Looking for volunteers for experiment in scientific dream-to-dream communication.

I have been working with the Zeo sleep headband, Sleep Stream Online website and home automation tools (remote control a bedroom light) to test lucid dreaming cues and eye movement response. I have coded a program that will leverage the processes of the website to allow for simple message passing between two people who are both in REM.

I am now ready for volunteer experimenters to attempt the historically first communication between dreamers (using lucid light/audio cues and lucid eye movement responses) and document the whole process for an article. I will be providing all of the hardware and software. I need the teams to be in relatively the same time zone, give or take, and each fairly experienced lucid dreamers.

Below are the research experiment details:

Research Title: Dream-to-Dream Communication using the Zeo and lucid dreaming (dream awareness) cues with dreamer response messages.

Protocol will be two volunteers adept at lucid dreaming where one dreamer (in REM stage) will communicate with the other (in REM stage) via two Zeo’s, a website interface provided by Sleep Stream Online and cuing tools (in this case X10 home automation light cues).

Description: Merriam-Webster defines communication as a “process by which information is exchanged between individuals through a common system of symbols, signs, or behavior.” Gestures, signs, speech, writing, semaphore, etc. have all found new media over the last with which to communicate: telephone, telegraph, radio, tv, the internet, etc. One thing, however, that all of these forms of communication have in common have been that these communications have always taken place between one conscious being and another, or, more precisely, between two individuals that are awake. Never have two people communicated when they were both asleep--more specifically when they were both dreaming. I, climbing a mountain in my dream, have never been able to call “hello”’ to you in your dream of sailing the blue ocean.

The main constraint on this type of communication has been the limitations of the dreaming brain to receive input from the outside world and to convey information back. Receiving information has generally been limited to what is called “incorporation”: the assimilation of an outside sensory stimulus into the “story” of the dream. Anecdotally, most of us have experienced something like answering a telephone or dreaming of a fire drill when our morning alarm goes off in our bedroom. Likewise, communicating from a dream is constrained by the near-paralysis of the body during REM, with the notable exceptions of eye movements and some small movements of the hands and feet.

These are formidable constraints to inter-dream communication, but not insurmountable for simple message passing between dreamers. New technology like the Zeo, the internet, and home automation tools that control a bedroom light via software allows for the exploitation of dream incorporation and eye signaling to provide rudimentary dream-to-dream communication. Contemporary lucid dream induction devices such as NovaDreamer and REM Dreamer have fairly proven the effectiveness of external cuing to evoke lucidity in many dreamers. And many laboratory studies (Hearne, 1976; LaBerge, 1977) have proven the ability of lucid dreamers to consciously signal to experimenters using deliberate eye movements. The success of such methods and the rise of the internet prompted me to write an article in the Spring 2010 issue of The Lucid Dream Exchange titled Multi-Player Dream Games. One reader suggested using the Zeo; whereupon I posted on the Zeo forum and was contacted by Brian Schiffer, an intern at Zeo and creator on an online website for streaming Zeo data.

The intended outcome for this research project is to document a simple message passed from one conscious (lucid) dreamer to another. The Zeo will be utilized to determine sleep stage and pass waveform data to a local computer program. The program, created by Brian Schiffer, will capture this data, parse out eye movements and pass the sleep data to Sleep Stream Online, a website also created by Brian that further provides additional logging features for this experiment. A computer program created by myself will query sleep stage and eye signal logs for both experiment subjects and based on coordinated REM activity, send a lucid dream cue to one of the dreamers using a X10 home automation lamp cue (and optionally computer audio). Ideally, this cue will be incorporated into the dream story and evoke lucidity (the cue event will also be passed to Sleep Stream Online for logging). Once evoked, ideally, this first dreamer will respond with strong intentional right/left eye movements that will be passed in the waveform from Zeo to the local software and on to Sleep Stream Online where it can be queried by the second dreamer’s software as a trigger to fire a X10 light cue to this dreamer. The second dreamer will be trained to know that the light cue incorporated into her dream is actually a cue message from the first dreamer and then respond with strong right/left eye movements in the dream—the results: actual inter-dream communication, as rudimentary as it is. This entire process can be documented both on the local computers and in the database of Sleep Stream Online, and along with dream testimonials from both dreamers, should offer strong evidence of dream-to-dream messaging.