rarely change because of the switch flipping in dreams), and looking into a mirror (reflections from a mirror, in dreams, often appear to be blurred, distorted, incorrect, or frightening).

Déjà Vu: The experience of feeling sure that one has witnesses or experienced a new situation previously (an individual feels as though an even has already happened or has happened in the recent past), although the exact circumstances of the previous encounter are uncertain. The most likely explanation of déjà vu is not that it is an act of “precognition” or “prophecy” but rather that it is an anomaly of memory, giving the impression that an experience is “being recalled”. Déjà Vu can be similar to the phenomenon called “tip of the tongue” which is when someone cannot recall a familiar word or name or situation, but with effort will eventually recall the elusive memory. In contrast, déjà vu is a feeling that the present situation has occurred before, but the details are elusive because the situation never happened before.

Precognition: It is also called future sight, and refers to perception that involves the acquisition of future information that cannot be deduced from presently available and normally acquired sense-based information (or in simple words… When someone “sees” into the future and knows what is going to happen). This phenomenon is also not accepted by the scientific community, because no replicable demonstration has ever been achieved. Precognition can also occur in dreams, where the dreamer will have a dream about something in the future. However, these instances are usually just a coincidence.

As Robert Todd Carroll said in his “Law of Large Numbers”, “Say the odds are a million to one that when a person has a dream of an airplane crash, there is an airplane crash the next day. With 6 billion people having an average of 250 dream themes each per night, there should be about 1.5 million people a day who have dreams that seem clairvoyant.”

If you want to learn more about these mysteries of the mind, and other mysteries of the mind, feel free to look around the internet.

Thanks to Wikipedia for giving me most of the information for this post, and to Alyssa for giving me the idea.

And some quotes by Demetri Martin:

“I wanna make a jigsaw puzzle that’s 40,000 pieces. And when you finish it, it says ‘go outside.’”

“I like when good things happen to me, but I wait two weeks to tell anyone because I like to use the word ‘fortnight.’”

“Saying ‘I’m sorry’ is the same as saying ‘I apologize.’ Except at a funeral.”

“A drunk driver is very dangerous. So is a drunk backseat driver if he’s persuasive. ‘Dude make a left.’ ‘Those are trees…’ ‘Trust me.’

I was on the street. This guy waved to me, and he came up to me and said, “I’m sorry, I thought you were someone else.” And I said, “I am.”

 I like to use 'I Can't Believe it's Not Butter' on my toast in the morning, because sometimes when I eat breakfast, I like to be incredulous. How was breakfast? Unbelievable.