Dreaming is a regular part of our nightly existence.  We enter the dream world each night whether we remember or not.  Frequently, our dreams are surreal mixtures of the fantastic and the ordinary. There is, however, another kind of dream which transcends the everyday, that is lucid dreaming.

Lucid dreams happens when the dreamer  “wakes up” in the dream.  Usually there is something   that triggers the awakening.  It could be anything, the realization that cats don’t fly or  that you’ve never learned to tap dance.  Whatever the occurrence, the dreamer realizes that he or she is not awake physically.  Usually, this state lasts for only a short time and then lucidity fades and the dream continues without awareness.  However, with practice, the length of time the dreamer can remain lucid increases.

There are several techniques that help the beginner become more proficient.  Some of these are:

1)  Dream recall – this can be done by keeping a dream journal.  The first thing upon waking in the morning, write down everything remembered.  It doesn’t have to be much, a word, color or feeling, anything you remember.  With continued journaling the amount of dream recall with increase.

2) Reality checks – this could be anything, a word or gesture that you constantly repeat throughout the day, such as looking at your hands when going in or out of a doorway.  When you see your hands, ask yourself “am I dreaming”.  Done often enough the gesture becomes second nature and will be repeated in a dreamstate.  It is a cue that can trigger the realization that you are not physically awake.

3)  Another is Mnemonic-Induction of Lucid Dreaming (MILD).  This technique was created by Dr. Stephen LaBarge of Stanford University, who is a pioneer in lucid dream research and consists of setting the intention to lucid dream by saying a mantra over and over while visualizing yourself awake in a dream.  Make the mantra short, such as “I am aware that I am dreaming”. Do not use the word “want” in your mantra, say that it is going to happen.  A command statement convinces the mind that this is what is happening.

4) There are also certain drugs or supplements that can help to achieve the lucid dream state.  One of these is Melatonin (3mg), this helps to set the circadian rhythm and its release is controlled by the pineal gland.   Another drug is nicotine, which is not recommended due to its highly addictive nature.

The first few times you achieve lucidity, you will likely be so excited that you will wake yourself up. Two effective techniques for extending lucidity are spinning  and rubbing your hands. Both techniques, originated with Carlos Castaneda, but LaBerge was the first to test techniques.   Of the two, hand rubbing seems to be the most effective.

People new to lucid dreaming spent much of their time indulging in various recreational activities such as flying to new places, this is to be expected, we all want to try things we aren’t able to do in the “real” world, but after you have enjoyed the extracurricular activities, its time to expand in new directions.  Lucid dreaming can help you find creative solutions to everyday situations or give you ideas on how to deal with past issues which are still causing stress in the present.  You will never know what knowledge can be gleaned during lucid dreaming.

Researchers find absorption features in spectrum of ordinary pulsar August 27, 2012 by Bob Yirka   Enlarge A diagram of a pulsar, showing its rotation axis and its magnetic axis. Image: NASA (Phys.org)—An international team of astronomers and astrophysicists has found some unusual spectral activity involving an otherwise “normal” pulsar; it displayed some absorption lines, which generally only occurs with bodies that have some degree of an atmosphere. In studying stars that lay outside the normal galactic plane, the team found, as they describe in their paper published in the journal Science, spectra that was not as smooth as expected, along with absorption lines.

Pulsars are the remnants of stars that have exploded, leaving behind their inner core; neutron stars with a very dense mass that spins causing the electromagnetic radiation emitted to appear to flash or pulse to observers here on Earth. Researchers studying neutron stars over the years have come to define most such pulsars as “normal”, i.e. they exhibit a smooth spectra. A few anomalous neutron stars been found however, that exhibit odd spectra. They exhibit weak pulsar effects and in some cases a less than strong magnetic field. In this new find, the researchers have found a pulsar, PSR J1740+1000, that appears to exhibit behavior found in both normal and non-normal neutron starts, opening up the possibility of a third class. In every other respect, the pulsar looks like most other pulsars, the only exception being the absorption lines. And now that they’ve seen it, the researchers aren’t sure what exactly to make of it. One possibility is that most pulsars have absorption lines and we just can’t seem them. That would be because most pulsars we can see exist in the flat, pancake like part of the galaxy known as the galactic plane. PSR J1740+1000 exists just above that plane, meaning there is less gas and dust between us and it, giving us a clearer view. Another possibility is that the absorption occurs due to some unknown particles that might exist high up in the pulsar’s magnetosphere, akin to Earth’s van Allen radiation belt. Whatever the cause, the finding has sparked some excitement in the astronomy world as it appears that there is more to pulsars than has been thought, and in further exploring pulsars and absorption properties, it’s likely researchers will come to better understand anomalous features found in other stars and systems as well. More information: Absorption Features in the X-ray Spectrum of an Ordinary Radio Pulsar, Science 24 August 2012: Vol. 337 no. 6097 pp. 946-949. DOI: 10.1126/science.1221378 ABSTRACT The vast majority of known nonaccreting neutron stars (NSs) are rotation-powered radio and/or γ-ray pulsars. So far, their multiwavelength spectra have all been described satisfactorily by thermal and nonthermal continuum models, with no spectral lines. Spectral features have, however, been found in a handful of exotic NSs and were thought to be a manifestation of their unique traits. Here, we report the detection of absorption features in the x-ray spectrum of an ordinary rotation-powered radio pulsar, J1740+1000. Our findings bridge the gap between the spectra of pulsars and other, more exotic, NSs, suggesting that the features are more common in the NS spectra than they have been thought so far.

A pulsar exhibiting unusual activity near the galactic plane. That is, its electromagnetic field is altered. Is this what is happening to our Solar System as we get closer to the Plane itself. Time will tell. Nox

Antarctic Ice Sheet Quakes Shed Light On Ice Movement and Earthquakes

Language family may have Turkish origins

Indo-European languages range throughout Europe and South Asia and even into Iran, yet the roots of this widespread family of tongues have long been controversial. A new study adds support to the proposal that the language family expanded out of Anatolia — what’s now Turkey — between 8,000 and 9,500 years ago, as early farmers sought new land to cultivate.

A team led by psychologist Quentin Atkinson of the University of Auckland in New Zealand came to that conclusion by using a mathematical method to calculate the most likely starting point and pattern of geographic spread for a large set of Indo-European languages. The new investigation, published in the Aug. 24 Science, rejects a decades-old idea that Kurgan warriors riding horses and driving chariots out of West Asia’s steppes 5,000 to 6,000 years ago triggered the rise of Indo-European speakers.

“Our analysis finds decisive support for an Anatolian origin over a steppe origin of Indo-European languages,” Atkinson says.

He and his colleagues generated likely family trees for Indo-European languages, much as geneticists use DNA from different individuals to reconstruct humankind’s genetic evolution. Many linguists, who compare various features of languages to establish their historical connections, consider Atkinson’s statistical approach unreliable (SN: 11/19/11, p. 22).

Atkinson’s group analyzed 207 commonly used words, including terms for relatives and numbers, in 103 ancient and modern Indo-European languages. The researchers produced possible language trees based on estimated rates at which languages gained and lost cognates, words with similar meanings and shared sounds, such as five in English and fem in Swedish.

The studied cognates are basic vocabulary terms that rarely get borrowed when speakers of different languages encounter one another, Atkinson contends. Thus, in his view, these words provide a valuable window into the evolution of separate branches on the Indo-European family tree.

The researchers combined their language trees with present geographic ranges of individual languages to identify the most likely location and age of the Indo-European family’s origins. An ancient Anatolian root emerged whether the researchers combined linguistic data or separately considered the 20 ancient languages and 83 modern ones.

As a further check, statistical simulations that assumed slow rates of language migration if people traveled along land routes or faster migration rates spurred by water crossings converged on a scenario in which Indo-European tongues originated among Anatolian farmers sometime between 8,000 and 9,500 years ago.

Farmers alone didn’t propel the evolution of different Indo-European tongues, Atkinson says. His team’s proposed trees suggest that new languages began to sprout within the five major Indo-European subfamilies from 4,500 to 2,000 years ago, after agriculture had spread across Europe. Kurgans or other expansionist Indo-European cultures could have instigated those later linguistic developments, Atkinson says.

Atkinson’s statistical reconstruction is unpersuasive, comments linguist H. Craig Melchert of the University of California, Los Angeles. Researchers can confidently rebuild trees of Indo-European languages extending back no more than about 7,000 years, he says.

Many linguists and archaeologists suspect that Indo-European languages originated in what’s now the southern Russian steppes, and that’s unlikely to change as a result of the new study, says linguist Joe Eska of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg. Cognate swapping across languages could have occurred more often than assumed by Atkinson, undermining his conclusions, Eska contends.

•       R. Bouckaert et al. Mapping the origins and expansion of the Indo-European language family. Science, Vol. 337, Aug. 24, 2012, p. 957. doi:10.1126/science.1219669.