One of the most devastating symptoms of those who suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is terrifying nightmares.
Sometimes these nightmares can be so intense that they lead to panic attacks, vivid flashbacks of negative past events, and even aggressive behavior.
The U.S. Army is currently doing research on how to counteract these nightmares by placing individuals into a “dream-like” virtual reality designed to quickly calm nerves and relieve anxiety.
The suggested treatment is that whenever a solider or veteran wakes up from one of these traumatic nightmares, they will immediately put on a pair of 3D digital goggles and enter into an “animated world of comforting sights.”
The research is based on other current existing treatments for PTSD, including image rehearsal therapy, where therapists and patients work together to identify stress triggers and how they can be defused in future situations. It also integrates biofeedback, where a patient can monitor their stress levels in real-time and find relaxation techniques that help bring their stress levels back down to their baseline.
Using both of these techniques, those who suffer from PTSD will be able to construct their own unique virtual reality, one that suits them best in lowering stress levels after an unpleasant dream. Researchers are hoping that the use of this kind of therapy over time can decrease the frequency and intensity of these nightmares in the long run.
While the research certainly isn’t finished, virtual reality already shows some promise of being a valuable therapy for other anxieties and phobias. There is some evidence that it can aid in relieving fears of spiders, flying, and public speaking.
It will be interesting to see how virtual reality therapy develops into the future. I’m always fascinated to see how new technologies are integrated into modern psychotherapy and just how beneficial they can be in helping mental disorders of all types. This will definitely be something to keep our eyes on as more research comes out.
The other day I had the pleasure of interviewing Jonathan Mead, an entrepreneur and blogger at Illuminated Mind, and author of the fearless self-improvement guide Reclaim Your Dreams. The book teaches you how to escape the monotony of 9-5 jobs, and begin living more on your own terms – a theme that really strikes the core of my own blog, and the lifestyle I’ve been trying to cultivate for myself over the past year.
So often people live their lives based on the blueprint that has been handed down to them: go to school, get good grades, go to college, get a comfortable job, and then settle down and start a family.
While this lifestyle may be perfectly suitable for some, I have always had other ideas in mind. I’ve always wanted more freedom and more choice. It’s good to know that I’m not alone, and others like Jonathan have already been successful defining their own path and living their dreams.
It can often be a scary thing to start living on your own terms. I’ve experienced the fear firsthand, and I face it everyday moving forward. It takes a great deal of responsibility to take control of your life. It also takes a lot of experimentation and inevitable failure.
It requires a leap that many are not willing to make, but when they make it work, they realize it was well worth the effort.
I’m currently in the same process Mead maps out in Reclaim Your Dreams. I’m facing uncertainty, I’m taking action, and I’m ready to learn from my failures and push forward.
I want to thank Mead for participating in this interview and letting me pick apart his brain a little:
Question #1: The unemployment rate remains high, and a recent article in the NY Times said that many are now seeking the entrepreneurial route. How can your book Reclaim Your Dreams help those who want to become self-employed or start their own business?
Reclaim Your Dreams isn’t a how-to guide to starting your own business. But it is a book that addresses an important pre-requisite to taking the plunge: how to find the courage to follow your heart. Most people sabotage themselves before they’ve even taken the first step. The ownership of their mind is not theirs; it’s overrun by the conditioning and ideas of what other people think they should do. We’re told from an early age that what it’s not okay to be who we are, we need to become something. We’re told that we need to work hard to succeed, and the work is a chore. All of this is nonsense. You don’t need to become anything, who you are right now is what you need to embrace. Work needn’t be a chore, you can do what makes you come alive and find purpose, enjoyment and earn a comfortable living from it as well.
Question #2: What is the single biggest factor that stops people from following
their dreams?
Passive assumption. The belief that things are a certain way without any real evidence to prove it. Most of the things we believe about the world or our capabilities are rooted in these assumptions. The problem is that we haven’t actually tested them, we don’t know if they’re true or not, so we’re really just guessing. That may be okay when you’re playing a game of cards, but when you’re life is at stake it’s better not to guess. It’s better to take what you believe, suspend it, and see what happens when you actually follow your dreams. You’ll be surprised that the repercussions are often vastly overrated.
Question #3: Is there ever a dream that is too big?
The only dream that’s too big is the one that you can’t truly believe in. Or the one that takes you away from living right now.
Question #4: In your book you write about dealing with naysayers, those people who discourage us from pursuing an unconventional lifestyle. Can you share some of that advice?
Well the first thing to remember is that “a statue was never raised to honor a critic.” It’s easy to be a critic, it’s a lot harder to do great things.
With that said the best way to deal with naysayers is to not care. And the only way you can be unaffected is when you get all of your approval from yourself.
Question #5: Instead of living their dreams, many are stuck in nightmare jobs, with nightmare bosses, and nightmare workloads. They want to be independent, but they have families to feed and bills to pay. They have no clue how to escape this prison-like lifestyle – what can these people start doing RIGHT NOW to build a better life?
You can start making more deliberate choices within your current circumstances. In a situation like that there are probably a lot of obligations and commitments that seem mandatory or unquestionable that really aren’t. Start systematically removing the commitments that don’t make you come alive. But start with something small. That might be deciding that you won’t work on the weekends and the evenings anymore, without exception. It might mean that you’re going to write a letter to your boss to explain how you want your working relationship to be. The more we work on these small things, the more courage we build to take bigger steps to creating the life we want.
Question #6: I’ve been collecting a lot of quotes lately. Do you have any favorites you’d like to share?
While we’re on the subject of following your dreams, I’ll share this quote I
highlight in my other ebook, The Zero Hour Workweek.
“The master in the art of living
draws no sharp distinction
between his labor and his leisure,
his mind and his body,
his work and his play,
his education and his recreation.
He hardly knows which.
He simply pursues his vision of excellence
through whatever he is doing
and leaves others to determine
whether his is working or playing.
To himself, he is always doing both.” – James A. Michener
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That quote is one of my personal favorites. I’ve always explained to friends how I’ll never have a “job” or do “work,” because I absolutely hate the negative connotations attached to those words. To me, the biggest obstacle in life is re-framing your work as a form of play, and then using that playfulness to create awesome things that people value. I sometimes think of this as the “Google mentality” – Work hard. Play hard.
Thanks again Jonathan for sharing a little about your personal philosophy. I think we could all benefit from listening to your advice and applying it more in our lives. I know our paths will cross again soon.
If you want to learn more about Reclaim Your Dreams click below.
How does our pursuit of knowledge reflect our individualism, and why is this so important? What makes this path towards self-actualization so difficult and lonesome?
Education Doesn’t End After School
One assumption I often see people implicitly make is that school is the only form of education. Friends and family constantly say to me ad nauseam, “Steven, you are so smart – are you sure you don’t want to go to graduate school and continue your education?”
This annoys me so much because I consider myself a person who absolutely loves knowledge and never sees an endpoint to my studies. I go to the library twice a week, constantly flipping through new books or reading cover-to-cover the ones I find most interesting. My interests range from psychology to economics to politics to philosophy, so how can anyone possibly tell me that I need to continue my education?
I feel I am an autodidactic at heart. The time I spend studying on my own I find infinitely more valuable than the time I spend in a classroom. When you study on your own you get to choose the curriculum, focus on subjects that most interest you, and go at your own pace.
Yet at the same time this method of learning is seen by our culture as inherently bizarre and even wasteful: Where is your degree? How do you expect to find a job? What are you doing with your life?
To Love To Know And To Do What You Love
I didn’t get a degree in Psychology because I thought it was where the money was at; no, I took it with the intent to learn about the subject. But people don’t understand this. They don’t trust themselves enough to do what they love. Instead, they would rather follow a predetermined path, as long as it provides security. The individual spirit thus begins to break down.
I am now unemployed, and part of that is simply my apathy towards looking for a job, but I feel just as competent as anyone else coming out of college (if not more). Why? Because I trust my passions, I trust my self-determination, and embrace that individual spirit. Besides, I am only 21, the world is in my hands, and now is not the time to forfeit to the chains of modern society. I have bigger ideas in mind, perhaps larger than most, and that is what makes this path lonely but rewarding. I love to know and I owe it to myself to do what I love:
“The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.”
- Ayn Rand
All Knowledge Is Self-Knowledge
When we learn more about our world – whether its astrophysics or behavioral economics – we build a greater understanding of ourselves. Our pursuits reflect our values and interests, so I don’t deny that when I do what I love, I am also separating myself from the whims that others would like to impose on me. In this sense, following our dreams is a lonely path. No one can do this for you, you must be the hero of your world.
United By This Loneliness
I wanted to share these quick thoughts with you in case you were feeling the same way. Doing what others tell you is easy, pursuing what you love is the hardest. There will be doubt. There will be loneliness. There will be signs of weakness and temptations to quit. But knowing that others share that struggle and knowing that it can be overcome is a power that connects us all. The world depends on our self-actualization.
P.S. – Great conversations on this article going on at Evolver. Feel free to join in!
Part 1: A Life of Dreams
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“Part one provides an overview of the major contributions made by Jung in his long career. Born on July 26, 1875, in Switzerland, Jung became interested in psychiatry during his medical studies. He saw that the minds of mentally deranged persons had similar contents, much of which he recognized from his own interior life, described in his autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections. His lifelong quest to understand the workings of the psyche led him to develop the analytical method of psychiatry. He proceeded by looking at the role in his patients’ lives of what he termed the personal and collective unconscious, as expressed through dreams, myths, and outer events. With film clips, photographs, and interviews with some of his colleagues, as well as with Jung himself, the story of one of the most important figures of the 20th century is told.”
PART 2: Inheritance of Dreams
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“Looks at the collective myths that are shared by different cultures and races throughout the world. Jung saw these as evidence of an underlying unifying principle in the human psyche, which he termed archetypes. These archetypes are present in the collective unconscious and express themselves to the individual in dreams and synchronistic events. The film surveys some of the archetypal symbolism in world myths. Jungian analyst John Beebe uses the science fiction film Star Wars to illustrate the presence of the ancient myths in today’s symbolic expressions. There is rare footage of Jung’s travels to Africa, England, and New Mexico, in search of archetypal motifs.”
Part 3: A World of Dreams
“This episode examines some interesting archetypal images expressed in modern imagery. The film takes the viewer through a diverse range of sources, from Alcoholics Anonymous and science fiction films, to modern architecture and the stock market. There are interviews with Jungian analysts including Aniela Jaffe, Jane Wheelwright, James Hillman, and Adolf Guggenbuhl-Craig. Dr. Harry Wilmer shares his work with the dreams and “healing nightmares” of Vietnam veterans. New Age philosophy and Alfred Hitchcock’s film Notorious are discussed as they relate to Jungian psychology.”
DREAM DIARIES AND MENTAL HEALTH
I don’t believe there is a single human who has not in some point in their life been fascinated by a dream. Especially as a child when our imaginations are running more freely I can recall some truly wild one – including several where I recognized myself as dreaming, otherwise known as lucid dreaming, a term coined by Dutch Psychiatrist and writer Frederik van Eeden in the late 1800s.
Freud and Jung believed that the ability to interpret one’s dreams could play a crucial role in mental health and even the cure of some mental illnesses. Although both disagreed on how an individual’s dreams should be psychoanalyzed, each would probably show no objection to one keeping a dream diary in order to record their experiences.
Modern day science on dreams has shown some success. The field is called oneirology. One leader in the field, psychophysiologist Stephen LaBerge, is well-known for his research on dreams and the development of Mnemonic Induction of Lucid Dreaming (MILD), a technique designed to achieve a state of lucid dreaming (click the link for a free guide on how to do it).
Dream diaries can also play a major role in more easily achieving a state of lucid dreaming because they enhance our dream recall and make us more likely to recognize a dream state when we are in one. This kind of lucid dream would be called a dream-initiated lucid dream (DILD), which is when an individual is in a normal dream state but eventually concludes that he or she is dreaming (this is what happened to me as a child).
Have you ever had a really emotionally-intense dream? Maybe you were frightened or incredibly happy? And as the dream unfolds it all feels so real at the time. You wake up, you realize you were just dreaming, but the dream stays with you throughout the day because it left such an impact on your psyche. When I have these kinds of dreams I am always tempted to tell a friend about them. But isn’t it funny that after we tell our friend about the dream they don’t seem nearly as impressed as we were?
Perhaps this sheds some light on the relatively inexplicably and personal nature of dreams to the dreamer. I believe Carl Jung touched on this too. The individual is the only person that can most accurately interpret their own dreams. If the mind is a symbol-manipulator, which I believe it is, than it is very likely that our dreams have a meaningful nature to them. Jung believed the psyche, much like our biological bodies, was a homeostatic system. Meaning, it always seeks a balance – and whatever may be lacking (or insufficient) in our external world may be trying to manifest itself in our internal dreams. Jung called these archetypes.
It is well-known throughout fields of cognitive psychology and neuroscience that the brain is not simply a passive receiver of information, it is also a machine that generates information, predicts and anticipates, and I would also argue: it has a certain sense of creativity, meaning and understanding that it seeks from our natural world.
One theory proposed by the American psychologist and psychoanalyst Mark Blechner, is called Oneiric Darwinism which furthers the idea that the function of dreams is to a series of spontaneous “thought mutations” – some of which can be interpreted by the mind as useful while others can be discarded. I think this brings up an important point. It is not scientific to say that all dreams serve some major purpose of the psyche – many of them may be just random neural firings. However, nothing is to say these “random neural firings” can’t have a significant impact on our perceptions and attitude. Dreams therefore can still be interpreted as manifestations of our subconscious – or a series of representations and symbols that we interpret as meaningful and purposeful – in the same way we can find meaning in everyday events, the clouds in the sky, or inkblots.
In other words, how we interpret our dreams also is revealing of our underlying beliefs, attitudes, and perceptions – not just the dreams themselves. With this in mind, keeping a daily dream diary is a great method to help us work through ideas, thoughts, feelings, and emotions in our psyche. This undoubtedly can lead to a healthier mind. It is a way to become more at peace with our internal world and self. Learning how to interpret our dreams can even help us to become better problem solvers.
TIPS ON STARTING A DREAM DIARY
1. Start and stay consistent
If you want to start a dream diary then do it now. Find a way to remind yourself in the morning to record whatever it is you remember. Maybe leave a note on your alarm clock, by your bed, or in front of your computer to remind you to write in your dream diary each morning.
2. Can’t remember your dreams? Record yourself anyway!
There are going to be mornings when you wake up and don’t remember any dreaming from the previous night. Record something in your dream diary anyway, even if it just how you are feeling in the morning or any thoughts you might have. You may even find that once you start reflecting on your state you’ll recall a dream you had. Whatever it is, try to record in your diary everyday. It is a good way to stay consistent and it will help you to eventually become better at recollecting dreams.
3. Upon awaking, stay in bed and reflect for a short period of time.
This may be bad advice if you have a tendency to fall back asleep, but if you can: after waking up just continue laying in your bed and reflecting on your dreams. This is the best opportunity to recollect because they are the most fresh in your mind. If you wake up and get out of bed too quickly you may start losing some of the details of your dreams. Our memory system can be very fragile sometimes (especially with dreams).
4. Write about the earliest and most meaningful dream you can remember.
Your dream diary doesn’t just have to be about current dreams. Record some from your childhood, ones that have left an impact on you, and ones that you have obviously found worth remembering. It is actually a really fun and informative experience to reflect on really old dreams and to try and recollect as many details as you can. This will help your future dream recall as well.
5. Describe your dreams in as much detail as possible.
Be as factual and descriptive as you can about your dream experiences. Also record what you think the dream may mean (if anything), and how you can use this information for personal development. Maybe you even learned something that is applicable to a real life situation?
6. Be open to the idea of analyzing dreams as a healing process of the psyche.
Often dream analysis can be thrown in as a mystical teaching, but I think it is more simple and practical than that. For this reason I suggest that everyone gives their dream diary a fair chance. At least try it out for 3 solid weeks before deciding whether or not it is worth continuing. This is just a recommendation. Most scientific research is now dedicated towards neuroscience and the biochemical origins of dreams, but the implications that dreams can serve someone in their own personal development could probably be traced back all the way to the Buddha and it is still prevalent today in modern forms of analytical psychology and hypnotherapy.
FREUDIT.COM
Someone recently shared with my a great website called Freudit where you can share dreams with others as well as help others interpret their own. The site is brand new but it is a very neat idea so I had to spread the word. If you would like me to interpret any of your dreams you can find me posting there under the name Lightfiend.