The ability to bring artwork back. Please Read! Need Help!

[dougdrums]

I read this and came up with a neat idea: http://lucidity.com/slbbs/index.html The ability to bring artwork back. Well, you would have your brainwave monitor hooked up to your eyes, and your wrists, modulate the voltage and store it onto a cassette while you sleep. When you are LD'ing, you could have a big white space as your canvas, focus with your eyes on the point of which you want colored. You would then clench your fist and imagine a black mark on the white space. The position of the eyes and clenches of your fist recorded on the tapes would then be able to be demodulated by a computer, and recorded as coords and time intravals respectivly. Then the data would be printed out on the coords your eyes were on at those times you clenched your fists. Get what I'm saying? If you want to get more complicated, you could control the color by your breath. I know it sounds odd, but you could monitor nasal airflow to corespond to color with this table: -------------------------------------------------------------------- | * * * *Color * * * | Red | Orange | Yellow | Green | Blue | Violet | |--------------------|-----|--------|--------|-------|------|--------| | * Wavelength (nm) *| 701 | *610 * | *587 * | *535 *| 473 *| *423 * | |--------------------|-----|--------|--------|-------|------|--------| | * Breath Time (s) *| *7 *| * 6 * *| * 5 * *| * 4 * | *3 * | * 2 * *| -------------------------------------------------------------------- The rate at which you breathing (inhale and exhale in seconds) would almost be nm*10^-2 , but since it is a bit hard to count to "five and thirty-five tenths one thousand", I had to mess with the numbers for green, blue, and violet. So, if i was to take a breath once in six seconds, I would record blue. This data could also be recorded on a tape. While being a difficult thing to do in a lucid dream (as well as in waking life), this could be a very good way to bring artwork back from the dream world. Does anyone want to help me with this project? I need more information and some schematics for the brainwave monitors, and someone lucid enough in a dream to actually carry this out. I can do the programming and electronics work. It would be so cool to see a device like this work! - Doug

[nerve]

coooool...

[dougdrums]

hahah, this is insanely easy: I just put the terminals of a multimeter on my wrist. While my fist was open, it recorded about 0.005 volts DC. When I closed it fast, it jumped up to about 0.035 volts DC. Now I just need to figure out where to put them for my eyes The voltage fluctates quite a bit on its own though...

[Seeker]

There is just one problem. I do not think you can clench your fists while you are in an LD. At least that was the last thing I read. Your idea about breathing should work. Now, if you could come up with some kind of tracking mechanism to follow eye movements, you could use them to draw. Or you could imagine you had Microsoft Paint up and running. Maybe look at the edge to pick a color from the palate, then a quick left-right movement. Go to the starting location on the canvas and hold your breath to 'put the pen down' Or you could use your breathing as a mouse click.... EDIT: I wonder what Lucid Art would sell for on e-bay? Ant the good thing about it is you can test it while awake!

[dougdrums]

Figure 4. Morse code communication from the lucid dream. Evidence of voluntary control of other muscle groups during REM was found by LaBerge, Nagel, Dement, and Zarcone (1981) while testing a variety of lucidity signals. We observed that a sequence of left and right dream-fist clenches resulted in a corresponding sequence of left and right forearm twitches as measured by EMG. Here the subject sends a Morse code signal with left and right fist clenches corresponding to dots and dashes, respectively. Hence the message translates as "SL" (... .-..), the subject's initials. Note that the amplitude of the twitches bore an unreliable relationship to the subjective intensity of the dreamed action. Because all skeletal muscle groups except those that govern eye-movements and breathing are profoundly inhibited during REM sleep, it is to be expected that most muscular responses to dreamed movements will be feeble. Nonetheless, these responses faithfully reflect the motor patterns of the original dream.

[Seeker]

Sounds like you have done your homework. I wonder how sensitive your multi-meter needs to be to pick up on this?

[dougdrums]

Well, it goes down to 0.001, I'm not sure how presice it is. heheh, lucid art, that'd be awesome!

[Seeker]

How goes the experiment?

[azwe_echo]

*stretches*... that was a good read! What I'm confused about is how you plan to "bring it back." I understand the multimeter that records your muscle movements, but...I guess I'm missing how you plan on "recording" what you create in the dream (i.e. the "art")... But yeah man, great experiement! Be sure and keep us updated! This is right up my alley, I'm very artistic... too bad I lack the lucid ability. For now anyway..

[Skywalker]

being a skeptic at heart i would normally say that your art dream idea is totally whacked, but i am becoming a believer of sorts after my last LD. I once saw a documentary of a man who learned to control his alpha brain waves through concious meditation by hooking his head up to an osciliscope with electrode contacts. He then modified the osciliscope by hooking it up to the stearing wheel of his sail boat. He set it up so a certain frequency of alpha wave would turn the boat left, (excuse me port), and another right(starboard ). The guy was actually stearing his boat with no hands using only his brain waves, i kid you not! Amazing! So i don't know anything is possible...

[Seeker]

Originally posted by Mannequin Skywalker I once saw a documentary of a man who learned to control his alpha brain waves through concious meditation I used to practice biofeedback in the 70's. The goal was to enter an alpha state. At the time, there were several devices on the market that would emit an audible tone that was supposed to track the frequency of your brainwaves. Here 30 years later, the technology must have been refined. Looks like it is time to research again

[dougdrums]

well, where you place the terminal on your body is really specific and varied. I think I'll make the modulator and some block diagrams this week. Let's focus on black and white first, then build a system to put seperate color data on top of it. - Doug

[Skywalker]

i have to say doug i am genuinely intrigued by your idea, the boldness of it floors me. I am actually an artist myself, i work as a graphic illustrator and have recently been inspired to think of compositions for paintings based on LD. I will have to become much more refined in my LD abilities before i could ever offer my services as a test subject in your experimants though, give me a few months, (years?)

[dougdrums]

w00t, update: well, ive came up with a way to save these things, how the data is going to be put together from the tapes, and the plans for the modulators/VCO's. - data will be demodulated and parsed by software. - one data unit will be four bytes long. - data will be in the format [x,y,t,c], where x and y is the location of the eyes, t is boolean for wrists, and c is color data. - data will be recorded on audio cassette tapes - there will be a seperate tape and modulator for each variable recorded. - color data, if there is any, will be one byte, where the rate of breathing is multiplied by 6 to fill one byte from red to violet. - I need emg info, machenes!

[dougdrums]

block diagram: terminals (on body) -> hacked emg -> amp -> modulator/vco unit -> final filter -> tape recorder need three of these things (four for color)

[dougdrums]

i was crazy to even think of trying to build a emg...: http://www.ee.ualberta.ca/~ee401/archive/s...tromyograph.pdf

[Seeker]

Doesn't look that bad. Just a little expensive.

[dougdrums]

yeah, after I checked the schematic, then the cost on ebay... im building my own . I need three of these things, and theres no way im dishing up 10,000 dollars for them.

[dougdrums]

http://www.math.princeton.edu/~simas/ecg.html exactly what I was looking for, awesome... now on to the modulator!

[dougdrums]

Update: Well, I'm damn close to a final schematic. My mom works at a hospital, I'll see if she can nic some of those emg/ecg electrodes the use (I need seven of the things ). Also, I need 3 of these AD624AD IC's, which are very expensive (5 bucks an IC!!!). If someone would buy these, I would be very thankful . I'll post the final schematic soon! -Doug