Lucid dreaming app triples users' awareness in dreams, study finds | Hacker News Reader

Lucid dreaming app triples users' awareness in dreams, study finds

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123 pointsmikhael111 comments

Once we can reliably induce lucid dreaming, and maybe with the help of some neural prosthesis to capture the output, we can recover all that lost productivity time by having people do immersive vr spreadsheet work in their dreams.

*Severance* has entered the chat.

I hope we can also guide lucid dreams to a degree where we can introduce in-dream advertising.

There's a movie about that, Strawberry mansion.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11398346/

Your comment reminds of of Hillman, who described Jungian dream analysis as "strip mining of the psyche".

This is on the Metaverse road map

back when I was writing XSL-T regularly I used to dream it, probably something about the verbosity of the language made it show up in my dreams, I would wake up pissed off I spent a night with XSL-T going through my head.

I used to be able to lucid dream quite regularly. I had a friend tell me that looking at your hands throughout the day would help as when you looked at them in your dreams you would realize it.

Now as I’ve grown older I don’t even dream anymore (I suspect due to THC use) but even on nights where I go to bed stone cold sober - nothing happens. I don’t dream. Does anybody else find themselves lacking the ability to dream at all?

I don’t mind it because while I do miss lucid dreaming and pleasant dreams, I completely miss out on the ability to have a nightmare.

How do you know with certainty that you do not dream? You spend zero minutes in REM? Do you track with Whoop or something similar?

I’ve tracked with both Whoop and Sleep number, I’ve gotten good “sleep scores”

Is it a case of not dreaming, or rather not remembering the dreams?

If a tree falls in a forest and nobody is around..

No I’ve dreamed before so I can tell when I don’t. I’ve discussed my dreams with my wife when I have them. They’re vivid on some occasions when I travel, most nights I don’t have any.

Take 400mg Magnesium Glycinate and be careful what you wish for.

Never heard of it, it appears to be a supplement for inflammation? When you say vivid dreams what are we talking about here?

I'm at the opposite end. I dream every time I sleep, even if it's a 10-minute nap. Could be undiagnosed narcolepsy in my case, but it doesn't bother me enough to get it checked out.

When you say "nothing happens", I'm not even sure what you mean. Do you just fall asleep and wake up hours later with no sense of time passing?

I can answer this one, you are aware of time passing and if you've trained yourself with an alarm you can still wake on cue. But there's just nothing in between, higher order thought just turns off.

I don’t really know how to describe it. I guess I have no sense of how long I was asleep until I see how dark it is (which is my immediate reaction when waking up) then I usually I have a decent guess. Although there are times I wake up and I have no idea if it’s 2 or 6 am.

Are you able to more accurately guess the time when you wake up based on the contents of your dreams? The rare occurrences when I dream if it’s over “10 minutes” there’s no difference in my perception if it’s that or hours.

No I can't estimate the time according to dream content at all. It could seem like hours in a dream even if I’ve only been asleep half an hour.

You need to be on THC break to resume sleeping. What you suspect is true as THC disrupts the sleep cycle and you don't get much of REM sleep while on it.

I started CBD that had THC in it a couple years back. At first I noticed a great ability to get to sleep. It was fantastic. I've often had trouble getting to sleep (going back...decades). But I did notice over time I had far fewer dreams. If I did have any, I couldn't remember. It wasn't an immediate loss, but I noticed.

I stopped THC in January this year, and ... dreaming came back. Been dreaming for several months at least. Probably back as early as Feb/March, but I can't recall for certain.

You have to quit THC for at least two weeks until you start dreaming again.

I had 2.5mg of thc every day for ~7 years. I couldn't remember the last dream I had when I quit thc in August. After not sleeping for 2-3 weeks I started having vivid nightmares every night for about a week. I'm still having extremely vivid dreams since, but they're no longer all terrifying. Sleeping better than ever and my anxiety is also better than ever.

I just read your comment after posting mine and it sounds like you've had a similar (but unfortunately opposite!) experience. The vivid dreams stop for me a few weeks after they start. Are your vivid dreams "permanent", or has it only been a short while since you started experiencing them?

You do, maybe. I’m a heavy user and have and recall plenty of dreams.

I'm a regular user and I dream if I take a nap and haven't smoked

Imagine what you could dream about if you stopped THC.

That implies I want to dream

Indeed, and IME, the dreams I have after taking a break from daily THC use are extremely vivid - to the point that I can remember them in detail for days afterwards. I enjoy that a lot.

I’m on the wrong end of my 30s and I haven’t dreamed consistently for years (or I can’t remember it at least). I have never used THC, so I suppose there are more reasons then THC to not dream. I’ll get the odd dream on a vacation every now and then- I suspect I’m too sleep deprived on a regular basis.

Looking at my Apple Watch data, I get regular amounts of REM sleep and Deep sleep.

I’ve noticed the same thing oddly- I’ll dream when I travel, especially when camping.

I'm 41 and have vivid dreams most nights. I jealously guard my sleep hygiene though and getting enough sleep every single night is one of the major priorities in my life. For this reason I never smoke week and almost never drink, as both of those effect my ability to sleep well. Even a single beer will show up on my sleep tracker as messed up sleep cycles.

I am a n00b when it comes to this matter, but... does THC stand for cannabis? And it helps one sleep?

Does dreaming less mean more deep sleep? Why would more deep sleep be a problem? I'm looking for a solution for my mother in law, who has only slept for 4-5h a night for the past 10 years and can't seem to fix it. This is wearing down her health.

THC is the primary compound in cannabis responsible for its “high”. Some plants are bred to be high in THC, but there are also those bred for CBD content, which doesn’t get you high. Both are useful in aiding sleep, though I’d say THC can be more stimulating, go for a strain labeled as indica for best results there. I’d recommend gummies (or mints/pills/etc.) as oral ingestion gives a much longer duration, otherwise it’s just a couple hours.

As you likely know, THC is illegal in many places, CBD is much more commonly available and socially accepted.

THC is the primary psychoactive chemical in marijuana. CBD is another compound that typically is sought after for pain reduction and as a sleep aid. THC is known to mess with REM sleep. If your are looking for information Erowid is a good resource, Reddit can be helpful too.

it makes you stoned - heavy and sleepy, but when you sleep it takes away REM phase - where you have dreams, some say, it's because it makes you micro-halucinating when you don't sleep

Look at your hands was a Casteneda trick. I find my quality of sleeps suffers so greatly when lucid dreaming that its not worth it because of health impacts.

It's more likely that you're not remembering your dreams. When I kept a dream journal, it became clear how easy it is to forget them. If I woke up in the middle of one, the longer I waited before I wrote it down, the harder it was to remember. It was also harder to remember further back into what dream I was recalling, as well as dreams preceding it. The next day, I would read them and have no recollection of much of the contents that I had written that night before. If I hadn't written them down, I'd be totally unaware they were even occuring.

I believe most of the dreams we remember are only because 1) we wake up midway within them and 2) their content happens to be somehow memorable. For part one, this can actually indicate poor quality sleep. Periodic nighttime alertness is a great way to remember more dreams. You may currently be experiencing better quality sleep than you used to.

Perhaps I should invest in some sleep tracking and investigate again. I don’t know how to describe it, but I’m not dreaming while asleep. Here’s an analogy - imagine dreaming is like putting your hand in a cup of water and remembering your dream is like your hand being wet until it evaporates (forgetting) the sensation I have when asleep would be akin to having a dry hand- I do not have the sensation of having a dream.

You can prove it to yourself by starting a dream journal and setting some alarms. Dreaming happens more frequently in the early morning to the time you wake up. Set yourself 2 or 3 alarms during this period, and keep a notepad and pen by your bed. Doing this on your phone may make it more difficult to go back to sleep. When the alarm wakes you up, write down any dreams you can remember and then try to go right back to sleep. Do this for a week, and I think you'd be surprised how many you realize you're having each night.

I’m not really craving dreaming again to be honest, like I said I don’t have nightmares.

It sounds like waking myself up wouldn’t be conducive to better sleep health.

Hello there. This reply is probably too late, but I have a recommendation.

Of course you should confirm the absence of contraindications first, but a good quality catnip supplement can induce vivid dreams. If you cannot find a reliable supplement, try a good quality catnip tea. Make it strong. Consume right before sleep.

Keep in mind that the effects rapidly reduce with consistency, so spread consumption sessions a week apart.

Sweet dreams!

I wonder what are the benefits from lucid dreaming. I read some claims that it’s possible we could gain access to some ‘hidden registry’ figuratively speaking by using methods such as lucid dreaming. However, I had a few lucid dreams in my life, all without any deliberate effort, they just happened and it’s nice to have them and all, but I don’t see myself getting out of my way to have lucid dreams. Does anyone get any substantial benefit from lucid dreaming out there?

I don't know. It just feels nice to fly, for once.

There is a significant recreational benefit. Flying feels amazing, and while I don't lucid dream anymore due to THC supplements for sleeping, I remember being fascinated and endlessly entertained by how _real_ it felt. I also remember quickly waking up upon the exciting realization that I'm dreaming. Rubbing hands together to stabilize the dream as you feel it slipping is a strategy I remember using. Or skipping inadvertently back into that gullible state where you take the most outlandish stuff at face value and outright forget that you're dreaming.

Pretty amazing when is works, though

But if dreaming serves a purpose, like processing experiences, emotions, 'defragmenting' the mind, couldn't regular lucid dreaming disrupt this?

It is incredibly entertaining. It is the closest thing to full dive VR we can get right now and I doubt we would ever get the "realness" as close as lucid dreaming without some physical hijacking in the brain.

The world is your oyster when you are dreaming and in control. That alone is enough of a draw for many people.

MXE/k holing is slightly closer to feeling like reality, and much higher resolution if you get good at controlling it.

https://qualiacomputing.com/2019/01/06/free-wheeling-halluci...

As other commenters have pointed out, the question itself might be pointless. The article makes the same mistake, trying to frame lucid dreaming around some supposed benefits it provides. But this craving for benefits is just a product of the ego. There’s a deeper layer to it—simply experiencing reality is already profound enough on its own. And being more aware of this beautiful reality during your lifetime, instead of literally being asleep at the wheel, is pretty amazing.

I do experience lucid dreaming ocasionally without any effort of my own and without paying for an application either. I’m trying to understand whether doing more of it benefits me in any way beyond the ocassional episodes that come naturally. Why is this pointless to you?

It's fun and interesting. Those are already pretty great benefits for something free and zero calorie, that takes up zero extra hours in the day.

I actually dislike lucid dreaming; it's not as restful and it's often difficult to return to restful sleep once you're aware.

I enjoy it a lot, but this is definitely a downside people should be aware of if they'd like to lucid dream. It's very easy to wake up immediately once you realize you're lucid, or take forever to slip out of lucidity.

My first thought when I saw this study is that now you can seek out lucidity on nights that you know you can afford disrupted sleep.

I first sought out lucid dreaming because it helped with my sleep paralysis. It's still difficult to keep calm, but if I do manage it during an episode, it can become a much less unpleasant experience. I also haven't had nightmares in a long time as a side effect.

When it happens nearly every time you go to sleep, it gets rather tiresome (I’ll show myself out)

Seriously though, I wish I could turn it off. Almost every single night. No thanks.

Edit: When it gets to be that common, it really starts to mess with your memory of things.

When I was little I had a reoccurring nightmare, but one night something seemed familiar and jarred me into lucidity. I made a conscious decision to go left instead of right and it ended uneventfully, never to return. A couple times since being somewhat lucid helped end a nightmare, though I had practiced a little using the 'Waking Life' technique of testing light switches

My mind eventually started becoming half lucid during nightmares by itself. Any time I have a nightmare where something is about to hurt me, a slight lucidity kicks in and whatever threat gets nullified. Most clear example was Jurassic Park-like and I was about to be attacked by a raptor when walking into a room. My mind anticipated what it was about to do and turned the threat into a cute dog.

Been hoping I can turn that into full lucidity at some point, but that type of nightmare where it happens is rare.

That's how lucidity started for me. I was having recurrent nightmares, and gradually built up my confidence at repelling the threat with telekinesis and fire. Those "skills" evolved into having lucid dreams about once a month, for a while.

I remember in one dream, it started off on a nice beach, when awareness hit me. I looked around and marvelled at how real it all looked. I was near a wooden railing and touched it, wondering how could I ever tell the difference between a dream and reality, since it all looked and felt so solid and vibrant. Then I noticed a truck parked nearby, levitated it with my mind, and hurled it hundreds of meters down the beach.

The frequency of lucidity subsided after a while. I don't know why my brain only switched on lucid dreaming for just one phase of my life. I did have another lucid dream a week ago, the first in about four years. I was flying over a landscape and entered a surreal city, and once again marvelled at how real everything all looked.

I'm with a couple of the other commenters in this thread. It's nice to have experienced lucid dreaming at some point, and it's fun when it happens again. However, it's also kind of pointless. A healthy attitude is to appreciate restful sleep instead of craving for some useless thrill.

> I wonder what are the benefits from lucid dreaming.

Becoming lucid whilst asleep is important within Buddhism.

To my knowledge the Tibetans have developed this further than other schools (non Vajrayana) with a big emphasis on 'dream yoga' [0]. The idea within the religion being that if on your death bead you have learned to become lucid in dream then as you are dying you can fix your mind on higher realms and achieve a more desirable rebirth.

It would seem compatible with Theravada outlooks at least in principle as mentioned in Mahasi Sayadaw's Manual of Insight [1]. As well as supported by discourses such as SN 55.54 Gilāna Sutta [2].

For a slightly more secular approach (but still also from a Buddhist practitioner) you can check out Dreaming Yourself Awake [3].

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/62191734-the-tibetan-yog...

[1] > "Sleep is a prolonged period of the “life-continuum” or “functional” consciousness. This is the same kind of consciousness that arises during the first and last moments of our lives."

[2] https://suttacentral.net/sn55.54/en/sujato?lang=en

[3] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13151218-dreaming-yourse...

I would think the value of lucid dreams comes from having a better understanding of your unconscious self. Aligning the conscious decisions with the unconscious desires could lead to a more satisfactory life.

I believe feeling fulfilled on one's death bed is a positive experience and feeling unfilled could be hellish.

Supposedly it is easy to go from lucid dreaming to astral travel.

unless its one and the same

For me: I used to be a tiny bit good at lucid dreaming, just for fun. Now this skill has developed back, but it's still enough to be able to wake up from annoying dreams.

Those include: being with persons you no longer want to be with, writing exams at schools and failing terribly, repeating nonsense calculation/problem solving dreams...

I found it a great way to relax when life was hectic. Back when I was sober most days, I lucid dreamed a lot (~80% of nights) and I could remember the dreams well. I have/had numerous calm spaces in which I spent time and felt safe. Given I have PTSD, it was very helpful. It let me practice feeling safe.

In Robert Waggoner's book, Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self, the author, who was a very skilled lucid dreamer from childhood, describes how he had a moment of insight after waking from a lucid dream. He had been thinking of himself as the controller of his dreams, and treated them mostly as entertainment. But he realized that for everything he "decided" in his lucid dream, there was far more content that arrived, unplanned--scenery, characters, events, and so on.

This made him curious about using awareness within the dream not just for entertainment, but to conduct experiments and tests, to research what was and wasn't possible, what dream characters and dream consciousness knew or didn't know, all from within the dreams themselves. He's spent decades doing that, and comparing notes with other skilled lucid dreamers.

It's an incredibly fascinating book, a sort of natural history of the dream world by a seasoned traveler within it.

Also has a bunch of useful tips on cultivating lucid dreaming, which I remember working pretty well a few times when I had been disciplined enough to practice them.

Given enough time, [sleepers] will optimise the fun out of a [bedtime].

App the article is about: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.neurelectr... Doesn't install on recent android versions though

Another argument for every public funded thing should be open source.

100%, publicly funded research should result in open code and papers, not private code and private journal publication.

It looks like this was well-funded research:

https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1921678&His...

The first grant was for $616,000 (over several years), and there are at least three more grants attached to this research.

Academia is sometimes a bit ridiculous. This feels like something an undergrad student could do in their spare time for a capstone or thesis project with no material cost.

YC would do a better job of this.

If you agree, here's a petition: https://publiccode.eu

They won't accept a Yahoo address, saying "using this email is not possible"???

Feels like time for someone to make a newer version?

I'm working with researchers in Germany to hopefully reproduce the findings with a new study feature in the Lucid Scribe app.

Installed! Do you have any data on success rates?

Every lucid dream I have becomes a nightmare. When I suddenly gain consciousness in a dream I begin to panic and the atmosphere turns sinister.

The last time this happened it turned into some kind of sleep paralysis where I became aware of my physical body but was unable to move as I crossfaded between dream and reality.

Mine have never turned into nightmares, but once I become aware that I'm dreaming and try to take control, the dream seems to fall apart and I wake up.

I've had the sleep paralysis and crossfade that you describe. But it's never psychologically unpleasant.

I've also had lucid dreams where it seems like I get stuck in a time loop and keep dreaming that I'm waking up. It feels like hours have elapsed and I've even gotten bored.

This used to happen to me as well.

This might sound weird but what works for me is once I realize I’m lucid and the dream starts falling apart as you describe it - I quickly start spinning my (dream) body counter clockwise. In most cases this stops the awakening and I can continue lucid dreaming.

Waking up in the ”time loop” is also recurring to me, but a reality check often gets me back on track even when I’m pretty certain that I’m awake (I’m not). I usually just look at my hand. If my fingers look spooky, I’m still sleeping and can induce lucid again.

Interestingly enough I've had the opposite experience. If I'm having a nightmare, usually at some point I realize it's a dream, and from there I can almost always force myself to wake up immediately. It rarely happens for me in a regular dream but when it does I can start to control the scenario to some degree.

I've had both lucid dreams (which was enjoyable) and sleep paralysis before. The paralysis was not a fun experience at all, and sounds a lot like what you describe.

It's apparently common enough that there's folklore around it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_hag

I've only had the sleep paralysis a couple times thankfully, and anecdotally the last time I had woken up in the middle of the night beforehand, remembered something I needed to do on my computer, took care of it in a dark room real quick, then went back to sleep. I suspect the sudden bright light and a bit of stress probably contributed to it happening.

I we have our own folklore about it too. I believe a good percentage of alien abduction experiences are in fact attributable to sleep paralysis phenomena. Alien abductions are as real to us as night hags we're to our predecessors.

I would suggest doing a sleep test.

While I believe this can just happen to some people, in my case it was a result of sleep apnea. Getting diagnosed for it and taking remedial steps has been a life changer for me.

When the Apple Watches start monitoring for it, you’re going to see sleep apnea diagnosis skyrocket.

Personally every time I lucid dream I wake up a few seconds later. As soon as I realize I'm conscious, I directly remember the existence of my physical self, the feeling of my arms, my legs in my bed which directly wakes me up

Now that it's what you expect to happen, it probably makes it more likely to happen. I wonder if you could train yourself to expect a better outcome.

It can be difficult to control a lucid dream, so it may take some work. Most of my dreams have always lucid, but I didn't know people tried to control them until I was an adult. One of the first times I tried to control one, I tried to teleport to a beach, but instead a matte backdrop of a beach popped up, like I was in a 70's TV show.

I have been pretty consistent with creating lucid dreams in the morning by using my TV. 1) Start playing a movie 2) Set the audio just below being able to understand dialogue and can hear the conversations 3) Wear a blindfold to prevent energizing ocular receptors through closed eye lids.

Developed for an older android version, so I cannot use it.

Is Android no longer backward compatible?

I don't know, this is what Google Play tells me.

I think this is a normal experience, keeping a dream log https://medium.com/luminasticity/the-i-g-dream-log-5c3e5de92... of dreams that are "out of the ordinary" seemed to increase the number of out of ordinary dreams.

My experiences in lucid dreaming and "astral travels" are a bit like Lovecraft's Hypnos story, since in this altered state of lucid dreaming I could turn to have an experience of spiritual search, looking for those dark places that nobody wants to visit, like feeling invisible barriers that I would not dare to do again. In short, when this becomes a habit, you can control the experiences emotionally to force yourself to have a more hyper-realistic experience sensorially speaking, but the side effects are to feel a strong neural connection, so it is common if something goes wrong to have dream paralysis and experiences totally full of glich, but once you wake up you know that this is fantasy, although in the dream state it is impossible not to believe it.

That’s way more deep than my lucid dreams which are exactly like my regular dreams, except I can control what happens in them, like being in a movie I’m also directing and writing.

Usually it’s just something like I’m at a restaurant but I can just eat whatever I want because I know it’s just a dream and I can make it a different kind of restaurant instead if I want. I certainly never had anything spiritual about it.

I think a good way to describe my lucid dreaming is it’s just like day-dreaming, but immersive because it feels like I’m actually there experiencing it instead of just thinking about myself experiencing it.

I like to analyze everything that involves consciousness in a similar way to computer logic in order to understand it more deeply and perhaps find some application or replicate it. I understand you, I have rarely had that kind of control in my dream, what I feel is that there is something, like a kind of memory that forces you to remember that you can have that kind of control, I say this because really in my most common lucid dreams I do not have control of the dream, only a small part. I think we could differentiate them, there are dreams where I only have a little control but I cannot change everything to my liking no matter how hard I try to do so. Among other things, there are also lucid dreams where I live a kind of hallucination totally different from the dream where a strong emotion is felt to understand what is happening or part of it, but I understand that those are false memories, that the dream reaches different fundamental parts of the brain such as the part of remembering or experiencing artificial emotions, well in short, in these hallucinations within the dream graphically they are at their maximum, super clear and it is strange, when I wake up I feel that there was still some effect on my way of thinking about things until my recurring thoughts overwrite that way of thinking after a few minutes. Another thing, in a series of lucid dreams and sometimes when I went to those dreams from the moment I went to bed I lost the sensation of gravity (it happens to many people), then it was like being in a light first-person scenario (like reality, but in a watchful dream) until an invisible force takes me to the real dream (REM sleep) but if my consciousness was very charged with many ideas to do it is like I lost complete lucidity (something that was difficult to recover that memory later), so it gave me more results to create a kind of minimalist consciousness (I don't know how to explain it, it's like I could feel a physical place for my ideas and that they are not lost in that abrupt moment of entering REM sleep) to maintain my lucidity and the direction I wanted to give it before falling asleep, I don't think it's relevant to describe the experience, I only know that there were several entries to different dreams, where I followed the premise "if I can change something about the dream then it's not what I'm looking for and I have to keep exploring" it was a very intense dream I reached a kind of hallucination in different fragments with dialogues, external voices and different experiences, but the last one hurt my "soul" (it was not negative on the contrary, I am somewhat sensitive), when I woke up I felt a great emotional drain, I felt very tired and I knew it would take me a long time to do this again and continue in an objective way, it was 4 years ago and I still have not had that kind of control of the direction of the dream and to reach those limits. For now only short lucid dreams that occur to me in the middle of dreams (But nothing to do with the experiment). I hope that at least this is useful for someone else and hacking dreams, good luck xD

It seems very likely that it's possible to force people into lucid dreaming. However, it seems that any external methods rely on external cues during REM sleep and I'd worry that in doing so you might be subtly reducing quality of REM sleep.

I frequently fall asleep with YouTube playing softly through airpods and end up intense lucid dreams with in-dream characters that my brain invents to embody the youtube voices. They talking about machining, string theory, and whatever else is going on in the video which is often strange when the plot of the dream doesn't actually match up with what they're saying (which is an easy trigger to make it lucid).

I like having lucid dreams occasionally, but what I enjoy most from my dreams is being truly immersed without realizing I'm in a dream. However, it's good to have options for those who want it.

I wish I could become lucid during a recurring dream I've had since I was a teenager. I'm driving on a bridge over water. I look out the window and realize the bridge is either under construction or the draw bridge is coming up. Either way, I drive off. I've had this dream so often that I feel terrified driving over any bridge over water. Often I get the feeling “I've been here before” and the terror of the dream takes over. I've probably had that same dream a few thousand times.

It is interesting that sometimes I forget that people fear this type of behavior in different situations that from an external point of view seem illogical but that have an explanation that can prevent this type of dream experiences.

There is also a centuries-old practice of lucid dreaming, known as "dream yoga", in certain lineages of Buddhism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_yoga

Looks like it can be done without an app ;-)

I've wanted to make my own 'app' for a wearable device that i can trigger to vibrate for X seconds at Y intensity every Z minutes... to find the sweet spot for lucid dreaming. I only dig a quick look but didn't see any easy mode APIs for the wearables, for the vibrating feature

If you do this, please sell it as an intensive sleep retraining device, a la the Thim.io device except not garbage.

What’s garbage about the device? What other wearables have you tried for sleep tracking?

It just literally did not function for me (i.e. buggy software). One of those Kickstarter projects :/

This isn't really for sleep tracking. It's for sleep retraining. Basic premise is that falling asleep is a skill you can practice like any other, but it's hard to do that because you... well... fall asleep.

So this device is meant to ask you whether you're awake every minute (you say yes by tapping your finger) and once you stop responding, it triggers an alarm to wake you up. By waking up and falling asleep again repeatedly, you learn to fall asleep better.

Garmin seems to have vibration in Connect IQ api https://developer.garmin.com/connect-iq/api-docs/Toybox/Atte...

i want to do a data dump here. did you ever wonder how its possible that you can experience vivid, real-time non-scripted (so to speak) events that are totally lifelike? how is it possible to do that without sensory input generating the images and sounds? i thought about this a lot and there is only one answer that fits: the human mind generates a model of the world and everything in it, your experience of the world is actually happening inside of this model. when you are awake, your mind looks at the world thru sensory organs and updates the model accordingly which gives the illusion that you are directly experiencing the world. but in reality there is a middle man. this is why so many aspects of the dream world kind of half-work. like clock hands changing position. your mind isnt designed to operate without having information fed to it, so it can only predict so much and you get a kind of semi-logical state of world within this internal model. most of what you experience is not as real as you think, although the minds model is designed to track and predict reality as well as possible.

but theres more to the story. there were reports of people using a drug called ISRIB, russians mostly, a few years ago. its a drug that impacts the latency of cells, turning on cells that have gone latent due to injury... or for any other reason, reasons we may not be aware of. this drug is basically used in labs in cultures and is very new. people arent supposed to take it. but some people had it synthesized and they tried it anyway of course. most of them reported extremely life-like dreams. one person reported having waking dreams that were so real that even while totally and completely lucid, she was not able to tell that she was dreaming. she was pretty shaken up by it based on the chats. i think she described it as experiencing total insanity. but this tracks. when you are asleep, your model is not firing on all cylinders. part of the reason why the world is "unrealistic" is because your brain is not working as hard as it could to fill in the model in a coherent way. think about the experiences that schizophrenics have, seeing in full fidelity people and things that are totally non existent. all of these considerations together point to the fact that we inhabit models of the world rather than experiencing sensory stimuli directly.

I think you'll enjoy Stevan Lehar and QRI's work, you've re-derived some of it already:

- http://slehar.com/wwwRel/index.html

- https://qri.org/blog/hyperbolic-geometry-dmt

wow thank you so much for linking this. the journey to this conclusion began simply because i wanted to explain how my lucid dreams could be so realistic. i also came to a satisfying conclusion to the question of free will, many years ago. there are many things that inform how i see and operate in the world but these two tools most of all i cannot imagine living without. the one thing in my life that i still dont have any kind of satisfying answer for is pain. what is pain? do you know if someone cracked it?

I had good results with caffeine. Sleep for two hours set an alarm and drink some caffeine beverage or use caffeine pills and go right back to sleep.

I always become lucid when I'm experiencing a nightmare. And then I fight the nightmare, and it's all good again.

Every time I realize I'm in a dream I immediately force myself to wake up.

Carlos Castenada

I just want some good rest, not to experience a different reality doing bs work in my head

Yeah I figured out how to do it when I was early 20s but I’d always wake up completely shagged next morning. Now I like just going to sleep

I once met a guy whom I told I some times had lucid dreams. He replied matter factly - lucid dreams don't exist, with the same of contempt you'd tell a creationist that God doesn't exist. I said they do exist because I've had them before. At this point from his look he must believe I'm perhaps trolling him, like I'm claiming that I can fly or become invisible. After a lot of back and forth and a lot of condescension from him, he eventually admits he doesn't know what a "lucid dream" is. So he just thought it meant something like "I have visions in my dreams and they predict the future", and assumed that's what I meant without even bothering to check.

You wouldn't believe the kind of stupid people you meet at physics conferences.

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