Singularity Experience, a professional iPhone app for Lucid Dreamers
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Connecting to the iTunes Store.
Singularity Experience is my 2nd attempt at smartphone based lucid dreaming aid. The first one was the original Lucid Dreaming App for Android. The speed at which I was able to develop this app makes me a believer in Singularity.
In 2004, along with a handful of other dreamers I found the Dream Exit Initiated Lucid Dreaming technique. The idea itself has been implanted in my mind by Dr. Stephen LaBerge's track "Trance induction of lucid dreaming -bedtime". In that track, Stephen says:
Quote:
And you will find that you can re-enter any dream that you wish or create any new dream
This single phrase really works. Back in 2004, I called it Dream Reentry, because this is the essence of the technique.
The technique is a form of WILD, which is performed at the moment of sudden awakening from a dream. There's no need to lay in bed for 45 minutes, no need to get out of bed at all. The most dim realization that you are awake in bed may be turned into a lucid dream with a simple visualization exercise.
Over the years, there have been multiple dreamers both on DreamViews and LD4All who have discovered the same technique, completely independently! All of them report similar experiences with the same theme: A dream may be re-entered upon a certain kind of awakening. You might've heard about Dream Chaining, DEILD, WILD Chaining or Dream Re-Entry.
Normally, people wake up to report dreams in the light sleep stage that follows REM. This is when the brain chemistry has changed, the sleep paralysis is gone, and it is possible to recall and write down fragments of a dream. But such state makes it difficult to re-enter dreams consciously, unless you are in one of the later sleep cycles when it is still dark outside.
Dream reentry requires the dreamer to be awakened earlier - in REM. This does not happen naturally and requires an external cue, or a feat of willpower.
For example: You are frustrated with having a dream about being in a classroom after going to classes for 7 hours a day. You are fed up with the dream and wake up. This is a prime kind of awakening for dream reentry. (For more info, see this video : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=750x-JGcNzs)
For me, in August 2004, the external cue was most likely provided by cars driving by my window (I was sleeping on a porch with windows open due to heat). This little impulse of light and sound awakened my mind just a little bit to be able to re-enter a dream at will. At that point, I've been a hardcore lucid dreamer for over 8 months. I've had multiple WILDs, a couple OOBEs, experimented with recurring dreamsigns and repeatedly caught myself dreaming in my house by doing reality checks. All of these methods combined produced no more than 4 lucid dreams a week with a ton of effort: daily practice, daily posting, daily supplements and countless affirmations.
Then, at the beginning of August 2004, I discovered dream re-enty and I was able to relax. I went to bed knowing that I will dream consciously sometime between the end of the 2nd and 5th sleep cycle.
This is when I got the first taste of on-demand, at will, almost every day lucid dreaming. Using the dream reentry technique I was able to re-enter the same dream up to 5 times. The anxiety about awakenings disappeared. I was able to continue my adventures at will, perform fantastic experiments with matter and all sorts of dream powers.
Then I entered college, and my sleep schedule changed, the external cue disappeared. The diet changed. Ever since I've been looking for a way to re-capture the same experiences that I had all those years ago.
I've tried most of the lucid dreaming techniques out there. They all take too much effort to learn AND practice! After getting a taste of an almost instant transition from wakefulness to a dream, without hallucinations, almost without failure, it is hard to start practicing "sub-optimal" techniques again. Why lay in bed for 90 minutes trying to WILD, when I can re-enter a dream in 50 seconds upon awakening from a dream?
The idea of creating an app to help with Dream Reentry has guided my life since 2006. 3 out of 4 of my jobs have been working in industries that I hoped would help me create such an aid. They didn't. The industry seems asleep and pursuing long term strategies, unwilling to experiment with new ideas. I'm an electrical engineering student by education, and over the last 3-4 years have taught myself enough programming languages to be able to finally realize my vision of the lucid dreaming aid:
An inexpensive, portable, wireless tool to help with dream reentry. Not 200$, not 99$, but 5$. That's a galon of apple juice, 20-40 miles of driving a car, half a bottle of B6 at a local pharmacy, half a bottle of 5-HTP, or a coffee and a pastry at Starbucks. It's really affordable
I do not know if it works yet. The Android app has been in development for 3 months and in testing since April 20011. I do not hear any spectacular tales of lucidity from my Android app, which makes me believe that the traditional "External cue gets integrated into a dream" approach is finicky at best.
This is why this app, an evolution of the lucid dreaming app does not claim that cues will get integrated into a dream. They may, but the results of my experiments were unpredictable:
Experiments with orange light:
- I've been painting orange racing stripes on a car after seeing orange light
- I've heard programmers discuss my app's interface within a dream
- I've done powerpoint presentations on my app within a dream
- I've seen cars drive by with really orange headlights.
- I've seen dream characters fire guns (orange flash).
- I've had dream characters exchange phone calls
- I've been acting on text messages that I received in a dream.
All of these cues are really, really random, they caused 1 realization of dreaming in close to 3 weeks of testing. They are recognized as cues after the fact, but not in a dream. Both audio and light cues integrate into the dream in the most random, unpredictable way, making it difficult to understand, even with months of LD training.
On the bright side, I had multiple episodes of my recurring dreamsign - my middle school. I found myself drawn to the object, in some dreams literally hanging off it's side trying to peer in. Such occurrences indicate that my awareness in a dream is elevated.
This is why I'm abandoning the efforts of DILD in favor of DEILD and dream reentry. This technique focuses on entering a particular lucid dreaming scene - the last scene of a faded dream. There's no doubt when scene materializes that you are in a dream. It is the best technique. It dramatically raises your confidence in your LD ability, reduces anxiety about awakening, requires virtually no preparation, can be combined with Non-Induction, etc.
Singularity Experience is the first step towards realization of this project. The current (December 2011) version of the app is still dumb. It is really, really basic, it works through the mattress, while the app should really be mounted on your wrist.
What I'm hoping to accomplish with this project are 2 things:
1) Bring lucid dreaming into the mainstream
2) Arise interest within the scientific community regarding the potential applications of lucid dreaming in physics, study of brain and consciousness. I find that the majority of scientists who write papers on the subject have 0 mystical experience. No experience of existing within the mind whatsoever. How can they possibly postulate theories of consciousness without seeing the limitations of their own thinking?
Lucid Dreaming is an amazing tool. I'm sure we would all agree on this topic, otherwise we would not be on this forum. Futurists like Ray Kurzweil predict that the brain uploading will happen some time after 2045. That's lucid dreaming like experience on-demand. We will be able to swap bodies, merge our knowledge together, etc. But we, as lucid dreamers have already experienced these things in our lucid dreams!
I'm hoping that by attracting scientific attention to the subject (with the catchy app name), the lucid dream induction devices would be able to improve exponentially - at the same pace as the technology around us. The engineering techniques that boggle my mind, the statistical analysis that makes me want to bash my head against the wall are fluently understood by many engineers and statisticians around the world. The multi-threading issues that cause my app to crash can be resolved in a matter of minutes by a professional programmer.
It wouldn't take a single lucid dreamer 8 years to create a lucid dreaming aid. It would take a collective of scientists, programmers and engineers 3 months to put a world class product on the market. A product that would finally work. Currently I'm working on making this happen.
I ask for your support in helping realize this dream. Let's make lucid dreaming a more mainstream activity. Let's inform sleep scientists, doctors and programmers that we want a lucid dreaming aid that works. Unless there's a market, we will keep seeing hundreds of "Smart Alarm" clocks, but little to none professional quality lucid dreaming apps.
Let's start the Lucid Dreaming Evolution.
Connecting to the iTunes Store.
Additional materials:
App store promotion: Singularity Experience » Lucid Dreaming App
User manual and help Singularity iPhone Help » Lucid Dreaming App
