@Amanda, As far as I understand it, the reason why you read blindfolded is because that way they know you are using your midbrain. You aren’t reading with your eyes, you are interpreting the electric energy of the words or colors with your mid-brain. It’s a different sense, one that most people don’t consciously use every day, but a sense nonetheless. I think they mean the pineal gland, but there have been other parts of the brain mentioned as well so I’m unsure. I do know where it comes from though. It’s the third eye, which is a rich part of many Asian religions. My internet searches for “activate third eyeâ€, “activate mid-brainâ€, and “activate pineal gland†have all given me similar results.
@Kimba, yes I do think diet has an important role to play. I thought the following video was interesting and relevant, assuming the midbrain and the pineal gland are one and the same. I’m not vouching for anybody’s spiritual beliefs but my own.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92qmQFkYILM
Here’s a little insight to what I’m experiencing with this:
I mentioned that I had an experience with midbrain activation when I “saw” the distinct floral pattern of my sheets in the middle of the night. This was a very real experience for me, not a dream. What did it look like? Think of when you look at a bright light and then close your eyes. You see an after image under your eyes. Or when you stare at a blue carrot for 30 seconds and then you can see an orange one. Those two phenomenons are related to sight and vision, but they weren’t that unlike the way my brain interpreted the outline of my sheets. Another experience with it was when I was dozing on the floor while the kids played nearby. My eyes were closed, I felt a change in my consciousness, and I “saw” an outline of my son’s shoulder and his arm moving back and forth with a stick. I jumped up and looked at him to see that he was indeed playing with a stick but no one was in danger. I understand that photo-eye-play is important for developing photographic memory because it helps us become more brain is activated.
Learning the five different brain states was helpful for me:
Beta: Day-to-day brain state, the one you are probably in as you read this.
Alpha: A very relaxed, but still fully awake state
Theta: The state we are in when we dream. Also a state we enter briefly before falling asleep and again just as we wake up.
Delta: Dreamless sleep. Also healing periods, such as when we are in a coma.
Gamma: Hyperactive brain waves during an emergency. When time seems to stand still during a car accident, that person’s brain was in the Gamma state.
I was in the Theta state when I had my experiences, which is partially why I am relating my ability to control my dreams to some of my success with midbrain activation. My friend Ashly said that since she has been trying to do at-home midbrain stuff, she has had a dramatic increase of awareness in her dreams. I wonder if the pineal gland also has something to do with our dreams. It does regulate our sleep patterns. When I was a teenager I made an effort to learn how to remember and control my dreams. I kept a dream journal for a couple of months and would spend up to an hour or two writing them down in the morning. During that period I learned to become aware that I was dreaming some of the time, and while I couldn’t always directly control my dream (aka, I want this dream to become a Star Trek dream), I was able to learn how to fly and to control that ability. To this day I still have dreams where I figure out that I’m dreaming and the rules instantly change. I no longer have to worry about whether my kids are safe or if somebody is hurt because I know it isn’t real, and I can fly. I’m not afraid of falling in my dreams or loosing control. I have mastered it. Oddly enough, I often think that some other character in the dream is also dreaming with me and I think of them as an equal player. Anyway, that’s a tangent, but I bring it up because that happens in the Theta state, and I think that my ability to control my dreams may have also helped me to focus on the mental image of my sheets or my son’s moving arm when I was in the awake Theta state. Every time I have seen an image, I very distinctly felt myself going into that conscious state first. It was almost like flipping a switch. Warning, Theta state is also the state some try to induce through drugs and other practices. Brainwashing often happens in this state too. I am not going to try to bring my kids into this state for learning, I think it could be dangerous. Rather, I am pointing out that my own experiences have happened in what I perceive to be this state. Exercise caution.
As I poured over the WINK program we got yesterday, I saw a striking similarity between what they call “mental imaging†and what happens when you try to control your dreams. You pretend you are in a scenario, you imagine something happening, and you focus on it. I wish I could remember the name of the book I read back in high school, it was very helpful. Naturally, the WINK programs “mental imaging†wasn’t supposed to be a dream exercise, but an exercise for the imagination. I just saw a correlation. I think dreaming is very much a right-brained activity. It takes a lot of creativity to come up with a story complete with pictures, smells, sounds and sensations. But when was the last time you were able to read a book, organize your time, or do math calculations on paper in a dream? Every time I try to read a book in a dream, the words become jumbled, they change, or the index of a book is completely unhelpful- ie instead of being about cars there’s an unalphabetical list of dog breeds. I think our left brain tries to stay away from kookie dreams. Lol. Yes, dreaming is a bit of a tangent, but if we want to better understand and use our right brains, I think attention to dreams is a useful tool. Either that, or I’m just trying to validate all of the effort I put into it back in high school!
