Hypnopedia, or the ability to learn during sleep, was popularized in the '60s, with for example the dystopia Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, in which individuals are conditioned to their future tasks during sleep. This concept has been progressively abandoned due to a lack of reliable scientific evidence supporting in-sleep learning abilities.

A study published this August 6 in the journal Scientific Reports by researchers from the ULB Neuroscience Institute (UNI) shows that while our brain is able to continue perceiving sounds during sleep like at wake, the ability to group these sounds according to their organization in a sequence is only present at wakefulness, and completely disappears during sleep.

I always run a playlist of old-time radio shows during sleeptime. Usually I'm awake for the first 30-minute show, then fade out during the next one. Most of these shows are thoroughly familiar, but I try to keep a fresh episode at the start to snatch my brain away from whatever idiot stuff I was worrying about in the day.

Several times I've dropped off during a familiar episode, then popped back up for unknown reasons. This in/out process enabled me to note the scenery and characters generated by the mind in both modes.

In wake mode, familiar episodes always repeat the location and characters that I 'built' the first time I heard the episode; and obviously use the story that was in the script.

I dropped down into sleep while 'in' the familiar location. In early sleep the ear circuit is still connected, so I was hearing at least part of the dialog. The in-sleep version of the location and characters and story was ENTIRELY DIFFERENT from the familiar waking version. The dream-generator instantly wrote its own houses and terrain, its own characters, and its own STORY LINE, to fit the words that were filtering inward. Needless to say, all of these were considerably more interesting and original than the waking version.

Labels: Alternate universe, Answered better than asked

¶ 2:29 AM