Blinking in Morse Code

The program I wrote that records my sleep every night and detects REM can now also decode Morse Code in blinking patterns. Here is the video in case you aren't subscribed to my newsletter on LSDBase yet:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QiarEOZbkHU

How do you exactly record your sleep? Just curious :D .

I wear a headband that I designed, it will be known as a halograph FM and has a motion detector that is sensitive enough to pick up the hearbeat and can thus easily detect rapid eye movements. The blue peaks in the video are the heartbeat and the red peaks are the blinks.

This "blinking in Morse code" is not a new idea: in the late 70s/early 80s, the University of Edinburgh built a computer that could translate muscle spasms of sleeping lucid dreamers, who had been taught morse code and who had been told to "slap your thigh in Morse code" when lucid. I saw the BBC documentary on the whole research and prima facie, it worked.. and one of the subjects was able to communicate directly to the computer whilst fast asleep.

I know it is not a new idea ,but I still think it is kind of cool to do a research on your own sleep. I wish I had the skills to do so like you coder :P .

Anything I can do, you can do, and greater. Start here: Visual Studio or if you don't have a Windows machine: Eclipse.

Haha I am already programing in eclipse. What I meant is that I wish I was at your level , because I view myself as a newbie. It is just that I have a lot of pressure now because of my finals at school so I can't get any progress on my projects. Right now I am building my first 2D game, a chess game. The interface itself is almost ready so now I want to try and teach the computer how to play. Even though the project is going slowly ,I don't care because I am having fun building it.

You are off to a better start than me! One of my first games was a simple car game with 7 lanes of ever faster traffic, occasional missile power-ups and the odd mini-bus taxi that would randomly swerve. It was pretty addictive and I heard from the younger brother of a friend that they still played it at my high school at least five years later!

This has some great implications. Good for dream journalling hah.

I have actually been planning on adding an interface to Lightened Dream so that when you click on a detected REM phase in Lucid Scribe it will automatically create or open the journal entry.

This is a fantastic idea! But I can't help but think that blinking that much during a dream could be distracting from achieving the goals you'd set out for - but I think the idea of doing something like this could be really great for recall :D

You could also perhaps get into the habit of doing this kind of thing during the day - perhaps intergrate it into some kind of RC? There's a lot of possibilities here imo :)

Thanks. It is not distracting if the goal itself is to write something from within a dream! But I did wake myself up the other night when I sat down in a dream and started to blink "S".

Oh I have a great idea for you! Why don't you make your program play certain sounds according to the morse code you send. You can examine how does it affect your your dreams.

Yeah, I like that. I bet the heartbeat in the background will add a nice ambiance to it.

Lol, that's so cool.

So coder how did it go? Was your heart beating faster like you predicted?

No, no - I just said that the beat of the heart would add a chill atmosphere to the recordings. I have not yet had a chance to write the code to convert the biofeedback data to sound.