DREAM RESEARCH

One of the stronger theories of LOST addicts is that the entire premise of the show was one trapped in a dream.

Whose dream is an open question. As is why humans dream at all.

Scientists are still not sure why we dream.  But new research in mice suggests that the brain might be using periods of deep sleep to clear out residual memories to make room for fresh ones.

Published in the journal Science, researchers in Japan observed the mice's hypothalamus while the mice slept. During their deep REM sleep - - -which is associated with dreaming in humans - - - a type of neuron that produced a hormone called MCH had a sharp uptick in activity. The MCH neurons also appeared to be targeting neurons in the hippocampus, the brain region that consolidates memories.

In an experiment, researchers isolated MCH neurons in the mice's brains for observation. The mice were allowed to sniff and play with two toys, which were removed when the mice had become familiar with them. Later, the mice were given a familiar toy and a new toy. With their MCH neurons artificially activated, the mice sniffed them both—suggesting that their memory of them was worse. When the neurons were artificially deactivated, the mice were able to remember that they had already been exposed to the familiar plaything.

The ability of MCH neurons to go patrolling the hippocampus during REM sleep led the paper’s authors to suggest the brain might use this dream stage to do some neurological tidying up, getting rid of non-crucial information so fresh data can be processed.

Why would we want to forget things? An abundance of information can be overwhelming and inhibit the ability to make sense of new knowledge. But if something is truly important—a birthday, a PIN number, a vacation—the brain will hang on to it.

If you want a technology analogy, it is like de-fragmenting your hard drive. Bits and pieces of computer information (code) is randomly stored on your hard drive media. But over time, accessing bits of information get stored in different places on the drive. When you run a preventative maintenance program, it rejoins the associated information bits for better access.

One of the reoccurring oddities of the show was the frustrating part that the main characters "forgot" key information at important moments. As a viewer, "how stupid!" was a common reaction to a character falling into a known trap. This study could be an explanation that the characters' memories were being erased by new memories (or brain washing).

Also, if the story engine was in the mind of one character, such as Jack or Hurley, then certain stimulus or an overactive imagination could jumble up aspects of his fantasy world to create continuity errors.

Story continuity errors was a big gripe during the show's run. It was bad enough that certain questions were asked but never answered, but drastic errors made some people wonder if the writers were getting lazy or there was a deeper meaning. The consensus in the end was the former.

The dream theory also gets some credence because of the Sixth Season's forced "happy ending" in the church for the main characters. The story and show premise did a 180 DEGREE turn on the adamant "this is not set in hell or purgatory" show runner promise to an after life after show.

This current science study may be a small point in the larger picture of what we do not know about ourselves. Likewise, it also shows how much we still do not know about LOST, the series.

BIOHACK

The New York Post reports:

If you’ve ever tried out a virtual reality headset, you will understand the disarming sensation of pulling the headset from your eyes once it’s game over.

It’s incredibly easy to trick your mind into feeling sensations like fear, panic or even total calm and now — according to scientists in London — dreaming.

Scientists are beavering away at methods that can coax the brain into changing its perception of what’s real.

A group of scientists in London are putting volunteers into a dream state even though they are awake.
Carl Smith, director of the Learning Technology Research Center (LTRC) in London  that they have been successful in the process, called “context engineering.”

They can do this using a method called binaural beats, where a tone of a particular frequency is played into one ear and a different tone of another frequency is played into the other.

The brain tries to regulate the sound and creates a third tone that balances the two by creating an equal frequency.

Focusing on this third tone, a method called “delta entrainment,” allows people to drop into a dream state – without going to sleep.

Smith said:”When people want to go into a dream state they can do a 15-minute delta entrainment so their brain actually goes into the delta state, a sleep state, even though they’re not sleeping – and that’s just through listening to binaural sounds.”

It’s not just for inducing different levels of consciousness, these methods can help us regulate sleep patterns, calm us down and help us focus, they claim.

There are a variety of exercises you can perform to train your brain into focusing on senses we typically ignore.

This includes concentrating on your peripheral vision to gain a sense of calm, something athletes are adopting to focus their mind.

It’s part of a subculture called biohacking, which has gained notoriety among amateur scientists. 

The implications of this new process engineering the mind are intense. Tricking your mind to feel intense emotions such as fear and panic could be weaponized against an enemy. A soldier in a panic attack state is not concentrating on his training. He is vulnerable. A weak link.

The use of sound, a tone to stimulate delta sleep patterns, to force a waking person to go into a dream state seems like a plausible Dharma experiment. Viewers often questioned why the main characters were oblivious to their surroundings, the lack of questions to get answers, and a general malaise from the beach campers.

When Faraday remarked that the light on the island was "different," he was seeing it as being diffused or interrupted in its normal pattern. Like light, sound is also a wave form. It is possible that the island light refraction was a byproduct of tonal "context engineering" of the island inhabitants. In the last season, there was a strong hint that the characters had to "awaken" in order to be saved. Saved from what? An island experiment into mind control? The re-training of one's human brain to change into an altered state of consciousness to pass on to another dimension (as the ancient Egyptians believed in their burial texts)?

You can put all the characters missteps, misinformation, misguided missions and missed opportunities on the fact that they were sleepwalking through the series. Literally. Sleep deprivation by putting their minds into delta wave patterns mimicking sleep when they were not at rest. You could then "suggest" patterns of behavior like programming a computer to run simulations. For example, when Hurley's imaginary friend came to him in the island and convinced him it was all a dream - - - in his head - - - and the only way to "wake up" was to jump off a cliff, Hurley was going to do it until Libby showed up out of nowhere. And to keep Hurley grounded, Libby then became his unlikely girlfriend. This dramatic shift in Hurley's thought processes could be an example of how he was programmed to change course. And to keep him on the right path, Libby was constructed to give him a new purpose.

Is there a state of consciousness between being awake and being asleep? Does daydreaming create the bridge between those mental states. And can one scramble their defined positions to change a person's personality, thoughts, morals, goals and fears?

LOST was a series of manipulations. Powerful personalities were always looking to manipulate behavior in others. Some did it by intelligence. Some did it by force. Some did it by instilling fear. But the manipulation was to create order, obedience and leadership.

If these manipulations were a series of experimental biohacks, that puts the series in a new light. None of the characters were dead or truly alive. You could think you were immortal (like Jacob and Patchy) if those images were planted in your mind. They were lab rats in an open experiment.

But what was the end game of the experiment? If it was to get the characters to merge their collective thoughts to find the same finish line in the church, then they succeeded in that task. But what was the church? Was it the afterlife or was it merely the end of an elaborate video game? And the idea of the characters walking out into the bright white light (the symbolism of out-of-body death experience) could be the means of bulk erasing their memories by the scientists conducting the experiment.

Or it could have been a crazy military experiment to try to "expand" the territory of mankind by trying to find a way to "jump" into parallel universes or alternative realities (such as heaven after one dies and their spirit is released). One could have a great military advantage is one could control another world embedded in the present reality. People like Widmore saw the power in controlling the island (and its mind altering possibilities).

This news story sheds some more credence on a biohack premise to the show. The character(s) may have been mere test subjects outside the realm of Earth's physics and cultural common sense.

BETWEEN SLEEP AND AWAKE

The little clue about being "awake," from something, still haunts theorists.

The debate focus is on whether the sideways world was real, paranormal, heavenly or an illusion.

Scientists are researching the mental condition which occurs just before a person wakes up from sleep. There is a distinct period where things can happen to a person: experience a paralysis nightmare or sleepwalk. The sleep paralysis occurs when your mind wakes up prior to your body. The sleepwalking occurs when your body wakes up before your mind.

History is littered with references to "demonic" sleep attacks. No one knew why people acted strangely. Since it was not normal, the explanation had to be it was paranormal. The content of hallucinations can often be thematically linked to the feeling of paralysis –  manifesting as visions of an intruder in the bed who is physically holding the sleeper down. Records of incidents attributable to sleep paralysis can actually be found throughout history, in different cultures,  dating back as far as 400 BC. Some blamed witchcraft and curses.

Sleep paralysis is when your limbs are frozen but your mind is dreaming about a terrible thing, for example, a monster attacking you. Your mind races its instincts to flee or fight back, but your body does not respond. That increases the fear one feels in the moment.

Science states that a person could be awake and been dreaming at the same time. Sleep disturbances include types of parasomnia,  the inability to move, these periods of wakeful paralysis are often accompanied with vivid multisensory hallucinations. Effectively, imagery from your dreams can actually intrude into your waking reality.

The precise physiological mechanisms that result in sleep paralysis are still not entirely understood. What is known is that, typically, when we dream, our actions are confined to our imagination. We all have a built-in safety mechanism, which you can think of as something like a circuit breaker; it effectively blocks your brain’s motor planning signals from becoming motor action signals. This mechanism prevents us from physically acting out the actions that we dream of making. Thus, when you’re being chased by a monster in a dream, you don’t actually rise up and charge into the bedroom wall, or evolutionarily-speaking, tumble out of your tree. However, our brains are highly complex systems, and, as such, are prone to the occasional glitch.

One example is sleepwalking, which occurs when the paralysis eases too early, while you’re still asleep. On the flip side, sometimes the paralysis lingers – even after you’ve awoken. This typically happens just on the threshold of sleep – either just as you’re waking up or just as you’re drifting off. You can be conscious, with your eyes open, but be completely unable to move your body. Again, this is a fairly common occurrence, but the experience can be understandably alarming.

Such problems may be a consequence of more general sleep disruption. Researchers have shown that sleep paralysis experiences can be induced in lab settings when subjects are repeatedly woken from deep sleep. Researchers believe that 50 percent of people will experience at least one episode in their lifetimes.
Why would a person's mind act in such a strange fashion? One theory is that sleeping might serve to ‘consolidate’ memories from our waking life. The brain is de-fragment its information just like a computer software program corrects disjointed stored files. 

In 2000, a team of scientists at Harvard Medical School reported that participants who played the video game Tetris would continually report seeing game-like imagery, the iconic falling blocks, just before falling asleep. Similar results have been obtained using other types of video games.  This evidence has been used to support the idea that sleeping might serve to ‘consolidate’ memories from our waking life - consolidation is term that refers to the process of reinforcing and strengthening newly created memories. Experiments have demonstrated that people who are given memory-based tasks will perform better if they’re given the opportunity to sleep after learning. It seems as though after we’ve been engaged in a learning task, our minds might be using sleep as a sort of rehearsal space to practice problems.

But the sleep disturbances occur when the normal sleep process (and its mental sorting process) goes out of whack.

There is an old saying that you should never wake up a sleepwalker. It would be too traumatic for them to wake away from their resting place. People have had actual conversations with sleepwalkers. The idea that a person can be living in two "different states," awake and asleep is part of the issue with the LOST mythology paradoxes.

Were the main characters always awake? They were rarely shown sleeping - - - or was that purposeful to mimic the projection of a dream state. Why were clues such as "Illusion" on the name of a boat so clear at major story points? Why were Egyptian symbols of the dead used so often?

It begs the question of whether the characters were in some sort of "in-between" state of existence: partially awake (which accesses their personality traits) and partially asleep (which accesses their memories, fears, desires, emotions, etc.). Science research is beginning to think that there is such a place in daily human life.

HEADING DOWN THE ROAD

As October creeps toward Halloween, with scores of creepy clowns popping up along the roadsides of America, the season gets us back to one element of LOST - - - dream theories.

But in this holiday season, nightmares.

One can broadly classify dreamers into two categories:

1. The upbeat, positive daydreamer who fantasizes about a better life for him or her self.

2. The depressed, anxiety ridden, negative sleeper who tosses and turns at night with ghastly visions of danger and horror.

Many scientists believe that dreams during sleep have major conscious contributions to a person's life. They believe that dreams are the mind's computer running simulations of potential events to gauge how the person (sleeper) will react if the simulation comes true. This is part of a probable ancient self-protection mechanism to teach instinct and survival skills.

The human mind is a complex thing which probably has hard wired in itself self-preservation.

So, one could presume that people who have happy dreams are living happy waking lives.

The counter part to that presumption is that people who have nightmares are living unhappy lives.

There is probably a gray area of people who lead mixed waking lives (people who are caught in a rut, dream of better things, or at times fear the worst.)

When you look at the scope of LOST's story lines, most center upon what would consider a negative path. The drama that incorporates danger, death and violence is easier to comprehend and compel viewership.

Each of the main characters on the show had deep seeded concerns about their lives. There were more negative emotions driving character actions than happy-go-lucky personalities.

Many characters had deep, unresolved emotional issues such as abandonment, abuse, social anxiety disorders and irrational fears. Many characters were heading down the road to nervous breakdowns, anti-social behavior or addiction/retreat from society.

So it is no wonder that these characters "wound up" together in the same place.

The place (and what it represents) is a matter for another discussion. But the series may have been an attempt to work through the characters underlying secrets, unresolved conflicts and personal angsts in the form of living island nightmares (real and imagined).

DREAM POSTS

“Never give up on a dream just because of the time it will take to accomplish it. The time will pass anyway.” - - -  Earl Nightingale

Life is a long journey filled along the way with pot holes, obstructions, smooth pavement and challenges. It is how each person deals with things in their path creates a lesson on a "life well lived."

One has to ponder whether the next generations will have a similar view of their world.

For example, in the 1970s, a boy would dream of becoming a millionaire and owning a Cadillac. He was told that if he worked hard in school, and got a good job with a good business, he could achieve anything. The generation who got through college in the early 1980s and into professions probably made those dream posts along their paths.

But can the same be shared with boys today?

He is immersed in technology from an early age. Before he speaks, he can play simple games on his parent's smart phone. He views the world as an entitlement. He is pampered by his parents and spoiled by his grandparents. He will have a different view from his parents dreams. He may not want to own a car. He may not want to work hard (spending extra time to get promotions and salary/benefit increases). He may not want to learn about 401(k) or retirement planning. He wants to live a free and simple lifestyle with his other Millennials in a faux sense of utopian ignorance.

He really does not ponder future dreams but instead views the world in the present. What can he consume, digitally and physically, in this moment. His goal is to move through life and experience it as it comes to him like a shark wandering the ocean currents for food.

There will be exceptions to this view. But many employers have commented in the past five years that they have good, well paying jobs that remain unfilled due to the deficiencies in entry level hires, especially their personal views toward work and self-determination. They need supervision, encouragement and rewards for simple tasks. Employers want employees not burdensome babysitters for managers.

Dreams and goals are the markers for people to expand their horizons, to push themselves to greater heights, to prove to themselves there is more in this world than just what could be handed to them. There are the creators and there are the consumers of content. The gulf seems to have widened in the passing generations.

 It is like the professional who is bogged down in their regular job. But they have always dreamed of writing the great American novel. But they seem to feel there is not enough time to start or finish one. Your mind will trick you into that trap of procrastination. Instead of watching a TV show repeat, fire up the word processor. Instead of going out to eat, set a slow crock pot meal and fire up the word processor. Instead of just walking in a nature preserve taking in its beauty, multitask and think about your novel's characters and story structures.

Time management seems to be the biggest hurdle for people who want to accomplish their dreams.

BRAINS IN JARS

The London Daily Mail had a recent article describing what an Australian professor claims that our entire existence could be an elaborate illusion controlled by a genius evil scientist.

The premise is that you are not where you think you are. 

Your brain has been expertly removed from your body and is being kept alive in a vat of nutrients that sits on a laboratory bench.

The nerve endings of your brain are connected to a supercomputer that feeds you all the sensations of everyday life. 

This is why you think you're living a completely normal life.

Do you still exist? Is the world as you know it a figment of your imagination or an illusion constructed by this evil supercomputer network?

Could you prove to someone that you are not actually a brain in a vat?

As the article states, the philosopher Hilary Putnam proposed this famous version of the brain-in-a-vat thought experiment in his 1981 book, Reason, Truth and History, but it is essentially an updated version of the French philosopher René Descartes' notion of the Evil Genius from his 1641 Meditations on First Philosophy.

While such thought experiments might seem glib – and perhaps a little unsettling – they serve a useful purpose. They are used by philosophers to investigate what beliefs we can hold to be true and, as a result, what kind of knowledge we can have about ourselves and the world around us.

Descartes thought the best way to do this was to start by doubting everything, and building our knowledge from there. Using this skeptical approach, he claimed that only a core of absolute certainty will serve as a reliable foundation for knowledge. 

He said: If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.

It is from Descartes that we get classical skeptical queries favored by philosophers such as: how can we be sure that we are awake right now and not asleep, dreaming?

To take this challenge to our assumed knowledge further, Descartes imagines there exists an omnipotent, malicious demon that deceives us, leading us to believe we are living our lives when, in fact, reality could be very different to how it appears to us.

This premise has been discussed as a possible explanation to the LOST mythology. 

For example, who did Patchy of the Others survive being killed by the sonic fence and the island visitors to somehow come back to kill Charlie with an underwater explosive? To have nine lives, a human has to be unrealistically lucky or be reincarnated many times over. Or in this premise, he never really died because he was never really alive. He was a computer simulation, a reusable prop, to infuse the subject jar brains with conflict, reality, drama and emotional responses.

Another explanation of the evil genius controlling everything was inferred from the huge military industrial complex that was the island. Human experiments were part of the mission of the island scientists. It is not a great leap to see how an unseen overlord could have been directing the action, just like the man behind the curtain in the series nod to the Wizard of Oz. 

And this article does touch upon the embedded theme throughout the series: philosophy. Characters like Locke and Hume were named after famous philosophers. The characters had to make philosophic decisions between right and wrong, free will or capture. LOST could be viewed as an interactive thesis of philosophic questions being run through various programs in a supercomputer.

Because of the various continuity errors and story line red herrings, many LOST fans questioned the truth of the series story lines. There was doubt that the story writers and show runners actually knew what they were doing. Many have been searching for answers to explain or cover-up the show's big flaws. So, in a way, many continue to do a philosophic autopsy on the show to glean new information and explanations to make the show better in their own minds.

The mind is a powerful but not very well understood thing. It is an intangible element incorporated in the tangible brain. Our current science studies state how we "think" the mind works, but no one has shown the ability to download, in real time, the mental images of a human being onto a monitor. It is merely speculation, educated guess, theory. But what if there were a higher being who could actually tap into the conscious and subconscious mind of human beings - - -  for entertainment or research purposes? That would put the human race on par with gold fish in an cosmic aquarium.

SHORT SLEEPERS

Researchers have found a gene mutation which allows some people to sleep as little as four hours a night.

Researchers discovered a tiny mutation in a gene DEC2 that was present in those who were short-sleepers, but not in members of the family who had normal length sleep, nor in 250 unrelated volunteers.

When the team bred mice to express this same mutation, the rodents also slept less but performed just as well as regular mice when given physical and cognitive tasks.

Getting too little sleep normally has a significant impact on health, quality of life and life expectancy. It can cause depression, weight gain and put you at greater risk of stroke and diabetes. “Sleep is so important, if you sleep well you can avoid many diseases, even dementia,” said the lead researcher. “If you deprive someone of just two hours sleep a day, their cognitive functions become significantly impaired almost immediately.”

But why sleep is so important is still a bit of a mystery. The general consensus is that the brain needs sleep to do some housekeeping and general maintenance, since it doesn’t get much downtime during the day. While we sleep, the brain can repair cellular damage, remove toxins that accumulate during the day, boost flagging energy supplies and lay down memories.

People with the DEC2 mutation can do the same cleaning up process in a shorter period of time – they are just more efficient than the rest of us at sleeping.

Since discovering the DEC2 mutation, a lot of people have come forward claiming to only sleep a few hours a day. Most of these had insomnia. “We’re not focusing on those people who have sleeping issues that make them sleep less, we wanted to focus on people who sleep for a few hours and feel great.”

A positive outlook is common among all of the short-sleepers  studied. “Anecdotally,” the report says, “they are all very energetic, very optimistic. It’s very common for them to feel like they want to cram as much into life as they can, but we’re not sure how or whether this is related to their mutations.”

One can assume sleep deprivation can cause lingering mental issues including concentration, nightmares, lack of focus, anxiety, stress, tiredness and physical and mental mistakes. It sounds like much of the early characters coping with the island. In fact, rarely did we see any character sleeping or awaking from a deep slumber. It was non-stop action and reaction.

Is that itself a clue to the dynamics of the story? Were the fact that the LOST characters on edge, seeing smoke monsters, hallucinations and voices really caused by sleep deprivation? And if this was a giant experiment to determine who could function with less REM sleep, did anyone come close to a functioning, normal human being?

HEAVEN AND HELL

One of the interpretive themes of LOST was heaven and hell. Some fans felt that the main characters were in hell, symbolized the by the island and its various monsters, sinners and punishments. Others thought that the characters found their heaven in the sideways world, which ran concurrently in the Season 6 series - - - but if you look at Alpert's back story, it had been running for eternity.

The concept of duality - - - two different planes of existence - - - is also a reoccurring theme. Many scientists believe in the time-space continuum contains multiverses, where each action creates a new and slightly different universe based upon those probable effects of an action.

But there is a simple way of looking at the LOST's split story personality.

From a spiritual perspective, each living person has two states: an awaken state and a sleeping state. When you are awake, you are living and experiencing the good and bad of real life. Over time, daily routines like work and family become grinds. The repetitive nature of living is a drain upon one's creative, adventurous curiosities. In order to fulfill that need, people tend to have deeper, more complex dreams when they sleep. Sleep is a person's way of repairing and re-energizing their body. But it can also be a needed fantasy diversion to a person's "perfect world."

In fact, people sometimes can get "lost" in their dreams. They may not be able to tell what is real and what is fantasy. The illusions in dreams become delusions in real life. And this creates personality disorders and mental mistakes, deep problems at work or with family. A prime example could be Locke, who drifted fantasy games into his real life to the point where he gave up his normal existence to join a commune in the hope of finding a "family"

It can be said that when people are awake in their boring, rotten, habitual work world, they are living in hell. For most of us, we cannot change the relentlessness of this existence. We are trapped by circumstance and obligation.

But when we totally get away from the daily routine, our dreams can appear to be heavenly. Our fantasies make us the star of our own movie. We can be the hero, the lover, the protector, the superhero, the leader, the greatest person in the world.

LOST's island world could be considered the collision of both the heaven and hell aspects of a person's existence. It contains fragmented bits of both worlds which cannot exist together. The show rarely showed anyone sleeping - - - insomnia was rampant. It could be a clue that the characters were trapped in a limbo between being awake and being asleep - - - a place ruled by their nightmares.

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.

LOST DREAMS

There are various resources to interpret one's dreams.

Dreams are often viewed as a subconscious exercise to try to figure out what is bothering your conscious self.

If you dream about being "lost," it could mean several different things. One source states:

To dream that you are lost suggests that you have lost your direction in life or that you have lost sight of your goals. You may be feeling worried and insecure about the path you are taking in life. If you try to call for help, then it means that you are trying to reach out for support. You are looking for someone to lean on. Alternatively, being lost means that you are still adjusting to a new situation in which the rules and conditions are ever changing.  

To dream that someone else is lost represents some unresolved issues or feelings pertaining to the person that is lost. Consider what aspect of that person you may have lost within your own self. Perhaps you need to recapture and re-acknowledge those aspects.

In both instances, the main characters in LOST could have been in a dream state interpretation. Individually, they had lost their direction in their life either personally or professionally. They may have pieced together a collective imagination of strangers with similar problems in order to cope with their own issues. The main characters struggle is trying to acknowledge and accept various aspects of their life, their character and their fate.

WHEN YOU CAN'T SLEEP

There is a Japanese legend that states that if you cannot fall asleep it means that you are awake in another person's dream.

How interesting.

LOST had several key trigger words or concepts: awakening, dreams, alternative reality, changes in time and space.

But what is a better representation of an alternate reality or change in time and space than dreams?

Even another person's dreams that affects you.

It is not that the person who cannot sleep knows about, or controls the other person's dream. It is probably the exact opposite. When one tosses aimlessly trying to get to sleep, you are restless and not in a dream state. It is like the actual dreamer has pulled the mechanism for your dreams, your subconscious REM dream state, from you to power their vivid imagination with your appearance, words, character and personality.

Would this be a dream thief in action?  No, because they are not "your" dreams since you are still awake.

The idea that a heavy, deep thinking dreamer can attach their mental thought waves to other people to harvest and extract "better" more lucid dreams is a fascinating collision of philosophy and science fiction.

Through the series, we rarely saw any of the main characters actually sleeping. They were constantly on the move, in day light and at night. And over time, they did look tired. Their mental faculties were low. (How many times did we complain that the characters failed to ask basic questions to people coming back from a mission?) The island characters were the ones who were sleep deprived for a reason.

It still could be associated with a Dharma experiment on weaponizing dreams for the military. Or it could be that the stress levels and electromagnetic properties of the island interfered with anyone getting REM sleep (the biological basic need to rest and recharge one's internal batteries). Prolonged non-sleep can make people forgetful, irritable, and psychotic.  

But what does the original legend mean?

It may be a philosophical means to explain how being awake can be expressed on different levels of reality. Being in another persons dream for example can simply mean that person has interest in you or it can actually be a theoretical idea that you exist many different places at once.

In LOST, we presume that the main characters were in two different places (island world and the sideways plain of existence) at the same time. The sideways people could not "remember" their island pasts until "they were awakened."  Since the sideways world was the after life, it could be equated that the main characters were "restless ghosts" who could not come to terms with their pasts. 

Or it could mean that in each person, we have many people: we have our biologic human form that is transfixed to this planet. We may also have a spiritual form which rests inside our body, but it can be released into a different plain of existence. Perhaps, people whose "soul" has left their living body are suddenly defenseless against the temptations and evil urges that plague mankind. 

In the sideways world, the characters did not reunite with their bodies. Their souls "remembered" their past - - - their island past and their friendships, the missing pieces in their lives.  

PRE DEATH DREAMS

During their final days, people commonly report having extraordinary dreams and visions. While there’s an extensive record of these pre-death experiences, little formal research on them exists.

Researchers from Canisius College, however, recently conducted the first such study, published in the Journal of Palliative Medicine and found that end-of-life dreams and visions (ELDVs) are an intrinsic and comforting part of the dying process.

The study included 66 patients receiving end-of-life care at the Center for Hospice and Palliative Care in Cheektowaga, NY. On a daily basis, researchers interviewed patients about their dreams and visions, specifically asking about their content, frequency and comfort level.

More than anything else, patients said they dreamt of deceased relatives and friends. While dreaming of the departed may sound saddening, patients said the experiences, which grew more frequent as they neared death, brought them significantly more comfort than dreams concerning other topics.

Study authors say it’s important that doctors understand ELDVs as cathartic, comforting and natural experiences. Too often, according to the press release, doctors and nurses dismiss ELDVs as delusions or hallucinations that require fixing. But the end of life dreams and visions differ from delirium in a significant way: People who are delirious have lost their connection to reality and cannot communicate rationally. Because delirium poses risk and causes distress, it merits medical treatment. ELDVs, per this research, don’t warrant the same cautious response; they’re meaningful and healthy, and can affect quality of life for people nearing the end of theirs.

Can this new research area be applied to LOST?

The show winds up as an End of Life experience. And Christian told Jack that many of his friends died before and after him . . . . which suggests that Jack's experiences on the island could have manifested dreams with his "deceased" friends in a fantasy world.

DREAM ADVENTURES

Robert Moss is the creator of Active Dreaming, an original method of dream work and healing through the imagination. Born in Australia, he survived three near-death experiences in childhood. He leads popular seminars all over the world, including a three-year training for teachers of Active Dreaming and a lively online dream school. A former lecturer in ancient history at the Australian National University, he is a bestselling novelist, journalist, and independent scholar. His seven books on dreaming, shamanism and imagination include Conscious Dreaming, Dreamways of the Iroquois, The Three “Only” Things,  and Dreamgates: Exploring the Worlds of Soul, Imagination, and Life Beyond Death. 


Moss’s Active Dreaming is an original synthesis of contemporary dreamwork and shamanic methods of journeying and healing. A central premise of Moss’s approach is that dreaming isn’t just what happens during sleep; dreaming is waking up to sources of guidance, healing and creativity beyond the reach of the everyday mind. He introduced his method to an international audience as an invited presenter at the conference of the International Association for the Study of Dreams at the University of Leiden in 1994
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Over the past fifteen years, he has led seminars at the Esalen Institute, Kripalu, the Omega Institute, the New York Open Center, Bastyr University, John F. Kennedy University, Meriter Hospital, and many other centers and institutions. He has taught in-depth workshops in Active Dreaming in the UK, Australia, Canada, Costa Rica, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Lithuania, Romania, and Austria and leads a three-year training course for teachers of Active Dreaming. He leads popular online dreamwork courses at www.spirituality-health.com, writes the “Dream Life” column for Spirituality magazine, and hosts the Way of the Dreamer radio show at www.healthylife.net.


He has appeared on many TV and radio shows, ranging from Charlie Rose and the Today show to Coast to Coast, and including The Diane Rehm Show on NPR, Michael Krasny’s Forum on KQED San Francisco, The Faith Middleton Show on Connecticut Public Radio, and CBC’s Tapestry program. His articles on dreaming have been published in media ranging from Parade to Shaman’s Drum and Beliefnet.com.


He is a former history professor who has become a “dream archeologist." 


He says while “archeology” is often understood to be the science of unearthing and studying antiquities, the root meaning is more profound: it is the study of the arche, the first and essential things. The practice of “dream archeology” requires mastery of a panoply of sources, and the ability to read between the lines and make connections that have gone unnoticed by specialists who were looking for something else. It requires the ability to locate dreaming in its context – physical, social and cultural. And it demands the ability to enter a different time or culture, through the exercise of active imagination, and experience it from the inside as it may have been. These are the skills we need to excavate the inner dimension of the human adventure.


There is a growing line of dream practitioners who are training people to "control" their dreams. Some use the method of pre-sleep suggestion to get your unconscious mind to focus on a type of dream you want to take in REM sleep. Others suggest that what troubles a person before they sleep will find its way into their dreams as a brain's mechanism on how to solve problems or cope with waking issues. There are a few people who can control their livid dreams like a Hollywood director. In these situations, a person may not actually be totally asleep but may be in a stage between daydreaming and actual sleep. A light sleeper may be in more control of its conscious library of thoughts, ideas and images to enhance a dream experience.


It would be revolutionary for people to be able to control their dreams. 


But science still does not fully comprehend why humans dream. Most theorize that dreams take away from the active mind's routine waking tasks. It is a method of "re-charging" the body's energy levels and healing properties. The brain would normally continually be at full active levels like revving a high performance engine. But in order to calm it down, the human body rests or sleeps so the brain engine does not overheat. Other researchers think the brain is a very complex bio-chemical computer which needs to de-fragment its files every night in order to remember information, thoughts, memories and functions. Occasionally, people in dreams may "see" strings of numbers, letters or images zip through their mind's eye like a computer screen compiling lines of program code.


Spiritualists believe that in sleep, a person's soul awakens to analyze its host and to express its beliefs to the subconscious mind. In this view, a person and his or her soul are partners in life. One is in the physical world, the other in the inner, unseen, intangible world of self. The soul may be considered the "inner voice" that some people hear when having to make hard, split second decisions. The soul may also be the instinct and mechanism to protect yourself from yourself, through the use of fear, anxieties and survival modes.


In either situation, human beings for some reason crave adventure. In the real world, most people live real dull lives. Everyone craves some level of adventure, surprise and out-of-comfort-zone accomplishments. Dreams may be the easiest and safest avenue for the human mind to meet those needs of adventure. But at a certain point, humans who think about having new adventures get depressed if they do not have the courage of taking a chance and physically going out to do it. This holds true in the stress and introversion in personal relationships. Sometimes pulling the trigger and asking someone out can open the door to a great adventure or blow up in one's face. The fear of rejection and being hurt is one of those hard wired traits that holds most people back and makes the security blanket of their fantasy dreams harder to break because they can get what they want in their adventure dreams without being hurt by another person.


Most people would say that is living a false life. Life itself is an adventure that one has to take the reins and ride in the real world.

DREAM ALARMS

An article at psychologium.com indicates that certain types of dreams can mean a person has a serious mental condition.

 Vivid Dreams Can Mean You Are Highly Stressed.

If you have some very vivid and crazy dreams, then it could be a sign that you are suffering from stress and clearly this is an issue that needs to be addressed. It has also been ascertained that driven people who work in a constantly stressful environment have been shown to be more likely to suffer from these kinds of dreams on a regular basis. It is believed that it is linked to the brain finding it difficult to process the information that it has picked up during the day, so it is playing catch up during the night leading to more restless nights.

Vivid Dreams Can Be A Sign Of Bipolar Disorder

It is accepted that people with bipolar disorder can suffer from very vivid dreams and even though some argue that it can be linked to medication, this is not always the case. Instead, it is linked to the way in which people with vivid dreams suffer from disrupted sleep patterns and various sleep disorders and it is known that there is a connection between this and bipolar.
However, it is important to point out that just because you have these kinds of dreams does not mean that you have this serious mental illness, but it is at least possible. The only question that is unknown is whether the dreams can occur at the start of bipolar disorder or if it is a symptom that appears later on and is almost a by-product of the illness.

More Dreams Than Usual Can Point To Depression

It has been known since the 1970’s that there is a link to an increase in the number of dreams that a person can have with depression. Studies have shown that people with depression can have three or four times the number of dreams than a normal person and once again it is linked to the type of sleep that the person tends to have when they are depressed. It alters the REM sleep that the person gets when they are depressed and this, in turn, alters the types of dreams as well as the ability to recall them. An individual that is depressed can also find it easier to recall the dreams and they will also often feel tired in the morning as a direct result of the extra brain activity during the night.

Nightmare Disorder

Nightmare disorder is when an individual has repeated nightmares over a certain period of time and this is something that is actually recognized by psychiatrists and psychologists alike. This particular disorder has been linked to a range of mental health issues including PTSD, generalized anxiety, sleep disorders, and stress, so identifying the root cause is not always easy. It is important that an individual knows the difference between this and night terrors so that a doctor or psychiatrist can get to the actual problem.

Nightmares and Borderline Personality Disorder

As well as PTSD, it is known that nightmares may be an indicator of borderline personality disorder. As with other examples given above, it is often linked to the way in which sleep patterns are altered due to the disorder itself. Research has shown that people with borderline personality disorder often suffer from more dream anxiety than other people. It is this anxiety that can lead to the development of nightmares and the same study has shown that this anxiety can be attributed to trauma that the individual had earlier in their childhood and indeed this is one key factor in the development of this particular disorder.

Nightmares and PTSD

People that suffer from post traumatic stress disorder report a higher number of nightmares than the average person. There are studies that show that people with this particular disorder may have higher adrenaline levels, so in turn the adrenaline results in nightmares and dreams that contain a lot more energy. It has also been medically proven that certain medication that lowers blood pressure and the production of adrenaline in PTSD sufferers also leads to a reduction in the nightmares hence the certainty of the link between the two. In the case of PTSD, it is common for the individual to actually relive the events that has led to the development of PTSD, so being aware of the nature of the dream is extremely important in helping with the diagnosis.

Anxiety And Dreams

People that suffer from anxiety will often have strong dreams containing a lot of detail and they can also be quite prolonged rather than short bursts of dream activity. It is believed that it is linked to the activity of the mind during the day as it is known that, when anxious, the energy levels in the brain are significantly higher. The brain also tends to absorb more information which needs to then be processed and this is what can then lead to the activity in the dream. If the anxiety is not tackled, then this can become a recurring theme and the difficulty here is that it does tend to play a role in changing sleep patterns and other examples also state that sleep patterns do indeed play a major part in not only the ability to remember a dream, but also our mental health.

The author states that dreams are capable of being one indicator to understand the state of an individuals mental health. It does not a clear link to mental health issues,  but individuals who suffer from repeated nightmares or vivid dreams probably should discuss them with their doctor.

For the LOST dream theorists, this article is another basis to conclude that the entire series, with its vivid detail, was all a nightmare/dream of a single character.

NON-DREAMERS

Whether they are reliving childhood anxieties or visiting imaginary landscapes, most people dream.

But there’s a small subset of the population who claims either to have stopped dreaming, or never to have dreamed at all. A group of researchers recently decided to look into the sleep patterns of self-proclaimed non-dreamers, to try to determine whether they may still be producing dreams.
The researchers, whose study was published in the Journal of Sleep Research  recruited a unique group of participants. They wanted to look specifically at people who have REM sleep behavior disorder—a condition that causes people to act out their dreams. Because people with the disorder move around or speak in their sleep, their sleep patterns and behaviors are easier for scientists to observe.

According to New York Magazine, four percent of the participants in the 289 person study said they never dreamed or hadn’t dreamed in over a decade. However, upon observation, many of them appeared to dream, moving, speaking, or reenacting imaginary scenarios in their sleep. For example, one participant in his 70s, who claimed not to have dreamed since his 20s, was observed arguing with, punching, and swearing at an invisible enemy as he slept. Upon waking, however, he claimed not to have had any dreams.

The researchers recognize that the appearance of dream behavior is not definitive proof of dream production. More research is still needed to determine whether behaviors like sleep-talking and moving correspond to actual mental images. Still, the study provides strong initial evidence that non-dreamers may, in fact, be dreaming. 

This is an interesting study to apply to the sideways world when the characters "forgot" about all their time on the island.

If alleged "non-dreamers" dream but don't remember their dreams, does that not fit the pattern or premise of the sideways world? The characters had to be "jolted" into remembering their past. For Jack, it was touching his father's coffin. 

So if we transpose this scientific observation into the LOST story line, we get this possible explanation.

We know that the sideways world was the after life because Christian told Jack that everyone in teh church was dead.

Being dead, the characters could not "remember" their island time or the other characters.

Now, there would be two possible explanations of this: 1) the dead souls don't have clear recall of their past lives or 2) the dead souls can vividly dream (and probably collectively).

Now, many other researchers have been studying the purpose of dreams. Some believe it is a way humans try to solve real life problems in a safe and secure fashion. Some believe that dreams are a way for the body to rest and recharge (but the mind has to always be active since it controls all bodily functions). 

Why would the dead need to dream?

Perhaps, the same way the living do: in order to sort through their problems, anxieties, fears, and regrets in order to become self-aware, self-assured and self-healed in order to "move on."

Whether in work or relationships, some people do get bogged down to the point of being unhappily stuck in a situation or hurt from a missed opportunity. This paralysis can be long lasting and bitter.

The dead LOST souls needed a means of reviewing the errors in the lives, making peace with the choices that they made in life, and accept who they were in order to move on in the afterlife.

So it is possible, despite the similar living issues and problems the characters had, each of them were also "non-dreamers" who could not remember working out their issues in their own minds.

WHY WE DREAM

Sleep is a must for all animals, including you. You must sleep to live. When we sleep it may seem like we’re not doing much. But this is when our bodies are busy growing, healing, and learning—especially our brains. They make sense of the lessons, games, words, feelings, and thoughts we had during the day. 

We have something inside our bodies called a circadian (sir-CAY-dee-an) clock that tells our bodies when it’s time to sleep. It’s not a real clock! The circadian clock is a system controlled by neurons, or brain cells, behind your eyes that react to light. This clock tells us to be awake during the day and to go to sleep at night.

Because the human brain evolved before we created electric lights. You’re not reading this on the computer or phone in bed, right? Because that’s a bad idea. The light from the computer tricks your circadian clock into acting like it’s daytime, so you’re not as sleepy. When you stay up late and lose sleep, your brain and body don’t work as well the next day. It’s harder to learn new things, remember old things, and not be cranky.

The LOST universe contains many aspects of necessary sleep: vivid dreams about being chased in the jungle, the falling feeling like the plane crash, the quest for love and to be loved - - -  all fairly common dream episodes in individuals. But there is also a strange element to the LOST saga that is underappreciated: very rarely did we see any character actually sleep. The key moment was the eye lid shot of the character's eye opening (which some believed was a symbol to the gateway of their soul - - - in a corresponding flashback.) 

And when in the sideways (death) universe, the characters had to "awake" in order to remember so they could move on in the after life. But this would mean that the characters prior to the sideways universe were (a) asleep all the time or (b) that immediately after life, our limbo existence is a sleep state not to maintain one's life forces but to organize your memories so you don't forget who you are in your next existence. It is not so much as reincarnation but re-recognition of what made you who you were - - - every experience is a learning lesson which sets in motion future decisions, good and bad.

Some scientists believe that another reason we dream is to work out our real world problems in a personal laboratory setting called our mind. If you want to ask out a young woman, you may dream of different ways of asking her out so you prepare you conscious state for the time you have the courage to make your dreams come true. The restless energy of a dream mimmicks the butterflies in one's stomach so you are training your mind to react to a real world event.

Some people are better at anticipating future real world events, especially in personal relationships. Other people have problems or are clueless to how others will react to their advances. Some people who have difficulty relating to other people may find more comfort working through their life dreams in a dream state than trying to apply their wants or desires in the real world. 

The LOST landscape is littered with characters with the latter traits. Loners who are intense dreamers who perceive their future in unrealistic happiness. Introverts,  who would rather run away from the hard work of forming lasting relationships, caught up in the bitterness of their own self-loathing. Their only escape is to dream that they are famous, adventurous, a criminal, an outback survivalist, a miracle surgeon, a military McGyver, a rock star or an unwed mother. Throw all these dreams into the reality of a vivid, collective dream scape, you have the basis of LOST.

DREAM

"There are anxieties from dreams that are more real
Than the ones life brings; there are sensations
Felt only by imagining them
That are more ours than our very own life.
There are countless things that exist
Without existing, that lastingly exist
And lastingly are ours, they’re us…"

Fernando Pessoa

REM

The BBC recently reported that scientists have finally mapped individual brain cells during REM sleep cycles.

For the first time, scientists have recorded from individual brain cells during the dreaming phase of sleep.

After each rapid eye movement (REM) they recorded bursts of activity that match what happens when we are awake and we see - or imagine - a new image. 

They suggest that these well-known flickering movements accompany a "change of scene" in our dreams.

The recordings were made from patients with electrodes implanted in their brains to monitor seizures.
"It's a unique opportunity to look at what's happening inside the human brain," Dr Yuval Nir, from Tel Aviv University in Israel, told the BBC. "We're very thankful to the epilepsy patients who volunteered to take part."

Dr Nir worked with colleagues from France and the US on the study, which is published in the Nature Communications journal. 


Over the course of four years they worked with 19 different patients, recording from electrodes in several different brain areas but largely within the medial temporal lobe. 

This is not a part of the brain directly involved in vision, Dr Nir said.

"The activity of these neurons doesn't reflect image processing. It's more about signalling to the brain about a certain concept. You can close your eyes and imagine Queen Elizabeth, and these neurons will fire. This activity implies a refresh of the mental imagery and the associations."

When the patients were awake and shown a picture, especially one associated with a memory, the researchers saw a particular pattern of activity.

"About a 0.3 seconds after the picture appears, these neurons burst - they become vigorously active," Dr Nir explained. "This also happens when people just close their eyes and imagine these pictures, or these concepts."

Intriguingly, he and his colleagues spotted a "very, very similar pattern" during sleep. In particular, these bursts arrived just after eye movements during REM sleep.

This is the phase of sleep in which we dream, and it is characterized by these occasional, very quick eye movements.

It has long been thought that these movements might reflect the visual component of dreams, but there has been no clear evidence for this - until now, Dr Nir said.

"We are intimately familiar with the activity of these neurons. We know they are active every time you look at an image, or when you imagine that image. And now we see them active in a similar way when you move your eyes in REM sleep, so it becomes very probable that the eye movements represent some type of reset, or 'moving onto the next dream frame'.

"It's almost like when I was growing up and we had slide projectors. You move to the next dream slide, if you like." Our eyes flicker in spurts during the dreaming phase of sleep.

This could help to explain why unborn babies and blind people also move their eyes during REM sleep, he added.

"Even people who are congenitally blind... can still dream about their aunt coming to visit from Florida: her voice, the emotions and all the associations that go with that.

"And when the dream changes from meeting this aunt to, say, taking your dog for a stroll in the park, then the brain activity changes and this happens in sync with eye movements."

Other sleep researchers welcomed the findings. Prof Jim Horne, who established the Sleep Research Centre at Loughborough University, said the study fits with our improving understanding of REM sleep.

He also emphasized that flickering of a dreamer's eyes, which only happens in brief spurts, does not mean they are surveying a scene. 

"The eye movements are not actually scanning your dream - they're reorienting your visual thoughts," Prof Horne told BBC News.

"This study endorses other findings that REM sleep has many similarities to wakefulness. I see REM sleep as rather like the screensaver on your computer; all you need is the touch of a button and your computer leaps to life. It's very close to wakefulness. Non-REM sleep is more like when you switch your computer off, and waking up requires a process of rebooting," he said.

Prof William Wisden, a neuroscientist at Imperial College London, was also convinced by the similarity of brain activity between awake and REM states - but he said there are bigger questions still to answer.

"The most fascinating question of all is why do we have to have REM sleep? Why does our brain have all this circuitry to do that?This paper doesn't answer that, but it does emphasize how similar being awake and in REM sleep are, for particular circuits in the brain," he concluded.

One of the popular theories to LOST was that it was part of an elaborate dream sequence, whether it was an individual creating their own sleep fantasy world, or a collective dream by networking the sleep cycles of patients together to form an interactive video-like game, or a laboratory experiment in human behavior where stories, characters and the like are feed back into the subjects who use experience it as a vivid dream.

PLANE CRASH DREAM

One of the basic theories about LOST is that the entire series was a dream.

A dream by a character (known or unknown) who has a nightmare about living through a plane crash. But what does a dream about a plane crash represent?

It is not an uncommon dream. A person dreams of a journey – airplane or car are the most common – that ends in a crash. Alternatively, the person wakes up just before the crash. The dream analysis is that the person has angst, anxiety and fear of failure in their personal life, either a project or a goal.

Plane crash dreams are about the fear of not hitting your goals. Perhaps they are unrealistic, or perhaps new circumstances have made them appear harder to achieve.

If you dream of a plane crash it suggests you are anxious about the failure of a project. The dream meaning is of you having planned a project that doesn’t get you where you thought it would – and is accompanied by the fear that things will end badly.

Plane crash dreams (and car crash dreams) are particularly common during recessions and times of financial crisis, and can be directly translated as someone worrying about their financial situation – a lifetime’s journey, with a planned end, where there is a sudden concern about getting safely to the goal.

However, the dream can in fact relate to any important project or goal where there is a fear over successful completion.

Plane crash dreams can signify you have set unrealistic goals, that the goalposts have moved, or that events have suddenly obscured the finish line. The dream is an expression of your anxiety.

A dream of a plane crash represents your self doubt and your lack of faith that you can successfully complete a project.

Plane crash dreams can also represent an extreme fear of phobia of a future event.

Plane crash dreams are about your anxiety for the future.

It might therefore be an appropriate time to look at your goals to see if they are still achievable. Can you make changes so that your goals appear easier? Or do you need to recalibrate your goals to take into account current circumstances?

The fear of failure can often be overcome by a fresh analysis of the obstacles in your path and a more realistic plan on how to reach your goals.

The most clues in the series point to one character who had the most plane crash type associated mental issues: Hurley. The Numbers were weaved throughout the story line, which directly connect Hurley to the plane crash dream theory. Hurley had many fears and phobias. One of them was finding love. At the same time, fear of rejection which was embodied by his father leaving him at an early age. With his self-image and self-esteem at a low point, he puts little effort into himself or his goals. He is stuck in a personal and financial rut. Even with his dream of being a lottery winner, that success in his dream or mind is cursed. He is anxious around people and fears making decisions. He would rather hide in the shadows than have the limelight on him. As such, he was extremely anxious about his future - - - with his mother pressing him to find a wife, have kids and be responsible. Instead, Hurley would find comfort in a bucket of fried chicken, perpetuating the doom he cast upon himself.

In a sad twist, it would then seem in Hurley's plane crash dream that his only fulfillment in life is in death, when he re-connects with Libby in the after life to live happily ever after. In other words, he has little reason to move forward to change his current life - - - procrastinate to the bitter end. There are many people who can relate to Hurley's plight of being stuck in a routine, a quiet, meek, miserable life with little personal growth to risk even the harshest rejection in order to find happiness with others. That could be why The Others were shown as evil, dark and dangerous. Hurley was more a shell introvert around strangers than a humorous, nice guy around friends or co-workers. It is very difficult to break old habits to risk putting yourself out there for failure. This is why the Hurley dream theory makes sense in the LOST mythology. The story was about fears, anxiety, loneliness, risk, rewards, new friendships, bonds and love.

DO COMA PATIENTS DREAM?

Science is trying to figure out how the conscious and subconscious mind works. Several studies have tried to use EEG monitors to pinpoint brain activity in normal resting individuals, sleeping individuals and people in a coma. The results have been inconclusive. Brain activity is hard to measure on a quantitative level.

People in comas are, to the best of our knowledge (at least in most cases) incapable of entering REM sleep, and very likely are not going to have any kind of dream or nightmare. This is because the brain system required to have a dream are in fact the same systems required while you're awake - to the point that your visual cortex will light up in an FMRI during a dream - it does not light up during a coma. Now, in contrast, there are some patients who aren't in a coma but rather an immobile state (imagine the computer's on, but the monitor's disconnected) - these patients have brain activity and can even, for instance, picture a tennis game if it's described to them. This state would likely allow for dreams, and if so, nightmares. However, if they did, they would likely dream just like we do.

It is also incorrect to assume that we only end nightmares by waking up. The sudden shock of awakening makes us remember the dream more clearly. Most dreams are finite because the neurological triggers for them are transient. We dream, research indicates, to solve problems. To walk through the aspects of our day that were unresolved or had left incomplete traces that needed to be handled. Nightmares similarly give us a chance to practice at our fears - however, our brain is unlikely to keep giving us practice after a certain amount of time.

In our non-waking state, there are two factors at work: dreams to solve problems and nightmares to practice facing our fears.

That seems to be a mission statement for LOST.

Take Hurley for example. He had a fear of rejection, including from his father and later with women. He also had an active imagination to try to solve his problems such as money, work and body imagine. In the complexity of Hurley's semi-conscious sleep state, he could have had both problem solving dreams and fear nightmares overlapping to create his island adventure.

Because what happens when Hurley "awakens" from his island time? He is in the sideways world with a lovely woman, Libby, and his friends.  This could still be part of his dream-nightmare resolution. For Hurley learns through his island time to be responsible, to not blame curses or bad luck for his issues with his parents, work or love life, and that by just being himself he can attain his goals of a romantic life and lasting friendships.

If that is the message of LOST, it is a good one.