INCEPTION **Exclusive**

Hey, we’ve all seen A Nightmare on Elm Street, so we know evil doers can enter our dreams, right?    

Seriously, in writer/director Christopher Nolan’s latest film, Inception, saboteurs find a way to enter people’s dreams to extract or plant information. But is anything like that remotely possible?  Nolan offers little insight into the background of his story other than doing research on lucid dreaming—simply defined as the state of mind where a dreamer is aware that they’re dreaming. To find out more, Film2Fact got an exclusive interview with Ryan Dungan Hurd, a lucid dream researcher with an MA in Consciousness Studies, a Certificate in Dream Studies from John F. Kennedy University, and a book entitled Sleep Paralysis: A Dreamer’s Guide.
  
F2F: What are the real possibilities of sabotaging or invading one’s dreams?

Hurd:  Mutual dreaming is a real phenomenon that is experienced by millions. I'd define mutual dreaming as statistically improbable dream content shared between two or more people on the same night. But that is consensual dream sharing. Dream invasion, on the other hand, is not as well understood. I think it's more likely to happen the old fashioned-way (dream telepathy, vision quests) rather than through some technology-assisted method involving drugs and fancy Virtual Reality goggles.

Is it possible to extract or plant information through dreams via injection or other means?


Hurd: There's certainly no scientific evidence. Robert Waggoner, author of Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self  tells a story about his own lucid dream in which he teaches a friend of his to become aware she is dreaming when she sees a peace sign in front of her face. Then, four months later, Waggoner met this friend for lunch and as they walk towards each other in greeting, she gets a "curious look" on her face and then makes a peace sign right in his face. She says later she's not sure why she did that. (more on this story can be found here).


Have there been any successful attempts to extract or plant information in dreams?

Hurd: The best scientific evidence for dream telepathy is the work done by Dr. Montague Ullman and Stanley Krippner, PhD at the Maimonides Medical Center in the 1970s.  By setting an intention, focusing on emotions and visual imagery, "senders" can influence the dreams of "receivers" who report their dreams. The International Association for the Study of Dreams actually conducts research into this method every year at their annual conference for fun as a "dream telepathy contest."  It's always done in a way that the receivers have no idea what the sender is focusing on, and the results are always stunning. Someone regularly comes up with the image or a statistically improbable rendition of the image on that night.

Has the government or military ever experimented in dream invasion technology or manipulation?

Hurd: The claims of a secret government research on dream sharing and manipulation are either fictional or still classified. However, The movie The Men Who Stare at Goats recently portrayed a fictionalized account loosely based on US and Russia government projects investigating "psychic powers" including the remote viewing projects on the 1970s and 1980s. Remote viewing is the alleged use of deep imagination, trance or dreams to discover information about a place, person or event. The evidence is pretty convincing. An Air Force program (for example) resulted in the successful location by remote viewing of a downed Soviet TU-22 airplane. During the Gulf war remote viewing was used extensively for intelligence gathering, and from 1990-1995 a program called "Stargate" was resurrected from an earlier Ft. Meade project (Not to be confused with the film and television series of the same name).  Ted Koppel interviewed former "Stargate" personnel in 1995 on Nightline. The work most likely continues in classified projects despite the 1995 briefing from the Defense Intelligence Agency that remote viewing has no scientific merit.

Upon further research, Film2Fact found some amusing information in a book called Mind Matrix: Covert Electronic Harassment Mind Control Program by the mysterious Commander X.  Allegedly, there are over 40 pages of official U.S. patents for mind control devices.  The inventors of some of the patented devices claim to be able to project subliminal messages into the minds of unsuspecting victims, as well as to silently influence moods and behavior. There are also devices that can broadcast a speaking voice directly into the brain, completely bypassing the normal auditory system.  Scary stuff, especially if you believe The Matrix is based on fact and Big Brother is watching.

More on Ryan Dungan Hurd

A site devoted to some Inception-related articles.

Other films of note relating to dreams and mind manipulation.  Please add to this list!

Dreamscape


The Matrix


Spellbound

The Cell