Some researchers think that playing video games may help dreamers to have and control lucid dreams more ably.
The first study suggested that people who frequently played video games were more likely to report lucid dreams, observer dreams where they viewed themselves from outside their bodies, and dream control that allowed people to actively influence or change their dream worlds – qualities suggestive of watching or controlling the action of a video-game character.
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Virtual reality simulators have already been used to help PTSD patients gradually adjust to the threatening situations that plague their waking and sleeping thoughts. If [Jayne] Gackenbach’s hunch is correct, perhaps video games could also help relieve the need for nightmares.
As I recall, Jaron Lanier, the computer scientist credited with inventing the term “virtual reality,” once said that he had hoped that VR technology would be used to give people practice in navigating after-death states of consciousness, what the Tibetan Book of the Dead calls the bardo states.
But that was not what the market wanted, apparently.
This research interests me very much. Certainly, the Chaos Magicians and related “Currents” can point to this as a legitimization of the concept of “techno-magery”. Perhaps it will encourage a refreshed approach to computer-based magic, which seems (to my limited experience, and I would appreciate a techno-mage correcting any misapprehensions I might have) to have been reduced to little more than some website-based shrines, chatroom rituals, and a few “mind-expanding” pieces of software that are a decade old.
Changing consciousness is changing…How we did magic is not necessarily how we will do magic…
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