Hi,

Recently bought some of Jeffery Thompsons meditation aids from Amazon. He uses either music or nature sounds incorporated with Binaural Beats.

I also bought a sleepsonic pillow. This is a small pillow with stero speakers built in that plug into an ipod or anything else. Its about 100 times more comfortable than trying to sleep with Ipod ear buds. I had been using a headband to keep the earbuds in - but this was really uncomfortable and often woke me up in discomfort.

I created a playlist that uses some of Thompson's Delta wave recordings for the first 4.5 hours, then Theta waves for an hour then Alpha Theta for the another 4 hours.

I tried it over the weekend with good results. I had something of a "party" weekend and so did way to much drinking to go lucid. But I did have some very odd, vivid and long dreams.

What has me quite excited by this approach is that I had a very odd vivid dream where all kinds of odd stuff was happening, it was bright and sunny but I could hear a thunder storm, the sound of thunder became a major part of the dream. I ended up having to try and take a ladder off the roof of this building as we were all scared that lightening might stike it and cause a fire on the roof. The THETA track in my playlist is a thunderstorm recording.

Therefore the pillow is comfortable enough to keep me asleep and the sound track does not wake me up, yet the soundtrack is becoming part of the dreamscape. I will therefore start affirmations to "recognize I am dreaming when I hear thunder" - this could become a way to induced dream signs on demand.

Will drink less this weekend and see how well this works.