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MIT Researchers Have Developed a ‘System for Dream Control’

547 points by dsr12 9y ago

veli_joza 9y ago
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.
- freneticfox 9y ago
  For a long time now, I've been kinda self-experimenting on inducing these kinds of states in myself, without resorting to hardware or hard/scary drugs. It all started with my realization that sleep brought me answers in general; i.e. a realization that my general pattern was to work on hard problems all day until I hit various brick walls, then step away and do Real Life and then later at night I'd Sleep, and then often if I'm lucky I wake up the next morning with important realizations that get me past the previous day's brick walls, and then the cycle repeats. Once I realized this pattern, I started optimizing for more sleep cycles per day and a more-immediate transition from BrickWalls->Sleep, basically by injecting a daytime nap in the midst of my workday if/when I can (working from home has its privileges!), aiming for ~1.5h or ~3h nap increments when I can, since that seems to match well with my sleep cycles for reaching REM in the middle and then waking back out of it on a natural cycle boundary. I'm also a heavy coffee drinker for the stimulant effects on my thinking, and at one point heard about the "Coffee Nap" idea (TL;DR - it takes ~30m for caffeine to really kick in, so when you get tired you chug a coffee and lay down, and let yourself wake later as it kicks in). Somehow over time all my random experimentation on these various inter-related things settled into a new pattern that works well when I can achieve it: I try to hit the brick wall while still fairly amped on caffeine (have a last cup as I'm moving away from the laptop if I'm behind on my caffeine intake), then switch over to a nap state. As I'm laying in bed falling asleep, I initially force my thoughts on whatever my Brick Walls are, and my body's still a bit uncomfortably caffeine amped/buzzed for laying down and trying to sleep, but between the coffee buzzing and the descent into sleep, I now usually end up having a very odd transitional but semi-conscious mental state for a solid 10-15 minutes (sometimes longer) on my way to sleep. During this time, free associations and strange dreamy unrelated things start springboarding out from my initial more-directed thoughts, and it's clear this is basically an open channel to get those lateral-thinking associations going while still barely conscious. It's like a psychedelic-drug-free version of a short acid trip or useful lucid dreaming state. Eventually I succumb to sleep, but I have had a very good success rate (relatively - it's still not necessarily high in the absolute!) at getting good intuitive answers to my problems on waking. Over time I've gotten better and better at achieving these states with practice, but it still requires a lot of these triggering conditions/patterns above. I think/hope eventually I may reach a point where I can induce these mental states at will without actually going to sleep afterwards or relying on caffeine buzz to kick it off.
  - epberry 9y ago
    I’ve experienced some of these same things. But more than that, I applaud you for experimenting!!
  - kayoone 9y ago
    I recently read "A mind for numbers" which leans on this concept of working hard on a problem (focus mode) and then stepping away from it for some time (diffuse mode) very heavily. I also realized that this works really well for me and i guess for most people.
    - psyc 9y ago
      I've relied on this for decades for complex development tasks. Now when a manager asks me to propose some design solution, I just say flat out that I'll probably know what to do after a couple of sleeps.
- ende 9y ago
  If you’re interested in additional reading along these lines, Robert Anton Wilson (of Illuminatus Trilogy fame) has a lot of interesting material.
- testplzignore 9y ago
  Until now I never knew that there was a name for "hypnagogia". For most of my life, I was never able to remember this period of sleep, but over the last few years that has changed (not intentionally, so I don't know what changed in my body to cause the difference). I've developed some level of awareness during it and can wake myself up from it, then remember at least some of it. If you've never experienced it, it's like every part of your brain is talking to every other part of your brain, and you have many bizarre connections of thoughts happening in parallel. It's different than a normal dream, where it seems there is only one "thread" running at a time.
  - jxub 9y ago
    How have you developed that faculty?
    - babygoat 9y ago
      I read somewhere that Thomas Edison used to take naps with ball bearings in his hands. At the instant he fell asleep, the bearings rolled out of his hands and hit the floor and woke him up during this transition state.
      - jimsmart 9y ago
        I believe Dali did it too: sat in a chair, holding a key above a metal plate.
      - loblollyboy 9y ago
        I also read that somewhere
      - mattmanser 9y ago
        This is in the article...
      - nathancahill 9y ago
        My farmer friends call it a "spoon nap" sit in a chair holding a spoon, as soon as you fall asleep the spoon drops and you can get back to work. Typically taken directly after a big lunch.
- donttrack 9y ago
  Hypnagogia.. Didn't hear that word before. I get that a lot and tried to explain it to other people, but nobody seem to understand what I am talking about. It feels like I am dreaming while I am still awake in some kind of transitional state, where I am not conscious and also not asleep. It is not the same as lucid dreaming, which I had a couple of times also.
  - babygoat 9y ago
    I get this a lot too and had to look up the term. The first time I tried acupuncture I went into this state right away.
  - jl2718 9y ago
    That moment when your brain falls asleep in class and tells you it unveiled the deep connection between carnival blister peanut texture and the quantum variational bound. And then you wake up suddenly and get scared because you think you might have yelled out something stupid. Or maybe I’m just the only one.
    - sangnoir 9y ago
      > Or maybe I’m just the only one not just you - I didn't have a name for it, but my brain pretty much does free-association in that phase. On more than one occasion I've jolted awake because I've had a earth-shattering revelation, only to realise my idea was already invented (hot air balloon) or pretty ridiculous (like having your toaster burn the day's agenda on your toast). I can't help but wonder: how many multi-million dollar ideas have I had and then promptly forgot as I got into deeper sleep?
      - marshray 9y ago
        > having your toaster burn the day's agenda on your toast Shut up and take my money!
        gregpilling 9y ago
- buovjaga 9y ago
  > 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. "If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern." William Blake: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790)
- rangibaby 9y ago
  My favorite use of Hypnagogia is to find things that I have lost around the house. It's able to pull memories out of your brain that you can't usually access (analogous to backup tapes in your garage I guess). When I was younger I was able to make music by counting beats in my head with a hi-hat just before I hit a hypnagogia state. I knew I was there when the hi hat would keep counting even after I stopped consciously doing counting, then an entire analog and digital orchestra in my brain would start playing wonderful tunes. Of course I could never remember them after, but it doesn't matter.
anikishaev 9y ago
arduino + bend sensor, really?
everdev 9y ago
> 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.
- cjslep 9y ago
  A cue* not queue
  - piyh 9y ago
    queue of cues
sandworm101 9y ago
>> ... 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.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- captainbland 9y ago
  Maybe just have it say "Coca-cola tastes great!" - boom, billion dollar industry right there. Or as in Futurama "Lightspeed briefs, as seen in your dreams!"
  - maaaats 9y ago
    Reminds me of Brave New World.
- mkempe 9y ago
  I'd be interested in experimenting with Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies [1][2] as cues. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_Strategies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_Strategies [2] http://obliquestrategies.ca http://obliquestrategies.ca
ve55 9y ago
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.
- ShorsHammer 9y ago
  Just to extend on that: Learning to recognise a dream state is quite trivial with some regular practice, there's many methods, one example is reading a street sign multiple times a day, looking away, re-reading and confirming to yourself that it hasn't changed (Written words will not stay the same in a dream). It's an amazing feeling to repeat such a boring inane boolean task only for it to suddenly be true. The common hurdle for practitioners seems to be remaining calm while maintaining the lucid state, which takes far more effort and skill overall. It essentially becomes a meditation finely balanced between waking up and falling back asleep.
- emiliobumachar 9y ago
  There's still value in making it substantially easier and more practical.
  - bdamm 9y ago
    What is the value? I've never been able to do it, nor have I tried much, as I don't see the difference in my life between controlling my dreams or simply allowing them to happen. My dreams are, to me, a vacation from the chore of trying to control the awake state. Why should I learn to bring that stress into my sleep state? Is there any evidence that lucid dreaming makes being awake any easier or more satisfying?
jamessb 9y ago
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 http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/3190000/3188403/alt10.pdf [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joYEbU2R57Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joYEbU2R57Q [3]: https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=3170427.3188403 https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=3170427.3188403 [4]: https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/sleep-creativity/overview/ https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/sleep-creativity/overview...
squeaky-clean 9y ago
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.
- beobab 9y ago
  I, too, was expecting instructions on how to control dreams. It's something I can do with varying success when I become aware that I'm dreaming, and I was hoping that this might help me improve the chances of becoming aware that I was dreaming.
- mygo 9y ago
  > 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 used an app like that to trigger a lucid state (might be the exact same one) and yeah I heard it say “you are dreaming” in that creepy voice and it gave me a freaking lucid nightmare. It succeeded in making me realize I was dreaming without waking me up, but my heart raced to about 200bpm and I thought that scary voice was going to come and kill me. Who the heck made that app?
- danielskogly 9y ago
  I still remember being scared awake by that audio loop many years ago. Lucid dreaming had caught my attention for a while, and when they released the lucid dreaming feature I thought I'd give it a go. The media volume on my phone being set to maximum definitively did not help when that creepy voice wrought me out of sleep and I haven't tried it since. I wonder if it actually works, but can't really try it out nowadays as I'm not sleeping alone.
  - 9y ago
mrbill 9y ago
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.
- ForgorPsxrd123x 9y ago
  :)
- pbhjpbhj 9y ago
  This? https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0093777/?ref_=m_tttr_qt https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0093777/?ref_=m_tttr_qt Prince of Darkness (1987)
  - anigbrowl 9y ago
    Oh my. I spent years trying to track down the source of that sample and eventually gave up and forgot about it. A John Carpenter movie I wasn't aware of? Thanks!!
  - mrbill 9y ago
    Specifically these. Scared the crap out of me as a 13 year old. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGsv0pJemTY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGsv0pJemTY
- rusk 9y ago
  ... it is happening again ... it is happening again ...
ph0rque 9y ago
http://pbfcomics.com/comics/the-dreamcatcher-3000/ http://pbfcomics.com/comics/the-dreamcatcher-3000/
goodroot 9y ago
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.
- mjburgess 9y ago
  I think the converse is true, no? That the shamanic practices will be pealed back, to reveal the familiar reality of scientific investigation. I've had many lucid dreams, sleep paralysis, etc. "Navigating your dream state" seems really just like a lucid dream. You're pretty much able to create a life-like world at whim in a lucid dream. The ability of the mind to hallucinate sensation in great depth is tremendous, and im sure, tied deeply to dreaming.
  - goodroot 9y ago
    That is an excellent point. I do agree that the converse is true. Together, now we are talking.
  - psyc 9y ago
    The advantage to opening yourself to what is loosely called 'right brained' thinking, is that you don't have to wait around for someone to publish a rigorous study in a journal about the subject you're seeking a solution for. If I waited around for science as much as some HN users imply they do, I'd be paralyzed and barely ever make progress on things that matter to me. I believe great scientists often start in wooville before they are able to distill science out of it. “Why should not a bold thinker have guessed something that is afterwards confirmed by sober and painstaking detailed research?” -Freud
    - mjburgess 9y ago
      The generation of hypotheses is "right-brained thinking" in these terms. Science is a process which includes the creative step of imagining a solution/explanation. The differentiation between science and "systematic religous doctrine" is not in the character of the people, nor particularly in the way they think. Only that the scientist has an additional goal/duty to test his explanations.
komali2 9y ago
>“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."
- orodley 9y ago
  Lots of Greg Egan's work deals with consciousness. For example, "Permutation City" is great.
suuuuuure 9y ago
Ah yes, vice.com, the premier outlet for reporting top-notch research
- Stratoscope 9y ago
  People say things like that about buzzfeed.com too. But Vice and BuzzFeed both do a lot of quality journalism these days. This article is a good example. Is judging an article by its domain the modern equivalent of judging a book by its cover?
  - suuuuuure 9y ago
    I disagree about the quality of the majority of their journalism, but I acknowledge that Buzzfeed has broken some high-impact stories in the last few years. My issue is: why not link to the actual paper? HN is full of intelligent people, we can understand the primary literature.
braindongle 9y ago
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.
icnd1ccent 9y ago
I can't believe no one mentioned Queensryche's "Silent Lucidity" 'till now.
- mindcrime 9y ago
  I remember now...
qwerty456127 9y ago
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.
dmead 9y ago
These comments are garbage. Pseudo scientific nonsense permeates even the smartest of groups it seems.
tauntz 9y ago
> 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? :)
- DavidSJ 9y ago
  Consider an alternative hypothesis? In your hypnagogic state, your brain actually produced an image based on what she described to you, then reordered the chronology of events so that it seemed to you like you imagined the image before she described it. Not too dissimilar from deja vu. It's well known that brains can sometimes reorder the chronology of events, especially if they occur within a short time window.
  - tauntz 9y ago
    Thanks, I haven't thought of this but it sounds plausible as well.
  - Relys 9y ago
    Also see Déjà Rêvé.
anigbrowl 9y ago
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
fnordsensei 9y ago
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.
- optimalsolver 9y ago
  What do you do when your arm falls back on the bed? Do you put it up again? And how many times do you do this before getting into the desired mental state?
  - fnordsensei 9y ago
    Yeah, exactly. Sorry, the description was a bit rough. Essentially; lie down on your back. Raise your arm from the elbow as if you were about to point to the ceiling, while keeping the elbow resting on the bed. When you are about to fall asleep, the arm falls down, waking you up (hopefully). The point is to give you the opportunity to sort of traverse back and forth over the line separating waking and sleeping consciousness quickly. The goal is first of all to be able to "spot" the state of mind. Since it's usually just something we pass by on the way to sleep, we don't normally have a very clear sense of what the state is like. Therefore it's hard to hold for any amount of time. Familiarizing yourself with the characteristics of the state of mind helps when trying to hold on to it. Which is the eventual goal: to remain in the state for a longer time before waking up or falling asleep. The arm thing is rigged to wake you up rather than letting you fall asleep. This is to increase chances that you're able to bring something useful back to full waking consciousness. If you have a very successful session in the liminal state, but then you fall asleep, chances are you won't remember the details later on. A friend of mine achieves the same effect by putting his arms behind his head, tucked under his pillow. He finds it very uncomfortable to sleep like this, so eventually he gets tired enough to slip into hypnagogia, but he never quite falls asleep. It doesn't work for me, I find that position very comfortable. But basically, you can be creative in this regard. Anything that helps you hover back and forth between waking and sleeping mind helps you chase down the elusive middle bit. Another friend swears by taking a double espresso and laying down in the afternoon. Apparently this is enough to keep her from going deeper into sleep than desired. I haven't had much success with this particular method either.
feedbeef 9y ago
Also see: https://www.artofmanliness.com/2015/02/18/hypnagogic-nap/ https://www.artofmanliness.com/2015/02/18/hypnagogic-nap/
beegeezuz 9y ago
I have Hypnagogia almost every night, not because I want to though... stress, anxiety, depression...
nbulka 9y ago
one cigarette + laying-on-your-back nap = lucid dream
sfink 9y ago
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

547 points by dsr12 9y ago

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.

freneticfox 9y ago
For a long time now, I've been kinda self-experimenting on inducing these kinds of states in myself, without resorting to hardware or hard/scary drugs. It all started with my realization that sleep brought me answers in general; i.e. a realization that my general pattern was to work on hard problems all day until I hit various brick walls, then step away and do Real Life and then later at night I'd Sleep, and then often if I'm lucky I wake up the next morning with important realizations that get me past the previous day's brick walls, and then the cycle repeats. Once I realized this pattern, I started optimizing for more sleep cycles per day and a more-immediate transition from BrickWalls->Sleep, basically by injecting a daytime nap in the midst of my workday if/when I can (working from home has its privileges!), aiming for ~1.5h or ~3h nap increments when I can, since that seems to match well with my sleep cycles for reaching REM in the middle and then waking back out of it on a natural cycle boundary. I'm also a heavy coffee drinker for the stimulant effects on my thinking, and at one point heard about the "Coffee Nap" idea (TL;DR - it takes ~30m for caffeine to really kick in, so when you get tired you chug a coffee and lay down, and let yourself wake later as it kicks in). Somehow over time all my random experimentation on these various inter-related things settled into a new pattern that works well when I can achieve it: I try to hit the brick wall while still fairly amped on caffeine (have a last cup as I'm moving away from the laptop if I'm behind on my caffeine intake), then switch over to a nap state. As I'm laying in bed falling asleep, I initially force my thoughts on whatever my Brick Walls are, and my body's still a bit uncomfortably caffeine amped/buzzed for laying down and trying to sleep, but between the coffee buzzing and the descent into sleep, I now usually end up having a very odd transitional but semi-conscious mental state for a solid 10-15 minutes (sometimes longer) on my way to sleep. During this time, free associations and strange dreamy unrelated things start springboarding out from my initial more-directed thoughts, and it's clear this is basically an open channel to get those lateral-thinking associations going while still barely conscious. It's like a psychedelic-drug-free version of a short acid trip or useful lucid dreaming state. Eventually I succumb to sleep, but I have had a very good success rate (relatively - it's still not necessarily high in the absolute!) at getting good intuitive answers to my problems on waking. Over time I've gotten better and better at achieving these states with practice, but it still requires a lot of these triggering conditions/patterns above. I think/hope eventually I may reach a point where I can induce these mental states at will without actually going to sleep afterwards or relying on caffeine buzz to kick it off.
- epberry 9y ago
  I’ve experienced some of these same things. But more than that, I applaud you for experimenting!!
- kayoone 9y ago
  I recently read "A mind for numbers" which leans on this concept of working hard on a problem (focus mode) and then stepping away from it for some time (diffuse mode) very heavily. I also realized that this works really well for me and i guess for most people.
  - psyc 9y ago
    I've relied on this for decades for complex development tasks. Now when a manager asks me to propose some design solution, I just say flat out that I'll probably know what to do after a couple of sleeps.
ende 9y ago
If you’re interested in additional reading along these lines, Robert Anton Wilson (of Illuminatus Trilogy fame) has a lot of interesting material.
testplzignore 9y ago
Until now I never knew that there was a name for "hypnagogia". For most of my life, I was never able to remember this period of sleep, but over the last few years that has changed (not intentionally, so I don't know what changed in my body to cause the difference). I've developed some level of awareness during it and can wake myself up from it, then remember at least some of it. If you've never experienced it, it's like every part of your brain is talking to every other part of your brain, and you have many bizarre connections of thoughts happening in parallel. It's different than a normal dream, where it seems there is only one "thread" running at a time.
- jxub 9y ago
  How have you developed that faculty?
  - babygoat 9y ago
    I read somewhere that Thomas Edison used to take naps with ball bearings in his hands. At the instant he fell asleep, the bearings rolled out of his hands and hit the floor and woke him up during this transition state.
    - jimsmart 9y ago
      I believe Dali did it too: sat in a chair, holding a key above a metal plate.
    - loblollyboy 9y ago
      I also read that somewhere
    - mattmanser 9y ago
      This is in the article...
    - nathancahill 9y ago
      My farmer friends call it a "spoon nap" sit in a chair holding a spoon, as soon as you fall asleep the spoon drops and you can get back to work. Typically taken directly after a big lunch.
donttrack 9y ago
Hypnagogia.. Didn't hear that word before. I get that a lot and tried to explain it to other people, but nobody seem to understand what I am talking about. It feels like I am dreaming while I am still awake in some kind of transitional state, where I am not conscious and also not asleep. It is not the same as lucid dreaming, which I had a couple of times also.
- babygoat 9y ago
  I get this a lot too and had to look up the term. The first time I tried acupuncture I went into this state right away.
- jl2718 9y ago
  That moment when your brain falls asleep in class and tells you it unveiled the deep connection between carnival blister peanut texture and the quantum variational bound. And then you wake up suddenly and get scared because you think you might have yelled out something stupid. Or maybe I’m just the only one.
  - sangnoir 9y ago
    > Or maybe I’m just the only one not just you - I didn't have a name for it, but my brain pretty much does free-association in that phase. On more than one occasion I've jolted awake because I've had a earth-shattering revelation, only to realise my idea was already invented (hot air balloon) or pretty ridiculous (like having your toaster burn the day's agenda on your toast). I can't help but wonder: how many multi-million dollar ideas have I had and then promptly forgot as I got into deeper sleep?
    - marshray 9y ago
      > having your toaster burn the day's agenda on your toast Shut up and take my money!
      - gregpilling 9y ago
buovjaga 9y ago
> 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. "If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern." William Blake: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790)
rangibaby 9y ago
My favorite use of Hypnagogia is to find things that I have lost around the house. It's able to pull memories out of your brain that you can't usually access (analogous to backup tapes in your garage I guess). When I was younger I was able to make music by counting beats in my head with a hi-hat just before I hit a hypnagogia state. I knew I was there when the hi hat would keep counting even after I stopped consciously doing counting, then an entire analog and digital orchestra in my brain would start playing wonderful tunes. Of course I could never remember them after, but it doesn't matter.

anikishaev 9y ago

arduino + bend sensor, really?

everdev 9y ago

> 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.

cjslep 9y ago
A cue* not queue
- piyh 9y ago
  queue of cues

sandworm101 9y ago

>> ... 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.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
captainbland 9y ago
Maybe just have it say "Coca-cola tastes great!" - boom, billion dollar industry right there. Or as in Futurama "Lightspeed briefs, as seen in your dreams!"
- maaaats 9y ago
  Reminds me of Brave New World.
mkempe 9y ago
I'd be interested in experimenting with Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies [1][2] as cues. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_Strategies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_Strategies [2] http://obliquestrategies.ca http://obliquestrategies.ca

ve55 9y ago

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.

ShorsHammer 9y ago
Just to extend on that: Learning to recognise a dream state is quite trivial with some regular practice, there's many methods, one example is reading a street sign multiple times a day, looking away, re-reading and confirming to yourself that it hasn't changed (Written words will not stay the same in a dream). It's an amazing feeling to repeat such a boring inane boolean task only for it to suddenly be true. The common hurdle for practitioners seems to be remaining calm while maintaining the lucid state, which takes far more effort and skill overall. It essentially becomes a meditation finely balanced between waking up and falling back asleep.
emiliobumachar 9y ago
There's still value in making it substantially easier and more practical.
- bdamm 9y ago
  What is the value? I've never been able to do it, nor have I tried much, as I don't see the difference in my life between controlling my dreams or simply allowing them to happen. My dreams are, to me, a vacation from the chore of trying to control the awake state. Why should I learn to bring that stress into my sleep state? Is there any evidence that lucid dreaming makes being awake any easier or more satisfying?

jamessb 9y ago

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 http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/3190000/3188403/alt10.pdf [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joYEbU2R57Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joYEbU2R57Q [3]: https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=3170427.3188403 https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=3170427.3188403 [4]: https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/sleep-creativity/overview/ https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/sleep-creativity/overview...

squeaky-clean 9y ago

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.

beobab 9y ago
I, too, was expecting instructions on how to control dreams. It's something I can do with varying success when I become aware that I'm dreaming, and I was hoping that this might help me improve the chances of becoming aware that I was dreaming.
mygo 9y ago
> 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 used an app like that to trigger a lucid state (might be the exact same one) and yeah I heard it say “you are dreaming” in that creepy voice and it gave me a freaking lucid nightmare. It succeeded in making me realize I was dreaming without waking me up, but my heart raced to about 200bpm and I thought that scary voice was going to come and kill me. Who the heck made that app?
danielskogly 9y ago
I still remember being scared awake by that audio loop many years ago. Lucid dreaming had caught my attention for a while, and when they released the lucid dreaming feature I thought I'd give it a go. The media volume on my phone being set to maximum definitively did not help when that creepy voice wrought me out of sleep and I haven't tried it since. I wonder if it actually works, but can't really try it out nowadays as I'm not sleeping alone.
- 9y ago

mrbill 9y ago

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.

ForgorPsxrd123x 9y ago
:)
pbhjpbhj 9y ago
This? https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0093777/?ref_=m_tttr_qt https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0093777/?ref_=m_tttr_qt Prince of Darkness (1987)
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  Oh my. I spent years trying to track down the source of that sample and eventually gave up and forgot about it. A John Carpenter movie I wasn't aware of? Thanks!!
- mrbill 9y ago
  Specifically these. Scared the crap out of me as a 13 year old. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGsv0pJemTY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGsv0pJemTY
rusk 9y ago
... it is happening again ... it is happening again ...

ph0rque 9y ago

http://pbfcomics.com/comics/the-dreamcatcher-3000/ http://pbfcomics.com/comics/the-dreamcatcher-3000/

goodroot 9y ago

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.

mjburgess 9y ago
I think the converse is true, no? That the shamanic practices will be pealed back, to reveal the familiar reality of scientific investigation. I've had many lucid dreams, sleep paralysis, etc. "Navigating your dream state" seems really just like a lucid dream. You're pretty much able to create a life-like world at whim in a lucid dream. The ability of the mind to hallucinate sensation in great depth is tremendous, and im sure, tied deeply to dreaming.
- goodroot 9y ago
  That is an excellent point. I do agree that the converse is true. Together, now we are talking.
- psyc 9y ago
  The advantage to opening yourself to what is loosely called 'right brained' thinking, is that you don't have to wait around for someone to publish a rigorous study in a journal about the subject you're seeking a solution for. If I waited around for science as much as some HN users imply they do, I'd be paralyzed and barely ever make progress on things that matter to me. I believe great scientists often start in wooville before they are able to distill science out of it. “Why should not a bold thinker have guessed something that is afterwards confirmed by sober and painstaking detailed research?” -Freud
  - mjburgess 9y ago
    The generation of hypotheses is "right-brained thinking" in these terms. Science is a process which includes the creative step of imagining a solution/explanation. The differentiation between science and "systematic religous doctrine" is not in the character of the people, nor particularly in the way they think. Only that the scientist has an additional goal/duty to test his explanations.

komali2 9y ago

>“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."

orodley 9y ago
Lots of Greg Egan's work deals with consciousness. For example, "Permutation City" is great.

suuuuuure 9y ago

Ah yes, vice.com, the premier outlet for reporting top-notch research

Stratoscope 9y ago
People say things like that about buzzfeed.com too. But Vice and BuzzFeed both do a lot of quality journalism these days. This article is a good example. Is judging an article by its domain the modern equivalent of judging a book by its cover?
- suuuuuure 9y ago
  I disagree about the quality of the majority of their journalism, but I acknowledge that Buzzfeed has broken some high-impact stories in the last few years. My issue is: why not link to the actual paper? HN is full of intelligent people, we can understand the primary literature.

braindongle 9y ago

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.

icnd1ccent 9y ago

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

mindcrime 9y ago
I remember now...

qwerty456127 9y ago

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.

dmead 9y ago

These comments are garbage. Pseudo scientific nonsense permeates even the smartest of groups it seems.

tauntz 9y ago

> 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? :)

DavidSJ 9y ago
Consider an alternative hypothesis? In your hypnagogic state, your brain actually produced an image based on what she described to you, then reordered the chronology of events so that it seemed to you like you imagined the image before she described it. Not too dissimilar from deja vu. It's well known that brains can sometimes reorder the chronology of events, especially if they occur within a short time window.
- tauntz 9y ago
  Thanks, I haven't thought of this but it sounds plausible as well.
- Relys 9y ago
  Also see Déjà Rêvé.

anigbrowl 9y ago

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

fnordsensei 9y ago

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.

optimalsolver 9y ago
What do you do when your arm falls back on the bed? Do you put it up again? And how many times do you do this before getting into the desired mental state?
- fnordsensei 9y ago
  Yeah, exactly. Sorry, the description was a bit rough. Essentially; lie down on your back. Raise your arm from the elbow as if you were about to point to the ceiling, while keeping the elbow resting on the bed. When you are about to fall asleep, the arm falls down, waking you up (hopefully). The point is to give you the opportunity to sort of traverse back and forth over the line separating waking and sleeping consciousness quickly. The goal is first of all to be able to "spot" the state of mind. Since it's usually just something we pass by on the way to sleep, we don't normally have a very clear sense of what the state is like. Therefore it's hard to hold for any amount of time. Familiarizing yourself with the characteristics of the state of mind helps when trying to hold on to it. Which is the eventual goal: to remain in the state for a longer time before waking up or falling asleep. The arm thing is rigged to wake you up rather than letting you fall asleep. This is to increase chances that you're able to bring something useful back to full waking consciousness. If you have a very successful session in the liminal state, but then you fall asleep, chances are you won't remember the details later on. A friend of mine achieves the same effect by putting his arms behind his head, tucked under his pillow. He finds it very uncomfortable to sleep like this, so eventually he gets tired enough to slip into hypnagogia, but he never quite falls asleep. It doesn't work for me, I find that position very comfortable. But basically, you can be creative in this regard. Anything that helps you hover back and forth between waking and sleeping mind helps you chase down the elusive middle bit. Another friend swears by taking a double espresso and laying down in the afternoon. Apparently this is enough to keep her from going deeper into sleep than desired. I haven't had much success with this particular method either.

feedbeef 9y ago

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

beegeezuz 9y ago

I have Hypnagogia almost every night, not because I want to though... stress, anxiety, depression...

nbulka 9y ago

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

sfink 9y ago

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