Thread: Strange way to attain lucidity

^^ Interesting, and as for the experimentation, I haven't had any luck either and my friend does not seem answer to my emails anymore.

Hi Eddydpyl- hope you don't mind if I join your interesting thread - interesting discussion! I had 2 thoughts
1. LaBerges original verson on MILD is different from the more commonly cited technique as described in EWOL. In the original tech developed by La Berge (c.1980) the 'mantra' is the same but the 'subject visualises his body lying asleep in bed, with rapid eye movements indicating he is dreaming. At the same time, he sees himself being in the dream just rehearsed' (my bold). The eye movement bit is interesting - I can't find the research immediately to hand but from what I remember la berge initially thought he could induce dreaming by mimicing REM's - he later ruled this out, hence its not in the EWOL book. Perhaps your friend has stumbled upon a similar finding.
2. Maybe of more interest (but along the same lines) is the possibility your friend is inducing mechanical phosphenes. Phosphenes are illusionary spots of lights as perceived by the brain. I often get people coming to see me complaining of these. Basically if you push your eye into an extreme direction of gaze (like looking straight and inward as you saw your friend) this deforms the globe of the eye (through the eye muscles yanking on it) which puts pressure on the retinal cells, stimulating them sending a message to the brain that its seeing light (sparkles, ovals) if you've got your eyes closed or its pitch black. You can get a similar effect if you rub your closed eyes for a while (sparkles/shapes - I used to do this as a kid with my eyes pushed into a pillow). The link here is that you also get (non mechanical) phosphenes when people are dropping into hypnagogic sleep - the geometric patterns that people see that then form imagery prior to WILD'ing are the same think ultimately occuring in the same place (the brain) but just of a different origin. I don't know but maybe your friend is accelerating/controlling the sleep stage by mechanically inducing the onset of these - rather than having to wait their natural onset.

I did a similar thing with my eyes around 6 nights ago (though this was the middle of the night) , I'd been trying to WILD (I'm still pretty new to LD'ing as NyxCC my excellent dream guide can vouch for! ), anyways I'd been waiting for about 40mins and started to get some thrumming vibrations throughout my body, I knew I should be getting close to WILDing but also knew my alarm clock was about to go off to tell me to go to work, so I squeezed my eyes looking in and up and this produced more vivid geometric patterns (like expanding snow flakes) - but I couldn't 'get into' any visualisations and after a min or two gave up. But the eye position def seemed to increase and accelerate the visual patterns (phosphenes).

Anyway - these ideas could be completely unrelated to your friends success (sorry in advance!) - but thought it might be useful to share as the phosphene connection might be another way of suggesting why your friends eye positioning helps induce lucidity.

^^ Cool! We have already figured out the ear popping thing (while awake that is) but the eyes part is still a bit of a mystery, though some have suggested possible explanations. He did recognize HH when I explained it to him but didn't give it too much importance, which doesn't necessarily mean it doesn't, as I said I had some difficulties communicating with him about this. Anyway, I didn't know about this so much appreciated

Great info Tlaloc! The part about more vivid phosphene stimulation with the eyes movement adds another piece to our puzzle.

Originally Posted by Eddydpyl

^^ Interesting, and as for the experimentation, I haven't had any luck either and my friend does not seem answer to my emails anymore.

Perhaps he is just busy. I tried it again last night and did have some success with inducing more sleepiness than before. I previously bookmarked and finally now read VagalTone's link: Go Ahead…Roll Your Eyes | The Best Brain Possible and it seems to have a lot of correlation with what you are looking into here. Interesting!

Originally Posted by fogelbise

Perhaps he is just busy. I tried it again last night and did have some success with inducing more sleepiness than before. I previously bookmarked and finally now read VagalTone's link: Go Ahead…Roll Your Eyes | The Best Brain Possible and it seems to have a lot of correlation with what you are looking into here. Interesting!

Just read it, I remember having seen someting similar elsewhere but can't tell where. We could then say that the NREM skip (if possible) may be explained by the stimulation of the brain waves that appear in REM?

Edit: Remembered, NLP, it's mentioned in the comments section in the article.