I've wondered if this might be a better approach to VR in the future.
If we could turn on a dreaming state and somehow a computer could control what you experience in the dream. You'd get full motion and haptics for free. No motion sickness, etc.
If we could turn on a dreaming state and somehow a computer could control what you experience in the dream. You'd get full motion and haptics for free. No motion sickness, etc.
To give you a good example, in a dream it is practically impossible to read. If you are dreaming that you are reading, one of the tricks I have played to get into lucid dreaming is to try to say what I am reading. It is either impossible, or it becomes absolute nonsense because there is nothing for you to read and your dream is skipping over that detail. To get into lucid dreaming, you just need to notice that and then decide not to wake up.
For sleep paralysis, you actually are looking at your room. You can see the pattern on the wallpaper in exact detail. Everything is real (except for the hallucinations). Also, you can't move.
When I've got sleep paralysis, I usually feel like someone has broken into the house and I need to warn people. But I can't move a muscle. I can't speak. Sometimes I will literally see people in my room. Sometimes I will see other things (even bizarre things like flowers).
It's interesting, though. A colleague of mine opined that sleep paralysis was the absolute most terrifying thing on earth. I said flippantly that I had it and it didn't bother me much.
Unlike lucid dreaming, I don't seem to be able to catch the inconsistencies in sleep paralysis. But as soon as I realize that I can't move, I get really pissed off and it overrides my fear. It's hard to describe, but I have a kind of internal explosion that starts in my stomach and gradually forces it's way out and shatters the sleep paralysis. Often I end up shouting something incoherently as I emerge from sleep. As soon as I wake up, I feel absolutely pumped up and amazing -- empowered, I guess.
I hadn't really thought about it, but I wonder if the lucid dreaming has allowed me to subconsciously recognize the paralysis and trigger a way to get out of it.
I haven't had a "nightmare" in probably 10 years because they never make any sense to me while I'm dreaming. Like if it's a drastically bad situation I always realize that it can't possibly be real, which switches off the dream as if it were a movie. Then I'm left in a sort of void where I have to work toward waking up -- out of the sleep paralysis. It was at this point that I used to panic, but now I know better, and that eventually I'll be fine and awake. I too seem to have a lot of energy after this process of "escape".
But my original comment was more a question of whether or not the research in the article could potentially trigger a lucid dream state, facilitating an on-demand, in-brain VR situation.
I don't think I've ever experienced fully conscious eyes-open sleep paralysis.
This is speculation rather than fact, as far as I am aware. I do know about sleep paralysis (I worked on a movie about it and got to read a bunch of interesting research) but there are also lots of mystical/ meditational techniques for handling your dream experiences - it's a skill that can be learned.
Now when it occurs, I think, Oh. Sleep paralysis again. That's annoying. And then I either wait it out until I can wake up fully or try to fall back asleep and convert it into a lucid dreaming experience.
I've never felt an unbearable fear or the presence of some other being though. Just strange noises (usually a dull roar that is so loud it becomes a physical pressure on my body), tingling in my limbs, vertigo, and sometimes the feeling that the bed is tilted and I am continuously sliding down the incline along the sheets except that the sliding is infinite and I never move (a type of vertigo, I suppose, though this comes with the sensation of the fabric moving across my skin as I slide).
All that said, it doesn't prevent me from actually seeking it to get a lucid dream though. So yeah, I agree a technology that helps it would be interesting.