Brain Damage Steals Dreams

Researchers are closer to understanding the generation and importance of dreams thanks to the help of a woman who apparently lost the ability to dream following a stroke.

The 73 year-old woman suffered an ischemic stroke, which halted blood flow to a relatively small area deep in the back part of her brain.

She temporarily lost her vision, which was not surprising as one of the brain functions localized in this area is the processing of visual information.

However, the most shocking effect of the stroke appeared a few days later: She ceased to have dreams.

"These results describe for the first time in detail the extent of lesion necessary to produce loss of dreaming in the absence of other neurological deficits," says study coauthor Claudio Bassetti of the Department of Neurology at the University Hospital of Zurich in Switzerland. "As such, they offer a target for further study of the localization of dreaming."

Rare condition

The loss of dreaming along with visual disturbances has been documented before, but is quite rare. The condition is called Charcot-Willbrand syndrome and usually carries with it other symptoms besides the loss of dreams.

For their study, Bassetti and colleague Matthias Bischof studied the brain waves of the woman for six weeks following the stroke while she slept.

They found no disruptions in her sleep cycle. REM sleep continued normally, for example, which is significant because REM sleep and dreaming occur together, although research points to different brain systems controlling the two.

Some dreaming function did eventually return, as the woman reported occasional dreams a year after the stroke. However, full dreaming ability did not return, as she reported having only about one dream per week, compared to three or four prior to the stroke.

Unraveling the mystery

The findings shed light on some of the enigma surrounding dreams.

"Further conclusions about this brain area and its role in dreams will require more studies analyzing dream changes in patients with brain damage," says Bassetti.

The research is reported in the Annals of Neurology (read abstract).

DREAMS

2-2-95 - DREAM - My husband gave me a brand new 1993 car. He had the seat set too far ahead and I couldn' slide in behind the wheel without dragging my clothes crooked under me. So, I put the car into 2nd gear (it was running) and re-set the seat into the 2nd position, got out of the car and got back in.

I noted at that point that I was wearing my nightclothes (not what I was really wearing). Two of my children were in the car (age about 10). I decided to test drive the car and go around the block. It was dark out now and I pulled the knob to turn the lights on. They didn't come on until I pulled the 2nd knob.

I backed out into the street noting that there was no traffic coming. I drove down to the corner intersection and stopped because the red light was on. When the light turned green I went straight ahead.

At that point, I saw that he road was a very steep hill. I thought it would be an excellent test of the car to see if it would make it up the hill. The car worked fine and went up easily, but I noted that the farther up the hill the car went, my brain stayed at the bottom and my arms stretched up the hill with the car.  This was disturbing and I wondered how far the car would have to go before my brain caught up with it.

I could see the car way up at the top of the hill, it had made it completely to the top and was on the top flat street. My arms were stretched from the bottom of the hill still. I was distressed at this point and was able to inch the car forward little by little. I saw that the car was a white 4 x 4. I didn't want the car to get away from me, but couldn't figure out how far it would have to go before my brain went up the hill too.

My arms stretched easily. That was no problem. I inched the car forward little by little. Finally as the car was just about to get away from me, my brain popped up the hill into the car, but as it did, the scene became cartoon-like and I woke up.

Date: 97-12-09 20:53:17 EST

I dreamed I was walking in a green park. It was a sunny day. I layed down on a park bench and dozed off.  I dreamed I was in another setting ( I don't remember where).  I got sleepy there and went to sleep. I awakened back on the park bench. I knew I'd had a dream. I got up from the bench & started back through the park, thinking to go home..then I realized... "This is also a dream & I'm not awake yet!" I went back to the park bench. I laid down & let myself sleep. I then awakened in my own bed at home.

The only point to this dream-dream, was to show me the different realities we can wander through & return to a pre-ordained placement. I have many lucid dreams. Partway through the dream, I realize I'm dreaming. It helps in problem solving. I think to try to remember this dream when I wake up. I may get into some impossible situations at times,where there seems no plausible solution. At that point I say to myself, "Just wake up!" ..all dilemmas disappear.

by: bji@webtv.net (jan ingersoll)

Several nights ago, I had an extremely important ET related dream.

Since then, my dream partner, Dee Finney and her friend Michelle Lavigne-Wedel, who is a UFO/ET researcher, and author of important books on this topic, have been discussing my dream, trying to analyze it for meaning.

Dee had been asking me for more and more details about the dream as I had not written it down. I didn't think it was that important an event until Dee relayed the information to me that my description of the ET in the dream, according to Michelle, is the closest to 'real' ETs that she has ever heard.

Here is the dream:

I was sitting on the couch in the livingroom of a house somewhere. I was lucid and knew I was dreaming. There was little furniture in the room. There was a large window across from me and the only light in the room was coming from the moonlight streaming in through that window.

There was a large screen, like a large television set, across from  me on which I was watching various shades of blues and black, like clouds under water. On the bottom of these clouds were shapes coming from them like festoons of color and it was mesmerizing and beautiful. It seemed like this was in water like in a pool.

Then I noticed there was a woman sitting on the couch to the right of me and she was asleep, sitting up.  I was pretty certain the woman was a celebrity like Barbara Streisand. She was leaning against the arm of the couch.

I knew I was dreaming and wanted to wake up, but instead I was trying to wake the woman up.

I then noticed that woman actually looked like the singer, Cher. I actualy called her name, "Cher!!" 

I had the strong feeling that I wanted to wake her up, that it was extremely important for her to wake up. She moved and stirred a bit, but then I had an odd feeling on my left arm like someone was wrapping a towel around my left arm and pulling it a little.  I looked and there was nothing there.  

I looked up and ahead and to the right a little, and a greenish/yellow ET came into focus. It was a tall and spindley type of ET with stick-like limbs and was walking towards the sleeping woman. He walked slowly and languidly and appeared similar to the tall ET that was in the movie, "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."

When he appeared, I realized that he was the one who had pulled on my arm. I looked towards Cher and said to her, "See! They're here! It's time to wake up."

It seemed like she stirred a little bit more, and at the same time the ET rather evaporated from view.

Then I started hollering out loud to Dee to wake me up, but I was actually saying, "Joe! Wake me up! Joe wake me up!" Dee deliberately didn't wake me up right away, hoping I would say something else, but I just kept yelling to her to wake me up as I was lucid in the dream and couldn't get out of it by myself.

Dee finally touched me on the hand and I was instantly awake and told her the dream.

Jung had a UFO dream (recounted in his autobiography) of an alien object looking at him through a telescope, which led Jung to wonder whether he was dreaming the UFO, or whether it was dreaming him! If UFO events are the synchronistic manifestation of archetypes, one would expect a mirror relationship to exist between our dreams (the psychic plane) and the outer manifestation (the physical realm).

3-1-00 - DREAM - This seems it might be a shared dream, but we don't know for certain.

I was dreaming that there was a man out on the street in the dark. I was inside the house with a radio, watching a very sensitive audio frequency gauge, trying to hone in on the exact frequency that the man out on the street was broadcasting at. I was using a computer mouse-like pointer on a red light point in order to do this.

I woke up suddenly when Joe started chanting indian again. However, he soon broke the indian chanting with English yelling with words like "Help!, Shut up! Michael! and some other words that were too low toned to hear and understand.

Joe woke himself up and I asked him what he had been dreaming. He said it was nightmarish, that he was out in the dark and someone was trying to sneak up on him.  He started hollering, trying to wake himself up. He spoke the words in the dream that I heard him hollering out loud.

From: drmlink@ipa.net (Bryon Smith)

Hieroglyphics & Space People 1/23/98

In this dream between 6 and 7 AM this morning just before I got up I thought I was in my own bed at the house where I grew up. Upstairs room and I saw a plaque with gold hieroglyphics on it. The clearly the image became the more I saw how similar yet different it was from Egyptian hieroglyphics. There were many new symbols on the writing along with mixtures of the Egyptian hieroglyphics. Some of the markings were of full size beings, people, and images of human looking beings with animal’s heads. One of these figures was drawn showing it carrying a staff that had a huge loop on the top end of it. At the bottom of the loop there was a small cross like thing. I looked closer and saw it was a figure of an Ankh.

Suddenly I realized I was dreaming and wanted to see more about these writings to learn their meaning and origin. I held on tight and called out for my wife to come quick. All the while I was observing the images I was seeing in my dream so as not to lose contact with my dream state.

Then I saw men who appeared to be on a journey and they were dressed in Egyptian type garment covered with robes, headdresses and trimmed with gold. These men were of royal origin and they were on a quest of some kind. The man in front who wore the most gold and had the fancy headdress was carrying a paper with writing on it. This paper was mostly held in his left hand. In his right hand he had a small flat gold object that was similar to a Popsicle stick in size and shape and on one end it had a round flat disk.

On the paper on the top of the first page was a list. This writing was not in hieroglyphics but I did not recognize the script. The first two lines had turned dark while the rest of them were still bright gold in color. Then he touched the third line with the disk end of this gold object in his hand and like magic the third line also turned dark. Then I realized he was crossing off things on a list. Things that either he was searching for or things he had found. Perhaps he was crossing off events I do not know. I do know the first page was the only page that I saw that had these lists on it. The rest of the papers were filled with writings.

Then I looked up and thought I saw a chandelier on my ceiling and this light had many lights around it and all of them were changing shapes at the same time. Then I told my wife as I knew she was setting beside me. "I have seen into another world and there I saw alien hieroglyphics and these beings were not of this world."

Suddenly I realized I was still dreaming and thought I had woke up and was back home in my own bed. Later I really did wake up and realized that even my thoughts that I was awake were also a dream. It was so vivid and real.

I went in and out of this dream several times and worked on the project
it gave me, knowing I was awake and dreaming at the same time.

I chose 4 masters from a larger group of individuals -
3 men and a woman. Their picture and information was within
frames that were like railroad tracks, so the the corners came
apart and could be put back together again. I took the frames off,
doubled the size of the photos and the information. Then the
hardest job was to put the frames back together so it enclosed
all 4 Masters together using all the pieces, including the corners.

The four Ascended Master teachers pictured below all presented themselves
to me in dreams and visions over the last 20 years. I will be always grateful
that they chose to let me know they were there for me.

These were not the only Ascended Master teachers I have seen. I also have
several Native American guides who are helping me to present pages of
information for students in the world.

See: http://www.greatdreams.com/masters/ascended-masters.htm

GOD WEARS SUSPENDERS - AND PEOPLE ARE TOYS?