
MIT Researchers Have Developed a ‘System for Dream Control’ - dsr12
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ywxjvg/steel-ball-control-dreams-dormio-mit-hypnagogia
======
veli_joza
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.

~~~
testplzignore
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.

~~~
joslin01
These have happened intermittently through my life when my stress is high.
This is only personal clue I can give to you "why" otherwise maybe you're just
getting good at it.

In my last episode, I was floating toward a wall and all these thoughts were
firing, "you're in a dream", "you'll go through the wall", "don't be afraid"
but the rational side that felt like I was going to slam into a wall freaked
out just at the wall & I woke. I still wish I just let myself slip through the
wall..

~~~
loblollyboy
I reliably have dreams that involve flooding when I am stressed or frustrated.
I'm not particularly good at remembering dreams, don't try, but after one
dream that seemed particularly 'symbolic,' I read some Jung and now I
recognize that, in almost every dream I do remember, there are archetypes and
symbols that he mentions. Jung wasn't really 'systematic,' but there are on
order of 10-100 sub/objects in dreams that he emphasizes quite a bit and I see
these in mine. Also, I tend to only remember a dream at times when my
'subconscious is [probably] trying to tell me something'

~~~
joslin01
Yep, I see dreams same way and enjoyed reading Jung a lot in college. It makes
sense that stress would induce more dreams if you saw dreams as mechanisms to
heal your own mind, or at very least, point out the problem. I have read in
other texts that we live out our ego fantasies in dreams (both scary &
exhilarating) because otherwise it's a "pain" we can't handle until we get a
taste for it.

You might find the dream dictionary[1] interesting.

[1] -
[http://www.dreammoods.com/dreamdictionary/](http://www.dreammoods.com/dreamdictionary/)

------
squeaky-clean
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.

~~~
danielskogly
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.

~~~
fudged71
I had the exact same experience, it was really freaky and I had to turn it
off.

------
jamessb
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/)

------
goodroot
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
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.

~~~
psyc
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
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.

------
tauntz

      > 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
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.

~~~
Nition
I was thinking even simpler: Maybe she started talking about the orange ball
earlier, but he was asleep (or mostly asleep) at that point, and so started
dreaming about it. Then he woke up at the last bit of the story.

------
komali2
>“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
Lots of Greg Egan's work deals with consciousness. For example, "Permutation
City" is great.

------
fnordsensei
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
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
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.

~~~
optimalsolver
Thanks. Very interesting.

------
sandworm101
>> ... 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.

~~~
captainbland
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
Reminds me of Brave New World.

------
braindongle
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.

------
ph0rque
[http://pbfcomics.com/comics/the-
dreamcatcher-3000/](http://pbfcomics.com/comics/the-dreamcatcher-3000/)

------
sfink
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

------
qwerty456127
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.

------
icnd1ccent
I can't believe no one mentioned Queensryche's "Silent Lucidity" 'till now.

~~~
mindcrime
I remember now...

------
everdev
> 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
A cue* not queue

~~~
piyh
queue of cues

------
feedbeef
Also see:

[https://www.artofmanliness.com/2015/02/18/hypnagogic-
nap/](https://www.artofmanliness.com/2015/02/18/hypnagogic-nap/)

------
anigbrowl
_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

------
ve55
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.

~~~
dosycorp
I think it's interesting. Tech to create a feedback loop to keep you in a
particular state.

When I was a kid I really had this thing for switching a light switch between
off and on. Know what I mean? There's a spot you can hold it between off and
on where the light flickers, and buzzes, at low power, sort of randomly.

I guess this is like that for wake-sleep. Cool state to be in and to get there
without drugs, concentration, or whatever else. Very simple.

Can you lucid dream/OBE? Was it possible to learn?

~~~
OnMyPhone
I'm not who you're replaying to, but...

When I was learning how to lucid dream, one of the triggers that I used to
tell I was in a dream was flipping a light switch on and off. When I saw
nothing happened, I knew it was a dream. Another big one I use is looking at
any words, numbers or clocks to see if they were legit, or random characters /
garbage.

I started to "feel" what a lucid dream was because I would get some nightmares
that would eventually wake me up. It felt real and I could remember everything
about it (for a few minutes). The big ones always involved me falling from a
building, and waking up once I hit the pavement.

Over time, I forced myself to try to mostly stay asleep during these
nightmares. I remember falling from stuff, hitting the pavement, waking up,
but keeping my eyes closed and trying to keep from waking up. It got to the
point where I would "half" wake up, but still be in the nightmares. Then with
some practice, I could do that to normal dreams too.

I can't really do it on demand, so it's more if I am having a crazy dream, I
can usually snap out of it and fully control everything about it.

~~~
basementcat
+1 on looking at words.

I once was having dinner with a girl and the topic of conversation drifted to
dreams and how one might tell if one is in an "Inception" type scenario. I
used the menu as an example-- read a line from the menu, close the booklet,
reopen and reread the same line. I told her if the two lines aren't the same
line, you're dreaming (the rendering hardware in your brain apparently uses
different PRNG seeds for procedural texture generation).

I paused awkwardly as I realized that items in the menu kept changing each
time I reread them.

She was very offended when I told her she was a figment of my imagination.

~~~
veli_joza
I like your explanation for changing lines of text, but I don't think brain is
actively generating any content. I think brain is just trying its best to
apply daytime pattern recognition to un-orchestrated neural activity. The most
recently learned patterns are the strongest, which is why often you'll dream
stuff that happened that day. If you spend a lot of time performing single
activity (like gaming), the dream will be intensive and focused; this is
called the Tetris effect.

------
anikishaev
arduino + bend sensor, really?

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

------
mrbill
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._

~~~
pbhjpbhj
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)

~~~
mrbill
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)

