THE BIG SIM

One of the Big Theories for the premise of LOST was that the entire series was an elaborate mental dream, a collective dream or a computer simulation. It was not real. It was pure imagination.

Hurley was the perceived imagination engine. He was the one character that actually had vivid, structured and strong imaginary friends. One almost got him to jump off an island cliff, after telling him "none of this is real."

There were other clues that Hurley's mind was in control. The Others lab featured rooms that were based on psychological manipulation to mind control. The lab people were dressed and functioned like the doctors and nurses at his mental institution. Likewise, Hurley was able to move in and out of the institution like he owned the place.

Another strange thing was that Libby was in Hurley's same day rule at the mental hospital, but he did not recognize her when she showed up on the island. Hurley was friendly with everyone at the hospital; just like at the island everyone was his friend. The idea that Libby would fall in love with Hurley is something he could have longed for - - -  recall, he lost the clerk young woman to his best friend.

The idea of the "collective coma" was a theory I stated when the series was still running along. It was basically that a series of coma patients were hooked together on a local area network to track brain wave activities. However, the coma patients minds are much more active than the patients outward appearance, so they have created their own virtual world (all of which predates our current AR and virtual reality headsets). Bits and pieces of the patients memories could have been used by Hurley and others to create the island world, the adventures and action which none of patients could fathom because of their medical conditions.

Locke's miracle recovery when he landed on the island is another example of "mind over matter" imagination. Locke believed he was an Australian outback hunter, but the wheelchair made that dream an impossible nightmare. He created his own path and adventure in the island world.

There is also a possibility that the main characters major accomplishments may have been embellished. Jack had a huge daddy complex. He suddenly became a miracle surgeon, to surpass his father's hospital status. But what if he was not an accomplished surgeon - - - but a mental patient who has hallucinations of his dead father. In order to patch things up, he dreams of a way to show his father that he was worthy of his praise.

It is the same motivational theme with his father's abandonment of him. It was something that stuck in Hurley's mind. He turned to eating to cope with the abandonment. It made him unattractive and unmotivated to succeed in life. He dreamed of being a rich and successful man. The only way that could have happened was the miracle win of the lottery - - - which in turn was his curse that he tried to runaway from.

Kate's own daddy issues made her runaway from reality. Her back story was one of manipulation and adventure but she never suffered any true consequences for her crimes. The unbelievably wrong trial was clearly the outcome of a delusional criminal.

All the bits and pieces of the LOST tangential story lines can be easily merged into one big mental simulation of events. An adventure for those who cannot adventure. Those people who wasted their lives without accomplishment, true friends or a path to enlightenment. Yes, LOST had its sci-fi fantasy elements but those can also be created in the imagination of one or more main characters.

DREAM THEORY

A recent article in mentalfloss.com suggests that some researchers have found evidence for an alternative possibility: that dreams are a form of threat simulation, readying your brain in the rare event that you do find yourself confronted (pantsless or otherwise) with a dangerous situation.

According to this theory, outlined by cognitive researcher Jim Davies, dreams act as a dress rehearsal for dangerous scenarios in real life. Support for the idea comes in several forms, beginning with the fact that our most vivid and memorable dreams tend to be more like archetypal nightmares.

"They have a tendency to feature negative emotions—fearful, angry, and anxious dreams are more common than happy ones," Davies writes. "And the things we dream about tend to be biased in the direction of ancient dangers rather than more modern ones. We dream about being chased by animals and monsters more than having our credit card defrauded, even though most of us have very little real-life experience of being chased by animals (or monsters)."

Additionally, there are clues to the purpose of dreaming in the way the human subconscious responds to real-world events. In 2008, researchers at Tufts discovered a shift in the way people dreamed immediately after 9/11, as dreams about being attacked increased in intensity and frequency. But while people were having more and worse nightmares, they weren't about plane crashes or terrorism; the central imagery of their dreams remained unchanged, suggesting that their brains were reaching for an ancient script about being under threat —and rehearsing for the possibility of a future catastrophe—rather than reliving the memory of the recent tragedy. Per the researchers, the evidence pointed to dreams being an "emotionally guided construction or creation, not a replay of waking experience."

Another curious link between dreaming and disaster-preparedness: the phenomenon of prescient dreams. Though not formally researched, anecdotes abound from people who've dreamed of a frightening experience only to then live through it in real life. For instance, in 1983, 20-year-old painter James Murphy III survived a terrifying fall from his job site atop the Rip Van Winkle Bridge in upstate New York, plummeting more than 150 feet into five feet of marshy water on the coast of the Hudson River. In an interesting wrinkle, Murphy's mother reported that he had dreamed about falling the previous night, and that in the dream, he took a tuck position upon entering the water, protecting his head and neck—a move he repeated the next day when he plunged into the Hudson. Did dreaming his way through the fall beforehand contribute to Murphy's quick thinking, and subsequent survival, in that critical moment? The theory of dreams as threat simulation suggests that the answer is yes.

There's a lot to learn yet about why and how we dream, and per Davies, the most likely explanation is that dreaming is a multi-faceted and multi-functional process. But in the meantime, everything we know about the usefulness of mental "practice" supports the idea that dreams help prepare you to navigate the waking world. Studies show that visualizing yourself performing a skill makes you substantially better at it. And for the minority of people who are capable of lucid dreaming—the practice of recognizing when you're in a dream and taking control of the narrative—there's no end to the things you can learn to do while you're asleep.

"You can rehearse any skill in a lucid dream," Daniel Erlacher, a researcher at the University of Bern, Switzerland who led a study in which lucid dreaming led to improved performance in a coin toss game, told the Harvard Business Review.  "It has been well established that athletes who mentally rehearse an activity can improve their performance, and it makes sense that dreams can achieve the same effect."

And much like the reports of prescient dreaming, anecdotal evidence certainly supports the concept of rehearsing for real life in your dreams (be they lucid or not). German researcher Paul Tholey, who founded the scientific study of dreams (oneirology), for one, used himself as a guinea pig.
"He claimed that by practicing in his dreams, he’d learned to snowboard so well that he could do it without bindings, which is almost impossible," said Erlacher. "I’ve spoken with people who went snowboarding with him, and they watched him do it. So there has been some validation."

SIMULATION

One premise of LOST was that it was only a simulation of reality.

It could have been a video adventure game with the characters being avatars.
It could have been an interconnected dream experiment.
It could have been a mock mental warfare simulation by Dharma and the U.S. Military.
It could have been an imaginary dream of a coma patient.

Or it could be our reality which itself is not real.

Scientists work to find out how our world actually works.
Recently at the American Museum of Natural History, scientists debated whether or not the universe is a simulation. The answers from some panelists may be more comforting than the responses of others.

Physicist Lisa Randall said she thought the odds that the universe is not "real" are so low as to be "effectively zero."

But on the other hand, celebrity astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, who was hosting the debate, said that he thinks the likelihood of the universe being a simulation "may be very high."

The question of whether or not we know that our universe is real has vexed thinkers going far back into history, long before Descartes made his famous "I think therefore I am" statement. The same question has been explored in modern science fiction films like "The Matrix" and David Cronenber's "eXistenZ."

But most physicists and philosophers agree that it is impossible to prove that we don't live in a simulation and that the universe is real. Tyson agreed, but said he would not be surprised if we were to find out somehow that someone else is responsible for our universe.

If someone else is responsible for our universe, then we would call those persons or things gods.

In any higher order planetary relationships, the most intelligent, strong, technological and adaptable species are the alpha species who can assert their will on the rest of the known world. In human evolution, mankind had to have come to the realization that it was the alpha species. But instead of adopting a self-sufficient, own legacy approach to species self-esteem, ancient and disconnected cultures adopted religion and worship of superior beings as being responsible for their own self-awareness and life cycles.

Some could argue that religion is a pagan belief system because they did not have the means to investigate their true world. Except, that ancient cultures did have the brain power to solve and predict thousand years of  astronomical cycles with the accuracy of our current atomic clocks. Ancient people were more well versed in nature and the effect of cycles on human existence. They were the first to understand and to ponder the question of whether we are alone in the universe.

Ancient Egyptians constructed the pyramids in 20 years. Our modern technology cannot replicate that feat. Generally, the public does not think ancients were very advanced in their thinking. But they pondered the same "big" questions we do today.