“Dreaming the Virtual: Why Lucid Dreamers Should Steer the Digital Economy…

… Beyond simple aesthetics, lucid dreaming and VR share some of the same therapeutic applications. VR can be used to treat PTSD, for example. Lucid dream therapy can do that too. Other applications involve treatment of nightmares and anxieties related to autism—not to mention their use as tools for creative and artistic expression.

But VR and lucid dreaming are different. A lucid dream is limited only by your imagination and determination, while VR is limited by code and—more importantly—by coders. ..

…And if we can cultivate the ability to maintain consciousness while dreaming, we can use that cognitive space to develop flexibility of mind, imagination, intentionality, engagement with the unconscious—in ways that are simply not possible even with the most sophisticated computer systems…

… In a similar way, I suggest that research into lucid dreaming and VR should occur in tandem, spiraling back upon each other…

Let’s make sure the digital economy serves human ends. Let lucid dreamers steer the ship…” By Kevin Healey – THE BLOG – 04/27/2016 09:08 pm ET Updated Dec 06, 2017 – HUFFPOST –  https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/dreaming-the-virtual-why_b_9791298.html

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Weighing the Pros and Cons of a Device That Can Record Your Dreams

By Gardner Eeden

July 28^th, 2018

–ST. LOUIS, MO

Instead of binge-watching the latest viral Netflix series, how about watching yourself in episodes of your own twisted inner dream world on Dreamflix?

As gaming and social media tech companies are rushing to give us immersive, interactive, “first-person” mind-blowing virtual experiences, a handful of smaller startups and researchers are trying to capture the ultimate virtual world we all inhabit naturally—the dream.  The idea of a dream recorder (DR) isn’t just fantasy.  People are working on it.

A device that can record and display our inner thoughts, imagination, and dream world would be one of the most profound devices ever created–but some may wonder if it should be created in the first place.  What are the benefits and consequences of technology that might one day put all our brightest and darkest thoughts on display?  How well have these companies considered the ramifications of the technology?  Such a device would arguably do as much or more to alter human behavior than psychotropic drugs, Crispr, and gene splicing combined.

Imagine the marketable form of such a device; something that combines the abilities of an fMRI, EEG, and video recorder that’s portable enough to attach comfortably to your body.  In essence, a device not unlike a smart phone or smart watch, with tiny electrodes that feed from the brain’s electrical signals in order to record our inner visualization, or that can read biosignals from your skin.

What would actually be recorded?  To start, we’d capture an ongoing series of random images as crude visualizations, not unlike how we experience the dream; it would record pure, fractured thought as it’s formulated.  It could be calibrated and set to infiltrate our near-subconscious levels of thought, then dive to deeper layers to get to deep stage dreaming.  Assuming we are conscious in this state all the time (biconsciousness), whether asleep or awake in the world, we would not necessarily need to be asleep to use such a device.

Would our DR be able to capture sound as well, even if no actual sound waves are generated within the dream?  Would it capture our perception of sound and convert it to an audible and understandable track within the device?  It would certainly need to be able to provide instant playback and the ability to send the captured video imagery to your laptop or another source.

In one approach, we’d need to establish a baseline of conscious imagery and build a database of our particular visual perceptive data, as has been done in experiments by Dr. Yukiyasu Kamitami, with the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International in Kyoto.  We all imagine things—even a ball, a dog, a girl—somewhat differently.  Just like Siri and Alexa need to get to know your voice—the intonation and dialect you speak—the DR would need to understand what signals fire when you think of certain objects.  After extensive mapping, a subject then sleeps in an MRI machine (no small feat in itself), and her visualizations are captured and matched to her database.  With this, researchers have a very rough but often accurately close estimate of objects she sees within her dream.

Another approach is utilized with Dormio, a hand/finger device which collects biosignals that track transitions in sleep stages (such as muscle tone and heart rate change), specifically to study hypnagogia, the stage between waking and sleeping.  Adam Haar Horowitz, a researcher with the Media Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology,  stated in a BBC interview that “The waking you will be more connected to the sleeping you and that connection between the two is a form of self-discovery.”

Then, there’s CloudX, a Los Angeles-based startup that seeks to directly record dream imagery, speech and motor behavior.  It would use a combination of EEG, fMRI, fNRIS and EMG to produce a crude taped recreation of your dream.  This project is in its startup phase and doing work with the professional dream research community, including the IASD (International Association for the Study of Dreams).

This is all a far cry from watching your last night’s dreams on an app no more complicated than Hulu.  None of these projects, whether for research or commercial usage, are promising hi-res, 4K playback—or any meaningful playback at all.

But let’s assume these technical challenges are achieved; we can capture our dream, video and sound both, and replay it on a device.    We would have countless hours of video, something akin to watching a cloudcam display that we would desperately try to make sense of (just as we attempt to interpret the dream), because we wouldn’t be able to understand it all.  It would give us generations of data to process about our own thoughts; we could easily become obsessed, even addicted, to watching and dissecting our dreams.  Indeed, the 1985 Wim Wenders film Until the End of the World gave us just such a scenario, in which people became utterly addicted to watching their own dream replay.

Perhaps most importantly, we are not going to like much of what we see—especially if watching the playback of our lovers, spouses, friends, and children.  Even St. Augustine was terrified that God would judge his actions within the dream.  Are we ready to experience our darker sides that we rarely acknowledge?  Would it open the way for self-reflection and healing, or open the door to new, bolder (or pathological) ways of behaving in the world?  It’s possible that our behavior in social media has already given us a clue.

Then throw into the mix an ability to spur lucidity within the dream.  With stronger degrees of lucidity, we can be in the dream environment and do whatever we want—exercise our super powers of flight, strength, and speed; conjure any figure we like to interact with them; and have sexual encounters with anyone in the dream or anyone we can imagine.  What would we do with a recording of us living out our wildest fantasies?  Would we be posting these on Dreamflix or DreamHub?

Let’s consider how culture, industry, and other fields could be revolutionized by DR technology.

The subconscious mind, and thusly all imagery that it generates, is perception, not factual truth.  It is both highly subjective and objective, a paradox of self-reflection.  Rest assured, if humans can abuse a technology, we will.

HEALTH/MEDICAL

An entire new industry would spring up within the fields of neurology, psychology, and behavioral sciences.

Imagine being able to explore the inner mind of someone, such as an autistic child, who can’t outwardly express themselves in an understandable way.  Or, perhaps, someone in a physical coma whose mental activity seems shuttered.  What clues would be yielded from unedited broadcasts from the subconscious?  Could the DR (Dream Recorder) open ways of communicating with those we couldn’t previously understand?

Imagine how this might shed light on the trapped mentalities of an autistic individual, someone suffering from schizophrenia, dementia, or just delusions in general.  Could we develop any insights into how they might view the world?  People prone to psychosomatic illnesses might be able to trace the origin of such delusions.

In the world of psychology, new treatments for people who display psychopathic behavior might be discovered.  When the subconscious is made visible, we become exposed in ways far more intimate than our guarded confessions during therapy sessions.  However, visualization of actions from the dream would be far from trust-worthy for the sake of diagnoses.  The dream is where we exist unencumbered by laws of physics and morality, and surreal, obtuse events from the dream would be ripe for misinterpretation (just as the “interpretation” of dreams now).  Psychiatrists sometimes use dreamwork as a means of overcoming debilitating fears; a DR could offer an entirely new approach.

Individuals would likely need to give legal consent to DR usage, whether awake or asleep.   Countless ethical issues could arise in considering the devices as tools of treatment in psychiatric therapy.  HIPAA laws and restrictions would certainly need a rewrite.

SCIENCE

Recorded imagery would be a scientific playground and/or battleground, rife with sparring factions of “materialists” (who believe that all consciousness, imagery and dream activity is physically based within the brain) and “fundamentalists” (who believe, to varying degrees, that consciousness is a fundamental force of the universe along with gravity, electromagnetism, and the nuclear forces).  Would actual recorded evidence of subconscious activity provide real clues to explore regarding the origin and nature of consciousness itself?

First and foremost would be the pressing question that undermines all of reality TV, and also of quantum particle physics:  being observed can change a particle’s state, and people who know they are being observed (or even suspect so) will change their behavior.  But could they actually alter subconscious activity knowing that the activity would be viewed?  Double-blind experiments may prove difficult and ineffective.

We could broaden the study of conscious experience and capture dream imagery at its shallowest layers—from the moment we close our eyes and our own inner visualization takes over.  We could prove whether or not a “hypnogogic” state emerges from a different visual toolbox that transforms into dream imagery as we ride the conscious waves into—and through—our sleep cycles.  Vitally, we could record our subconscious imagery even as we are awake and conscious with most of our attention and focus turned to the physical world.  This is the basis of biconsciousness.

The ability to become lucid is key to using this technology to push the current limits of our conscious experience.  Avid lucid dreamers could be enlisted to control their dream activities and do exercises that expand their simultaneous awareness in the world and the dream.  They would become mental athletes in training.  How far can they go?  Would it be like an athlete watching tape of the day’s game; analyzing where they went wrong, what mistakes they made when losing lucidity, and how to correct them next time?  After repeated viewings, they could learn how to hone their attention and focus to strengthen their dream stamina and control—and take it to new extremes.

ENTERTAINMENT

A recording device that displays all our wildest fantasies and epic surreal thought lines would be immensely addictive to watch and to learn about ourselves.  Imagine taking a mental “selfie” of your current deep state thought.  Would you be willing to share it with your friends?  Your parents?  Your wife or lover?

We would create “ultimate dream warrior” competitions; first person to achieve a wild goal within the dream wins.  Lucid dreamers might broadcast their wild adventures; the “found footage” genre would have an entirely new springboard in which to experiment.

Put the DR on as you listen to music.  You would essentially create your own music video to go along with it.  Artists of all media—film, music, painting—could generate an endless creative loop that feeds on itself, exploring within the dream works of theirs that haven’t yet been produced, and producing them in the world.

We could possibly learn to value pure experience over “story.”  People would create YouTube channels that are, literally, made of themselves, giving new meaning to “YouTube.”

Perhaps, at long last, we will be able to realize that people rarely, if ever, dream of “midgets” and people talking backward (thanks, David Lynch, for that trope).  Maybe when confronted with real dream imagery and action, Hollywood will stop thinking that dreams are meant to tell stories or underscore plot lines.  We don’t fold buildings in perfect geometrical lines, and shootouts are rare (thanks Christopher Nolan).

MILITARY

As with most technology, the military, especially in the hands of outlying terrorist factions, could put machines like this to horrible use.  They could record the dreams of POWs and use them as interrogation bumpers.  Sleep deprivation is already one of the most heinous torture methods.  One of the last remaining comforts of a POW is that their captors can’t get in their heads.

Most frighteningly, if we can indeed capture video from the dream, would we also be able to insert visualizations into the dream?  Brainhacking is a thing…would dreamhacking be far behind?  And could it be used as a new form of subversive or subliminal advertising and marketing, or, worse, as a means of intimidating or terrifying an opponent?

If the reverse DR technology is realized and we are able to inject another person’s experiences into our conscious arena (just like the plot device in Kathryn Bigelow’s stunning 1995 film, Strange Days), groups could simulate terrifying and tragic experiences.

Military training might seek to tap into the wild and lawless “id” to further train special forces to prepare them for “black ops” missions.

RELIGION

If our consciousness is an intrinsic and vital part of our sense of self and our sense of spirituality, would these devices harness a more powerful tool for exploring, in a spiritual way, our connectedness with the universe?  For centuries, some have felt that God speaks to them through their dreams; would people start seeing God in their dreams, the way we see Jesus in a piece of toast?

We would certainly see aspects of ourselves and our free, subconscious behavior that we might not recognize.  As Carl Jung once wrote, “one does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”

Most of these ideas may seem far-fetched now, but we have to remember just decades ago when artificial intelligence and quantum computing were the stuff of science fiction.  Brilliant minds of today are cautioning against the rush to usage of technology we barely comprehend, technology that could be devastating and catastrophic in the wrong hands.  It often comes down to weighing whether the benefits would be worth the abuses.

And so we ask the question that ethical scientists have asked for centuries: If we can, does it mean we should?  Captain Kirk from Star Trek was wrong.  “Space…the final frontier…”.  The final frontier is exactly the frontier we started with…our own mind.

GARDNER EEDEN is a writer, photographer and avid lucid dreamer and author of Lucid: Awake in the World and the Dream.  He recently presented his groundbreaking workshop on biconsciousness, “Lucidity & the Biconscious Mind” at the International Association for the Study of Dreams conference in Scottsdale, AZ.  Eeden is producing a new video and workshop series titled “Hardcore Lucid: WTF, Dream?” that will be available in spring of 2019.  You can follow him on Facebook or Twitter @gardnereeden.  For interviews/correspondence, email: gardnereeden@gmail.com

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The next generation of dream recording technology is under way. Cloud X is a non-profit, crowdfunded project set to take place in Los Angeles, California.

Considering that such technology is becoming a reality is quite mind-blowing and, of course, has various aspects to it. Below is some information on the new project. The team exists of quite a number of experts in the fields of psychology, neuropsychology and neuroimaging.

“The CLOUD X project is an attempt to record a complete dream—imagery, dreamed speech and dreamed motor behavior…

The technologies involved in the project will be a combination of electroencephalography (EEG), electrooculography (EOG), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) and electromyography (EMG). EEG and EOG will help determine when the sleeper is in rapid eye movement sleep (ripe for dreaming), fMRI or fNIRS will capture dreamed imagery, and EMG will collect covert muscle activity used in dreamed speech and dreamed body movement reconstruction…

…recording and reconstructing dreamed visual imagery and dreamed speech are more complex. In both cases, pattern matching of awake recordings and dream recordings determine the resultant reconstruction and dream movie…

…For visual imagery, software needs to be trained on awake brain patterns gathered from individual and image databases…

…For this project, we plan to utilize experienced lucid dreamers as subjects and train these subjects in a set of specific dream scenarios, i.e. visualization, body movements and speaking both when awake and when dreaming…If successful with this approach, the software training cycles for imagery and phoneme decoding can be reduced and the imagery recorded more personal and specific.

…As part of Cloud X, we also plan on producing a short documentary about the project, a “making of” film, in this case on the creation of the first movie from a dream…

…Our project lead, Daniel Oldis, is an independent dream researcher and author of The Lucid Dream Manifesto. His work has been featured by Forbes, CNN, Psychology Today, the Huffington Post, Fox Networks, Coast-To-Coast AM, CBS Radio, Australian Broadcasting, the Orange County Register, Dreamtime magazine and other media…” – Go Fund Me – Cloud X – The Dream Movie

The post Cloud X – The Next Generation Of Dream Recording appeared first on LUCID DREAM RESEARCH.

…External stimuli in the form of scent, audio and muscle stimulation direct the content of the dreams. We use Dormio to detect the state between sleep and wake (Hypnagogia), influencing visual and idea generation using audio. We use Essence to alter the emotional content of dreams and memory consolidation during Rapid Eye Movement (REM) and Deep Sleep. We use Electronight to administer muscle stimulation to arms and legs and change the kinesthetic content of dreams…

…Crossing boundaries both disciplinary and experiential, Cocoon offers an embodied investigation of one’s own consciousness, a philosophy in the flesh: With it users can observe and engage the torsion of their senses, see and shape dreams which are otherwise entirely uncontrollable, unlinked, and unseen” – Engineeringdreams – Dream Lab – “The Dream Lab is an initiative from the Fluid Interfaces Group at the MIT Media Lab” – MIT Media Lab – Engineering Dreams

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Cocoon

This is "Cocoon" by Oscar Rosello on Vimeo, the home for high quality videos and…

Vimeo

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…Horowitz said the third generation will work just by monitoring eyelid movement in sleeping subjects.“ – Motherboard – https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ywxjvg/steel-ball-control-dreams-dormio-mit-hypnagogia

“We initiate automatic audio recording alongside interruption, allowing users to speak their dreams in semi-lucid states, not waking themselves up entirely to issue reports…

…The technology that drives Dormio is open source. That means the software for our biosignal tracking is on Github. ..And Tomás, who led that build, wrote about it step by step here. You can, for now, build yourself one. – Media – https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/sleep-creativity/overview/#faq-is-this-dreaming-what-is-stage-1-sleep

“HYPNAGOGIA, also referred to as “hypnagogic hallucinations”, is the experience of the transitional state from wakefulness to sleep… Mental phenomena that may occur during this “threshold consciousness” phase include lucid thought, lucid dreaming, hallucinations and, sleep paralysis.” – Wikipedia

Dormio: Interfacing with Dreams

Dormio: Interfacing with DreamsAdam Haar Horowitz, Ishaan Grover, Pedro Reynolds-Cuéllar, Cynthia Breazeal, Pattie MaesCHI ’18:…

YouTube

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“Induction of lucid dreams: A systematic review of evidence”

– by Tadas Stumbrys, Daniel Erlacher, Melanie Schädlich, Michael Schredl –boris.unibe.ch/39251/1/21_LucidDreamInductionReview_23_revised.pdf

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“The LdreamM headset induces Lucid Dreams by analyzing the brainwaves (EEG) it receives from 8+2 electrodes and then playing pre-recorded sounds at precisely the right time…” –

ldreamm.com/De/index.html

The post A Lucid Dream Device – EEG Brainwave Analogy and Sound Effects appeared first on LUCID DREAM RESEARCH.

DreamStar – Developed by lucid dream pioneer and psychotherapist, G. Scott Sparrow –  http://dreamanalysistraining.com/moodle2/

G. Scott Sparrow, EdD, LPC, LMFT (Va,) Advisor to the Executive Committee, and Chair of Education for the International Association for the Study of Dreams, Professor, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley
Charter Faculty, Atlantic University

LUCID DREAM STUDIES

Lucid Dream Studies – The Alef Trust – Post Graduate Certificate – Accredited by Middlesex University – Program Tudor is Tadas Stumbrys – https://www.aleftrust.org/academic-learning/post-graduate-certificates/lucid-dream-studies/ 

“Tadas Stumbrys, PhD, is a lecturer and a researcher in the fields of dreams and consciousness, with a particular focus on the phenomenon of lucid dreaming. He holds MSc in Consciousness and Transpersonal Psychology from Liverpool John Moores University and PhD in Sports Science from Heidelberg University in Germany” – Aleftrust.org

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University of Texas Rio Grande Valley IRB# 907-90991

This survey is being conducted by:

Principal Investigator Gregory Scott Sparrow, EdD, Professor at The University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley

Co-PI Ralph Carlson, PhD, Professor The University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley

In consultation with Ryan Hurd, MA, Lecturer in Psychology and Holistic Studies, John F. Kennedy University

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What Technique(s) or Condition(s) do you think caused your first Lucid Dream?

The post Ongoing/Future Study of the Supplement Galantamine appeared first on LUCID DREAM RESEARCH.

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REM Detecting Devices/Masks

The post What Technique(s) or Condition(s) do you think caused your first Lucid Dream? appeared first on LUCID DREAM RESEARCH.

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The post REM Detecting Devices/Masks appeared first on LUCID DREAM RESEARCH.