Some say that lucid dreams are not possible.  I for one was a believer in that theory for a long time.  The sheer thought of being able to control something that was so fake and unreal really did not click with me until a few years ago when I got my wisdom teeth out.  I got very strong painkillers that helped a lot with the pain, but they also had some odd side effects.

One of those effects was that they made you extremely drowsy.  I read this and thought to myself “okay, a lot of things make you drowsy, it can’t be that bad.”  I took the pain medication and had a nice rest the first time around, but the second time I took the medication, I realized something.  I had not actually woken up.  My brain was creating a simulation of what waking up would feel like and synthesizing those feelings.  It went so far as to wake me up in the dream and give me more medication.  I then found out that I could change things in my dream.  I could walk around, people could talk to me and I could carry on entire conversations with fake people.  It was a really weird feeling.

At first it did not occur to me that maybe my body was still back on the recliner that I was laying on when I fell asleep so I went back and checked.  Turns out it was still there, and this is where the dream got really weird.  As soon as I realized that, I remember thinking, man, this is really weird.  Right as that thought crossed my mind, it must have triggered something, because I woke up.  Whether that thought was enough to throw me out of my dream state and back into reality, or if the pain medication had simply worn off, I will never know.  But what happened to me I can only classify as a medical induced lucid dream.

It was odd to be able to control things that I knew did not exist, but at the same time it was really invigorating.  To this day I have not been able to have another dream like that one, which makes me wonder if it really happened at all or if it was just a dream about a lucid dream.

As a kid my grandparents always had dogs.  Not just any dog, they always had beagles, which is a certain type of dog that is good for Hunting.  We had trained these dogs to hunt for wild rabbit, which usually are very fast and hard to keep track of.  These dogs were able to follow the rabbit’s scent and chase them around until we got ourselves positioned to capture the rabbit.  While training them in and of its self is an example of classical conditioning that is not the example I would like to talk about.  The first thing that we noticed after getting beagles for the first time was that they were extremely gun-shy.  That is to say, they were afraid of guns and the sound that they make when they go off.  For obvious reasons this was not going to work considering we wanted these dogs to become rabbit hunting dogs.  So, the unconditioned stimulus was the appearance or sound of a gun.  The unconditioned response was the dogs running, cowering, or barking.  After we found out what the cause was of their seemingly random odd behavior we decided that we could train them to be calm around guns.  In order to do this we trained the dogs using treats!  This was the conditioned stimulus.  When the dog would not appear scared or run from a gun we would give it a treat.  When it would bark at a gun we would not give it a treat and ignore it for a while.  Eventually after a few weeks of doing this once a day we had each dog trained to the point where they all did the conditioned response we wanted of them which was to not be afraid of guns (specifically to act like they were not even there).  We did not even know it at the time, but when I was younger we used classical conditioning in order to train our dogs to not be afraid of guns.

After having learned about how our memory and retrieval of these memories works I have noted that the way that I had previously been studying has been wrong all along.  This is the reason why when I get to an exam I will sometimes blank out and forget all of the answers to the exam that I am taking.  It is because when I study I “cram” the night before and tend to not actually understand all of the information that I am going over.  What I am doing is storing that information in my short-term memory which only lasts a small amount of time.  The problem with that is that this memory does not last.  This explains the feeling that I always have during exams of having known the information last night and being able to recite it perfectly but during the exam not being able to retrieve the information at all.  It is because it was never encoded to my long-term memory and therefore only lasted twelve to thirty seconds which explains why right after reading information I could recite it but at the time of the exam twelve hours later I had no idea what I was talking about.

In order to remedy this situation my study habits are going to have to change.  What needs to be done is I need to go through the information and actually understand it.  This will enable me to encode the information I am taking in and store it in my long term memory where I can access it at a later time.  In order to do this there are a few techniques that I can use, but the most likely one will be explaining the things that I am reading out loud to myself.  This may seem weird but in order to make thing make sense through the English language you need to know a level of detail about the things that you are describing.  This forces you to move the information you are studying into your long-term memory and will allow you to be able to recall the information at a later date with ease.