The Central Ideas Of Lucid Dreaming

“All that we see or seem, is but a dream within a dream.”(Edgar Allen Poe). Lucid dreaming is when you realize you are dreams start to feel like a reality. The central idea of inception is to create a dream within a dream in order to plant an idea in someone else's mind. Christopher Nolan, the creator of inception, portrayed lucid dreaming inaccurately, the movie doesn't completely add up with The scientific research, the techniques used to induce lucid dreaming, and some of the main ideas of inception are not accurate (time dilation, limbo, sharing dreams, dying in dreams, and lastly switching between dream levels.) Greek philosopher Aristotle once realized that "often when one is asleep, there is something in consciousness which declares
Scientist Stephen LaBerge created a technique to induce lucid dreaming called MILD. “…common technique …used to induce a lucid dream at will by setting an intention, while falling asleep, to remember to recognize that one is dreaming or to remember to look for dream signs when one is in a dream.”(wlww.neurosoup.com) MILD stands for Mnemonic induction of lucid dreams. This is done by making frequent reality checks during the day so it follows you into your dreams. These checks could be simple like how many fingers do you have? If you wear glasses, how good can you see without your glasses? Just little things in your conscious state that might change during lucid dreaming. A newer technique used by scientists to induce lucid dreaming is electric scalp stimulation. “They used a non-invasive method called Transcranial Alternating Current Stimulation (tACS). tACS uses electrodes placed on the scalp to stimulate the surface of the brain. When they sent an electrical current in the Gamma frequency into the frontotemporal region of the scalp, the participants overwhelmingly reported a self-aware dream upon waking.”(Www.ultraculture.org) Basically this technique allows scientists to create the process of lucid dreaming at a faster pace than the normal sleep cycle of ninety
First things first, sharing dreams is not a possibility as of now. That is the most glaringly inaccurate concept of this movie. Even though a dream may be similar to someone else's , it is not the same lucid dream. In order for the characters to plant an idea into their victims brain, they have to have lucid dreams, within lucid dreams. Now, that might be possible, but from what scientists have learned so far from their studies of lucid dreaming is that you may have control of your dreams, but you can not dream within a dream. Like dying in a dream, you would just wake up in reality. Which brings up the next inaccuracy of Inception, time dilation. Inception depicts time to go by faster each different level of unconsciousness you go into. Five minutes of sleep equal one hour of dream time, during the first layer of unconsciousness. “After verifying that lucid dreaming was actually occurring in lab, Stephen LaBerge and his lucid volunteers performed a number of experiments in their dreams designed to ferret out the differences between the waking and dreaming states, and also measured the subjects’ physical reactions to changes in their dream worlds. For instance, in one experiment LaBerge had subjects count out ten seconds in their dreams and report, via eye movements, when they had completed the task. By measuring the time that passed