Organist Gabriel Dessauer konzertiert am 25. Juni in Gackenbach

https://www.orgel-information.de/News/2023/6/20230613_3.html

      Symbiotic relationships are an intriguing matter: how one event or action can have an alternate – if not unexpected – impact upon another. Gaming, besides its usefulness to improve cognitive reaction time and hand-eye coordination, has found further advantages over the human mind. Behold the latest discovery… frequent game playing allegedly holds power over the dreamscape.

      The unearthing of this phenomenon began in a Canadian household at the break of the 1990s. Jayne Gackenbach, a psychologist at Grand MacEwan University, was riveted by her son Teace’s fascination over his Super Nintendo – namely in the various ways her son’s hobby could become self-impactful. An inquisition in Gackenbach sparked the question: how could hardcore game-playing (pertaining to regular play sessions of more than 2 hours, several times a week) morph insights into the waking and nocturnal landscapes?

      Her most recent findings, published in Dreaming, verified her beliefs whereas diehard gamers were more likely than their peers to be overcome within a lucid dream. 125 gamers and non-gamers were surveyed, in which Gackenbach and her colleagues found there to be a strong correlation that proved her hypothesis.

      "The major parallel between gaming and dreaming is that, in both instances, you're in an alternate reality, whether a biological construct or a technological one," she says. "It's interesting to think about how these alternate realities translate to waking consciousness, when you are actually reacting to inputs from the real world."

      Ensuing these studies, Gackenbach found further evidence that during each lucid dream, gamers displayed a strong sense to govern themselves as a character – at the point where many subjects could even toggle between a first and third-person perspective (much alike a Bethesda game, or Minecraft).

      "Gamers already know what it's like to be in control in an alternate reality," Gackenbach states. "So it makes sense that a gamer would notice, ‘hey, I'm in a dream,' and know how to manipulate that situation."

      According to some of her prior research, it was established that under intense and overly-daunting situations – better recognized as nightmares – gamers seemed to be unfazed in comparison to non-gamers, with the ability to hone in and tackle these extreme circumstances more efficiently. This resulted in more bizarre dreams for gamers: typically involving a combination of outlandish, whimsical scenarios with space travel and imaginary characters.