Bob Conder K4RLC:
-Woke up after interesting dream (playing pickup basketball) and wondered
what technology it would take to record the visual imagery of dreams, then
capture and download it to a medium (dvd).
-Have any of you been invovled in such endeavor, probably govt related?
-Recording the brains's electrical activity during sleep, and identifying
dream (REM) sleep is a piece of cake now, but it would be really
fascinating to have an external video image of one's dreams, for personal
and research purposes.
-Just dreamin'
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Gaby Bader, SM6HUG:
Very interesting idea but I would not like to "dream" about how such a
system will be used by Big Brother. As a Sleep Medicine specialist we
already face a few problems with e.g. RBD (REM behavioural disorders - i.e.
(often) agressive behaviour during dream states...).
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David Rathke,KI5NG:
Makes you wonder what format our brains store our video in, doesn't it?
This ought to be discoverable. It's probably stored in a physically 3D
way (which IS currently being worked on, because the storage density
would be far greater than it currently is.)
I remember wondering about that a number of years ago when the father
of a close friend of mine was dying of cancer, which at this point had
spread to his brain. As the family was all in their den watching TV, he
announced that he was hallucinating, seeing very real-appearing things
being acted out on a stage of reality. (He was amused by it at first
... it was like a, "Hey, guys, guess what I'm seeing now?!" moment.
Later, it became problematic, as he began to loose his ability to tell
which was reality and which was not.) After listening to his
descriptions, it dawned on me that he was dreaming -- but
while still fully awake. Somehow, the barrier between his conscious
mind that perceives reality and whatever mind we have during REM sleep
while we are sleeping, had broken down. You know how incredibly real
dreams can be? He was seeing both at the same time while retaining his
ability to tell one from the other.
Dreams must feed the same part of our mind that our other senses feed,
like two video cameras plugged in to one monitor: one camera is pointed
to reality, the other to a mind-created world ... but the monitor can't
tell the difference if they are both fed in the same format and into
the same port (input.) In my friend's father's brain, the switch
between the two cameras had failed and was allowing both cameras to
feed the input simultaneously. It must be left up to our higher
cognitive functions to sort out the difference. (My rat terrier must
think she's really chasing the squirrels and deer she must see
in her dreams.)
Surely, somebody is researching this. The implications range from
sorting out schizophrenia to helping the blind to see again (and the
deaf to hear again - vision is only one of the senses....we
could even transport a Helen Keller into a world where she would be
fully functional [remember the Star Trek episode, "The Menagerie?"])
Just dreamin' a little more....
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Fred Simowitz, K0FS:
The gentleman with the metastatic brain tumor might have been having complex visual hallucinations as part of a seizure. This would be likely if the tumor were located in the posterior temporal lobe or the parieto-temporal association areas. Although such seizures originate in visual and visual-associated areas, they also may sometimes bring in auditory components as well. Most of the time, at least at the outset of a given episode, the patient is aware that they are illusionary. Regardless of the source of the man's hallucination (ie, dream vs. seizure), the camera 1/camera 2 theory may have merit. Whichever biochemical "director" was at the control room console at the time momentarily switched both cameras to the main feed, and the subject got what you described.
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