Lucid Dreaming

Halia and Eric soon arrived at Dr. Li's lab. As soon as Halia saw Dr. Li, she immediately hugged the man. During the month and a half that they knew each other, she had been through a lot, but it was nice to know that she wasn't completely alone.

"Halia, how have you been?" Dr. Li asked.

Halia glanced at Eric, not knowing whether to jump into the bad news straight away.

"Dr. Li, we have a situation..." Eric immediately cut in.

After a bit of explaining, Halia recalled everything that happened between her and Sean to the doctor. In the end, the doctor sighed, "I was afraid this would happen."

Halia stared at the doctor in curiosity, "You knew about this?"

The doctor sat Halia down, hoping to calm her emotions, "When we were running tests on rats, we noticed an odd reaction in one of them. Normally, when we downloaded memories into the rats, they simply recognized mazes and sounds which they didn't experience before. But, there was one particular rat that adopted the behavior of its memory-donor. It was normally quite a territorial and feisty rat, but it suddenly turned submissive. It only happened once and we couldn't confirm if it was definitely because of the memory, so we dismissed it."

"But, it appears as though you have been affected in the same way," the doctor shook his head.

"To explain this, I need to show you a diagram of the human brain," the doctor gestured for Eric to bring him a picture on the wall.

"As I told you before, we downloaded memories from Sara's amygdala, which is the emotional center of the brain. It stores emotional memory and triggers your brain to react to certain emotions. For example, when you had a panic attack that one time, the amygdala remembered a frightening memory and threw your body into panic mode," the doctor said as he pointed to an area in the middle of the brain.

"However, there is also a part of your brain that deals with logic and reasoning - your frontal lobe. It stops you from doing things that make no sense. Your frontal lobe is active all day, except for when you're asleep," the doctor then pointed to the front section of the brain.

"Scientists have proven that during a dream state, the frontal lobe is usually switched off and the amygdala goes into hyperdrive. This explains why our dreams make no sense and we feel like we aren't in control. Our dreams are completely emotion driven and have no logic."

"So, I fall into a dream state when I'm around Sean even though I'm awake?" Halia asked in confusion.

"Not exactly. What's happened in your case, is that you have an overload of emotional data from Sara in your amygdala that gets triggered whenever you see Sean and it suppresses your logic. Which means, you simply react the way that Sara would in that situation."

"Basically, your frontal lobe isn't switched off completely like in a normal dream state since you're aware of what's happening; it's​ just overpowered by your emotions. What you're experiencing is more similar to lucid dreaming."

Halia scratched her head. It was a lot of information to process. "Lucid dreaming?"

"Yes, lucid dreaming. The first stage of lucid dreaming is realizing you're in a dream. This is when your frontal lobe is a little active, but not enough to overpower your amygdala. That's similar to the state you're in when you see Sean."

"What you need to do is reach the second stage of lucid dreaming. Some people realize they're in a dream and they learn to take control of it. Sometimes, they can even force themselves to wake up. In that situation, their frontal lobe regains control. That's your aim."

"According to what you've said, you've woken up twice thanks to Jackson and once because of Eric. If not for them, I'd hate to imagine how long you would have stayed in that state," the doctor said worriedly. "What you can do for now is perhaps set up an alarm when you're around Sean and program it to go off at certain intervals. But, of course, the best thing for you to do is to learn how to wake yourself up."