Testing an EILD tonight, a vibrating bluetooth bracelet!

Hi everyone,

I have been looking into external devices to help me lucid dream. I've seen a few posted on here but I wanted to make one of my own. I was first going to make a mask with LEDs over the eyes using an arduino kit, but that was coming in at about £50. A cheaper solution was to take a vibrating bluetooth bracelet and make it vibrate at certain intervals and see what happens.

I bought this bracelet: http://www.lm-technologies.com/home/...tooth-bracelet

I picked it up from Best Offer By for about £13 delivered so it was worth a punt.

It's quite loose on my wrist which is good because I didn't want the sensation to be too strong against my arm. It's my first night tonight so if it is too strong, I'll probably put a sweat band or something underneath it to reduce the sensation.

I'm a software developer by trade, and thought it would be fairly trivial to use linux and a bluetooth adaptor to emulate a phone, and make the bracelet vibrate whenever I wanted it too. It turns out that it's not easy at all, and there is no one else out there that has attempted something similar. (If anyone out there has done any work with bluez-utils / hcitool and emulate a bluetooth phone class, I would love to hear from you! :) )

So I have resorted to pairing the bracelet with my phone as it is intended, and writing a quick bash script in linux which generates a call using the asterisk software pbx at my work. This will "one bell" me at a predefined time. I have timed the call so it disconnects after one ring and therefore one vibrate.

If it works, I will look more into emulating a phone via a bluetooth adaptor so times can be easily set by a user (and not require a bloomin' pbx). If it doesn't I'll make the LED mask! :D

I'll update this with my progress if anyone is interested :)

Yes, I'd like to know how you get on.

Okies, so last night the anticipation might have been too much. I woke up before it was meant to go off (wondering why it hadn't gone off), too readily when it did, and I set the timings too close to when I wake. I have changed the timings so hopefully it will have a better affect tonight.

I also noticed that the same thing happened to me as people using other devices, which is if they were woken up by an EILD, there wasn't enough time to get back to sleep before the next occurrence - in my case a vibration - of the external device is triggered.

I am going to have another crack at trying to get a bluetooth adaptor to work with the bracelet as I don't like the lack of control I have with using a phone system to trigger the vibrations.

On a side note, I did have a weird dream which might have been triggered by the bracelet but I didn't attain lucidity.

I had been involved in a car crash with my wife - which for some reason was Julia Roberts - and we were both terribly messed up in the crash. An assessor then came out to see if it was worth spending all the money on bringing us back to our full health. He was looking over us, wondering how much it would cost to stop us from being as flat as pancakes. Luckily, my wife (Ms Roberts) had recently written some wonderful poetry, so decided to save her and me. In rehab, the doctor loved tending to my svelte wife, but for some reason I had turned into Robin Williams, and he made it quite clear he didn't like treating my hairy body and posture.

As my external senses integrated the vibration into my dream as a car crash, I might have to seek an alternate way to induce lucidity anyway :D

The 2nd day of testing almost didn't happen as I forgot to charge the bracelet, but I charged it for 30mins before I went to sleep and there was enough juice in it for the duration.

This time I modified when it would vibrate and elongated the duration between vibrations from every 5 mins for 2 hours to every 20 mins for 2 hours.

I was woken up once by the vibration but the rest of the times I didn't notice it. I did have a lucid dream however and it lasted for quite a long time. Twice in the lucid dream I almost lost control and things started to fade, but I concentrated on holding onto something in my dream a couple of times and managed to stop myself from waking up.

The dream that I had was bomb related (until I took control of it) where a church was being bombed. Again it could be coincidence or it could be the vibrations on my wrist. A bomb dream and a car crash dream don't sound like the nicest ways to attain lucidity. I'll keep trying and let you know of my progress.

I realise this could be done with a vibrating watch and if it does work I might buy one of those and test them. I just went down the bracelet route because it was a lot cheaper than most of the vibrating watches and I wanted to make sure it worked before bought it. I do however like that the bracelet has plenty of give, and if I got a watch I would probably need to do the same.

The 3rd night of using this gave me a lucid dream. I might have just been lucky because it's the weekend and I can sleep a little bit longer. I generally have more luck getting lucid at the weekends because of the extra sleep, whereas I sometimes struggle during the week.

It only woke me up 1 time out of 7 vibrations so I think I'm going to tweak it a bit more now.

Tweaks:

• I will pull the bracelet further up my arm so I feel the sensation a little bit more - hopefully I can get more of a response from it in my dreams.
• I will increase the amount of vibrations to every 15 mins, between 4 and 6 am.

** I have also managed to pair this device with my linux box, which means I have full control over how many times it vibrates, and for how long. **

This makes it at £13 (not including the bluetooth adaptor), a cheaper option to using a vibrating watch. I just need to play with it some more to find the optimal use for it. The best thing about this is it will wake you up, without having to do anything to turn it off like some of the other techniques using alarms that need to be turned off/snoozed.

Does anyone else have any suggestions? Maybe I should also wear it during the day and have it vibrate every now and again?

Wow, that's very interesting. Good work, and keep it up!

It could help to have it vibrate during the day a few times, just to get it through your mind that when it vibrates, you're awake. :P