… of rainbow dreams and butterfly wings

After yesterday’s sun rainbow experience, I dreamt about a much bigger and brighter rainbow the night after. It was quite a profound experience as I kept wondering in the dream that what are the odds of experiencing such spectacular phenomena in quick succession. I also remember a lot of colorful butterfly wings but I am not sure that whether these images were from an actual dream or some factual memory got inserted into that experience later on. 

Now that is the problem with dreams. Since these occur completely inside our minds without any input from our senses, we tend to forget about them rather quickly. 

A while ago, while reading a book, I suddenly experienced a rush of memories. Soon I realized that these were not related to a real place or experience. These were about a city in my dreamscape. Then there was I place where I use to go for long walks in my dreams. These places were a bit similar to the real places in my life but also quite different. 

Would we ever be able to record our dreams and share them like our stories and musings? 

It turns out that we are on the way to achieve just that. There is a TED Talk by Mary Lou Jepsen from 2013, in which she talks about a couple of cutting-edge brain studies. With the help of fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging), it was proved that the brain scans of a person looking at an image and thinking about the same image were virtually identical. The researchers were able to infer rudimentary images and videos from the scanned fMRI databases at that time. 

Technology has improved considerably since then but still, there is a lot to be accomplished. A Progress of many folds is required to truly capture human thoughts and reflections. But scientists believe that in a future not so distant, we might be able to "dump our ideas directly to the digital media" and communicate without the barriers imposed by languages. That would certainly unleash an era of human creativity, unprecedented in our collective history. 

Once we are able to capture the dreams and channel thoughts, directing them subtly towards a particular narrative, would be a rather trivial task. After all, a number of us are able to do so during Lucid Dreaming states. 

... and that would be an ultimate virtual reality (VR) experience.