User:Mariah Syktich/sandbox

Etymology:

Frederik Van Eeden studied his personal dreams since 1896. He wrote down the most interesting ones and out of all these dreams 352 were what we know now as “lucid dreams”. Throughout all the data he collected from dreaming, he created different names for different types of dreams. He named 7 different types of dreams; Initial dreams, pathological, ordinary dreaming, vivid dreaming, demoniacal, general- dream-sensations, and lastly lucid dreaming. Frederick Van Eeden said the seventh type of dreaming, lucid dreaming, was the most interesting and worthy of the most careful observation of study. Eeden studied lucid dreaming between January 20th, 1898 through December 26th, 1912. In this state of dreaming Eeden explains that you are completely aware of your surroundings and are able to direct your actions freely, yet the sleep is stimulating and uninterrupted.

17th Century:

French philosopher Rene Descartes was a philosopher interested in Lucid Dreaming during the 17th century, impacting the way people interpreted the idea. He proposed the idea of “The Dream Argument”. Descartes proposed the idea saying how it was hard to tell if we are actually awake, when we think we are. Following that proposal, he came to notice that people don’t know for sure when they are dreaming. “How do people know that they are awake if they very well are dreaming and not becoming lucid enough to know that they are awake?” Descartes made an impact on other philosophers such as Nick Bostrom.

Creativity:

In the brain, if you are awake and participate in some type of activity, your mind is processing external information about the environment and constructing a model of the world. While your awake, but aren’t physically active, your balance of input tends to be more internal. You focus more so on wondering, you daydream. On the other hand, in our very own sleep we put very little sensory input for the outside world into our mind that we don’t form a conscious model of it. Depending on the state of the sleepers brain, it could create a multidimensional world model, or could even be doing very little, depending on the person. If one is in a model state, creativity could take place here during the three stages of sleep.