Articles
Throughout history there have been many attempts to further our understanding of dreams. The Aborigines hold to the Dreamtime, when the world was created from the infinite possibilities that existed. Sigmund Freud held that dreams were a window into the unconscious desires inherent in people, and could be interpreted as such. This view was widely held amongst western society until the late twentieth-century when scientists such as Allan Hobson and Mark Solms began to propose theories suggesting there was a more chaotic element to dreaming, though they were of different opinions as to where exactly within the human brain dreams originated.
The twentieth-century led to a flurry of research on the human brain and a renewed interest in dreaming as neurology and psychology became more accepted within the scientific community. It was Wilder Penfield who, almost by accident during his studies of epilepsy, discovered that an electrical current could stimulate specific areas of the brain to create a dream-like state, notably areas of the forebrain including the parietal lobe, which deals with integrating sensory information, and the hippocampus, which deals with memory.
The idea for the Virtual Dreaming technology grew out of a postgraduate thesis on Penfield’s work by Gray McNaughton in 2000. His work put forward the idea of stimulated dreaming as a form of alternative therapy, but McNaughton's work was largely ignored and labelled ‘fanciful dreaming’ itself by many of his peers. He would go on to found IDDR, a group created to further investigate practical avenues for the use of stimulated dreaming.
The work of IDDR led directly to the development of the virtual dreaming technology, which they now license to community organisations. You can find more information on the Institute of Dream Research on their site at: www.virtualdreaming.org