Tag: dream

Professor Guy Leschinzer interview

During the Covid pandemic, I did a lot to sort out my sleep. I also read a few books about sleep including the popular Why we sleep by Matthew Walker and The Nocturnal Brain by Guy Leschziner. Then said…

I’m sure many will disagree, but I’d recommend The Nocturnal Brain over Why we sleep. Although I will admit it is a harder read, due to some of the experiences explained in some detail.

Its not a criticism of why we sleep but the nocturnal brain had so much more depth and watching this full interview with Leschziner, really confirms the level of depth and experience he has witnessed.

My weird lucid dream: Google’s relaunch into tablets?

Old trational Japanese house

I had a strange dream last night… No not that kind of a dream!

I have been doing a number of sleeping/dreaming tests during the pandemic including trying build back up my ability to lucid dream.

With that, I had quite a amazing one last night (Wednesday 2nd Feb 2022)

I lucid dreamed I was seeing the Google’s new attempt at the tablet market. It was different size tablets, from 7inches to 13inches. I assume it might have been the news about root access to the remarkable 2 earlier the same day, which got me thinking. The noteworthy part of the dream was the sales room was in a traditional Japanese wooden house (complete opposite of  apple’s white and glass stores) a distance from the centre of town, surrounded by lots grass and water. Plus the tablets were housed in wood rather than plastic or metal.

There were many pastel colours from yellow, purple, red,  greens, browns and blacks. The tablets were quite thin but comfortable to hold. The tablet supported both finger control and a thin pen like stylus. The screen had some different kind of technology, like colour ink but a more vivid.  I expected to see a new futuristic version of Android to be installed on picking one up. But instead was greeted with Fuchsia.

Other features? Multiple day battery, Google tensor chip, light to carry, usual wireless connections including bluetooth, wifi, nfc, 5g but no cameras and not waterproof only dust proof. All for 349 pounds?

Later the same day I heard the news story that Google is rethinking tablets again. Honestly had no idea but I don’t think for how great the tablets were I was dreaming, google is going to do wood tablets… or will they *wink*

The dream has become their reality

Inception Mombasa

Imran posted a link to me from Wired magazine around Lucid Dreaming.

I had a good old read and found it very interesting and similar to how I’ve understood the current state of lucid dreaming.

Lucid dreaming has been slowly gaining prominence in recent years. The release of Christopher Nolan’s 2010 science-fiction blockbuster Inception— in which corporate spies sneak into their marks’ dreams to steal their secrets and implant bad ideas — was a landmark moment. (The spies use a top as a tool for reality tests; if it spins indefinitely, then they know they are in the dream state; if it falls, they are awake.) Nolan said that the film was inspired by his own experience of lucid dreaming and that its ambiguous ending—the camera lingers on a spinning top, leaving viewers to wonder whether or not it will fall—should be taken to mean that “perhaps all levels of reality are valid.” Google searches for “lucid dreaming” spiked around the movie’s release and have never returned to pre-2010 levels. And the internet, of course, has helped. A constantly updated Lucid Dreaming forum on Reddit has accumulated more than 190,000 subscribers.

Later in the piece there is some rough and ready double blind experiments with Galantamine in the equivalent Inception’s Mombasa dream den.

The workshops have also provided him with a way to move his own research ahead. They have given him access to a group of people who are willing to participate in his studies, even if they aren’t certified by a lab.

Eames: They come here every day to sleep?

Elderly Bald Man: [towards Cobb] No. They come to be woken up. The dream has become their reality. Who are you to say otherwise?

Extending REM has been a dream (pun intended) for many and Galantamine might be a step towards this. Its been mentioned on a few blogs and forums I’ve seen but never really looked into it. Any notion of a drug to extend this is worrying for me personally but like microdosing each to their own I guess.

Galantamine is not a magic bullet, though; it can trigger nasty side effects like headaches, nausea, and insomnia. And it can work too well—cautionary tales of galantamine-induced nightmares can be found alongside success stories. “It felt like my brain was being drawn and quartered,” one lucid dreamer wrote. “I kept falling back asleep into these bizarre dreams that I can only describe as my head being scraped against the bottom of a submerged iceberg.” “It felt like I was falling through my bed and all these loud screeching sounds and vibrations started happening,” testified another. “It was so scary and I felt paralyzed.”

The wired piece centres around Galantamine and the study of it on Lucid dreaming. The study to date is questionable, but like the quantified self community, its good to see someone trying something. Although I personally would have declared something under competing interests, as Stephen LaBerge did setup the Lucidity Institute.

Regardless its all very interesting and thanks to Imran for the post…

What does your circadian rhythm say?

It’s always been clear that sleep is a big deal and more and more research is coming out to show the massive effect sleep can have in our lives. Especially at critical times of our development.

I have been tracking (quantifying) my sleeping solidly for about 3-5 years and its surprising to see the effect of the things like different alcohol drink, cheese, coffee, milk and chocolate. I also been to many events, with the last one being Cafe Sci: Myth and Science of Sleep. I generally track my dreams now, which is quite different from previously when I use to track them with a lot more detail.

Tracking sleep can seem a but of nonsense; I mean leaving your phone on your bed while you sleep or using a wristband device to collect data can seem poor for data collection. However with some calibration and a few months data, it becomes clear through the patterns whats good quality and bad quality sleep; oppose to the length of sleep. The key being the cycles of sleep… Light sleep into REM into deep sleep into light sleep and over again.

Sleep as Android data

Here is me sleeping in a hotel for 5hrs 49mins after drinking cocktails in London during the week of Mozfest. You can see the alcohol puts me into deep sleep quickly but it takes a while for my body to get back into its normal sleep pattern. I also had a done a lot of walking that day.

graph_detail_20171019_1.11

This clearly shows although I had 7hrs 21mins of sleep when I woke up, I felt like crap. To be fair I had red wine, and was on cold meds to get rid of my long lingering cold. Once again I was in a hotel, this time in Sarajevo. No coffee this time.

graph_detail_20171119_1.30

This is from todays sleep, even with a few scoops of ice cream and coffee, I slept extremely well and woke up feeling pretty fresh and ready to take on the world.

I use Sleep as Android with my Pebble watch. I do sync everything to Google Fit, Google Drive and Dropbox to make a personal back up for myself.

Ultimately I would clearly say I have learned so much by looking at the patterns, especially over a longer period of time.

What do neural networks dream?

Neural net dreams
Neural net “dreams”— generated purely from random noise, using a network trained on places by MIT Computer Science and AI Laboratory.

James at work pointed me in the direction of Google’s neural network project.

Artificial Neural Networks have spurred remarkable recent progress in image classification and speech recognition. But even though these are very useful tools based on well-known mathematical methods, we actually understand surprisingly little of why certain models work and others don’t. So let’s take a look at some simple techniques for peeking inside these networks.

We train an artificial neural network by showing it millions of training examples and gradually adjusting the network parameters until it gives the classifications we want. The network typically consists of 10-30 stacked layers of artificial neurons. Each image is fed into the input layer, which then talks to the next layer, until eventually the “output” layer is reached. The network’s “answer” comes from this final output layer.

The results are right out of a trippy dream or a hallucination.

Inceptionism: Google goes deeper into Neural Networks

Inception is a metaphor for cinema?

Abandoned Cinema

…One of the coolest ideas behind the film “Inception” is that the entire film was widely reported on the internet to be a metaphor for cinema. Cinema creates an artificial dream world and invites the audience into that dream that we then fill with our subconscious. We already have dream sharing technology. It’s called cinema.I am a story junkie and I am immersion junkie.

The dream is real…? Now that makes sense…

I had never heard this but then again at the build up of Inception, I was kinda of busy. Mind blown!

This was taken from a interview with Jason Silva. It really got me thinking while reading it on my kindle today. I specially love this reply to Why are you so fascinated about what happens to our brains when we watch movies?

Diana Slattery writes that Immersion is a “necessary precursor for any kind of interpersonal persuasion or transformation to occur”..  Janet Murray writes that we “long to be immersed” and that we “actively metabolize belief in story”… because we are effectively narrative beings.

I’m fascinated by the liminal spaces we enter when we are absorbed by cinema: that magical borderland between dreams and reality, the space of archetype, of myth, of madness and ecstasy, the landscape of the imagination, freed from the constraints of time/space/ distance.
Cinema is the realm of subjectivity. The only technology that allows us to enter the mind of another.  Cinema is cartography for the mind.   As Gene Youngblood wrote: “cinema reflects mankind’s historical drive to manifest his consciousness outside of his mind in front of his eyes”
Love it… We long to be immersed, we have always wanted to manifest our consciousness for others to be immersed in…

Dreamboard starts a trend

What people dreamabout

Dreamboard I have wrote about a few times before and I have been using the application on my tablet to remember my dreams. But recently people like Simon have been contacting me about shadow which to be fair sounds a lot more like a cross between Dreamboard and Lucidpedia.

Building a community of dreamers sounds cool but very difficult to do. I don’t know if a kickstarter project is the best way, specially when you have the likes of the same information on lucidpedia and many other places across the web. Nope I would suggest something like OKTrends is the way to go. Data like I suggested for mydreamscape would be super valuable to many people including advertisers.

But of course dreamboard are already two steps down that road…

Dreamboard, the largest database of dreams in the world – obtained by a patented system for data collection – has officially entered the second stage of its development: the analysis of the great amount of data collected with a scientific and multidisciplinary approach in order to identify patterns of different nature.

Our scientific team has grown, and is now guided by Professor Patrick McNamara, Ph.D, Associate Professor of Neurology at Boston University School of Medicine and Dissertation Chair at Northcentral University. He has been active studying sleep and dreams for two decades and is a winner of NIH awards to study sleep and dreams, before becoming Chief Scientific Advisor of Dreamboard. He will work with our first Scientific Advisor, Prof. Bruno Bara, M.D., Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology, Director of the Center for Cognitive Science, Director of the Center for Neuroimaging, Director of the Schools of Cognitive Psychotherapy of Como and Torino.

Impressive stuff, I look forward to some serious findings to come from our aggregated data.

It was also good to clarify the Facebook link, which is just to do a login and not share private data.

Some dream shouldn’t be followed

Banksy - Follow Your Dreams // Cancelled

I only recently discovered Mark Manson. I’m sure theres quite a few of you guys who will be thinking geez I’ve been reading his stuff for ages. But I can’t even remember how I came across him. One of a whole load of posts he wrote is the controversial “Why Some Dreams Should Not Be Pursued.”

Mark breaks it down with decent examples and some deep thoughts behind it and the self help industry.

We are all beaten over the head that we should always pursue our dreams, always follow our passions, always turn reality into what we believe will make us happy. Most marketing and advertising is based on this. The majority of the self help industry pushes this. And with the rise of Tim Ferriss and “lifestyle design” obsession of this generation, it has become a borderline religion…

I know what he means, the lifestyle business has grown and grown.

There is this conflict I have in my mind. Its a conflict between community (doing what people think you should do) and individualism (doing what your dreams says). I don’t buy all this self help crap but I do want to be happy (heck who doesn’t want to be happy?). When I say happy I don’t mean this crazy Hollywood style happiness you see on TV or they shovel down your throat any chance they can. Be Happy / Buy are shit… Roll the Fight club ikea montage.

Back to Mark…

But it’s not just materialism, the “follow you dreams” mentality dominates our relationships as well. It’s only in the last couple centuries that romantic love has been championed as the sole prerequisite for a happy relationship.

Lonely? Just fall in love and then live happily ever after! Duh.

It’s reached the point where practically all of our pop culture is based upon the idea that romantic love is a justification for just about any neurotic behaviour.

Another conflict… (damm Mark is right on the buzzer) My dating… I enjoy it but I do want to find someone special. When I say special I don’t mean perfection, I mean someone I would spend the rest of my known life with. Its important to me (yeah how selfish of me) but having gone through a divorce, I’m not a believer in there’s one person for everyone (something which the media seems to push down our throats). So on an individual level someone who connects with myself. Don’t get me wrong I do sometimes think about what it would be like to have someone very different (don’t ask, i’m not telling)

Some friends say why go out dating, if you just leave it it will happen. I say balls, and I actually kinda of enjoy it. As a friend who turns out reads my blog said, Its part of you… When she said this, I was kinda of thinking maybe shes got a point. I like meeting new people and enjoy dating, so it works. From an individual level again, its all good times. From a community point of view its a little different.

Maybe this is another reason why I’m writing this book, the life & opinions of a modern geeky gentleman… Putting the dream aspect on paper rather than in reality.

Mark’s example of the young woman from New York City who had the recurring sexual fantasy was certainly the icing on the argument. Some of our dreams should never happen and its really important to remember this (this story has to be read as its not very safe for work).

Losing control in reality is dangerous. Despite how arousing it may be, one could get hurt or killed. It’s only possible to lose control and stay safe within the confines of one’s own mind.

The reason not every fantasy should be pursued is because fantasies never have negative repercussions. Reality does. You’re able to feel fear and terror without ever actually being in danger. You can feel excitement and adrenaline without ever actually risking anything. You can experience the joy and pride of a great success without actually suffering through the hard work.

Absolutely! I wanted to be big name DJ many decades ago. Traveling the world playing the music I love and being paid for it. I guess its like the rockstar thing Mark talks about. But it was about 16 when I realised the reality of the pursuing such a dream. The daily drudgery, playing in crap venues, playing crowd pleasing tunes just to make it up the DJ ladder. Screw that…! As Mark says I might have been in love with the result not the process. Seriously settling down and getting into the internet was one of the best moves I’ve done.

I don’t like to climb. I just want to imagine the top

The process and the details is whats missing from our dreams. In actual fact thats the fun part… In my great BBC job, the details all matter and the result isn’t the be all and end all… But maybe somewhere in this messy post, I can mentally link my dating with the process and details.

Next time someone says just fall in love, maybe I should say… “don’t you see I’m in the process of doing so and loving it” *smile*

Maybe I’ve fallen in love with the process of falling in love, not the result and actually this is perfectly natural? (Don’t all scream at me at once…)

combine Dreamboard and Lucidpedia please

I would really like to see Lucidpedia and Dreamboard do a combined application or at least interoperate with each other (can you imagine an xml schema for dreams?)
Dreamboard is beautiful looking and the app is simply a joy to use. Writing into Lucidpedia is frankly a nightmare, specially on a mobile device, although it does have rich metadata.
I want to ask Luca about the last slide, because that looks just like the plans for the never realised Mydreamscape.
World domination…? Nope just an understanding of what people are dreaming about all over the world (flashforward collective memory style).

Dream journal metadata

I said a while ago how I found a site which is much closer to mydreamscape than anything else I’ve found to date.

One of the key parts was the dream journaling and its interesting to see the amount of metadata lucidpedia requires.

Title, date, dream… is fine and they actually have a level of privacy

If you like, you can annote dreamsigns by enclosing words or sentences with [ds] … [/ds] tags.
Parts of your dream description that you rather prefer to be private when you decide to share this dream with others,
use the [private] … [/private]

Cool but, how about,

  • Sleep time – First state the time when you went into bed and then input the time when you woke up in the morning
  • Image and Video – Add your own Image or YouTube movie to this dream!
  • Rating out of 5
  • Lucidity – Were you not lucid, half lucid or fully lucid anytime during this dream?
  • Characters – Which people that you know from real-life did you meet in your dream?
  • Permissions which are…

Share with Lucidipedia.com users only
Only people with a Lucidipedia account are able to read, rate and comment on this dream record by using Dream Journal.

Make this dream readable for everyone
Share also with anyone outside of Lucidipedia.com, Anyone you provide with the URL of this dream record would be able to read it. Great for sharing on Facebook or Twitter with friends!

Thats one heck of a load of metadata about a dream…! By the time you filled all that in I’m sure you would have forgotten most of the facts… I’m fascinated by the idea of sticking a video or image into the dream but I’m sure it would be used in the right way.

Lucidipedia, mydreamscape done correctly

All is a dream

For many years I had wonder when someone was going to create a place for dreams which is tasteful and about the culture of dreaming.

There was Remcloud.com which opened with much fanfare. Although still running, feels spammy and pretty crappy. All the other places I’ve seen have been more about dream dictionaries or forums about dreams. Mydreamscape was meant to be a tasteful, cleverly crafted and a social network about the culture of dreams.

Well I think someone has finally done it… lucidipedia.com feels like a serious site and seems to have some very good tutorials and tips to help you dream and remember them. There’s even an online dream diary section which seems to tick all the right boxes with dataportability and sharing features.

So I guess there is only one way to discover how good it is, yes dive in and try it out…

The Batman Complex

If only… But what a amazing piece of work by a fan.

And so, as promised, this is the follow up to the teaser. Here we have a full length (well, a bit longer than the norm, but hey, what can you do…hahaha) theatrical trailer that delves a little deeper into the story behind The Batman Complex. As explained in the teaser, the gist of the idea revolves around a few fun topics, mainly the whole “what is real?” train of thought, and also every fans desire, deep down or upfront, to be Batman at least once in their lives. LOL. And so, I tried to craft a story where we see what happens when someone takes their dream of being Batman a little bit too far. An idea, after all, is a truly resilient parasite. 😉

While some of it is still left a bit ambiguous (both unintentionally and intentionally – while there’s only so much that can be strung together, I often like to leave a little bit open so as to see what fellow fans are able to imagine/create), I believe it offers a bit more than the teaser. As you might be able to tell, the theatrical trailer takes on less of a “horror” vibe than the teaser. For this extended look, I wanted to focus more on the character aspects (and a bit of the tragedy as well), and attempt to move past the initial shock of the psychological twist. One aspect I tried to hint at was the paralleling descent of both Bruce and Cobb. As Cobb and the team go deeper into Bruce’s mind, they start to encounter the truly dark issues that his subconscious houses. As a result, Cobb himself gets caught up in the obsession of all that lingers in the mind of a Batman. There are a couple fun things in there that are best left to surprise, but all in all, I’m relatively happy with how it turned out. It’s fairly fast paced and doesn’t leave much room to breath, which helps amplify the tension I think. But that’s just me. I hope it works just as well as the teaser did.

As for the future of the project, I’m not sure what’s next. I don’t think I’ll do a second theatrical trailer. Maybe a couple of TV spots, but other than that, I think I’ll let this one remain as it is. We’ll see. Perhaps I’ll be further inspired by some other ideas that’ll come to me in a dream… 😉

Memes where do they come from?

I’ve taken my eyes off mydreamscape for a few weeks recently but I’m back on the case. Recently attended a nice lecture (I was recommended by my hypnotherapist Shannon) which reaffirmed what I’m trying to do with mydreamscape.

The organic chemist August Kekulé claimed that a ring in the shape of Ouroboros (an ancient symbol depicting a serpent or dragon eating its own tail.) that he saw in a dream inspired him in his discovery of the structure of benzene.

As noted by Carl Jung, this might be an instance of cryptomnesia (cryptomnesia occurs when a forgotten memory returns without it being recognized as such by the subject, who believes it is something new and original. It is a memory bias whereby a person may falsely recall generating a thought, an idea, a song, or a joke, not deliberately engaging in plagiarism but rather experiencing a memory as if it were a new inspiration.)

In the session/lecture I attended Susan Leigh who was the guest speaker, talked about dreams but from the point of view of a hypnotherapist. The idea being if someone comes to you for help, you might be able to get an idea of what and where there problems take root. However there was still lots to learn for someone like myself.

I wrote notes down while she was talking but here’s a few of the key points.

  • Dream descriptions are not as important as how they make you feel.
  • Within the first 30mins of falling a sleep, you are treated to a preview of all the dreams you will have that night. Like a set of trailers for that night
  • Repeative dreams obvioulsy say a lot more you that one offs.
  • The dreamer is the best person to describe and make sense of there dreams. The whole dream dictorory thing is questionable, although broad concepts do still some what apply.
  • Friends and family who know the dream may be better that a expert at understanding elements of the dreamer dream.
  • Food and drink can have a serious effect on dreams
  • Using self hyponisis its possible to artect your dream
  • Mental fatigue creates images which are not helpful
  • All manimals dream
  • Dreams are symbolic and people generally have 6-7 dreams a night

Susan mentioned the work of Dr Keith Hearne who is a internationally known British psychologist who conducted the world’s first sleep-laboratory research into ‘lucid’ dreams. Funny enough I didn’t know but I’ve actually got a book of his on my bookshelf Understanding Dreams.

So going back through the key points, I’m wondering if I should focus more on the metadata of the dream that the description its self. But also interestingly the concens about gaming or spamming the system isn’t such a worry anymore. The descriptions will be interesting but overall the descriptions won’t be that important plus will only really be interesting to friends and family who know that person.

In actual fact there was quite a lot of talk about the fact people close will be able to interupt the dream. I’m not sure what this means in the face of dream dictionaries (i assume there very generalised).

Lots of food for thought, but it strikes me that until we can confirm what kind of dream the person is having, the ephasis should be on the metadata collected. Roll on the dream recorder…

More dream recording news

My lovely hypnotherapist, sent me a clipping from the Metro the other day. Its was a clipping about the ability to record your own dreams.

Although I saw this general thought in a post my boss sent me a while ago, it was good to read something similar in the mainstream press.

I’ve included the text for those who can’t be bothered to read the image.

A real hope of recording our dreams

A real hope of recording our dreams

Dreams could one day be recorded electronically, allowing them to be interpreted, scientists say. Experiments in which volunteers had electrodes surgically implanted deep inside their brains had already allowed researchers to ‘read’ people’s minds, said Dr Moran Cerf. The breakthrough could eventually lead to the development of a dream recorder, he added. ‘We would like to read people’s dreams,’ Dr Cerf said. ‘It would be wonderful to read people’s minds when they cannot communicate, such as people in comas.’

In tests on 12 epilepsy patients, electrodes recorded the activity of neurones in a part of the brain called the medial temporal lobe, which plays a major role in human memory and retention. The volunteers were shown more than 100 familiar images, such as Marilyn Monroe and Michael Jackson, on a screen. From these, pictures that had triggered responsive neurons in different parts of the subjects’ MTLs were selected.

The patients were then shown two of these images superimposed and told to think about one of them, while the scientists ran the neuron patterns through a decoder. When the decoded information was fed back on to the superimposed images, the one whose neuron was firing more quickly was enhanced, while the other faded.

By watching this online feedback, more than two-thirds of subjects were able to make their targeted image completely visible and entirely eliminate the other picture. By observing which brain cells lit up and when, Dr Cerf and his US colleagues, Christof Koch and Itzhak Fried, said they were in effect able ‘read the subjects’ minds’. The study is published in the journal Nature.

Once again, I really need to get mydreamscape up and running…