Thread: REMee reconsidered

My remee has arrived! My first thoughts/observations after using it 3 times:

• adjusting brightness levels needs to be done at sleeping light conditions with dark-adjusted eyes.
• it's more uncomfortable than my regular sleeping mask: the nose opening is too small. Loosened the band a lot to make it more comfortable and found it had moved out of position last night (although other nights it has not moved).
• not enough settings for different timings: only 2 different programs: 1) (default) bedtime, and 2) nap. The intervals for the settings are different.
• intervals are limited. You can't for example, program it to start after 3 hours and signal every 90 minutes thereafter, (the length of a sleep cycle) which seems to be a big negative.

For a timer-only device, the limitations on the timers are sort of disappointing. You need to aim for just one big REM cycle basically.

And the disadvantage of the online-only programming is you can't wake up at 4am, decide to put on REMee, and say "OK, 6am is my big REM, so start running 2 hours from now" while you're lying in bed, you have to get up and do a full programming cycle. If you kept your laptop by the bed that might be OK I think I that would still wake you up a lot.

So it seems the 2 major uses can be: 1) aim for my main big dreaming REM [default settings], you have one shot to hit this and 2) DEILD mode [nap setting]

Honestly, REMEE was a waste of money, and a cash-in with the growing trend of lucid dreaming. It does very little to help you dream, and I have yet to actually see the lights in my dream, even once. The only time I had a dream with it was because a Dream Entity asked where my mask was. Then, while lucid, the mask woke me up.

Originally Posted by Tiresias

Honestly, REMEE was a waste of money, and a cash-in with the growing trend of lucid dreaming. It does very little to help you dream, and I have yet to actually see the lights in my dream, even once. The only time I had a dream with it was because a Dream Entity asked where my mask was. Then, while lucid, the mask woke me up.

You don't mention how much effort you spent to try to configure it, and how much time you spent training to recognize lighting as dream signs, and what your LD background/frequency is without remee.

The link in my original message shows one experienced LDer who spent effort tuning REMee's settings until it got to the point where it was multiplying his LD frequency by 3x his base frequency without it. That can not be considered a failure by any means! It is a smashing success, in fact.

I'm not out to show remee is a great tool for the average Joe, doing so was never my interest in it. I want it to help in boosting *my* personal LD frequency, and I'm not afraid of spending effort to tune it, just like I'm not afraid of the effort of daytime practice to invest in my LD future.

Your post echoes the majority of the feedback I see on remee. However, I find it interesting that the one single post I was able to find (well there was one other) from:

1) an experienced LDer
2) who spent time to customize remee

showed great results, while all the "it was a waste of money" posts say very little other than just that, and as such are basically useless as data points.

And let's assume that you never see (or recognize) the lights in dreams. Then you wouldn't see the lights in masks that detected REM either, unless the reason that you never saw the lights was that remee never triggered in REM, which again one can conclude that you didn't put in the effort to map out your dreaming times and experiment with different remee settings to hit it.

I think I had my first noticing of remee lights in a dream a few nights ago. It was right around the time of my initial delay (5hrs), and I woke from a dream where I saw my some playing a video game, and I went over to watch, and the game was oddly colored, sort of monochrome orange-ish / red-ish / amber. That's a pretty subtle sign, if that was remee, and it shows the importance of considering all types of lighting/coloring signs.

I'm still experimenting with the lower light levels. Mostly @ 10%, but this above time was @ 15% (initial delay 5 hrs, incremental time I think 10 mins).

There are a lot of wrong assumptions in this post. Let me address them.

Originally Posted by FryingMan

You don't mention how much effort you spent to try to configure it, and how much time you spent training to recognize lighting as dream signs, and what your LD background/frequency is without remee.

Since you asked, before Remee, I'd have sporadic lucids. Usually about 2 to 3 a month without practice, and more with. With Remee, I tried a lot of different things to make it work, from using it daily for 30 days with various settings, including naps, to using it for WBTB only with tweaked settings to hit the sweet spot of REM. Nothing really worked. I had the REM Dreamer, which I sold, and I had more luck with that, but it was so bulky, I'd wake up more often than not if I moved wrong. When I didn't, I would see the lights and go lucid nearly every single time.

Originally Posted by FryingMan

The link in my original message shows one experienced LDer who spent effort tuning REMee's settings until it got to the point where it was multiplying his LD frequency by 3x his base frequency without it. That can not be considered a failure by any means! It is a smashing success, in fact.

I'm not out to show remee is a great tool for the average Joe, doing so was never my interest in it. I want it to help in boosting *my* personal LD frequency, and I'm not afraid of spending effort to tune it, just like I'm not afraid of the effort of daytime practice to invest in my LD future.

Your post echoes the majority of the feedback I see on remee. However, I find it interesting that the one single post I was able to find (well there was one other) from:

1) an experienced LDer
2) who spent time to customize remee

showed great results, while all the "it was a waste of money" posts say very little other than just that, and as such are basically useless as data points.

And let's assume that you never see (or recognize) the lights in dreams. Then you wouldn't see the lights in masks that detected REM either, unless the reason that you never saw the lights was that remee never triggered in REM, which again one can conclude that you didn't put in the effort to map out your dreaming times and experiment with different remee settings to hit it.

The most telling thing about the quality of the device is the actual kickstarter, of which I was a contributing member. Other than being insanely late without much offering, the devices came broken for a lot of people, late without any notification, and offered little support. About two or so months after all the Remee orders were done, the two man team started a new kickstarter for a new project unrelated to dreaming. Basically, showing they really had no interest in anything but cashing in.

I still have my Remee, and I'll experiment for one more month with it and post my results.

Originally Posted by Tiresias

I had the REM Dreamer, which I sold, and I had more luck with that, but it was so bulky, I'd wake up more often than not if I moved wrong. When I didn't, I would see the lights and go lucid nearly every single time.

Well that's hopeful, if the timing can be made right, light signalling masks can be effective.

The most telling thing about the quality of the device is the actual kickstarter, of which I was a contributing member. Other than being insanely late without much offering, the devices came broken for a lot of people, late without any notification, and offered little support. About two or so months after all the Remee orders were done, the two man team started a new kickstarter for a new project unrelated to dreaming. Basically, showing they really had no interest in anything but cashing in.

I still have my Remee, and I'll experiment for one more month with it and post my results.

That's all irrelevant to whether or not the device, assuming you get a functioning one, can be helpful to increase frequency for a reasonably experienced LDer: not a noob (someone who does regular day practice, and can have LDs, but at a lower frequency than desired, and not an expert (who presumably doesn't need it)).

I will refer again to the blog linked to in my opening post: it is existence proof of significant LD frequency boosting with remee, after considerable effort [he said two months] to customize it and adjust its settings frequently. Posts like "remee is a ripoff" with no supporting experiences or data serve no purpose. People maybe thought that remee was promising easy lucidity for Average Joe, and in that regard it may be a ripoff. But that angle holds no interest to me, a dedicated dreamer. My only interest is whether remee can help me to LD more, and I will be experimenting over the upcoming months to determine this.

Hi FryingMan - interesting thread! I had a quick look at that link you copied in your first post about the positive review of Remee, I didn't see alot of detail from the user regarding how they had fine tuned their method - was there more info somewhere I'd missed? Or have you been able to contact them? They certainly sounded as if they had worked out how to get the most out of the device somehow.

I've never used the Remee, but I have been using a small vibrating clock in a similar fashion - doing a wbtb then setting it to go off at repeating intervals. I had quite a bit of early success with this in inducing lucidity either directly (via incorporation into the dream) or indirectly (after awakenings when the stimulus woke me). But I found after awhile I started to sleep through the signals and the incorporations tailed off, presumably as my mind become subconsciously habituated to the cue.

I've been trying to think of ways to mediate this effect as there was no problem in hitting REM periods using an interval timer (as the remee does), I was wondering if you had come across any more info about how the individual you'd linked in to had achieved this.

I'd also be interested to here more about how the interval timings are limited -

For a timer-only device, the limitations on the timers are sort of disappointing. You need to aim for just one big REM cycle basically.

cheers, and good luck! - T

Originally Posted by Tlaloc

I'd also be interested to here more about how the interval timings are limited -

cheers, and good luck! - T

Thanks!

Remee has only two initial delay settings: default, and "nap". default has a range of up to about 7.5 hours, and nap has a range of up to 1.25 hours, and there is only one "signal interval" for both initial delays of up to 31 minutes. remee will continue signalling after the chosen initial delay (default or nap), every "signal interval" minutes until 13 hours is reached (or the user turns if off). You can see the full set of programming options by going to the remee site (google finds it easily) and clicking on the "program remee" tab, click through the choices to see the full set of options to programming remee.

You can't chose a different initial delay from the two programmed choices, and you can't change the signal interval, without sitting in front of a computer and applying new settings to the device.

They wanted to make it easy to use and a complex "tap the button" interface would have they thought been too much.

I'd *love* to be able to say: signal at 4.5 hours, then if I wake up at that time, OK, signal me in 2 hours. You can't do that without programming remee again because the nap delay is max 1.25 hours, and you've already set the initial delay to 4.5 hours.

I'd like the "at bedtime" setting to have a different signal interval than the nap setting. Again, can't do that without sitting at a computer to reprogram.

For example, bedtime delay of 4.5 hours, interval of 10 minutes, then nap setting of 45mins or 1 hour initial delay and interval of 15 minutes. Can't do that without getting up to reprogram it (and nap setting only goes to 31 minutes).

edit: yeah the guy doesn't go into detail into his settings, but that's sort of pointless since it's so highly individual. Brightness level, signal patterns, initial delays, all tailored to each person, what works for one person will clearly not work for another. What he did say that he did was reprogram it just about every night based on how he felt, so he really got good at predicting his REM times based on his waking condition.

My remee me falls down and prevents sleep after wbtb... No lights spotted so far...

Hey, I just spotted your thread here, FryingMan.
I've messaged you about this already, but thought I'd add it here for others to see.
I'm an experienced lucid dreamer and used no supplements/aids for the first 5 years I was inducing LDs, but over the past 2 years, I have been trialling various lucid aids as part of an experiment.

I have only used the Remee and handful of times, and I thought that I was having no success.
I noticed that I would often see the lights when I used nap mode, and would think to myself that they were going off too early because I wasn't asleep yet.
I started to wonder whether I might actually be asleep when this was happening, just dreaming that I was still lying in bed. So I decided that I would do a reality check next time, even if I thought I was awake.
I did this yesterday morning during a nap. I put the Remee on, got comfortable, and tried to fall asleep. I could still feel the Remee on my face and saw the lights flashing through my eyelids, and was convinced that I was still awake, but I did a nose plug reality check to test anyway. I could still breathe with my nose plugged and became lucid.
I'm wondering if this is happening to a lot of people who think the Remee is failing them. I know FryingMan has said that he sometimes sees the lights flashing on nap mode before he's fallen asleep. It would be interesting to have other people test this theory.

That's really interesting. I'm currently running it to signal very very frequently, I just want to either have the lights 1) wake me up, or 2) notice them in a dream. So far I only really "see" the lights when I think I'm awake and haven't yet fallen asleep. So I'll be sure to RC the next time I notice the lights and feel awake.

I've been running at 70% brightness starting at 5 hours, every 15 minutes for the past several nights. and I still think it's not waking me up and I'm not noticing them (or they're too subtle) in dreams. I'll switch to 100% brightness and set the interval to 10 minutes tonight and see how it goes (starting at 5 hours).

If that doesn't work I'll switch to all 3 patterns as blinking as that seems to get my attention the best.

My current settings:

5 hours / 1 hour / 10 minutes / no wiggle
75% / 90% / 100% (100% selected) / no ramping
split-bounce(4) / glow alt(4) / alt-blink(4) (they seems the most "annoying")

Will see how this goes for a week or so. This thing on these settings better manifest in my dreams, or at least wake me up.

I should also mention that I've only ever noticed the lights when I put the Remee on in the middle of the night/morning, on nap mode.
When I wear it from the start of the night, it often ends up coming off by the time I wake up, and I've never noticed the lights in my dreams that way so far.
I haven't altered the brightness online yet, so it's currently at 70%.

Nothing noticed last night, except when (yes I did an RC) awake.

Tonights settings: 4.5 hours / 45 minutes / 5 minutes (!!!!)

Maintaining brightness at 100%. Jeez, what does it take to notice these things? I don't want to pull the strap much tighter, but I will if I have to. Mostly the mask seems to stay in place though. I think the design would be much improved with multiple rows of LEDs, especially lower, since the mask tends the slip "up" (the nose stops it from slipping down).

No success for me the last couple of nights, either.
I've been using factory defaults until now, but I've just changed my settings:

Brightness: 100%
Initial delay: 4.5 hours
Nap delay: 10 mins
Signal interval: 5 mins

Good luck!

Well, yay, progress of sorts, I saw the lights in a dream last night with the "nuclear option" settings of last night. However, I was *driving* at the time, and I became blinded instantly, which freaked me out so much I woke up in a flash and tore the mask off my face in a panic.

The lights weren't red in the dream, they were white/clear, which leads me to believe I've seen them once before when dozing lightly, when they were also white/clear.

As a plus to the shock waking, I had good recall of some short dreams leading up to that moment.

FryingMan, have you changed your RC to one that includes light -- either looking for it or reacting to it?

If you haven't, it might be worth a try.

Originally Posted by Sageous

FryingMan, have you changed your RC to one that includes light -- either looking for it or reacting to it?

If you haven't, it might be worth a try.

Yes, I added light-based signals to my vigilance: bright light/reflections, traffic lights, brake lights, any group of lights in fact or bright conditions, about 2 months ago I started in preparation for acquiring some LD mask.

Last night was the first time I noticed the effect of remee's lights in any dream. Hopefully next time it hits I won't be "driving" so I won't panic at the visual "interruption." Haha it was anything but subtle, I've been preparing for very slight changes since a lot of the LD literature on light masks say the changes can be very slight on the scene, but this was BOOM total instant unexpected change in visuals, so I should prepare for that case as well!

Well, good, this means I *can* see lights in the dreams! Full blast: 100% brightness, every 5 minutes. I actually woke up, saw the lights, then dozed back to sleep (sort of amazed that I could do that within the 5 minute window!) Now to slowly back off the brightness and the frequency to find the sweet spot where I can stay asleep but still notice the lights in dreams.

I woke up with the lights flashing multiple times last night. Didn't notice any within dreams, though.
Perhaps I'll take the brightness back down a notch.

I did have dreams about the Remee, and witnessed someone going into a trance and having a lucid dream, but I don't think it was triggered by lights.

I've not worn remee for the last 2-3 nights and have had much improved recall. Not sure why. Maybe just my increased motivation to build back the recall and not related to remee at all. I think I sleep better a bit without it, even though it blocks out light a bit better than my plain sleep mask.

Looking forwards to the Aurora. My sleep patterns are too irregular with my family life to pin down a predictable time for hitting REM. Best use is probably in nap mode as ~Dreamer~ noted, and putting it on in the middle of the night, rather than wearing it from bedtime.

Unfortunately/fortunately Aurora is not a mask, it sits on the forehead. It won't work with a mask since it must read the position of the eyes. I wonder if it will work on your side with your head against a pillow so one eye may be blocked. I'm used to sleeping with a mask now and may not be able to without one.

I've heard of Remee users having more success when using the nap function alongside WBTB. That being said, to me that is a compromise on the poor functioning of the product. Any self-proclaimed 'lucid dreaming mask' without actigraphy or EEG isn't worth its weight in dog turd. Luckily the charlatanism of the Remee team hasn't harmed interest in legitimate products, Aurora and NeuroOn were both recently funded on kickstarter.

As for the remarkable increase in frequency for the Remee user cited in the OP, I believe a more significant increase would be made by focusing self-awareness and memory. I really think that it would be more work to fight against the inherent limitations of Remee to get it to work than to work with the fundamentals.

I really don't care about remee founder claims, I don't care whether it's a "scam," etc. I want any aid to boost lucidity that I can get my hands on -- my dry spells are very long and very demotivating, the current one approaching a month (a MONTH, the time it took to get my first LD from zero experience!), despite non-stop intense day work every single day. I'm upping my night work and hoping that my day and night work will meet eventually (my recall for the past two nights has been way up and looking promising, including a near-lucid). I understand that remee is lights on a timer, nothing else. But I just need a little nudge, and until better products are available, I'm using what I can.

So for those of us *doing* the work, and still not getting lucid for long spells, hopefully lucid aids can help to get the ball rolling and keep it rolling.

^^ I hope that you understand that that day work you're doing has its own intrinsic value side from LD prep, FryingMan, and that you never feel like you're wasting your time, even during dry spells.

Also, if the Aurora works for you (and I hope it does), remember that you still must do your day work, because it ain't the machine that's making you lucid -- it's only loosening the door a bit.

Oh, I look upon it all as long-term investment, absolutely, and don't consider it a waste at all. I just want some reasonably frequent short-term results to keep it interesting .
Any night with decent recall is a successful night, in my mind. Dreaming is awesome!