The study of "lucid dreaming", a state in which dreamers can consciously change the course of a dream almost as though they were awake, may also impact strongly on healing.

      Karen Olness, research director of the Minneapolis Children's Medical Center, has documented how some children "can control certain physiological processes previously believed to be autonomic by using their imaginations." She says that some children were, in a controlled study, able to raise the temperature of their fingers by imagining they were wearing heavy mittens.
      "It is," she says, "reasonable to think children may be able to learn to control their immune processes by using this kind of visualizaton...and preserve these skills into adulthood."

      Barbara Brown in "Beyond Biofeedback":
"...the body follows COMMAND VISUALIZATIONS. We need not program each nerve directly...instead, we visualize what we want to happen, and the body converts the command visualization into the individual neral processces for execution. The body knows what to do if the person involved knows what is desired; it does not care about the scientific accuracy of the commands, or about the results per se. Negative, destructive commands can be followed with the same success as positive commands. It is this very fact that gives rise to the peculiar physiological behaviors called psychosomatic diseases."

      Neil Schneiderman, a psychologist at the U. of Miami Medical School, in collaboration with Dr. Mary Ann Fletcher, director of the clinical immunology laboratory at the U. of Miami, found that both aerobics and relaxation, combined with other training in managing stress, resulted in an increase of about 10 to 14 percent in levels of the immune system's T- 4 cells, which fall as infection with the AIDS virus progresses.

      Dr. Schneiderman:
"The gain, while modest, shows that there is a psychological buffering effect in the immune system. The big question is whether we can enhance immune function to a degree that will lengthen the period until symptoms of AIDS itself first appear."

      Related studies, such as the one conducted by Dr. Kenneth Croen at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases [New England Jour. of Med./Dec.3], suggest that an 'off' switch has been found for the herpes simplex virus type 1, indicating the presence of similar switches in other viruses that cause chronic infection. The action of CDS cells and other immune system components could, then, be enhanced using visualization techniques described by Dr. Olness (especially in theta or delta brain-wave states). This approach could provide a prophylactic effect in non-infected individuals, and, when combined with the other FULLY-REALIZED factors under the theory umbrella, possibly eliminate viruses from infected individuals in combination with drug therapy (or at least render them permanently DORMENT).

      Subjects trained in various meditation techniques in a study at the U. of Arkansas (commissioned by the Institute for Noetic Sciences), both altered and enhanced their immune function.