Hack the Unconscious!
Scientists finally found a way to “penetrate” our dreams. Did they just prove Freud was right all along?
In the midst of my journey in getting into cybersecurity industry and red-teaming, I found myself stumbled upon an extremely interesting topic — vice.com recent reports on scientists study on manipulating nightmares into dreams. This may align towards myself more due to my deep interests towards Freudian concepts and psychoanalysis school in the past two years.
Now let’s begin with Freud.
We all may have heard his statement on how the interpretation of dreams is the royal road to understand the unconscious activities of our mind. Freud examined most of his personal dreaming experience in his 1899-published book, “Die Traumdeutung”, he emphasized that many of the things he saw within his dreams are the repressed experience that he himself was not even able to admit. To which this includes our unconscious (and repressed) desire or motivations. In his practices, he would listen to his patients’ dreams and analyse them to understand how their past experience influenced their behavior from its manifest content and its latent.
Now how do I relate this to my personal experience? My dreams are always the byproduct of my current stressors or deep desire to which I strongly agree with Freud — when certain thing does not go well or I involve myself heavily in worrying as such, I would a 100% see it in my dreams. I feel like this way it is impossible to be able to control our dreams since it is inherited in our deepest day-to-day pressure experience. Some of us may have heard about lucid dreaming when we are “allowed” to be in a state of aware when we are entering our dreams, change its narrative through MILD and WBTB methods, but how do we, truly, being in charge to the extent that we are able to hack it?
Scientists in 2010 (read) had argued that we get our extreme negative viewing on dreams during Rapid Eye Movement (REM) when we are having the most cortex and there are rhythmic bursts within the system of the brain, manifesting it before bed, etc. Now the current finding in Geneva, had shown that TMR (targeted memory reactivation) could be used as a “sleep therapy” to treat patients with PTSD?
Now what about TMR? Scientists have been developing this method at least for the last 10 years, basically to use some sounds or smell during REM sleep to soothe and avoid nightmare.
How does this information should have given Freud credit? TMR, I argue, is not the way for us to deal with our unconscious. The title of manipulate our dreams could be falsely misleading, we are unable to have control upon what we are seeing in the dreams. TMR just soothes and distract the subject. Using sounds even to a lighter degree such as white noise will calm our mind and distract the stressors that have been corrupting us before bed. Freud taught us to solve our inherent issues, connecting them to our past traumas instead of attacking and distract them.
This is a DoS attack to our unconscious, giving distraction until its server down, and basically to give us the perfect, calming sleep.
Does it solve the problems we have within our unconscious? absolutely not.
Being aware that there are things that are unsettling (and needed to be solved and analysed in our reality) should be the key to acquire the sleep we want.
