Sublime

Theta frequencies (5–8 Hz) predominate at the edge of sleep, as in the floating “hypnopompic” state I described in chapter 15 on EMDR; they are also characteristic of hypnotic trance states. Theta waves create a frame of mind unconstrained by logic or by the ordinary demands of life and thus open the potential for making novel connections and assoc

The only things I can see are waves of purple, ebbing and flowing through the absolute darkness. Phosphenes, I think, remembering the technical name for the colorful effect that blossoms to life when people close their eyes. They’re caused by minute electrical charges created inside the human retina, only visible when not being bombarded by visual

and 14 Hz. So this research suggests that when we are lucid dreaming we may actually be more conscious or self-aware than we generally are in normal waking consciousness.

Perhaps the most striking discovery of Carhart-Harris’s first experiment was that the steepest drops in default mode network activity correlated with his volunteers’ subjective experience of “ego dissolution.” (“I existed only as an idea or concept,” one volunteer reported. Recalled another, “I didn’t know where I ended and my surroundings began.”)

ignoring the Dreaming is an undiagnosed global epidemic.

One of the very few relevant surveys in the past ten years showed that over 25 percent of our national population recall having at least one spontaneous out-of-body experience.

Sleep six hours or less and you are shortchanging the brain of a learning restoration benefit that is normally performed by sleep spindles.