I follow the various disciplines involved in the scientific quest to quantify consciousness. My interest arose from a 'miracle' of consciousness my family witnessed and experienced during a 3-month period back in 1992. At trial in a later civil lawsuit stemming from that incident, a "finding of fact" upon the testimony of a dozen medical/scientific 'experts' found that our son's conscious condition prior to his death did qualify as a genuine Miracle. For the mundane purpose of absolving his doctors from any responsibility to treat him for physical injuries they had diagnosed, but still. An odd finding in a court of law. While I was and am willing to entertain the existence of the miraculous, I had quite a different theory to explain how our son could be awake and functioning despite his doctors and their hand-picked experts insisting that such a thing was physically impossible.
The experience ignited my interest in where, exactly, science was on the subject of consciousness. My interest tends toward the various anomalies more than your standard daily awareness because I am convinced that no "Theory of Everything" [which must include Mind/Consciousness] can be considered comprehensive if it does not explain the anomalies as well as the common manifestations. And, of course, the fact that it's the anomalies that are most interesting.
In my diary Waking Up Dead - The Quest for Consciousness I introduced the subject of Near-Death Experience [NDE], and in a later diary A Question of Consciousness, the subject of Shared-Death Experience [SDE]. The resulting discussions have been quite interesting and educational, so for those who may wish to delve even deeper, keep going beyond the orange fleur de kos...
My "theory" for why our son was able to function despite severe head trauma - which while highly unusual, was obviously not impossible - had to do with the fact that he was a "dreamwalker." A term of endearment we used to describe both his lucid dreaming and his propensity to occasionally BE the Batman-like hero of his dreamstate while sleepwalking. This kind of thing wasn't something that overly concerned us, as lucid dreaming had been present in our families over some generations. The sleepwalking was new, but we were careful to put locks on the doors where he couldn't reach them, which I'd learned from when my baby sis was a regular Master Escape Artist from the moment she could walk. Thanks, Mom.
At any rate, we knew the Dreamwalker pretty well. We hadn't seen him since our son hit puberty, but recognized him in ICU after the accident. Because it was immediately clear that we could calm and 'control' him in this state, we were cleared to stay with him day and night. Where we remained over the next three months as the brain injury (frontal lobe contusion) cleared, by which time his normal waking self had fully returned.
I saw a little ditty on ScienceDaily today entitled Lucid dreams and metacognition: Awareness of thinking; awareness of dreaming. It reports that researchers from the Max Planck Institute in Germany have found the brain area which enables self-reflection tends to be larger (more developed?) in lucid dreamers. Thus, they conclude, lucid dreamers are possibly more self-reflective when awake as well.
The researchers could make this connection because studies of lucid dreamers via fMRI back in 2011/12 helped to pin-point the brain centers for self-perception, self-reflection and consciousness development. Or, as the headline puts it, Lucid dreamers help scientists locate the seat of meta-consciousness in the brain.
The "Related Stories" list then sent me to a release from the University of Lincoln last August entitled Awake within a dream: Lucid dreamers show greater insight in waking life. In this the researchers showed that lucid dreamers were 25% better at solving insight problems than non-lucid dreamers. Insight defined as the ability to "think in a different way" when approaching problems.
Finally, a tidbit of relatively 'new' knowledge (August 2011) on the cog-sci front does tend to support my observation that the facility of lucid dreaming could indeed be an important factor in the observable presence of higher level self-consciousness even after severe head trauma/brain injury. Patients in a minimally conscious state remain capable of dreaming during their sleep. Seems to me that if this is true (and it apparently is), and the minimally conscious person happens to be an accomplished lucid dreamer with a history of occasionally dreamwalking, then those doctors all those years ago who claimed the patient's physical/mental state was literally and authoritatively impossible (aka 'Miraculous'), lost out on some fame and fortune they might have claimed for themselves by simply doing their jobs and documenting the case in detail as it presented to them. They'd have been 20+ years ahead of their fields, could have been leading the way.
So... any lucid dreamers here? Any insights into whether or not we can expect in future research from the medical end of the Consciousness Quest that a significant number of NDE/SDE experiencers may also have some history of lucid dreaming? Per the extended development of "meta-consciousness" centers in the brain. And what would that mean?