Man cracks open skull in attempt to control dreams

A man from Russia’s Novosibirsk Region says he nearly died after trying to perform brain surgery on himself using a handheld drill with the aim of controlling his dreams.

As reported by BAZA, 40-year-old Mikhail Raduga got the idea to install an electrode in his brain over a year ago. He appears to have attracted a cult following on social media with his writings and research on sleep paralysis, out-of-body states, and astral projection.

In June, Raduga revealed that he had chosen himself as a test subject for his experiments. He said he had initially considered turning to professional neurosurgeons but, due to a number of factors, including possible criminal liability for clinicians who performed operations, he ultimately chose to do everything himself in his apartment using a drill he bought at a hardware store. 

Raduga says he carried out the operation on May 17 after studying hours of YouTube videos on neurosurgery, and experimenting on five sheep. However, due to a complete lack of surgical experience, he reported losing nearly a liter of blood during the four-hour surgery and nearly died.

“Do not repeat! It’s much harder and more dangerous than you might imagine. A four-hour video of the operation clearly demonstrates this,” Raduga told his followers.

In the gruesome footage of his operation, Raduga could be seen holding back the skin on his head using paper clips, and drilling into the back of his skull. He then proceeded to stick a platinum and silicon implant into his brain, which he claims allowed him to use electricity to trigger certain actions in dreams. Five weeks after the botched surgery, however, Raduga went to hospital to have the chip removed.

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“I am glad I survived but I was ready to die,” he told the Daily Mail over the weekend, although he maintains that his ‘electrode’ has the potential to change the course of lucid dreams.

Professional neurosurgeons such as Alex Green of the University of Oxford, however, have slammed Raduga’s “extremely dangerous” actions and have warned that such operations should only be carried out by qualified experts.

“All sorts of complications could have happened,” Green told the Daily Mail. “For example, if he had caused bleeding from a cortical vein or an intracerebral vessel, he could have had a stroke with permanent deficit or death,” he said, adding that Raduga is now likely to be at risk of epilepsy.