I was introduced to this phenomenon through Kurzweil's book "How to create a mind". He claims that the brain is massively parallelized pattern recognition machine, with consciousness being a censor that filters results. While in hypnagogia, this censoring function is suppressed and you are able to make "unthinkable" connections between ideas you normally think are unrelated. Of course, you should just take notes of these connections and later evaluate them rationally to see if they have any merit. It's very exciting that technology might be able to prolong and enhance this creative state of mind.

Sleep As Android can do this same thing. It uses your microphone/accelerometer to sense motion and estimate when you're entering REM sleep. It's not as advanced as the more complicated set up here, but anecdotally I can say it works fairly well. You can set it to play a trigger phrase when you enter REM sleep to help train lucid dreaming. I've never done it though because they default trigger phrase included is downright creepy sounding. It's some echo-y modulated voice that goes "You are dreaming-ing-ing-ing...."

I was expecting the article to be an actual dream control device and not just a device that helps you control your own dreams. Kind of misleading.

Here's the conference paper [1], 30s preview video [2] and ACM Digital Library entry [3].

There's also a project homepage with a FAQ [4].

[1]: http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/3190000/3188403/alt10.pdf

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joYEbU2R57Q

[3]: https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=3170427.3188403

[4]: https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/sleep-creativity/overview...

Fascinating. I have a keen interest in Shamanism and more patience for "woo-woo" here than most. Navigating your dream state is a mighty Shamanic concept. It is one of two Shamanic practices that people here will entertain. The other is the idea of the memory castle.

New technological approaches like this will help us peel back the veil of the tangible, 'ordinary' realities of which we are comfortable. The world will be a much more funky and weird place once we realize there are non-ordinaries realities that we can explore, too.

  > Ideas were not coming from me, they were just passing through my head

This might sound like I'm crazy but this brings back memories of a strange experience from some years ago that I can't really explain other than "coincidence".. but in the light of this article I started to think.. is it?

Me and my gf were really tired and both exactly in this "almost sleeping but not quite" state. We were lying down with our heads touching (my left temple touching her right temple.. not exactly the temple but just to give a generic idea). We were still talking with each other but at the same time I was seeing random fragments of dreams and the reality was fading away and coming back occasionally. At some point I saw a dream(?) about an orange (I think.. or a ball) that grew bigger and bigger till almost everything was.. filled by it and at that moment my gf says something in the lines of ".. and then there's this huge orange ball coming at me and growing bigger". I woke up immediately and asked her to explain wtf just happened because she was seeing the exact same thing that I was seeing at exactly the same time.

Could it be that one of our brains was picking up the brain waves of the other (..the brains were so close together after all :)) and as our consciousness was fading between being asleep.. it didn't filter out this random interference and interpreted it in the same way, producing the same dream like encounter? Was she, in essence, "reading my mind"? Am I crazy? :)

>“Ideas were not coming from me, they were just passing through my head,” one subject reported.

Is consciousness even real, man?

Great books if you wanna chew on basically (for now) unanswerable questions:

Peter Watts' "Blindsight" and "Echopraxia."

Neal Stephenson's "Anathem."

This is great. The device is interesting. I've accomplished the equivalent thing manually by putting my elbow on the bed and keep my arm straight up. As I'm falling asleep, the arm would fall down, bringing me mildly back to consciousness again. It works, and is gentler than using steel balls, but the method used here is even more refined.

The even more notable aspect of the story is that it seems lucid dreaming and related phenomena is finally moving firmly into the realm of reality in the minds of sleep/dream researchers, if this article is to be any indication. Though I'm aware that lucid dreaming was technically proven to be real ages ago, the notion that it's not seems to have stuck.

Side note; one of my favourite things to do when flying is to induce a hypnagogic state and then compose, and simultaneously listen to, music in my mind. Or rather, have music be composed almost automatically with gentle nudges from me using emotions (it's hard to put into words). It requires noise cancelling headphones and either white noise or a good binaural beats track. And of course, I don't always end up in the correct state of mind to be able to do it.

The music I hear in this state is incredibly beautiful. I'm no musician however, and I've never been able to "bring anything back" that's been of any significance.

>> ... the world starts dissolving, but you still have awareness of your descent into unconsciousness and memories mixing with hallucinations,

>> Jibo robot would prompt them

So this is basically someone going on a guided acid trip. An induced state where real perceptions and illusions can be directed by an outside guide. As further proof, I'd like to see the robot say "your skin is covered in spiders". I'm betting that dreaming doesn't go so well.

Critic: "System for Dream Control", i.e., "People are suggestible as they fall asleep."

Fan: "But this is closed-loop. It keeps you in the hypnogogic state."

Critic: 1. Optimize a simple open-loop system using, say, number of repetitions, inter-repetition interval as f(repetition), and amplitude as f(repetition). Use your outcome of choice (e.g. the Alternative Uses Task) and a factorial design to explore the space. 2. Optimize closed-loop system for the same outcome, exploring its parameter space. 3. Randomize 100 people to (1) or (2) 4. t-test on the means 5. Get back to me 6. Even if p(2>1) < 0.05, (2) is still just a fancy example of "people's thoughts are affected by words that they hear."

Dr. Horowitz may be onto something. Let's not get ahead of ourselves with clickbait headlines while we wait and see.

Bizarrely timely for me. Just yesterday I experienced something much like this. I was working through a personal problem in my head but was pretty tired, and kept almost dropping off to sleep before realizing my chain of thought made no sense whatsoever and awakening myself. It happened a few dozen times (I was determined to get through the problem, though I wasn't having much success.)

But at some point, I was amused by where my mind was going to, so I started writing the dream fragments down. They were dreamlike, too -- they would sort of take over my brain, it was very difficult for me to recognize that they weren't rational or at all related to what I had been thinking about, and after I fully awoke they'd slip away entirely. But like I said, there was a point before falling asleep where I would become aware enough to realize what was happening, then grab onto some fragment of the dream, and wake up enough to write it down. So here's the list (these are all snapshots, as that was all I could hang onto):

    * my son saying he's going to jump up to the sky and then him soaring upward

    * someone being trained in the Israeli army

    * getting kicked out of a band

    * cutting an Adam's apple out of a chicken neck

    * stomping on something that looks like a painting lying on the floor, and shattering it

    * holding and tilting up a spatula, onion, and lemon

    * shooting missiles at the butt of an enormous cow

Where can I download the device schematics (or order a pre-assembled device) and an instruction manual on how to use it? I really bloody want a kind of "a crutch" that would throw me in a lucid dream without all that "dream journal" kind of exercises.

I can't believe no one mentioned Queensryche's "Silent Lucidity" 'till now.

> As they were falling asleep, the Jibo robot would prompt them with one of two phrases: “remember to think about a rabbit” or “remember to think about a fork.”

I'd imagine a queue like this would work, regardless of if I was sleeping.

Also see:

https://www.artofmanliness.com/2015/02/18/hypnagogic-nap/

although not all of the subjects remembered what they said to the robot, all of them “remembered and reported seeing the prompt word during their dream state, showing successful inception

Ha

This title seems quite misleading, dream control has been practiced by individuals for thousands of years and is easy to learn if you just do some reading and dedicate yourself to it ('lucid dreaming' and everything related to it). It doesn't require any devices or technology, although some techniques can involve using technology to make various things easier or more reliable. If you learn it well you should be able to perform just as well as this device allows you to, although this device seems a bit more focused on the state before lucid dreams, it could be just as useful as a consistent trigger to attain lucidity.

It's strange that the title says 'dream control' yet 'lucid dreaming' is barely mentioned once in the article. It seems like they just mean more awareness in a hypnagogic state, or the ability to wake up quickly after entering one, which can also be attained just by practicing.

The data provided attempting to show the benefits of this is severely lacking as well. A sample size of six with little specific description of their alternative use task is not useful in the same way saying they spent 158 seconds longer writing stories is not. I'm sure someone who remembers all their dreams can tell you a long and 'interesting' story, but it's not necessarily useful.

arduino + bend sensor, really?

one cigarette + laying-on-your-back nap = lucid dream

All i can think of... This is not a dream... not a dream. We are using your brain's electrical system as a receiver. We are unable to transmit through conscious neural interference. You are receiving this broadcast as a dream. We are transmitting from the year one, nine, nine, nine. You are receiving this broadcast in order to alter the events you are seeing. Our technology has not developed a transmitter strong enough to reach your conscious state of awareness, but this is not a dream. You are seeing what is actually occurring for the purpose of causality violation.