The Right Dream

The first tangible proof that there is a ‘reality shaping’ mechanism inherent in the human brain which can be activated by dreams, came from a study carried out by a University of Michigan psychologist by the name of Hazel Markus. She asked university undergraduates of roughly equal academic ability to take part in an experiment that required them to visualise a positive and a negative self.

Some were asked, for example, to think of working in a mindless job and living in a run-down apartment, while others were given the task of visualising living a life in the sun, having a well-paid job and owning a ranch with a swimming pool.

After having been given sufficient time to ‘see’ themselves in detail in their given jobs and lifestyles the students were then put through a barrage of tests that included solving maths problems mentally and writing with their non-dominant hand.

Surprisingly, the students who had been given the positive images to focus on outperformed by a significant margin those who had taken on the role of ‘losers’ and had been given a negative image to visualise.

The implication is that even such an innocuous activity as visualising yourself, job and lifestyle in the future, can have a tremendous impact on your ability to cope with the present thus creating a self-fulfilling prophesy of sorts.

Markus’ study was a small one. It did not go on long enough or in sufficient depth to indicate the exact nature of the reality shaping mechanism. Its findings however were sufficient to indicate that there is something there and that it can be made to work.

All the same, it would require an enormous leap of faith from your part, to equate the indications of a psychological study which analysed success in terms of self-motivation, crisis-coping ability and emotional stability when under pressure with the claims of medieval magicians that the brain can -through dreams or even daydreams- influence one’s external reality.

The confirmation that this indeed is so has come from the people who are these days involved in asking the deep questions about man, the world and the universe: the theoretical physicists.In chapter one we saw how man, these days, is considered to play a vital role in the way the universe unfolds. This has become known as the ‘participatory’ model of the universe, rather than the ‘observational’ one of Rène Descartes and Isaac Newton, and up to now experimental evidence in the field of sub-atomic physics seems to uphold the validity of this, newer, model.

This raises more questions than it answers. Man is a vital part of the universe only because he can interact with it in through means we have yet to discover. Clearly, there must be some sort of hidden mechanism at work that permits this interaction to take place. This is where dreams come in.