Gamma Wave Brain Zaps Induce Lucid Dreaming | Hacker News Reader

Gamma Wave Brain Zaps Induce Lucid Dreaming

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77 pointsadammichaelc53 comments

Lucid dreaming is one of the coolest things we can do. People think that dreams aren't real, but that's far from the truth. They aren't real in the sense that if I find a COOL WATCH or I win $2000 in a dream I can't take it with me to "real life," but when you think about what our life really is, it's a collection of experiences...not accumulation of physical objects.

In dreams you can have the same experiences you have in waking life but even more so. You can take these experiences with you when you are done dreaming. Lucid dreaming takes this even further. You can imagine a problem you have is a tangible object (a bug or something) in your dream and squish it. Although this seems purely symbolic, you can take the feeling of having dealt with a problem into waking life, which will give you more energy to do the same in your interactions with waking life.

Not to mention in lucid dreams you can fly everywhere you want to go, you can have sex with whoever you want however you want, you can be a bear or a toad or a tree, you can be three of yourself at the same time, you can slow down time, you can travel to the bottom of the ocean and you can see distant planets or the inside of a star. Is it real? Yes, because you are actually having these experiences, even if you are the only one having them.

This was very nice to see written down. Thank you for that. No doubt as LD becomes more and more popular we're going to see a lot of questionable info on the subject.

Some people are terrified of these experiences, perhaps with their own 'demons' to deal with. Others, many others, consider it one of the grooviest gifts imaginable :)

It's a unique thing, individual, but as it gets more known - we're going to see people trying to fit it into a simple box (as we always do) - and nothing useful will come of that.

Re: Gamma waves, hmm - yeah, isn't that like reading a frequency coming off a CRT and then trying to retransmit that frequency back to derive the original image? You need a serious understanding of the device to be able to do that. Perhaps it might be able to help 'induce' the state with the individual's help - maybe.

I first read about lucid dreaming 20 years ago when I was twelve. It was treated more as a new age fringe thing back then, but I had a blast experimenting with it. My favorite dreamscape involved a purely abstract state of mind where I could symbolically visualize components of algorithms -- nearly all of my work writing motion detection algorithms that worked in complex outdoor scenarios was refined in my sleep.

That being said, I eventually "gave up" lucid dreaming after 10 years or so. At a gut level it felt like sleep and dreams are best left to the subconscious -- a neural defrag, if you will. Personally I feel much more rested now that I make no effort to remember, much less control, my dreams.

I also practice LD (started at age 10-ish, now 38) but can't agree with your 'gut level' feeling. I feel it's what we are meant to be doing, rather than regular dreaming.

I am more rested, and more awake the next day. It continues to enrich my life in many ways. But yes, it's just another arbitrary choice, we're both going by 'gut' instinct.

in my first LD at 10, i built a go-kart from tools I created on the wall (where the school black-board was), and then flew out of the window on it - Pretty much a win for a 10 yr old.

Is there something specific you do to help you LD? Can you share more about your experience?

I also practice LD

This comment struck me as odd, since I thought LD wasn't something you can induce on your own, but when I Googled how to lucid dream I came across instructions for how to lucid dream: http://www.wikihow.com/Lucid-Dream

Another question: has anyone had the feeling when they are in a dream that they can't move? I want to force myself to roll over to the other side and something invisible holds me there. I noticed this happens mostly when it's cold.

Hey, I posted this elsewhere http://www.world-of-lucid-dreaming.com/52-ways-to-have-lucid...

Also: http://www.reddit.com/r/LucidDreaming (cant believe i'm linking reddit)

I started when I was young, somebody told me it was possible so the following night I tried it - and it worked. Such is the wonder of youth :)

It comes and goes, so it does require continual 'retraining' - basically find a technique that works for you and give it your best effort. At the end of the day I suspect these 'techniques' are merely 'permission slips' allowing our brain to accept that it's possible. Either way, they can work.

The thing you have described is 'sleep paralysis' when in waking life (at least in the LD circles) - it's a very good sign, apparently you're meant to chill and just let it be. If you really needed to move (emergency), your brain would override the 'state' and allow you to (that has happened to people, the body 'unlocks' immediately).

I don't know what it means in dream life, other than it would be a good cue to remember that you have FULL control in your dream. When it happens next, remember this chat, and make yourself superman.. use your superhuman powers to break free :D Whatevvvver you like, just know that you can actually do that, because many of us do every night.

I'm no expert, since I didn't need to go through any hardships to achieve it. So perhaps there are better people for more 'concrete' advice. Good luck, it's lots of fun.

> Another question: has anyone had the feeling when they are in a dream that they can't move? I want to force myself to roll over to the other side and something invisible holds me there. I noticed this happens mostly when it's cold.

Roll over on the other side IRL on in the dream? In the former case this seems to be a very good description of sleep paralysis[1], including the sensation of something invisible holding you immobile. (tl;dr for the wiki article: When you are asleep, you are paralyzed. Sleep paralysis happens when you are already paralyzed and not yet asleep, or still paralyzed and already awake.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_paralysis

Most tips I've read about how to trigger LD involve conscious effort throughout the day to check that you are not dreaming. It's weird, but I used to ask myself everytime I flipped a light switch "is this a dream?". It gets your brain in the habit of questioning when you're in a dream state and that can carry over to actual dreams.

I'm not aware of any foolproof method to experience LD, but it was definetly something that I worked hard at and didn't come naturally.

>Another question: has anyone had the feeling when they are in a dream that they can't move?

Yes, it's one of the most common dreams. Along with "falling" or "sudden fall".

Another classic is incorporating external elements (a phone ringing in the apartment, a police car passing) into your dream.

The old instruction to pinch yourself to check you are not dreaming is essentially all you need to do. The pinching itself is not really necessary, just the habit of checking the current status of reality.

>I feel it's what we are meant to be doing, rather than regular dreaming.

If we were meant to do that, evolution-wise, they we'd be doing it at some point in our evolutionary history. Instead we sleep and dream normally, and during that stage we have a quite good grasp of the mechanisms involved and how beneficial it is.

One thing humans do seem to be evolutionarily adapted to is pushing ourselves into altered mental states using a combination of hunger, dehydration, lack of sleep, rhythmic music, meditation, gradual hyperventilation, and the consumption of hallucinogenic plants. The associated practices (tribal rituals, spirit quests, ecstatic prayer, etc.) are fundamental to many early human cultures, and it was expected that everyone would participate in them. I would hazard to guess that sleeping while in such altered states would make lucid dreaming "easier"; a lucid dream—one that you've slipped into without realizing you had fallen asleep—fits the description of the ideal outcomes of many rituals more closely than, say, hallucinations or absent seizures do.

I've found I can access lucid dream-like states of mind when meditating on LSD, including visualizing algorithms. I also feel more focused and awake in a sense, on LSD, compared to a lucid dream, but maybe that's just me.

I haven't really used it for anything very useful though, the laws and conditions of today makes it a bit difficult. But it can give a glimpse of how things could be in the future, when computers are directly connected to the brain and lucid dreams or psychedelics are not really relevant any more.

That's fascinating. Kind of makes me want to practice lucid dreaming now. Makes a lot of sense though, with regards to how rested you felt after giving up lucid dreaming. Writing complex algorithms in your dreams does not sound restful.

We know very very little about what the mind is capable of, or which parts of it require the sleep process, or even how the sleep process is affected by a lucid dream state. We just don't know, my experience is completely different (than the OPs).

That person's experience could be a result of pre-conceived notions about 'effort vs reward', or any other number of intersecting belief systems. Who knows?

It is unique to everyone, and can be learnt in weeks or years depending on who you are (unless you are comfortable inducing it with gamma waves)

Do not rely on anecdotal evidence from others, only trust your own experience in matters that relate to the inner workings of your life. Find out for yourself if it's useful or not.

... it's, at the very least, an interesting adventure.

Note: gamma wave, not gamma particles. Gamma wave refers to an aspect of brain activity. Maybe I'm the only one who was confused by the title but I feel better knowing people aren't being irradiated for the experiment.

Yeah, that threw me off as well. For anyone interested in actual brain lasers:

http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fnsys.2014.00...

Yep: 'Gamma' is just a name given by convention to a frequency range of interest (here 30-40Hz; Gamma can be used to refer to frequencies from 30-100Hz, depending on the species and brain area being studied.)

>> If I understand correctly, the participants rated their experience of these three factors on a scale of 0 (strongly disagree that I had such an experience) to 5 (strongly agree). Now if we look to see the scores they gave for how much dream insight, dissociation and control they had, we find that the averages for the gamma stimulation condition are around 0.6, 1.3, and 0.5 respectively. > > That’s a pretty low score, even if it’s higher than it would’ve been without the brain stimulation.

Maybe, maybe not. Averages work for some things, not so much for others. Suppose 4-5 are no-fooling-definitely-lucid dreams, and 1-3 are questionable. If the average is being driven by a few dreams falling into '5' and otherwise scores are unchanged, you'd get a worthwhile effect but only a small shift in average on your 1-5 scale. I'd want to read http://www.blogs.uni-mainz.de/fb05philosophie/files/2013/04/... more carefully looking at how the overall rating distribution looks split by condition and whether the rating scale is masking a binary effect.

Yes yes, you are definitely onto something here.

Awfully, the standard deviations of almost every item in their validation study [1, Table 1] is greater than the means --in some cases even twice as big--, which themselves are very low (the majority are below 2, and several are below 1). This is, at a minimum, strongly indicative of bimodality --which would make sense since, among other things, participants were drawn mostly from Bonn University's lucid dreaming student club [p.11]. As a matter of fact, they report they threw away two data sets (!) precisely because of "extreme answering style (all items were scored as 0 or 5)" [ibid].

Why they didn't heed these warning signs (and at the very least use medians instead of means from then on) is beyond me.

[1] http://www.blogs.uni-mainz.de/fb05philosophie/files/2013/04/...

Since I was 10 I do lucid dreams. There are days that I struggle half a day to be 100% sure I'm awake and the other half to assimilate it.

For me this is really exhausting for three reasons:

1. the brain needs to properly sleep 2. they are so rich of details 3. they condense in 7/8 hours maybe 5/10 years of life

Basically they are what I think is a kind of parallel universe. I'm used to tell the entire "dream" to my GF. She always been astonished by them. They seems absolutely unrelated to anything I saw hear etc... during the day, they are in some case "boring" in the sense that I'm dreaming me in a totally different life, job etc... nothing "exciting" or "strange".

Your brain can only generate so much pseudorandom visual imagery per second; an effect that you can exploit to control how much and whether you're lucid dreaming. For example, if you fly up while looking down eventually you'll overwhelm your ability to generate a detailed geography and wake up. Or at least, that's how I manipulate my LD state.

Up till my early 20s, I used to lucid dream so much, I thought it was the normal state of dreaming (for everyone). Over the last few years the frequency has declined to maybe a couple times a month.

Of course, you never know how much you'd miss a thing until its gone. In this case, I didn't even know it was a thing before it started fading away.

I'd certainly let my brain be zapped to get this superpower back.

I used to dream and lucid dream a lot. My email signature was "Traveller by day and dreamer by night, or the other way around, I don't remember."

I have lost it and it is something I would like to get back.

I too experienced a plethora of lucid dreaming through my early twenties. Sometimes I would have a few a night for weeks. They tapered off gradually and I have maybe a few a year now (I'm 35).

Many were tied with sleep paralysis, which didn't give me the fear that most people associate with it. Sometimes I could extract my preceptual self from my body and experience walking around the room in a weird lucid dream world. All while simultaneously being aware of my pysical body lying in bed.

I would love to have those dreams again.

Wow, so similar. My first lucid dreams were initiated during sleep paralysis. Initially, these episodes were absolutely terrifying (i felt like I was suffocating). Lucid dreaming cured me of this fear .. once I realize i'm in a dream I can change the scenario to something more pleasant.

Or just fly away through the window ;)

I feel sleep paralysis and lucid dreaming are deeply linked phenomena.

I never had any lucid dream unfortunately, but this link has already been looked at, notably here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgJOMqIhvHM&list=PLC2DC804CF...

What's your sleep cycle like? Do you tend to fall asleep out of utter exhaustion, or do you tend to give yourself a reasonable bedtime and wind down period. I've found that I dream lucidly a lot less when I've let my sleep hygene go to crap.

As an aside, because of being a naturally lucid dreamer, nightmares confuse me and on the rare event I have them -- once or twice a decade -- they freak me out a lot more. That absolute loss of control of one's subconscious mind is near unfathomable to me. I can remember being six or seven and my sister telling me about a nightmare she had and me being absolutely confused about them; the thoughts of being injured in a dream was just something that happened in movies.

Interesting .. I tend to "become" lucid in the middle of a non-lucid dream (nightmare or otherwise). Rarely will I be lucid from the get go.

So when I gain "control", the initial scenario is set. Sometimes, it's quite a fascinating "twist" on recent real-life events. Other times it's Alice and the Wonderland style craziness.

Often I think I'm in a partially Lucid dream. I know I'm dreaming, I can mostly do what I want (including completely changing the scenario) but I am also not in control of everything that happens, particularly what characters appear or what they say/do in response to me. It's a bit like living in an alternative universe.

The strangest aspect is how realistic the characters are, particularly the real-life people. I'll be talking to a friend, and get a conversation that is so like that person that I'll often forget that it was said in a dream. This has led to some strange real-life conversations, lol.

Opposite experience here. The only times I've experienced lucid dreaming was when I was exhausted in a noisy/sunny environment.

I recently had a lucid dream for the first time. Really interesting experience. It was triggered by the fact that I plunged to a city at the bottom of the ocean and could still breath. I realized this was impossible and became lucid. I decided to try and have some fun with it so I 'willed' myself to have a gun. It worked, kind of. I had something in my hand that i could shoot with but it was sort of undefined. Kind of like if you are playing a 3d fps and the texture for your gun doesn't load properly. It was kind of amorphous and brown and glitchy. I suspect because I don't know a ton about guns and i didn't really specify what kind of gun or anything. Perhaps next time ill imagine an ak47 and see if I get more definition.

I played around shooting things for awhile but it was draining to keep control so I gave up and became batman, was knocked off a bridge, and broke my back on a cement pillar. I woke up screaming "You just killed Batman!".

As a graphics nerd, the handful of times I've had genuine lucid dreaming (when experimenting with it in college) was incredible. In the dream I would would focus on taking in the behavior of light and texture on surfaces and trying to gauge its quality from a computer graphics perspective, and always found the 'simulation' absolutely stunning. I remember encountering a large rabbit once and ran my fingers through it's fur and it felt and looked real. It's mindboggling how well the brain can simulate a fake environment when you go lucid, it's really beyond comprehension to me how it's able to do so. The brain can basically simulate the rendering equation in real time (or trick yourself into thinking it is, which is the same thing really.)

> The brain can basically simulate the rendering equation in real time (or trick yourself into thinking it is, which is the same thing really.)

I believe that your brain is rendering the reality for your consciousness even when you are awake. There is a lot of filtering and processing between your senses and your consciousness. For instance, your eyes produces a lot of noise which is filtered away. They have a blind spot [1], but your consciousness is not even aware of it! So, what you see when you are awake is not really the noisy distorted vision that your eyes have.

In addition to that low level smoothing and filtering, your subconscious has reconstructed completely the reality for your conscious mind: "This is because our brains consist of two relatively distinct regions. One, the cognitive unconscious, makes informed guesses and delivers them to the second, conscious part, which supports our awareness of what we are seeing while knowing little or nothing of how what we see has been constructed." [2]

"All we’re actually doing is seeing an internal model of the world; we’re not seeing what’s out there, we’re seeing just our internal model of it. And that’s why, when you move your eyes around, all you’re doing is updating that model." [3]

So, when your are dreaming, the subconscious mind is just "rendering" something else than reality for your conscious mind.

[1] http://io9.com/5804116/why-every-human-has-a-blind-spot---an...

[2] http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/node/2604

[3] http://aminotes.tumblr.com/post/7722763662/david-eagleman-on...

I'm being specific, I'm not talking about "rendering", I'm talking about the rendering equation, which is the mathematical formulation of light transport. I agree it's amazing the brain is able to interpret the light coming into my eyes into a perception of reality, but the startling thing about lucid dreams is that it is also apparently able to very convincingly simulate the external behavior of light itself properly as well, without external stimuli. (Which is currently an intractable problem computationally FYI.) For example, when I turn my head in a lucid dream under conscious control, reflections, texture, etc, behave what appear to be normal, in real time. This blows my mind.

> The brain can basically simulate the rendering equation in real time (or trick yourself into thinking it is, which is the same thing really.)

I always wonder about this. It occurs to me that it may seem to perfectly real because the brain is able to reproduce all, or close to all, of the features it would use to try to classify that object in real life, which would lead to it seeming like a 100% match, or 100% real.

I guess you could think of it as passing a dataset back into a machine learning algorithm that was just trained using that dataset.

It also makes me wonder what would happen if you try to conjure a specific animal or place that you know a little about, but are fuzzy details. Would you brain feel like "yup. this is the thing because it's absolutely everything I know about the thing; it's perfect" or would it have problems?

Of course, I'm not an expert in brains or machine learning, so this is just my wild speculation on my thought.

One of the freakiest lucid dreaming experiences I had was when I had a conversation in my lucid dream with a friend of mine while I was completely aware that it was a dream. We were having a conversation about how my mind was controlling what they said but yet it felt like a completely normal conversation, where I had no way to predict exactly what they were going to reply with. Bizarre.

If you want lucid dreaming without having to wait for a Gamma Wave Zapper, there is one alternative. Sertraline (Zoloft). I've been on and off of it a few times in the past 10 years for anxiety. After a few weeks of being on it, the lucid dreaming kicks in. Sometimes I wish I could record these dreams and make them into movies. It's quite the experience.

Or you could practice any one of the many natural techniques which many of us use daily. The drugs and gamma waves are unnecessary.

http://www.world-of-lucid-dreaming.com/52-ways-to-have-lucid...

I know it's not a 'quick fix' - but (no offence intended, just IMHO) it feels rather disrespectful to randomly flood the brain with chemicals to make it 'perform.' The chemistry in there is extremely complex, I am terrified to mess around with it.

Much the same way I wouldn't dive into a complex dev project randomly changing methods, unless I knew the larger scope.

I wouldn't scorn such "shortcuts." It's difficult for people to put sustained effort into something without having some sense of what the payoff will be like. "Cheating" once or twice can provide sufficient motivation for developing the skill permanently. Psychedelic drugs, for example, can provide a flash of mystical enlightenment that motivates people to begin meditating.

At no point did I scorn such "shortcuts" - read what I wrote without the assumption that I'm anti-drugs. I wanted to point out that you're playing with complex chemistry, and something as strong as sertraline chloride is a serious choice.

Also sertraline chloride vs something like (as an example) DMT - are very much not the same thing. DMT being a natural, powerful psychedelic used for many years in many forms by many cultures.

I wouldn't compare mushrooms to Zolpidem either, though the effects are similar. One is not like the other. Zolpidem (branded as stilnox at the time) gave me very similar effects, I basically had a ??real-life lucid dream?? within 20 mins of taking it. I stopped immediately.

Either way, to each his/her own - I merely wanted to offer a different perspective. If it works for you, go for it.

I actually just wrote about this (both the "zapper" and recording your dreams), check out the last segment of the article regarding turning lucid dreams into movies: http://www.lucidsage.com/the-future-of-lucid-dreaming/

I've read somewhere about curious practice of writing down everything you can remember from the dream immediately after waking up (to facilitate the recall keeping your eyes closed was recommended, I think). Maybe you should try that and see what comes out of it!

>The sweet spot was 40 Hertz. Zapping sleeping volunteers at this frequency, part of the so-called gamma wave band, led their brains to produce brain waves of the same frequency, the researchers found, which triggered lucidity 77 percent of the time, as determined by self-reports from the dreamers after they were awoken.

>Now if we look to see the scores they gave for how much dream insight, dissociation and control they had, we find that the averages for the gamma stimulation condition are around 0.6, 1.3, and 0.5 respectively.

I don't understand. A score of 0.6 for insight means, at best, 40% strongly disagreed that they knew they were dreaming and 60% perhaps moderately disagreed (score=1). Some higher scores for the successes would result in even more than 40% strongly disagreeing that they knew they were awake. I could see it having an effect for a small number of people, but how does that translate into "triggered lucidity 77 percent of the time."

Highly interesting effect, but note that the extent of lucid dreaming here is (self-) reported to be rather low:

"Despite the robust methodology, I think these headlines are getting carried away. Here’s why. Lucid dreaming was defined by higher scores in participants’ feelings of insight (knowing that they were dreaming); dissociation (taking a third person perspective); and control (being able to shape events). I looked up the paper where the researchers first described their scale for measuring these factors. If I understand correctly, the participants rated their experience of these three factors on a scale of 0 (strongly disagree that I had such an experience) to 5 (strongly agree). Now if we look to see the scores they gave for how much dream insight, dissociation and control they had, we find that the averages for the gamma stimulation condition are around 0.6, 1.3, and 0.5 respectively."

I had my first lucid dream when I was 16 years old. About 10 years ago I had a dream that I can only express as a self induced DMT experience. It happened during a time where I was in an extreme amount of "outside of myself" anxiety. I didn't know what DMT was at the time and only drew parallels after the fact from listening to interviews and reading a book on the subject. Since then I've had a few lucid dreams where I'm right on the verge of 'ripping open the universe' in DMT-speak. Anyway, it was life changing to say the least so I enjoy articles like these.

People are already making DIY transcranial direct current stimulation gadgets for themselves. The setup apparently isn't much more complicated than a regular battery and two electrodes taped to your scalp. Someone at Reddit also seems to be working on making a consumer device for the lucid dreaming thing: http://www.reddit.com/r/LucidDreaming/comments/25aos9/publis...

I wonder if staring at 40Hz refresh rate screens could produce a similar effect? I have a screen with a flickering backlight at a frequency just outside perception. If I use it for prolonged periods before bed, I can perceive a 'flickering afterglow' for minutes while trying to sleep.

I think that's like playing tetris or 2048 for too long.

(Depending on how long one played, there are overlays of the game in normal vision for quite a while. Or your brain is trying to do the pattern matching of the game to normal objects. (I've seen reports that people's brains were trying to combine cars of the same colour for example.))

The half a dozen or so times I can remember lucid dreaming I always try to fly. The only problem is that I start floating and can't control it and I start tumbling--it feels exactly like the point when you're tipping back in your chair and you realize you're going to fall.

I find normal dreaming much more fun. It's like playing Stanley Parable for the first time, instead of of opening Garry's Mod...alone.

I'll pick a Stanley Parable any day over Garry's Mod.

Thanks for the Tip on Stanley's Parable, never heard of it. Sounds very interesting, will try the demo now. Thanks.

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