Thread: Singularity Experience, a professional iPhone app for Lucid Dreamers

Here's what a sleep graph is supposed to look like.

The yellow X markers indicate sleep depth. Sleep depth is rising and falling over the course of the night. Notice how sleep depth has periodic peaks. Sleep depth spikes, then starts to fall resulting in a dream awakening, meaning that the REM is somewhere between the sleep depth peak and the dream awakening.

This is data picked up from the mattress, so the accuracy is really low. If human movements are a shadow of what's happening in the mind, monitoring motion through the mattress is like observing the shadow of a shadow through a fog. The example below is one of the best sleep graphs that I got with the app.

The blue raised line indicates the REM period where the app will be delivering reminders. The blue line at the middle level indicates light sleep. The low blue line indicates deep sleep. This is similar to what most sleep graphs give you, except it is guess. REM cannot be detected through the mattress. What can be detected are the light sleep stage that preceeded and follow it. The plotted blue REM line is a guess. The guess begins to spike predictably before the dream awakening, meaning you can adjust the app to deliver the reminder later, in REM.

Green markers are reported dream awakenings: awakening when either a dream fragment is remembered OR I've woken up right from a dream. Each X shaped marker is 5 minutes. A typical REM window starts at 15 minutes, increasing up to 45 minutes in the later sleep cycles.

For example, before the first green marker you will see 4 raised blue Xs, that's 20 minutes that the app believes is REM. The dream is reported 10 minutes later. For the next marker, the App believes that it sees 25 minutes of REM, the dream is reported 25 minutes later. this is still a good estimate.


Each gray X shaped marker is 5 minutes. Each gray arch is 90 minutes. In this case I report dreams in sleep cycles 3,4,5,6, approximately at 90 minute intervals, with one extra dream during the later sleep cycles.

you can adjust the light reminder duration using the Beginner mode> test>info to delay delivering the audio reminder for as long as you wish. .

Couldn't you just put a button in there, so when people have adjusted their setting etc. and lie down to sleep, they can press a button which will bring up a black screen?
Instead of just having a screensaver. Would save a heap of battery life.

So, if I have this correct....
The app, at the moment, will not alert you that you are in REM?

Originally Posted by tommo

Couldn't you just put a button in there, so when people have adjusted their setting etc. and lie down to sleep, they can press a button which will bring up a black screen?
Instead of just having a screensaver. Would save a heap of battery life.

So, if I have this correct....
The app, at the moment, will not alert you that you are in REM?

That's a fantastic idea. I made the sun button in the middle blank the screen.

The app plays a reminder when the user should be dreaming. I must say that this is an educated guess. There's no EOG to confirm that the user's eyes are moving rapidly. This is why calling that REM would be a mistake. In the upcoming update I will include an option to delay the reminder by a certain number of minutes. This should make it easier to try different times during dreaming.

Can you port this to Android? I just got a Galaxy Nexus, and there is no way I am buying anything Apple even thought this app looks amazing. If not, I'll make do with the Lucid Dreaming App.

Originally Posted by TheKing

Can you port this to Android? I just got a Galaxy Nexus, and there is no way I am buying anything Apple even thought this app looks amazing. If not, I'll make do with the Lucid Dreaming App.

I will improve the Android version's detection algorithm, but it will not look that pretty or polished. I hear they released Android 4.0, maybe that one will look better than 2.2.


Here's a preview of the history analysis feature that I will be adding with the next update. It attempts to answer this question:

When do I dream, and what influences it?

The graph shows 13 days of dreams reported upon awakening. Any time I write in a dream journal, I mark the dream with the app. The Y Axis shows seconds of the day with 0 being midnight. The major gridlines are spaced at 90 minutes.

These are preliminary results, and the data is still very rough.

The interesting thing is that the dreams, when plotted in such a way seem to align with some time, which appears to be independent of the time in bed. Since the circadian rhythm controls the biological clock, and the biological clock controls when we are dreaming, I hypothesize that by aligning the biological clock, the dreaming pattern would also be changed.

The leftmost line (#1 on X axis) is the last night. I had 7 dreams reported, including a rare dream during the first sleep cycle.

I hope that information like that would help me find the optimal times of going to bed and waking up. Hypothetically, this would cut the extra time spent in falling asleep and snooze fests in the morning. Since getting out of bed is easiest at the light sleep stage, this should also improve the productivity in the morning and reduce the need for coffee.

The coolest thing is that the dream recall and clarity also seem to vary overnight. In the future versions of such analysis, I will include dream quality, dream control and sleep quality along with other metrics.

I used the DEILD function this night and the apps predictions were unbelievable! I remembered a moment from the dream upon awakening and I guess that the cue made me more aware and I thought that I had woke up so I got a false awakening instead, when I had my fakse awakening I remembered to wiggle my fingers like the instruction said. And when I felt that I could move my hand completely I had stabilised the dream enough, but it was so real that I thought I was awake. This happend three times! And the app made perfect predictions, so I am excited for the next night

Dear Developer,

I was lucky to redeem one of the promotion codes you posted, so I got the app for free.

I honestly believe you released the app too early, because I am either stupid or there are a lot of bugs.

Also a lot of times you forgot to disable functionality, like swiping left right after clicking "Info" on the reminder selection.

I am absolutely not able to set the alarm in the morning (except by using a preset other than custom, but even then I cannot change anything in the wake-up reminders - this might be intentioned). I tried everything. When i tap the play button, nothing will happen, no light, no vibration, no sound - and yes: that green thing is set to on.

I have questions regarding the UI which are not covered in the documentation.

When I tap the settings (clockwork), I find out that I can click on sound, on light and on vibration. Everytime I do that, the icon rotates a little (like 10 degrees). Does this have a meaning? Because it does not matter if I change anything (like for the sound). For the "light" it seems like I can set it to "I can see" and "Light", I can also select different lights in the apps status bar. By the way: Again this status bar with the "Set" option keeps being there, even if I close the "clockwork". If it does matter, why can I switch the green things beneath the icons? Again to enable / disable on second instance?

If I want to use the clockwork, for example to turn on / off reminders, why can I not select them without the other setting dialog (full screen with time interval settings) popping up every time?

Why are there two completely different ways to set / configure a reminder, while some features are covered in both ways and some are not and some seem twice? Why do I have to use both when I only want to use one? Can you not design this in a more simple, elegant and clear way? Maybe, until then, give us a simple debug menu where you can set it like in the Settings of iOS?


I have to say it is extremely difficult to understand such a complex application if you don't know whether the current GUI state is intentioned or not, if switches are supposed make sense and when they are not.

Next thing is: Somehow the application seems to mix up the sounds associated to the lights. I switch through the reminders and they all have the same sound. What is happening there? I wildly suppose the bug could be triggered by trying to play music for "void".

Again, I want to state that I see high potential in the app, but I am glad that I haven't bought it - because the app has to go through major bugtesting before being released to a major audience. Get this app straight Please .... I like it!

I used the app for the first time last night, and had an amusing dream about it, haha. I dreamt I woke up and turned off the app, and saw it had a fiery background. It would give you a summary of your night, and it said, "Lots of movement last night. Must be all those Volcano Bats." and it had loads more references to these Volcano Bats (capitalized) everywhere lol.

Anyway, if it played any reminders I didn't hear them, and I didn't wake up to record any dreams, but I did go to bed really late. I'm still getting the hang of it, so I'll watch the videos and such before I use it again tonight. It does look nice.

Originally Posted by Kitties

I used the app for the first time last night, and had an amusing dream about it, haha. I dreamt I woke up and turned off the app, and saw it had a fiery background. It would give you a summary of your night, and it said, "Lots of movement last night. Must be all those Volcano Bats." and it had loads more references to these Volcano Bats (capitalized) everywhere lol.

Anyway, if it played any reminders I didn't hear them, and I didn't wake up to record any dreams, but I did go to bed really late. I'm still getting the hang of it, so I'll watch the videos and such before I use it again tonight. It does look nice.

Haha, that's cool. The Interface of the app uses complex geometry. Some parts of the brain cannot process it in the dream, as such, the interface itself is a gauge of your mental performance within a dream.
When I was looking at the interface in the dream, it had a black grid background and orange/Pink single letter labels. I wander if this is what geometry looks like when the geometry center is not active.


I'd love to see what it would look like in a high control LD and a low control LD. So far, I've only consciously examined the interface in a dream once, and it wasn't for the current version. I've had glances of it here and there, but nothing like the kind of investigation that I'm looking for.



Regarding bugs: the update 1.1 is already pending in the app store. That one focuses on the detailed data, fixes some of the issues that you mentioned. There are 112 classes within the app, and my development time is limited. There were some higher priority bugs that got fixed for the release. Others are known and will be fixed.

There is currently no smart alarm feature in the app. The app only delivers lucid dreaming reminders.

The main feature that I'm adding in the new version is the ability to get a history file like the one above and delay the reminder by a certain number of minutes. This has already already shown promise after 2 nights of testing by producing a dream with both a recurring dreamsign, elevated degree of control and a feeling of lucidity. The reminder was played 5 minutes prior to awakening from a dream.

Use the simple interface for setting the reminder. The gear icon currently does not work as intended. It was deemed too complex for the average user. The gear icon was providing a compact way to edit all of the reminder properties from the same screen.

Originally Posted by BugsBugsBugs

Dear Developer,

I was lucky to redeem one of the promotion codes you posted, so I got the app for free.

I honestly believe you released the app too early, because I am either stupid or there are a lot of bugs.

Also a lot of times you forgot to disable functionality, like swiping left right after clicking "Info" on the reminder selection.

I am absolutely not able to set the alarm in the morning (except by using a preset other than custom, but even then I cannot change anything in the wake-up reminders - this might be intentioned). I tried everything. When i tap the play button, nothing will happen, no light, no vibration, no sound - and yes: that green thing is set to on.

I have questions regarding the UI which are not covered in the documentation.

When I tap the settings (clockwork), I find out that I can click on sound, on light and on vibration. Everytime I do that, the icon rotates a little (like 10 degrees). Does this have a meaning? Because it does not matter if I change anything (like for the sound). For the "light" it seems like I can set it to "I can see" and "Light", I can also select different lights in the apps status bar. By the way: Again this status bar with the "Set" option keeps being there, even if I close the "clockwork". If it does matter, why can I switch the green things beneath the icons? Again to enable / disable on second instance?

If I want to use the clockwork, for example to turn on / off reminders, why can I not select them without the other setting dialog (full screen with time interval settings) popping up every time?

Why are there two completely different ways to set / configure a reminder, while some features are covered in both ways and some are not and some seem twice? Why do I have to use both when I only want to use one? Can you not design this in a more simple, elegant and clear way? Maybe, until then, give us a simple debug menu where you can set it like in the Settings of iOS?


I have to say it is extremely difficult to understand such a complex application if you don't know whether the current GUI state is intentioned or not, if switches are supposed make sense and when they are not.

Next thing is: Somehow the application seems to mix up the sounds associated to the lights. I switch through the reminders and they all have the same sound. What is happening there? I wildly suppose the bug could be triggered by trying to play music for "void".

Again, I want to state that I see high potential in the app, but I am glad that I haven't bought it - because the app has to go through major bugtesting before being released to a major audience. Get this app straight Please .... I like it!

I'm working on fixing the bugs right now. I got ridiculously depressed lately, and it was very difficult to get anything done, especially as I was facing the showstopper crashes and bugs with core data. This halted progress on a number of features. What's available in the version 1.0 is maybe 70% of what I have planned.

For example each reminder is customizable with light, sound, vibration, and even the pattern of vibration was modifiable.
There are 16 reminders in total, while only 3 are customizable at the present.
The "GraphX" is an animated player that will play back the night's data rather than show you a static graph. It can display data in both number row and a polar form. The transition from rectangular to polar is quite spectacular. The polar graph shows events around a circle, potentially showing how the circadian rhythm/dreaming pattern changes overnight. All of this is animated, but not ready for release. The app itself can run in multiple modes, of which only the Mattress is currently visible.

The app has smart alarm logic in it, which jolts me awake at the first 3 seconds of sound. Currently you do not hear the reminder because it is played quite early. I'm introducing a custom delay in the next update, which will help you advance the reminder and play it later, when the dream is more stable.

I found that documenting such features is rather difficult, and using them without preparation is impossible.

Here's what's coming:

The Gear button on the singularity screen is supposed to bring up a very compact controller which can control all aspects of the app. It does nothing in the version 1.0. It will do the following:

Rotate and align it's pointer with the active reminder. This lets you configure the reminder, change light, vibration and sound. This offered a lot of customization, but was difficult to understand. I'm not sure if I'm ready to introduce the smart alarm at this point. That controller was supposed to change the marker types from regular to smart alarms.



Right bottom button on the singularity screen (speaker icon) becomes manual mode button.
In the manual mode:
Delay button lets you select a manual reminder delay from 0 to 95 minutes. This would be useful if you practice WILD or FILD. It will play a reminder on timer. You can even "aim" a manual reminder at your next REM episode if you wake up to go to the bathroom, etc.
In the morning, you can use this as a self-disabling snooze like alarm.

The play button on the manual mode panel schedules a manual reminder. A confirmation is printed in the console and a sound is played.
The pause button on the manual mode panel cancels all pending manual mode and automatic reminders. The confirmation is printed in the console.
The mute button disables sound for the reminders globally.

Man i was getting so sad i entered like half the codes and i randomly chose one and it worked lol!

Will be using it tonight

Er okay, I still haven't really worked it out, because for the past couple days, when I woke up, the app had already been turned off sometime during the night. :s I dunno if I'm doing it in my sleep or if my cat jumped on it or what. Maybe I'll try shutting my door or leaving it face down or something.

Originally Posted by Kitties

Er okay, I still haven't really worked it out, because for the past couple days, when I woke up, the app had already been turned off sometime during the night. :s I dunno if I'm doing it in my sleep or if my cat jumped on it or what. Maybe I'll try shutting my door or leaving it face down or something.

Do you mean that in the morning you have to re-open the app and it shows the splash screen again?

Originally Posted by Ev

Do you mean that in the morning you have to re-open the app and it shows the splash screen again?

No I don't think it crashed or anything, when I woke up I'm pretty sure it was still in the app, but it was around 1pm and the history was only up until about 9am. It's probably my fault somehow, lol.

Originally Posted by Kitties

No I don't think it crashed or anything, when I woke up I'm pretty sure it was still in the app, but it was around 1pm and the history was only up until about 9am. It's probably my fault somehow, lol.

That's peculiar. I've just found a bug that might've been related. It's an insidious bug which was caused by rotating the dial in different directions. At a certain point it flipped the sign of the rotation, causing all kinds of weird crashes. I'm fixing this now.

Ok I have went to bed at very late times for some days so I didn't even remembered my dreams and I didn't wake up to the reminders.
Last night I used the Bio2 Real Time app to find the best bed time, then I used the Singurlarity app and plugged it into my speaker pillow (To make sure that the alarm doesn't wake up anyone else).
Then I woke up and I thought that I might be dreaming so I started to wiggle my fingers, but I sort of black out. Then another alarm woke me up and this time I knew that I was awake and I told myself that on my next awakening I am going to be dreaming so I needed to be prepared for that. Then I was in some kind of party and I realised that I was dreaming, because I was somehow more aware.
Thank you again Ev And Merry Christmas to you all *<=)

Hm, been looking at the app trying to figure it out.

I think I stuffed something up. At first the clock was all nicely laid out with a few of the circles/reminders on the left side.
But then I was looking around in the app, and came back to the clock and there were just blank green circles all around it?

What do I do!????

Is there a reset defaults button?

Oh.... nevermind, I restarted my iPod and it went back to normal. lol

But it says that night time starts at 2200?

Holy crap Ev!!!! I woke up around 4:30 hours in to sleep and realised that the app had recorded that I was in REM!!!!
I was literally in awe. I mean I knew it was possible since you've been showing us the results, but to actually see that it had detected my dreaming....
Simple awesome and amazing.

I think it played the reminder, because in my dream someone was trying to show me how to use the app to record my dreams or something, but I woke up just
as they were about to show the screen to explain what they were doing.

So I'm pretty sure it played a bit too late, right at the end of my dream. Which I had expected. Because afaict it is set to play 15 minutes after it thinks you're in REM, is that correct?

I'll see if I can set it to play just a couple of minutes after it detects REM. I think it might work better.

Took me a little while to remember how to type in my dreams lol

I did have one slight "problem" which is that you cannot put the dream journal in to landscape mode; it's really hard to type on an iPod in portrait, because the keyboard is so small.
I have types all over the place lol

But yeah, great work man! I think this is going to bring me lots of LD's!

Hey Tommo,

It's great that you are having progress. If you email yourself the data, there's a console log, and the app should say when it tried to play the reminder. This is how I estimate how close the reminder has been played to the dream awakening.

Version 1.1 will have a lot more reminder delivery customization


I'll test different timezones, there was something weird going on before, now you've confirmed it!

Thanks Ev, I saw that option before, I will e-mail to myself now

Also, with the timezones, I just remembered something else too.
My battery died right after 6:30 hours.
When I turned it back on, coz there was still some life left, it went for another 1 hour or hour and a half. But it recorded it as 1st of January 2001. lol

Not sure why that was. But it will probably be solved by just getting power cord. Maybe it just glitched because it turned off while it was still running the app or something?

Anyway, thanks again

Here's a log from the app, as it was running last night, Note that it played reminders very close to awakening from dreams, potentially causing those awakenings.

I had a semi-lucid dream awakening at 4:02, in that dream I conjured wheels back on a bicycle (because they were stolen), then was shouting commands to lubricate different mechanical components of the bicycle as I was riding it. I did some cool trick riding and jumps before finally awakening.

The bicycle itself was a day residue from watching the "blackberry bold" glow in the dark commercial like 3 times and having family discuss why the bicycles glow in the dark.

The reminder, a short 12 second sequence has manifested itself as music star suddenly appearing on the street with some bodyguards. I was hanging out with the star a bit later, as he was sharing a strategy for music success with me. There were 3 components to success, one of which was 3D sound. That dream sequence was completely out of place, because the previous and subsequent dream has revolved around me riding a bicycle.


03:38:21: Requesting reminder with delay: 4 minutes
03:38:21: Deliver Reminder Finished
03:38:26: singularity epoch: 38
03:40:00: battery level: 100 max charge
03:40:00: battery level: 100 max charge
03:42:21: Presenting reminder
03:43:26: singularity epoch: 39
03:47:22: Reminder has been played
03:48:26: singularity epoch: 40
03:50:00: battery level: 100 max charge
03:50:00: battery level: 100 max charge
03:53:26: singularity epoch: 41
03:58:26: singularity epoch: 42
04:00:00: battery level: 100 max charge
04:00:00: battery level: 100 max charge
04:02:18: You reported Dream Recall


07:08:21: Requesting reminder with delay: 4 minutes
07:08:21: Deliver Reminder Finished
07:08:26: singularity epoch: 80
07:10:00: battery level: 100 max charge
07:10:00: battery level: 100 max charge
07:12:21: Presenting reminder
07:13:26: singularity epoch: 81
07:17:22: Reminder has been played
07:18:26: singularity epoch: 82
07:20:00: battery level: 100 max charge
07:20:00: battery level: 100 max charge
07:20:57: You reported Dream Recall

07:38:21: Requesting reminder with delay: 4 minutes
07:38:21: Deliver Reminder Finished
07:38:21: Passing reminder to delivery system
07:38:26: singularity epoch: 86
07:40:00: battery level: 100 max charge
07:40:00: battery level: 100 max charge
07:42:21: Presenting reminder
07:43:26: singularity epoch: 87
07:47:22: Reminder has been played
07:47:44: You reported Dream Recall


08:33:21: Requesting reminder with delay: 4 minutes
08:33:21: Deliver Reminder Finished
08:33:26: singularity epoch: 97
08:37:21: Presenting reminder
08:38:21: trying to deliver reminder
08:38:21: Passing reminder to delivery system
08:38:21: Within deliver reminder
08:38:21: Reminder is already visible, did not present a reminder
08:38:21: Deliver Reminder Finished
08:38:26: singularity epoch: 98
08:40:00: battery level: 100 max charge
08:40:00: battery level: 100 max charge
08:40:15: You reported Dream Recall


09:58:21: Requesting reminder with delay: 4 minutes
09:58:21: Deliver Reminder Finished
09:58:26: singularity epoch: 114
10:00:00: battery level: 100 max charge
10:00:00: battery level: 100 max charge
10:02:21: Presenting reminder
10:03:26: singularity epoch: 115
10:07:22: Reminder has been played
10:07:49: You reported Dream Recall


The new feature that I'm putting in version 1.1 is the customizable reminder delay. In the example above it has been 4 minutes, this can be adjusted, causing the reminder to be played earlier or later.

Customizable delay will be great!

I think I accidentally turned it off last night lol
It recorded 2 minutes to data
haha

Either that or it stuffed up again when the battery ran out.
Definitely going to go and pick up a wall charger today.

Originally Posted by tommo

Customizable delay will be great!

I think I accidentally turned it off last night lol
It recorded 2 minutes to data
haha

Either that or it stuffed up again when the battery ran out.
Definitely going to go and pick up a wall charger today.

The app shuts down when the battery level reaches 10%, which on an iPod should be after about 5 hours. I also noticed that the data collection may be interrupted by local notifications from the system (the dialog popup without a "get out of my face" button).

In version 1.1, I'm adding a feature to let you plot dreams against real clock. The left edge is midnight, and all dreams are plotted at the time when they were reported. Previous version only plotted dreams as time after bedtime.

Some patterns that may be noticed:
The natural awakening timer roughly follows bedtime
4 dreams were reported at around 4AM
After the first dream reported, it takes me some time to fall asleep, especially if I write in a dream journal. This is what the red marker is after the first dream.

You will notice that my regular awakening time is 9:38. If I try to "snooze", my rise time gets pushed towards the end of the next sleep cycle, at 11:00. Getting out of bed in between, lets say 10:10 is very difficult.

I also noticed that the time between my later sleep cycle dream awakenings fluctuates between 45 and 65 minutes.

A dream at 7:05 would have another dream at 7:55-8:06. The version 1.1 has a manual reminder, so if I wake up at 7:05, I can set a 45 minute manual reminder, using a long and intense audio to wake me up. At that point, I can either WILD or DEILD, depending on whether or not I was woken up from a dream!



Manual mode reminder lets me schedule a reminder with 0-95 minutes delay. This is done through the right panel on the Singularity screen:

Tap on the reminder which you would like to play
Tap the play button, it turns green to confirm that the reminder has been set
Tap Pause button to cancel manual and other pending reminders.