DREAMCATCHER // Dreamcatcher

From Shakespeare to Emily Bronte and beyond, many authors have given dreams the power to direct, challenge and reveal. In Dreamcatcher, young Indian playwright Kashyap Raja explores whether dreams may hold the key to unlocking your subconscious mind and your destiny.

The significance of sleep is a hot topic in modern science. Researchers have recently uncovered evidence that our brain has a plumbing network called the glymphatic system, which they believe may be responsible for clearing out dementia-causing toxins while we doze.

But dream analysis is still on the borderline with pseudoscience. Sigmund Freud’s idea that we act out our desires in dreams is undermined by a study showing that paralysed people dreamt about walking less than average, even though they all expressed a desire to regain that ability.

Carl Jung also taught that dreams are highly significant, containing truths and visions that emerge from different levels of our unconscious mind. This is the scenario that Dreamcatcher explores, with a machine that can look inside living people’s dreams, where, it’s revealed, you can always find your heart’s desire.

So does science support the notion that dreams can reveal the workings of the subconscious mind? Unfortunately neurobiological theory suggests that dreams emerge as we try to make sense of sporadic firings of nerves in our brain stem, which randomly activate memories. 

But scientists continue to explore what’s going on in the brain’s unconscious. The latest experiments show we can do complicated maths, as well as making rapid-fire judgements that guide our behaviour, without even knowing we are doing it. Is this how our destiny asserts itself?

The more that experts probe how our brains work, the more we realise how much processing is going on in our unconscious without our awareness. Currently, though, the suggestion that dreams carry great significance seems like wishful thinking. (RM)

Dreamcatcher ran at theSpace @ Surgeon’s Hall until August 27th - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/dreamcatcher 

The discovery of the brain’s glymphatic system: https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/news/story/3584/scientists-discover-previously-unknown-cleansing-system-in-brain.aspx

Significance of sleep to brain cleansing: https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/brain-may-flush-out-toxins-during-sleep

Neurobiological reasons for dreams: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2010/04/07/why-do-we-dream/#.V9m5A_krKUk

The power of our unconscious mind: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160315-the-enormous-power-of-the-unconscious-brain

50% LIABILITY // The Emslie Effect

Stripped down to its bloodless essentials, life is- give or take- a series of disjointed happenings, comings together and comings unstuck. There are birth pangs, there are death pangs. Big deal. John Emslie’s 50% Liability is a play that has something to say about all these things, plus one of those other elemental, everyday components: luck. Particularly, exclusively, bad luck.

In all honesty, it’s a show that deals exclusively with accumulated bad luck. How it stacks up, adds together and hardens into all that you’ve got. The genetic bad luck of being born, in a ‘scrawny’ (and Emslie makes this go a long, long way) frame ripe for the horrors of adolescence and high school, ripe for the bitter comic irony of becoming a male stripper in 80s Aberdeen (‘quite a conservative place’) having to carve out a niche hovering on the borderline of mutual humiliation for both stripper and client. Of all the petty, excruciating layers of incomprehension between the generations.

There’s not much in the way of linear narrative. But, for Esmlie, that’s sort of the point. He presents his life as a series of fluid, semi-connected catastrophes, each one more seemingly inevitable than the last. A broken neck in a slapstick occurrence at work, a near-death dream trip to Alaska, the use of his claims money to finance the show itself. In a sense, it’s a play that deals with how misery breeds misery and accumulates, as if by stealth. It’s a play that deals, blithely, with causality, with self-pity. With how it can take a whole lifetime to scramble clear of unpropitious beginnings. How that might be an impossibility in the end.

And finally, it deals with a kind of gallows hope. That even now, after a more than a lifetime's worth of ‘bad luck’, there’s the creeping anxious hope that ‘things can only get better’.

- FG

50% Liability played at C Venues - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/50-liability-1

Exotic Dancers: Gender Differences In Societal Reaction, Subcultural Ties, and Conventional Support- http://www.albany.edu/scj/jcjpc/vol10is1/bernard.html

Naked Ambition: The Truth About Male Strippers- http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/love-sex/sex-industry/naked-ambition-the-truth-about-male-strippers-7820919.html

Chance: A Key Role in Life- https://www.uky.edu/~eushe2/Pajares/ChanceCanPlayKeyRole.pdf

THE HOURS BEFORE WE WAKE // Tremolo Theatre

Judging by the extreme rarity of mobile phones, tablets, or even laptops on stage, the theatre world has barely caught up with the technological realities of the present, let alone the future. Tremolo Theatre’s The Hours Before I Wake doesn’t step too dramatically beyond the realities of the world we live in. But its commitment to representing a social media-rich, technologically-dense world makes it feel unusual - a sci-fi satire that’s close to home.

The biggest innovation in this dystopian future is that dreams are both monetised, and controlled. Individual consumers can select what they want to dream about, and take a pill to ensure that they can enact their fantasy painlessly during their sleeping hours. For Ian, the show’s protagonist, this fantasy revolves around becoming a superhero who rescues his office crush Janice from burning buildings. It’s childish stuff. But then, Ian is a huge pampered baby, cocooned from the harsh realities of the world by a soothing robot voice who helps guide him through his hours away from work - and reports any untoward behaviour straight back to his superiors.

Theorists have written about the dangers of a ‘frictionless’ world, where sharing on social media becomes constant and thoughtless -- leading to a situation where governments are able to gather a huge amount of individuals with minimum efforts. And companies are quick to take advantage of these new opportunities, too. Business are already able to track everything from their employees' movements to their facial expressions to their menstrual cycles.

The psychological effects of this dependency are less understood. Recent research has associated social media use (specifically, comparison-type behaviours) with onset of depressive symptoms. The Hours Before We Wake predicts a comfortable acceptance of constant sharing that's facilitated by soothing drugs [rather like Aldous Huxley's conception of the drug Soma in Brave New World]. 

This young company have devised a pretty dispiriting future, one that's a logical extension of a rapidly evolving corporate culture. But as its protagonist Ian is inspired to rebel against his tightly-controlled environment, it demonstrates how easy algorithms can be subverted by, as well as built from, human behaviour at its most individual.

- AS

The Hours Before We Wake was on at the Edinburgh Fringe from 5-28 August http://www.thehoursbeforewewake.com/

How frictionless sharing undermines individual privacy http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/how-frictionless-sharing-could-undermine-your-legal-right-to-privacy/254277/

Surveillance in the workplace http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/09/corporate-surveillance-activists/406201/

Impact of social media on mental health https://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/blog/social-media-and-young-peoples-mental-health

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GHOSTS AND HAUNTINGS // Chris French

Nearly 40 per cent of the UK population claim to have experienced a ghost, according to a MORI poll from the late 1990s, while a smaller but significant percentage – around a third – claim to have had some kind of paranormal experience. In this talk for the Edinburgh Skeptics on the Fringe, professor of anomalistic psychology (basically ‘weird stuff’) at Goldsmith’s University, Chris French, explains what might be going on from a rational, science-based perspective.
 
What follows is a straightforward explanation of several normal physical and psychological phenomena that cause people to believe they’ve witnessed some kind of paranormal activity. For example, many reports of poltergeists turn out to be straightforward hoaxes, notably including the founders of the modern spiritualist church, Maggie and Kate Fox, and the Amityville Horror which was popularised in a novel and films. Both have since been roundly debunked but still persist in popular culture as real.
 
One major cause of haunting stories is the poorly-understood condition of sleep paralysis, where a person partially wakes up during REM (dreaming) sleep. It’s remarkably common, and somewhere between eight and 40 per cent of the population are thought to experience it. Normally, the body is paralysed during REM sleep to prevent us acting out the physical motions of our dreams, so unexpectedly waking up in this state can be terrifying and disorientating. Even more distressing is the accompaniment of ‘dream hangovers’, such as visual, auditory and physical hallucinations. Given the similarities of these reported experiences across cultures, variously attributed to everything from sex demons (incubi and succubi) in Europe to the souls of unbaptised children on St Lucia, it’s likely that sleep paralysis is a much more common cause of ghost stories than previously realised.
 
We’re also hugely prone to creating things that simply aren’t there, such as seeing the face of the Virgin Mary in a cheese sandwich or inferring a ghostly whisper in crackling static. Alternatively, we fail to notice the blindingly obvious explanations for seemingly strange things right in front of our faces, as shown by the clever ‘Gorillas in our Midst’ study.
 
As French explains, the most important requirements for seeing ghosts are context and belief. You’re much more likely to spot a spectre if you’re a strong believer creeping around a reputed haunted house than a skeptic strolling through Sainsbury’s. But if ghosts are real, why should there be a difference? Like Fox Mulder in the X Files, some people just want to believe, and all too often their brain tricks them into thinking that they do. There is no cure, but approaching all paranormal claims with a broad, evidence-based and skeptical mindset will undoubtedly help.

- KA

 
Edinburgh Skeptics in the Pub is hosting Skeptics on the Fringe, Undiluted Brilliance, with a different speaker every night until August 28th, at 19:45 in the Banshee Labyrinth on Niddry Street - http://www.edinburghskeptics.co.uk/events-calendar/
 
Goldsmiths Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit: http://www.gold.ac.uk/apru/

The Fox sisters and the rap on spiritualism: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-fox-sisters-and-the-rap-on-spiritualism-99663697/?no-ist

The Amityville Horror hoax: http://www.snopes.com/horrors/ghosts/amityville.asp

Information about sleep paralysis – NHS Choices: http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/Sleep-paralysis/Pages/Introduction.aspx

The invisible gorilla experiment – an example of inattentional blindness: http://www.theinvisiblegorilla.com/gorilla_experiment.html