Consciousness: Expanding the Boundries of Psychological Inquery

Chapter five sets its focus on various states of consciousness. More specifically, it seems to focus on altered states of consciousness whither these modified states of mind be due to sleep cycles, hypnosis, or brain altering drugs (any depressant or stimulant really, not just the "bad" ones).
One aspect of the chapter that peeked my interest was that of not only near death experience but also simply out of body experiences. I was fully aware of such occasion as people, for example, claiming to have seen themselves being tended to in a hospital when they were medically considered dead and then returning to their body. The story of the officer leaving their body and watching themselves bring down a criminal was fascinating to me. This was simply something that stood out to me as something interesting. The more important topics concerning altered states of mind would be those that i mention at the exposition of this post.
Hypnosis was the most interesting topic in my opinion. The chapter discusses myths associated with it and from what i could tell from my looking a bit more in depth on this section was that many of these myths associated with hypnosis (such as forgetting everything that happens during hypnosis) "can occur" but is very rarely and usually due to the fact that the subject is expecting it to happen. One thing that I learn from a hypnotist I saw in the past was that, for the most part, hypnosis only succeeds if the subject is willing in most cases--in other words if one was actively attuning their mind to fighting hypnotic effects very little could be achieved by a hypnotist's efforts. This chapter will discuss hypnosis in much more depth than I feel the average student would know and I expect to find this topic particularly interesting.
The other part of the chapter, which I feel is a very important part of looking at altered states of mind, would be dreams. One of the most interesting concepts I encountered in the chapter concerning dreams was that they could essentially be used to gauge one's cognitive abilities. For example, children remember dreams on considerably fewer occasions than adults do and their dreams are much less complex. As one grows up and acquires more knowledge as life progresses their dreams gain a lot more movement and emotional context--something that many children might reasonably lack in early stages of cognitive development.