
Gamma Wave Brain Zaps Induce Lucid Dreaming - adammichaelc
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/body/gamma-wave-zaps-to-the-brain-induce-lucid-dreaming/
======
orthecreedence
Lucid dreaming is one of the coolest things we can do. People think that
dreams aren't real, but that's far from the truth. They aren't real in the
sense that if I find a COOL WATCH or I win $2000 in a dream I can't take it
with me to "real life," but when you think about what our life really is, it's
a collection of experiences...not accumulation of physical objects.

In dreams you can have the same _experiences_ you have in waking life but even
more so. You can take these experiences with you when you are done dreaming.
Lucid dreaming takes this even further. You can imagine a problem you have is
a tangible object (a bug or something) in your dream and squish it. Although
this seems purely symbolic, you can take the feeling of having _dealt with a
problem_ into waking life, which will give you more energy to do the same in
your interactions with waking life.

Not to mention in lucid dreams you can fly everywhere you want to go, you can
have sex with whoever you want however you want, you can be a bear or a toad
or a tree, you can be three of yourself at the same time, you can slow down
time, you can travel to the bottom of the ocean and you can see distant
planets or the inside of a star. Is it real? Yes, because you are actually
having these experiences, even if you are the only one having them.

~~~
hitchhiker999
This was very nice to see written down. Thank you for that. No doubt as LD
becomes more and more popular we're going to see a lot of questionable info on
the subject.

Some people are terrified of these experiences, perhaps with their own
'demons' to deal with. Others, many others, consider it one of the grooviest
gifts imaginable :)

It's a unique thing, individual, but as it gets more known - we're going to
see people trying to fit it into a simple box (as we always do) - and nothing
useful will come of that.

Re: Gamma waves, hmm - yeah, isn't that like reading a frequency coming off a
CRT and then trying to retransmit that frequency back to derive the original
image? You need a serious understanding of the device to be able to do that.
Perhaps it _might_ be able to help 'induce' the state with the individual's
help - _maybe_.

------
mcphilip
I first read about lucid dreaming 20 years ago when I was twelve. It was
treated more as a new age fringe thing back then, but I had a blast
experimenting with it. My favorite dreamscape involved a purely abstract state
of mind where I could symbolically visualize components of algorithms --
nearly all of my work writing motion detection algorithms that worked in
complex outdoor scenarios was refined in my sleep.

That being said, I eventually "gave up" lucid dreaming after 10 years or so.
At a gut level it felt like sleep and dreams are best left to the subconscious
-- a neural defrag, if you will. Personally I feel much more rested now that I
make no effort to remember, much less control, my dreams.

~~~
hitchhiker999
I also practice LD (started at age 10-ish, now 38) but can't agree with your
'gut level' feeling. I feel it's what we are meant to be doing, rather than
regular dreaming.

I am more rested, and more awake the next day. It continues to enrich my life
in many ways. But yes, it's just another arbitrary choice, we're both going by
'gut' instinct.

 _in my first LD at 10, i built a go-kart from tools I created on the wall
(where the school black-board was), and then flew out of the window on it_ \-
Pretty much a win for a 10 yr old.

~~~
read
Is there something specific you do to help you LD? Can you share more about
your experience?

 _I also practice LD_

This comment struck me as odd, since I thought LD wasn't something you can
induce on your own, but when I Googled how to lucid dream I came across
instructions for how to lucid dream: [http://www.wikihow.com/Lucid-
Dream](http://www.wikihow.com/Lucid-Dream)

Another question: has anyone had the feeling when they are in a dream that
they can't move? I want to force myself to roll over to the other side and
something invisible holds me there. I noticed this happens mostly when it's
cold.

~~~
hitchhiker999
Hey, I posted this elsewhere [http://www.world-of-lucid-dreaming.com/52-ways-
to-have-lucid...](http://www.world-of-lucid-dreaming.com/52-ways-to-have-
lucid-dreams.html)

Also:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/LucidDreaming](http://www.reddit.com/r/LucidDreaming)
(cant believe i'm linking reddit)

I started when I was young, somebody told me it was possible so the following
night I tried it - and it worked. Such is the wonder of youth :)

It comes and goes, so it does require continual 'retraining' \- basically find
a technique that works for you and give it your best effort. At the end of the
day I suspect these 'techniques' are merely 'permission slips' allowing our
brain to accept that it's possible. Either way, they can work.

The thing you have described is 'sleep paralysis' when in waking life (at
least in the LD circles) - it's a very good sign, apparently you're meant to
chill and just let it be. If you really needed to move (emergency), your brain
would override the 'state' and allow you to (that has happened to people, the
body 'unlocks' immediately).

I don't know what it means in dream life, other than it would be a good cue to
remember that you have FULL control in your dream. When it happens next,
remember this chat, and make yourself superman.. use your superhuman powers to
break free :D Whatevvvver you like, just know that you can actually do that,
because many of us do every night.

I'm no expert, since I didn't need to go through any hardships to achieve it.
So perhaps there are better people for more 'concrete' advice. Good luck, it's
lots of fun.

------
te_platt
Note: gamma wave, not gamma particles. Gamma wave refers to an aspect of brain
activity. Maybe I'm the only one who was confused by the title but I feel
better knowing people aren't being irradiated for the experiment.

~~~
md224
Yeah, that threw me off as well. For anyone interested in actual brain lasers:

[http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fnsys.2014.00...](http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fnsys.2014.00036/full)

------
gwern
>> If I understand correctly, the participants rated their experience of these
three factors on a scale of 0 (strongly disagree that I had such an
experience) to 5 (strongly agree). Now if we look to see the scores they gave
for how much dream insight, dissociation and control they had, we find that
the averages for the gamma stimulation condition are around 0.6, 1.3, and 0.5
respectively. > > That’s a pretty low score, even if it’s higher than it
would’ve been without the brain stimulation.

Maybe, maybe not. Averages work for some things, not so much for others.
Suppose 4-5 are no-fooling-definitely-lucid dreams, and 1-3 are questionable.
If the average is being driven by a few dreams falling into '5' and otherwise
scores are unchanged, you'd get a worthwhile effect but only a small shift in
average on your 1-5 scale. I'd want to read [http://www.blogs.uni-
mainz.de/fb05philosophie/files/2013/04/...](http://www.blogs.uni-
mainz.de/fb05philosophie/files/2013/04/Voss-et-al-2013_Measuring-
Consciousness-in-Dreams.pdf) more carefully looking at how the overall rating
distribution looks split by condition and whether the rating scale is masking
a binary effect.

~~~
gone35
Yes yes, you are definitely onto something here.

Awfully, the standard deviations of almost every item in their validation
study [1, Table 1] is _greater_ than the means --in some cases even twice as
big--, which themselves are very low (the majority are below 2, and several
are below 1). This is, at a minimum, strongly indicative of bimodality --which
would make sense since, among other things, participants were drawn mostly
from Bonn University's lucid dreaming student club [p.11]. As a matter of
fact, they report they _threw away_ two data sets (!) precisely because of
"extreme answering style (all items were scored as 0 or 5)" [ _ibid_ ].

Why they didn't heed these warning signs (and at the very least use medians
instead of means from then on) is beyond me.

[1] [http://www.blogs.uni-
mainz.de/fb05philosophie/files/2013/04/...](http://www.blogs.uni-
mainz.de/fb05philosophie/files/2013/04/Voss-et-al-2013_Measuring-
Consciousness-in-Dreams.pdf)

------
DAddYE
Since I was 10 I do lucid dreams. There are days that I struggle half a day to
be 100% sure I'm awake and the other half to assimilate it.

For me this is really exhausting for three reasons:

1\. the brain needs to properly sleep 2\. they are so rich of details 3\. they
condense in 7/8 hours maybe 5/10 years of life

Basically they are what I think is a kind of parallel universe. I'm used to
tell the entire "dream" to my GF. She always been astonished by them. They
seems absolutely unrelated to anything I saw hear etc... during the day, they
are in some case "boring" in the sense that I'm dreaming me in a totally
different life, job etc... nothing "exciting" or "strange".

~~~
politician
Your brain can only generate so much pseudorandom visual imagery per second;
an effect that you can exploit to control how much and whether you're lucid
dreaming. For example, if you fly up while looking down eventually you'll
overwhelm your ability to generate a detailed geography and wake up. Or at
least, that's how I manipulate my LD state.

------
argumentum
Up till my early 20s, I used to lucid dream so much, I thought it was the
normal state of dreaming (for everyone). Over the last few years the frequency
has declined to maybe a couple times a month.

Of course, you never know how much you'd miss a thing until its gone. In this
case, I didn't even know _it was a thing_ before it started fading away.

I'd certainly let my brain be zapped to get this _superpower_ back.

~~~
Sanddancer
What's your sleep cycle like? Do you tend to fall asleep out of utter
exhaustion, or do you tend to give yourself a reasonable bedtime and wind down
period. I've found that I dream lucidly a lot less when I've let my sleep
hygene go to crap.

As an aside, because of being a naturally lucid dreamer, nightmares confuse me
and on the rare event I have them -- once or twice a decade -- they freak me
out a lot more. That absolute loss of control of one's subconscious mind is
near unfathomable to me. I can remember being six or seven and my sister
telling me about a nightmare she had and me being absolutely confused about
them; the thoughts of being injured in a dream was just something that
happened in movies.

~~~
argumentum
Interesting .. I tend to "become" lucid in the middle of a non-lucid dream
(nightmare or otherwise). Rarely will I be lucid from the get go.

So when I gain "control", the initial scenario is set. Sometimes, it's quite a
fascinating "twist" on recent real-life events. Other times it's Alice and the
Wonderland style craziness.

Often I think I'm in a partially Lucid dream. I _know_ I'm dreaming, I can
mostly do what I want (including completely changing the scenario) but I am
also not in control of everything that happens, particularly what characters
appear or what they say/do in response to me. It's a bit like living in an
alternative universe.

The strangest aspect is how realistic the characters are, particularly the
real-life people. I'll be talking to a friend, and get a conversation that is
so like that person that I'll often forget that it was said in a dream. This
has led to some strange real-life conversations, lol.

------
joshontheweb
I recently had a lucid dream for the first time. Really interesting
experience. It was triggered by the fact that I plunged to a city at the
bottom of the ocean and could still breath. I realized this was impossible and
became lucid. I decided to try and have some fun with it so I 'willed' myself
to have a gun. It worked, kind of. I had something in my hand that i could
shoot with but it was sort of undefined. Kind of like if you are playing a 3d
fps and the texture for your gun doesn't load properly. It was kind of
amorphous and brown and glitchy. I suspect because I don't know a ton about
guns and i didn't really specify what kind of gun or anything. Perhaps next
time ill imagine an ak47 and see if I get more definition.

I played around shooting things for awhile but it was draining to keep control
so I gave up and became batman, was knocked off a bridge, and broke my back on
a cement pillar. I woke up screaming "You just killed Batman!".

------
gfodor
As a graphics nerd, the handful of times I've had genuine lucid dreaming (when
experimenting with it in college) was incredible. In the dream I would would
focus on taking in the behavior of light and texture on surfaces and trying to
gauge its quality from a computer graphics perspective, and always found the
'simulation' absolutely stunning. I remember encountering a large rabbit once
and ran my fingers through it's fur and it felt and looked real. It's
mindboggling how well the brain can simulate a fake environment when you go
lucid, it's really beyond comprehension to me how it's able to do so. The
brain can basically simulate the rendering equation in real time (or trick
yourself into thinking it is, which is the same thing really.)

~~~
gulpahum
> The brain can basically simulate the rendering equation in real time (or
> trick yourself into thinking it is, which is the same thing really.)

I believe that your brain is rendering the reality for your consciousness even
when you are awake. There is a lot of filtering and processing between your
senses and your consciousness. For instance, your eyes produces a lot of noise
which is filtered away. They have a blind spot [1], but your consciousness is
not even aware of it! So, what you see when you are awake is not really the
noisy distorted vision that your eyes have.

In addition to that low level smoothing and filtering, your subconscious has
reconstructed completely the reality for your conscious mind: "This is because
our brains consist of two relatively distinct regions. One, the cognitive
unconscious, makes informed guesses and delivers them to the second, conscious
part, which supports our awareness of what we are seeing while knowing little
or nothing of how what we see has been constructed." [2]

"All we’re actually doing is seeing an internal model of the world; we’re not
seeing what’s out there, we’re seeing just our internal model of it. And
that’s why, when you move your eyes around, all you’re doing is updating that
model." [3]

So, when your are dreaming, the subconscious mind is just "rendering"
something else than reality for your conscious mind.

[1] [http://io9.com/5804116/why-every-human-has-a-blind-spot---
an...](http://io9.com/5804116/why-every-human-has-a-blind-spot---and-how-to-
find-yours)

[2]
[http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/node/2604](http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/node/2604)

[3] [http://aminotes.tumblr.com/post/7722763662/david-eagleman-
on...](http://aminotes.tumblr.com/post/7722763662/david-eagleman-on-how-we-
constructs-reality-time)

~~~
gfodor
I'm being specific, I'm not talking about "rendering", I'm talking about the
rendering equation, which is the mathematical formulation of light transport.
I agree it's amazing the brain is able to interpret the light coming into my
eyes into a perception of reality, but the startling thing about lucid dreams
is that it is also apparently able to very convincingly simulate the external
behavior of _light itself_ properly as well, without external stimuli. (Which
is currently an intractable problem computationally FYI.) For example, when I
turn my head in a lucid dream under conscious control, reflections, texture,
etc, behave what appear to be normal, in real time. This blows my mind.

------
asd
If you want lucid dreaming without having to wait for a Gamma Wave Zapper,
there is one alternative. Sertraline (Zoloft). I've been on and off of it a
few times in the past 10 years for anxiety. After a few weeks of being on it,
the lucid dreaming kicks in. Sometimes I wish I could record these dreams and
make them into movies. It's quite the experience.

~~~
hitchhiker999
Or you could practice any one of the many natural techniques which many of us
use daily. The drugs and gamma waves are unnecessary.

[http://www.world-of-lucid-dreaming.com/52-ways-to-have-
lucid...](http://www.world-of-lucid-dreaming.com/52-ways-to-have-lucid-
dreams.html)

I know it's not a 'quick fix' \- but (no offence intended, just IMHO) it feels
rather disrespectful to randomly flood the brain with chemicals to make it
'perform.' The chemistry in there is extremely complex, I am terrified to mess
around with it.

Much the same way I wouldn't dive into a complex dev project randomly changing
methods, unless I knew the larger scope.

~~~
nemo1618
I wouldn't scorn such "shortcuts." It's difficult for people to put sustained
effort into something without having some sense of what the payoff will be
like. "Cheating" once or twice can provide sufficient motivation for
developing the skill permanently. Psychedelic drugs, for example, can provide
a flash of mystical enlightenment that motivates people to begin meditating.

~~~
hitchhiker999
At no point did I scorn such "shortcuts" \- read what I wrote without the
assumption that I'm anti-drugs. I wanted to point out that you're playing with
complex chemistry, and something as strong as sertraline chloride is a serious
choice.

Also sertraline chloride vs something like (as an example) DMT - are very much
not the same thing. DMT being a natural, powerful psychedelic used for many
years in many forms by many cultures.

I wouldn't compare mushrooms to Zolpidem either, though the effects are
similar. One is not like the other. Zolpidem _(branded as stilnox at the
time)_ gave me very similar effects, I basically had a ??real-life lucid
dream?? within 20 mins of taking it. I stopped immediately.

Either way, to each his/her own - I merely wanted to offer a different
perspective. If it works for you, go for it.

------
jere
>The sweet spot was 40 Hertz. Zapping sleeping volunteers at this frequency,
part of the so-called gamma wave band, led their brains to produce brain waves
of the same frequency, the researchers found, which triggered lucidity 77
percent of the time, as determined by self-reports from the dreamers after
they were awoken.

>Now if we look to see the scores they gave for how much dream insight,
dissociation and control they had, we find that the averages for the gamma
stimulation condition are around 0.6, 1.3, and 0.5 respectively.

I don't understand. A score of 0.6 for insight means, at best, 40% strongly
disagreed that they knew they were dreaming and 60% perhaps _moderately
disagreed_ (score=1). Some higher scores for the successes would result in
even more than 40% _strongly disagreeing_ that they knew they were awake. I
could see it having an effect for a small number of people, but how does that
translate into "triggered lucidity 77 percent of the time."

------
hdivider
Highly interesting effect, but note that the extent of lucid dreaming here is
(self-) reported to be rather low:

" _Despite the robust methodology, I think these headlines are getting carried
away. Here’s why. Lucid dreaming was defined by higher scores in participants’
feelings of insight (knowing that they were dreaming); dissociation (taking a
third person perspective); and control (being able to shape events). I looked
up the paper where the researchers first described their scale for measuring
these factors. If I understand correctly, the participants rated their
experience of these three factors on a scale of 0 (strongly disagree that I
had such an experience) to 5 (strongly agree). Now if we look to see the
scores they gave for how much dream insight, dissociation and control they
had, we find that the averages for the gamma stimulation condition are around
0.6, 1.3, and 0.5 respectively._ "

------
wturner
I had my first lucid dream when I was 16 years old. About 10 years ago I had a
dream that I can only express as a self induced DMT experience. It happened
during a time where I was in an extreme amount of "outside of myself" anxiety.
I didn't know what DMT was at the time and only drew parallels after the fact
from listening to interviews and reading a book on the subject. Since then
I've had a few lucid dreams where I'm right on the verge of 'ripping open the
universe' in DMT-speak. Anyway, it was life changing to say the least so I
enjoy articles like these.

------
rsaarelm
People are already making DIY transcranial direct current stimulation gadgets
for themselves. The setup apparently isn't much more complicated than a
regular battery and two electrodes taped to your scalp. Someone at Reddit also
seems to be working on making a consumer device for the lucid dreaming thing:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/LucidDreaming/comments/25aos9/publis...](http://www.reddit.com/r/LucidDreaming/comments/25aos9/published_in_nature_neuroscience_today_lucid/)

------
darkmighty
I wonder if staring at 40Hz refresh rate screens could produce a similar
effect? I have a screen with a flickering backlight at a frequency just
outside perception. If I use it for prolonged periods before bed, I can
perceive a 'flickering afterglow' for minutes while trying to sleep.

~~~
kaybe
I think that's like playing tetris or 2048 for too long.

(Depending on how long one played, there are overlays of the game in normal
vision for quite a while. Or your brain is trying to do the pattern matching
of the game to normal objects. (I've seen reports that people's brains were
trying to combine cars of the same colour for example.))

------
learc83
The half a dozen or so times I can remember lucid dreaming I always try to
fly. The only problem is that I start floating and can't control it and I
start tumbling--it feels exactly like the point when you're tipping back in
your chair and you realize you're going to fall.

------
stefan_kendall3
I find normal dreaming much more fun. It's like playing Stanley Parable for
the first time, instead of of opening Garry's Mod...alone.

I'll pick a Stanley Parable any day over Garry's Mod.

~~~
bornabox
Thanks for the Tip on Stanley's Parable, never heard of it. Sounds very
interesting, will try the demo now. Thanks.

------
seanv
sign me up!

------
xarball
Can I give. Money. To have that?

-The internet.

