"Who's Minding the Mind? The subconscious brain is more active, independent and purposeful than once thought. Sometimes it takes charge.“ (Benedict Carey, The New York Times, 31 Jul 07)
Here’s the dream-like scenario. "In a recent experiment, psychologists at Yale altered people’s judgments of a stranger by handing them a cup of coffee. The study participants, college students, had no idea that their social instincts were being deliberately manipulated. On the way to the laboratory, they had bumped into a laboratory assistant, who was holding textbooks, a clipboard, papers and a cup of hot or iced coffee – and asked for a hand with the cup.“
"That was all it took: The students who held a cup of iced coffee rated a hypothetical person they later read about as being much colder, less social and more selfish than did their fellow students, who had momentarily held a cup of hot java.“
This process of subtly cueing people to respond in a certain manner to certain stimuli is called priming. "Psychologists say that 'priming‘ people … is not some form of hypnotism, or even subliminal seduction; rather, it’s a demonstration of how everyday sights, smells and sounds can selectively activate goals or motives that people already have.“
Of interest to dreamers everywhere, "new studies reveal a subconscious brain that is far more active, purposeful and independent than previously known. Goals, whether to eat, mate or devour an iced latte, are like neural software programs that can only be run one at a time, and the unconscious is perfectly capable of running the program it chooses.“
One of the researchers is quoted: "Sometimes nonconscious effects can be bigger in sheer magnitude than conscious ones because we can’t moderate stufff we don’t have conscious access to, and the goal stays active.“ Science seems to show that the wakeful state of humans is not as conscious and nearly as much in our control as we might like to think.
"The new research on priming makes it clear that we are not alone in our conscioussness. We have company, an invisible partner who has strong reactions about the world that don’t always agree with our own, but whose instincts, these studies clearly show, are a least as likely to be helpful, and attentive to others, as they are to be disruptive.“
The unconscious is the realm of sleep dreams. It also plays a large role in daydreams, as well as visions and hallucinations. It plays an enormous role in both sleep and waking nightmares. The world of dreams encompasses larges swatches of the realms of the unconscious. The fear and the beauty of these realms lies precisely in the circumstance that our conscious minds exercise minimal, if any, control there. The terror arises in not having control. The beauty arises from the fact that information, viewpoints and understandings not constricted within the small boxes of „rational“ thought may enter our understanding. An important aspect of cultivating Dreamfulness is to bring conscious awareness to the content and working of our unconscious.
