The Oneironauts
| Author | Paul Kalas |
|---|---|
| Illustrator | |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Popular science |
| Publisher | Paul Kalas |
Publication date | June 15, 2018 |
| Media type | epub, kindle, print |
| Pages | 346 pp. (print) |
| ISBN | 978-1720177616 Search this book on  . |
The Oneironauts: Using dreams to engineer our future is a 2018 popular science book by University of California, Berkeley professor Paul Kalas, who is also the book's publisher. Kalas reveals that the 2004-2005 discovery[1] of a large dust belt (debris disk) surrounding the nearby star Fomalhaut using the Hubble Space Telescope was sketched in his dream diary on November 16, 1995.
Overview[edit]
The book reviews the author's 332 experiences of déjà rêvé (previously dreamed), a cognitive phenomenon related to déjà vu, questioning whether or not such experiences represent precognition or illusions due to false memory, pareidolia, confirmation bias, cryptomnesia, or temporal lobe epilepsy. For one of these experiences, Kalas argues that the spatial offset of Fomalhaut's dust belt away from symmetry around the star was not previously known to exist in nature until the Hubble Space Telescope observations of 2004, and could not have been anticipated earlier than a theoretical prediction published in 1999. The book presents a sketch from his dream log made in 1995 that shows a dust belt around a star with the same offset indicated and a similar inclination of the belt to the line of sight. Several discrepancies are attributed to the problem that present-day semantic knowledge cannot accurately categorize novel future circumstances. Kalas concludes that the physical evidence most likely represents a measurement of precognition.
Kalas suggests that the weak precognitive abilities of individuals during dreaming can be made useful (predictive) by adopting an egocentric symbolic code to communicate semantic future knowledge such as dates. Analyzing the dreams of groups of individuals with a shared future experience would likely help separate the symbolic code from the dream content that is unique to each individual. Knowledge of future events would then permit the engineering of timelines from personal to global scales.
The book speculates that precognition through dreams (termed the "oneironaut phenomenon") is functionally related to learning and spatial navigation, highlighting the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex as neural correlates. Kalas hypothesizes that the tenuous perception of future events explains why humans believe in hope, fate, and deity, concluding that all intelligent life would develop these concepts.
Reception[edit]
References[edit]
- ↑ Kalas, Paul; Graham, James R.; Clampin, Mark (2005). "A planetary system as the origin of structure in Fomalhaut's dust belt". Nature. 435 (7045): 1067–1070. arXiv:astro-ph/0506574. Bibcode:2005Natur.435.1067K. doi:10.1038/nature03601. PMID 15973402.
External links[edit]
- Paul Kalas official website
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