Gadgetory

so like my dream last night was aliens invaded and Angelina Jolie was like a general and she just starts getting bigger and eventually she's like 800 pounds and it got to the point where my only out was to jump in the toaster suddenly one of these prehistoric giant birds just comes up and just eats my graphicly just visually rips her apart we had to deal with the repercussions of this like mangled body of my mother and like walls start disappearing and like people are watching me but at some point I was flying you're just airborne and you came down and like I landed on a ramp and like Bob Balaban is standing there I'll just say hey Bob and then they kind of like get like a cross-section so you see the dead baby in the center but there's like layers and layers of paint around it and then there's this weird crazy flip where like I bring Ben Franklin with time machine into the present day and I'm just like showing him around and he's like I was saying you know his mind is alone like everything I showed him his Wikipedia article he was like yeah I had syphilis what happens when we go to sleep at night I've always been an advocate for a good night's rest when most of my colleagues are still dashing off emails or enjoying a nightcap I'm usually in bed by 10:00 two o'clock a solid nine hours but beyond appreciating the benefits of rest I have to admit that I'm also drawn to the fanciful imaginings that often come with it dreams but not just any dreams dreams I can control Oh you dr. Andrew Varga is a neurologist at the NYU Sleep Disorders Center sleep is a really evolutionarily preserved phenomenon from from creatures that you wouldn't even think would have sleep things like C elegans which is a little worm - fruit flies you get bombarded with all this experience during during wakefulness and sleep is thought to maybe help you sort of figure out like what's worth filtering out and what's worth kind of retaining do we know what is going on in the brain when someone has a lucid dream lucid dreaming differs from regular dreaming during REM in that certain frontal areas bilaterally seems to get much more activated during lucid dreaming you know the idea I think in to some extent behind lucid dreaming is that you create a little bit of a hybrid state that doesn't otherwise exist right part of your brain is essentially rip remains asleep and remains dreaming but part of the brain actually enters a state of wakefulness lucid dreaming it's the holy grail of sleep imagine having complete control over the world around you it's like the most immersive virtual reality experience and it doesn't cost you a dime just a warm blanket and lots of practice I've always had weird dreams like most people and been curious about what they meant was my psyche trying to process some earlier life trauma or teach me important life lessons or was my gray matter simply performing various restorative functions with dreaming simply an arbitrary side effect in trying to figure that out I read a book about lucid dreaming written by Thomas pizzelle a very active lucid dreamer and it made me think lucid dreaming could help me figure out what it all means and even if it can't well it sounds pretty damn fun do you ever get confused about whether or not you are awake or asleep yes do you think you're awake right now I am awake are you am i dreaming I'm also dreaming III think I mean what are some of the most intense or crazy or profound lucid dreams that you've had I mean do you do remember them like in like a vivid way or do they tend to sort of fade I was once told by an oak tree I asked how were you so strong how can I be like you and it said build something that will outlast your body I've gotten a great advice from an eight-foot-tall Abraham Lincoln a whale made of light told me all matter has its origin and spirit and it showed me that if you make changes here in the dream world you can actually affect the physical world that these are two parts of the same whole also if I said the word Cosi spasm does that mean anything to you you know when you get into bed and it is so cozy that you just have to like kick your feet and like do a little freakout like it's so warm in the bed that's the kind of spiritual practice I'm talking about so I want to be a lucid dreamer what do I need to do well you already are a dreamer so you got that down I am knowing you are a dreamer that every single night you have access to this rich inner world the next thing is about remembering your dreams so go to bed with a paper and pad next to you next to your bed wake up and you know that you'll have a dream so keep that keep that journal next to perform techniques like the wake back to bed so if you set your intention in the beginning of the night I'm going to become lucid you're gonna you're not going to be come into a dream in for another 90 minutes so the goal with the wake back to bed is to sleep for six hours straight wake up in the middle of the night or six hours later and now you're going to stay up about 15 minutes setting your intention that the next place I'll be will be a dream and I will become lucid and then you're going to go back to sleep and essentially you're going to go right directly into this REM cycle and with a strong intention can carry right over into a loose adjourn and I would say more than all of that it really is about waking up and being present more in your waking life that presence will carry over into your dreams because that's essentially what you're looking for is to wake up to the present moment of a dream so when you're when you're doing these practices yeah get into your pajamas and get into that cozy bed you know you're not just show them right the spasm cozy spasm exactly okay it's time to dream for the sake of this experiment I've also set up a camera in my room to document my dreams the second I wake up shadow wants to make the dream journal a mobile experience while the app does allow me to easily type out my dreams the dictation function fixes that middle of the night confusion that makes writing in a dream journal difficult shadow also pulls out key words from my dream and creates a more visual experience one that will help me train my brain to recognize patterns in my dreams good morning everyone and so I just woke up after falling back to sleep for another hour huh I had a really intense dream and I feel like it was the closest I've come to having a moment of lucidity and a dream it was just like a normal dream I'm already starting to lose it but I was in a car at a sports car next to someone that a dude that like I knew but I don't know who it was but like in the dream I felt like I knew him and he was speeding through like an empty city and then I had this moment of like where I just felt like really like in the car like could like the wind temperature from outside coming in and like feeling the car like around my body and then I was like slow down and like turn around and like take me to this house so he like turned around and and parked in front of a 2-story house and I got out of the car and then I woke up so now I'm already forgetting the dream but it felt like very very real it was really weird so a good step it feels like I'm making progress but I think it might be time for an upgrade this is the REM II sleep mask created by Duncan Fraser and Stephen McGuigan of bit Bangor labs the project was funded in 2012 through a successful Kickstarter campaign Remmy is a device that gives you this kind of predictable signal your dreams it flashes lights through your eyes while you're in a dream and you can kind of latch on to the two light patterns and it helps you recognize the fact that you're dreaming so you can say oh there's the lights in the middle of a dream like now I can start to control the world around me originally and when we'd start looking to it the main method was sort of to brute force train your brain to always check whether you're in a dream throughout your day you have some kind of action you would repeat look at a clock look at text count your fingers typically if you did that enough during the day you might do it in your dream however in the dream you look at a clock and you look away and you look back the time has changed or text is very hard to read so what you're doing is you're creating almost like a ticker in your waking life that would then carry over into your your dreams and would cue you and and Remy kind of automates that reality check process you know you don't have to train yourself necessarily all day to check your watch or you know read words Remi continues giving you predictable signals though they are of your own design so when you first turn on Remi you'll get a little signal just the back-and-forth pattern to let you know don't on and all the lights are working at this point it's in a regular mode which in default settings means it's going to just not do anything for five hours after five hours it's going to start showing you signals every 15 minutes with what like a two minute wiggle some of them are more jarring you'll get just all fulbright one eye flashing back and forth and some of them are just more like fading back and forth like a Nightrider type pattern most people say I saw it manifested as some sort of other light source and a dream they'll say you know I was standing there and suddenly my kitchen lights started going like this or ambulance went by and was for me I generally see them as lights as lights overlaid in a dream you know like nothing incorporated into the dream itself they're still an inner play it's like you suddenly nothing's there unless you will it to be there it's more like you're in a movie but all of a sudden you don't to say your lines and and you know take cues you can just do it everyone Steve and I had talked about was dreaming he talked about flying in space I just never done that and so the next time I I was in this dream I flew into space but I hit like a a painted space ceiling like a diorama and it was really fascinating to see how like I was able to do what I wanted to do to a point and then there was this sort of like third-party interpretation of that Wiley coyote thing yeah I think it doesn't really interesting when you can kind of bounce against your subconscious good morning night - with the Remy mask no lucid dreams but I just woke up from a dream that I was getting ready to get married and I dreamt that I was like in a house it was like my house or like a house I was familiar with with Carl and we were getting ready for our wedding because we were like getting married that day and we were like making food I don't know why because it was a some other wedding that is not the one we're planning we were getting ready for our wedding and then my oldest sister arrived and I was like all excited to see her and then we were lying on the grass and then my mom got there which is unusual because she's dead and she was wearing like the same clothes she always wore which was like total like mom pants like with the waist up really high and I'm like I tucked in like button-up shirt and she was there she got there and we were like really excited to see her and she was like lying on the grass with us and then she like turned over and gave me like a really big hug and then that was when my alarm went off and I woke up and I was crying so not the kind of dream I have every day I don't have dreams about her a lot and it was actually rather unpleasant booze Oh as if it was a very very big dream I feel like the last two nights with the mask I don't know what it is but the dreams have been like pretty intense I don't know if that's a good thing or bad thing using Remy and shadow help me to have more vivid intense dreams but I was still unable to have a lucid dream that will come with weeks months or maybe even years of practice whether I'm using my smartphone and LED mask or pen and paper my brain is my only tool in the end and while scientists continue to wrap their heads around what dreaming is and why we do it developers and lucid dream enthusiasts will continue to do their part creating whatever gadgets and apps are needed to better understand this bizarre tranquil even frightening experience that happens when we're trying to catch some C's in the meantime I'll keep dreaming