LUCID DREAMS

Sleep is an important function in humans. The exact nature of why people need to sleep (let alone the recommended eight hours a night) is unclear. Researchers have been trying to figure out why during a rest phase, human brains tend to remain active, including dreams and nightmares. Some have begun to research the condition of lucid dreams, a dream state where the sleeper actively controls what happens in their dreams.

It is postulated that if you think about something before you go asleep, your short term memory will be accessed to help complete the story before you wake. Other researchers think that strong, troubling thoughts or anxiety levels are put to the test when people dream. In other words, dreams are a series of symbolic "what if" scenarios to train your brain to decide a proper outcome in the decision making process when you are awake.

Lucid dreams may just be planted suggestions as you doze off. For example, if a teen boy has a crush on a school girl but he is too shy to talk to her, he may dream about her in such a way to interact with her without being rejected in real life. It may not be a lucid dream, but a planted story idea that the brain may create using stored memories.

In a study in the journal Dreaming, a pair of psychological researchers from the Sleep Laboratory at Swansea University in the UK report that people who hit their alarm clock’s snooze button more often tend to have more lucid dreams. A total of 84 participants between the ages of 18 and 75 filled out an online survey about their alarm clock usage and the frequency of their lucid dreams, if they had any. The participants were recruited through online forums on dreaming, although some reported never having succeeded in having a lucid dream.

The researchers found a significant relationship between how often people snoozed and how often they remembered dreams and experienced lucid dreams. While it could be that people who snooze a lot and people who lucid dream a lot have some unknown quality in common, there’s also a possibility that being briefly awoken by an alarm before going back to sleep might put your brain in the right mode to lucid dream, such as by producing rapid eye movement sleep (REM), a sleep stage that has been linked to lucid dreaming.

Lucid dreams can take on a high definition quality to it. There may be more "verbal" interaction with other people, known or unknown; in highly charged or adventurous situations. The sleeper may take on roles that do not suit him or her in real life. A shy, introvert could be a superhero in a lucid dream state.

And this is why the dream theory has many followers in the LOST world. It explains away all the continuity, science and plot errors or omissions because dreams are not real. It also explains the sci-fi elements like the smoke monster and lack of punishment for crimes and sins because they really did not happen. The components of LOST could be a jig saw puzzle of symbolic aspects of human life that are jumbled together into a layered story. And in such a fashion, the lucid fantasy could feel like it is real to the dreamer.