Ripples from the Future, A link between the real world and the Lucid Dream world?

Today I learned that a co-worker friend of mine who worked a few doors down from the Forest Service Office in my building committed suicide last night after struggling for months with severe depression. In her memory, I have submitted the following true story to The Lucid Dream Exchange:

Ripples from the Future
A link between the real world and the Lucid Dream world?

During my undergraduate years at a University of California school, I learned about lucid dreaming from a psychology class titled “Altered States of Consciousness” taught by Charlie Tart. I was subscribing at the time to “the Lucidity Letter” where readers share experiences and experimental results and I’d read several books on the topic. I tried various techniques to become lucid, with Dr. Stephen LaBerge‘s MILD being the most effective.

One night I realized I was dreaming when I found myself lying on my side but floating two feet above the grass in a specific location on campus. I decided to try an experiment. I knew my best friend “K” kept a dream journal, so I decided in my lucid dream to find her and see if I could influence her writing.

I got this idea because Professor Tart had told us of experiments with astral projection under hypnosis where people would try to read something written on top of a file cabinet that would be visible only to someone floating near the ceiling. I very much wanted to test for a connection between the real world and my lucid dream world.

In my dream, I next floated up to a standing position, then found someone who then morphed into my friend “K” .

I said excitedly, “K, I’m dreaming!”

She looked skeptical. I said, “If I can walk through that tree, will you believe I am dreaming?”

She said, “Sure”.

I walked straight inside a large oak tree. Since my expectation was that trees are dark inside, it got dark. I then woke up.

Unfortunately, when I called her in the morning, “K” did not recall her dreams that night and did not write in her dream journal. The dream was very powerful for me, nevertheless.

About six years after the tree dream, I got a job on the same campus. Guess what? Right through that very tree, in the direction I walked in my lucid dream, was my new office!

It gets better. After a few years of working there, I went on vacation.

When I returned, a workman was finishing the job of cutting down my tree. He said it had to be cut down to save the other nearby large trees because it had a disease.
Here’s the kicker: Every day, for years since, I have walked “though” where that tree was as I bring my lunch back to my office.  The missing tree, my office, and the dinning commons where I get my food each day are in a straight line. For years before they cut the tree down, I walked around it every day at lunch time.

Logic flaws such as “interpretation after the fact” of simple coincidences and mistaken memories are usually my explanation when I hear other people’s “prophetic” dreams. In this case, however, I wrote down my dream right when I woke up. The odds of a coincidence are too great. I had no idea, when I had the dream where I would end up working after I graduated from college. In fact, I worked at several jobs off campus before returning. I had no idea, either, that that particular tree would be singled out and cut down years later.

My prophetic tree dream is my personal best evidence that there is a deeper world than we currently know.  As a very concrete scientific thinker, my best explanation is that I somehow experienced a ripple of information from the future. If we discover that our brains communicate with light as well as known electrochemical processes, then the fact that anything moving at the speed of light has stepped “out of time” may allow light to bring information from the future back into the present. I can think of no simpler plausible explanation for my experience.

Just what does make me ‘me’?

Over the last few months I have been on an extraordinary journey to find out what makes me “me”.

I have had my brain scanned, tricked, electrocuted, drugged in a plethora of different experiments in my attempt to find out what it is that gives me the feeling that there is someone inside my head. Science calls it the search for consciousness. I call it the search for “me”.

I was not always aware of myself as a human being separate from those around me. But at what point does this self-awareness kick-in?

A fascinating experiment at University of Portsmouth indicates that it is between the ages of 18-24 months that a child’s brain develops to a stage when it suddenly becomes conscious of itself as an individual.

To test this each child is placed in front of a mirror and encouraged to play.

At some point the child will probably engage with its image in the mirror.

Once this interaction has been established, the carer takes the child away from the mirror and while wiping its nose the carer surreptitiously places a red dot on the child’s face in a place that cannot be seen or felt by the child. The child is then returned to play in front of the mirror.

In one case Owen, aged 16 months, engaged again with his image in the mirror but at no point was he particularly concerned that the image he saw had a large red dot on its face. In contrast when 22 month old Bethan saw her image in the mirror her hand immediately shot up to her face as she explored the strange spot that she saw on her cheek.

The strong reaction is an indication that Bethan recognises the image and thinks “that’s me”.

At some point during the brain development something happens which means we become self-aware – but quite what it is still remains a mystery. …

The Mirror Self Recognition Test was devised in the seventies by Professor Gordon Gallup. Originally he was looking to test consciousness not in children but animals.

“One day I found myself shaving in front of the mirror and it occurred to me: wouldn’t it be interesting to see if chimpanzees could recognise themselves in mirrors,” he said. Indeed they do. So how many other animals pass this test for consciousness?

It turns out that we are remarkably alone in the animal kingdom. In addition to chimpanzees only orang-utans recognise themselves in the mirror.

Of course if you ask most pet-owners they will probably argue vociferously that their dog, cat or hamster is conscious. Failing the test does not mean that other animals are not self-aware – but a positive result is convincing evidence for a brain that has developed a sense of “me”.

via BBC NEWS | Health | Just what does make me ‘me’?.

Scientists pull an ancient tooth for DNA, clues

It was the oddest of scenes: A neurosurgeon delicately threaded a scope up the neck and into the skull of a disembodied, 4,000-year-old mummified head. Sweating with concentration, another doctor clamped a molar and began to rock it gently back and forth.

Three hours later, the nerve-wracking operation yielded a tooth, a time capsule holding precious DNA, which might reveal the identity of the ancient Egyptian head.

The surgical team – doctors from Massachusetts General Hospital and curators and conservation specialists from the Museum of Fine Arts – was assembled recently in an attempt to solve this longstanding ancient art mystery.

The question arose after the 1915 excavation of a tomb in a necropolis 186 miles south of Cairo. Robbers had disturbed the tomb, which belonged to Governor and Lady Djehutynakht, who ruled the district of Hermopolis in about 2000 BC. They left behind a torso, scattered mummy wrappings, fine examples of Egyptian art, objects for the afterlife, and the head.

In preparation for an exhibit opening at the museum today, the head was subjected to a full modern medical workup, including sophisticated imaging at a lab in Charlestown, various failed attempts at genetic test ing, and finally, the delicate dental procedure last month.

“We’re trying to get every piece of information we can out of the material from the tomb,’’ said Rita E. Freed, chairwoman of the museum’s Department of Art of the Ancient World. “The 19th century was the era of unwrapping mummies. . . . Then, X-ray technology became available and we could X-ray mummies. . . . And then, people began to realize you could really do pathology.’’

The mummy’s ancient DNA, the scientists knew, might reveal its gender, and perhaps more, if any of it had survived. They began to take samples, unsuccessfully trying to get DNA from a small patch of skin from the neck of the mummy and a finger that had been recovered from the tomb. Finally, they settled on the place where the genetic material was most likely to be intact – deep in the pulp of a tooth.

via Scientists pull an ancient tooth for DNA, clues – The Boston Globe.

DIY Lucid Dreaming Device Makes Your Dreams Come True, Just Not In Real Life

Lucid dreaming is the ability to realize you’re dreaming and then actively control what you do, like flying naked into the president’s office or winning the ball game with a nuclear touchdown or whatever crazy crap you people fantasize about. It isn’t an easy thing to do, but there are people out there hell-bent on making their dreams enjoyable, I assume because their waking lives aren’t that exciting.

The best way to get yourself to lucid dream is to send yourself a signal while you’re in a deep sleep, generally via a flashing light of some sort. A dude who goes by “natetrue” went and built himself a mask that does just that, flashing you about 5 hours into your sleep cycle. The best part? He’s now selling kits so you can make your own for $30. Get your PJs ready, because I think there are some supermodels that need saving from a volcano… in your mind. –Adam Frucci

via DIY Lucid Dreaming Device Makes Your Dreams Come True, Just Not In Real Life – DIY – Gizmodo.

Tweetup With Space Station Crew Cut Short by False Alarm

NASA’s first live tweet-up between the public and astronauts in space was cut short Wednesday by a false alarm on the International Space Station.

The station’s two resident Twitterers – Nicole Stott and Jeff Williams – were mid-way through a live interview with a group of their Twitter followers gathered at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., when they were interrupted by a loud beeping.

“Excuse us just a second,” Williams said as he and Stott scrambled to check their consoles to investigate the source of the alarm. Soon after, the station passed out of communications range with ground stations, ending the live video link with the two astronauts.

The alert came from a smoke alarm in the station’s Russian-built service module, but there was no actual cause for concern, NASA spokesperson Rob Navias said.

“It was a false alarm,” Navias told SPACE.com.

The astronauts had been answering questions posed by members of the public gathered for NASA’s first ever tweetup – a meeting of Twitter followers – from space. Current and former astronauts also answered questions from Earth while waiting for the Earth-to-space video hookup.

Over a million people follow one of NASA’s accounts on the microblogging site.

Williams and Stott both use the site to share snippets of what life is like in space. Williams writes as “Astro_Jeff,” while Stott posts under the name “Astro_Nicole.”

“I think we’ve shown here in the recent past that Twitter is an effective way to get the word out about what we’re doing,” Williams said today during the event.

More fun for Twitter fans is coming up, when NASA plans to give 100 tweeps a tour of its Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., and a chance to watch the planned space shuttle launch on Nov. 12.

Life in space

The tweetup was a chance for people to ask about some of the ins and outs of life in space. A young woman named Sarah asked if there was anything about living on the space station that the astronauts hadn’t prepared or trained for.

“Something you can’t train for is how your body is going to react to the new environment,” Stott said. “Getting used to moving from one place to another without walking – just floating and pushing off of surfaces… I think that has been a really cool part of this whole experience.”

A teacher from Rochester, New York, said his students wanted to know why they choose to be astronauts, given the risk.

“I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t think it was [important],” Stott said. “I have a family at home, I have a young son. I truly believe that what we’re doing up here is opening up new opportunities for him as well as for the rest of the world.”

via Tweetup With Space Station Crew Cut Short by False Alarm – Yahoo! News.

1st sweat lodge survivor speaks out

A woman who took part in an Arizona sweat lodge ceremony tells The Associated Press that the spiritual guru who led the event pushed participants too far in what was supposed to be a life-expanding experience that culminated with people vomiting and passing out on the floor.

Texas resident Beverley Bunn is the first participant in the tragic incident to speak out publicly about the events that led up to the deaths. The 43-year-old told the AP in a series of interviews this week that by the time the sweat lodge ceremony began, the participants had undergone days of physically and mentally strenuous events that included fasting. In one game, guru James Arthur Ray even played God.

Within an hour of entering the sweat lodge on the evening of Oct. 8, people began vomiting, gasping for air and collapsing. Yet Bunn says Ray continually urged everyone to stay inside. The ceremony was broken up into 15-minute “rounds,” with the entrance flap to the lodge opened briefly and more heated rocks brought inside between sessions.

“I can’t get her to move. I can’t get her to wake up,” Bunn recalls hearing from two sides of the 415-square-foot sweat lodge. Ray’s response: “Leave her alone, she’ll be dealt with in the next round.”

By that time, Bunn had already crawled to a spot near the opening of the sweat lodge, praying for the door to stay open as long as possible between rounds so that she could breathe in fresh air.

At one point, someone lifted up the back of the tent, shining light in the otherwise pitch-black enclosure. Ray demanded to know who was letting the light in and committing a “sacrilegious act,” Bunn said.

The account marks a significant revelation in the investigation because it portrays Ray as driving participants to stay in the lodge despite signs all around him that the situation had gone horribly awry. Until now, few details had surfaced about Ray’s actions inside in the sweat lodge.

Investigators are considering bringing charges against Ray in a case that has cast a harsh spotlight on him and his self-help empire as he led dozens of people into the sweat lodge during a five-day retreat that cost more than $9,000 per person. He has hired his own investigative team to try to determine what went wrong.

Ray led the group in chants and prayers during the ceremony, Bunn said. People were not physically forced to stay inside but chided by Ray if they wanted to leave as he told them they were stronger than their bodies and weakness could be overcome.

via AP Newsbreak: 1st sweat lodge survivor speaks out – Yahoo! News.

Anthroposaurus Sapiens

That interesting video I posted yesterday showing a supposed part reptilian creature caught in a trap in Mexico has me wondering again if the aliens we encounter from time to time are actually intelligent dinosaurs. I believe this article is by Michael Magee.

Anthroposaurus Sapiens

Did the dinosaurs develop intelligence before Adam?

Some dinosaur iconoclasts have dared to ask this question, but even they have merely answered: They couldn”t have. Thus Bakker asks:

Why didn”t [the dinosaurs] evolve larger cerebral systems? Why didn”t they eventually produce super-intelligent species capable of making stone tools?

Desmond compares mammals with the superior dinosaurs and wonders:

Why did not “Man” land on the moon in the Cretaceous?

adding that by Man he meant a creature filling the ecological role of humans. Sagan asks if the dinosaurs had not all been mysteriously extinguished some sixty-five million years ago, would the saurornithoides have continued to evolve into increasingly intelligent forms?

All believe dinosaurs would have reached intelligence were it not for the Cretaceous terminal extinction. And all agree that they failed to achieve it because they died out first.

I disagree.

Some dinosaurs did develop intelligence and by so doing caused the Cretaceous terminal extinction, just as an insensitive ape developed intelligence at the end of the Tertiary and created the mass extinction that marks the end of that geological era. Though the direct evidence is sparse—I give what little there is in the next chapter—the circumstantial evidence is compelling. The thesis is not self-evidently false, as, say, the idea of a flat earth is. Today we consider it evident that the earth is round and revolves round the Sun—but these ideas have only become accepted in the last few hundred years.

The movement of the continents, continental drift, noted by Wegener sixty years ago seems obvious to us all now, indeed it was probably obvious to any child studying a map of the world decades before Wegener, but because continents were so massive and the experts could not think of a mechanism by which they could move, no one was willing to ask the question must not South America and Africa once have been joined?

We might find ourselves realizing simultaneously that the anthroposaur preceded us, and that we have just stumbled over the precipice of our own extinction.

Mankind has adopted its position of global domination in just five million years. The dinosaurs, we have seen, were warm-blooded, active creatures and usurped the rule of the thecodonts in only five million years. Mechanisms exist for species to evolve at astonishingly fast rates. On average a species of dinosaur did not last for more than two or three million years before becoming extinct or evolving into a new species. There is no reason why one of the dinosaurs should not have evolved intelligence during the last five million years or so of the Cretaceous Period.

- via http://web.ukonline.co.uk/michael.magee/awwls/00/wls143.html

And now, a word from the Council On Human-Reptilian Allegiance:

Dinosaurs are not just one species like man but a vast group of creatures which lived for millions of years – the modern equivalent is the whole of the mammals. Like the mammals only one dinosaur was likely to achieve intelligence. Just as remains of the intelligent mammal are scarce, one can expect the remains of the intelligent dinosaur to be scarce. Gribbon and Cherfas assure us:

The chances of finding fossils of an evolutionary variation that lasts only a few tens of thousands of years are slim.

Writer, Brad Steiger, in his book, Worlds Before Our Own, develops the theme of the cataclysmic seven worlds legends of the Seneca indians. Much of his research supports the thesis of intelligent dinosaurs. The anthroposaurs might have been one of the seven worlds!

Discussing the question of what would remain after an advanced civilization had been destroyed, he compares our own culture and technology with that of an ancient civilization. If a catastrophe were to happen to us now, he asks, what would remain for archaeologists to unearth 15,000 years from now?

He answers:

We are builders in wood and metal. Our most majestic stone buildings are little more than facades supported by thin tendons of steel. In a thousand years, even without flood, fire or nuclear warfare, our major cities would be little more than rubble… But if we were to enter another ice age and enormous glaciers should creep down from the north, as they have several times in the past million years, everything in their inexorable path would be pulverized.

Perhaps Velikovsky is correct when he writes, “Prior civilizations are buried so deeply within the lower strata of the earth that we simply do not have any archaeological evidence of their existence.” – COHRA

At the SETI conference last week I was surprised to hear NASA’s Chris McKay suggest we look for dinosaur relics on the moon.  Dinos went suddenly extinct about 65M years ago, and the dino fossil record seems spotty enough that we could have missed a lineage that went from possum to human sized brains in the ~10M year period it took mammals.  We could also have missed relics of a stone-tool phase that lasted only .2M years.  But a dino lander left on the moon should stay visible a very long time.

Humans have apparently already dug up a substantial fraction of the richest near-surface Earth metal deposits.  So a dino civilization that went much beyond our metal usage would have left a signature in reduced rich metal deposits.  And since the metal doesn’t actually disappear, they would also have left “strange” metal-junkyard deposits.  If modest efforts by geologists could exclude this possibility, that seems well worth the effort.

It would be very big and bad news to hear that metal-using dinos suddenly went extinct just when the other dinos did, and immediately after becoming big metal users.  If so, either dinos destroyed themselves with far more power than we humans can now muster, or powerful aliens exterminated them.

- overcomingbias

Chemicals Needed for Life Detected on Second Distant Planet

The basic molecules required for life as we know it have been detected in a second hot gas planet beyond our solar system.

The planet, which orbits a sun-like star about 150 light-years away in the constellation Pegasus, is not habitable but it has the same chemistry that, if found around a rocky planet in the future, could indicate a world that might support life or the presence of life.

“It’s the second planet outside our solar system in which water, methane and carbon dioxide have been found, which are potentially important for biological processes in habitable planets,” said researcher Mark Swain of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “Detecting organic compounds in two exoplanets now raises the possibility that it will become commonplace to find planets with molecules that may be tied to life.”

The first planet in which organic molecules were detected was HD 189733b, a hot, Jupiter-sized planet. The discovery was made by Swain and his colleagues in December 2008.

Swain’s team used data from two of NASA’s orbiting Great Observatories, the Hubble Space Telescope and Spitzer Space Telescope, to study another hot planet bigger than Jupiter, HD 209458b, and characterize it as the second known exoplanet with organic signatures.

The detections were made through spectroscopy, which splits light into its components to reveal the distinctive spectral signatures of different chemicals. Data from Hubble’s near-infrared camera and multi-object spectrometer revealed the presence of the molecules, and data from Spitzer’s photometer and infrared spectrometer measured their amounts.

“This demonstrates that we can detect the molecules that matter for life processes,” Swain said.

Astronomers can now begin comparing the two planetary atmospheres for differences and similarities. For example, the relative amounts of water and carbon dioxide in the two planets is similar, but HD 209458b shows a greater abundance of methane than HD 189733b.

“The high methane abundance is telling us something,” Swain said. “It could mean there was something special about the formation of this planet.”

Other large, hot Jupiter-type planets can be characterized and compared in the same way. The techniques used are also similar for those that will be required to shortlist rocky Earth-like planets where the signatures of organic chemicals might indicate the presence of life.

Rocky worlds are expected to be found by NASA’s Kepler mission, which launched earlier this year, but astronomers believe we are a decade or so away from being able to detect any chemical signs of life on such a body.

If and when such Earth-like planets are found in the future, “the detection of organic compounds will not necessarily mean there’s life on a planet, because there are other ways to generate such molecules,” Swain said. “If we detect organic chemicals on a rocky, Earth-like planet, we will want to understand enough about the planet to rule out non-life processes that could have led to those chemicals being there.”

via Chemicals Needed for Life Detected on Second Distant Planet – Yahoo! News.

UN: For 7th year, warming emissions grew again

The industrialized world again in 2007 boosted, rather than reduced, its emissions of global-warming gases, the U.N. reported Wednesday, as international negotiators looked ahead to crucial climate talks in December.

Emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases rose by 1 percent between 2006 and 2007 among 40 nations classified as industrialized under the 1992 U.N. climate treaty, the treaty secretariat reported, detailing data for the latest available reporting period.

It was the seventh consecutive year of an upward trend, it said.

European Union countries did cut their emissions year-to-year, by an average of 1.6 percent, led by Denmark’s 6.1 percent reduction. But the United States, the biggest emitter in this group, increased its emissions by 1.4 percent, and the output of heat-trapping gases by Japan, Canada and Australia also rose, the data show.

Scientists attribute a 0.74-degree Celsius (1.3-degree Fahrenheit) rise in global temperatures in the past century in part to the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The warming will severely disrupt the climate, they say, unless emissions are cut back sharply, by at least 80 percent by 2050.

Under the climate treaty’s 1997 Kyoto Protocol, 37 industrialized nations are committed to reduce emissions by an average 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. The United States was the only major industrialized nation to reject Kyoto, arguing such cuts would harm its economy, and that fast-growing economies, such as China’s, should have been subject to Kyoto quotas.

President Barack Obama, reversing his predecessor George W. Bush’s position, says the United States wants to join in a new post-2012 global agreement to rein in emissions, but in exchange U.S. negotiators seek some level of commitment from China, India, Brazil and other poorer nations. Developing countries complain, meanwhile, that emissions reductions envisioned in pending U.S. legislation are too weak.

The dispute threatens to block final agreement at the U.N. climate conference scheduled for Dec. 7-20 in Copenhagen, Denmark.

In releasing the emissions data, U.S. climate treaty chief Yvo de Boer said the numbers “underscore, once again, the urgent need to seal a comprehensive, fair and effective climate change deal in Copenhagen.”

via UN: For 7th year, warming emissions grew again – Yahoo! News.

Newark Airport security guard John Brek arrested for making threats against President Obama

A Newark Airport security guard was arrested for making threats against President Obama on the eve of Wednesday’s campaign visit to New Jersey.

Gun-loving John Brek, 55, of Linden, N.J., was taken into custody after his co-workers reported a conversation they had at an airport coffee cart to authorities.

He was charged under state law with making terroristic threats against the president.

Brek is a Republican and a member of the National Rifle Association, his father told the Newark Star-Ledger.

A search of Brek’s home turned up 43 firearms – although they all appeared to be registered weapons, officials said.

Obama is flying in Air Force One to Newark Airport for a Wednesday campaign stop with fellow Democrat Gov. John Corzine.

Authorities did not reveal the nature of Brek conversation. He is employed by Long Island-based FJC Security Services Inc., which has a security contract with the Port Authority.

The company said they it is “continuing to work with the authorities on this matter” but declined further comment.

No federal charges were filed in the case, said Malcolm Wiley, spokesman for the U.S. Secret Service.

Wiley said Brek has denied making threats.

via Newark Airport security guard John Brek arrested for making threats against President Obama.