Red Mercury Labs

About a week ago, I wrote an application for my Treo called the Lucidizer. The functionality is pretty simple. Between 9AM and 6PM, at random 30 to 90 minute intervals, it triggers the vibrate on the Treo and pops up a dialog box. After 15 seconds or so the dialog box goes away on its own.

The dialog box says “You Are Awake”.

The first day or two, there was a slight, barely noticable feeling of “why yes, I am awake!” each time it buzzed. The next few days it was not as annoying as I thought it might be - it didn’t really distract me from what I was doing or totally throw my concentration for a loop. By Friday of last week, it was getting annoying. It was a busy day at Red Mercury, and I had my Treo sitting on my desk, so the buzzing on my desk made me jump out of my skin a few times. By the end of the day, I was thinking, “yes, I know I’m awake!” and I was somewhat relieved when 6PM rolled around, after which it wouldn’t buzz again until the next day.

At this point you probably know exactly what the Lucidizer is designed to do, or you are a bit perplexed and at least mildly curious (otherwise you wouldn’t still be reading). The point of the Lucidizer is to get me in the habit of checking my surroundings to see if I’m awake. The idea is, if you get used to doing this while you’re awake, you will also start doing it when you’re dreaming. And if you figure out that you’re dreaming, you can do some interesting things, like fly.

This is known as lucid dreaming. I first read about it while in college in the early 1990s on USENET (an early Internet discussion forum). The description of lucid dreaming sounded completely impossible, either a hoax or some sort of misunderstanding. So I decided to give it a try. The discussion forum suggested writing a “C” on your left hand. If you got in the habit of checking for that “C” during the day, you would eventually check for it during a dream - and at that point, it wouldn’t be there (because your brain’s recollection of your hand that you see in your dream doesn’t include the “C” you wrote on it that day). And once that happens, you “wake up” inside your dream and can, well, fly.

The “C” trick kind of worked, sort of, once. I wrote the “C” on my hand, and glanced at it, and did this for just a few days. Then, one night, while asleep and dreaming, I realized I was dreaming and “woke up” in the dream. I completely felt like I was standing in the room where I was sleeping, but it was clear that it was a dream, because things were very… dreamlike (things would move around and change somewhat randomly). It didn’t last very long - it freaked me out and I woke myself up.

I hadn’t thought much about it since then, but at the 2006 Game Developer’s Conference it was mentioned in a session as an interesting technique to aid with creative thinking, and then out of the blue my wife mentioned it as something that her colleagues at a dot com company in the late ’90s had been interested in.

So, the lucidizer was born, and I think last night it bore its first fruit.

I was having this dream, a pretty normal dream where I’m zooming down the expressway going fairly fast, in a shopping cart, with my daughter. Of course, there are no steering or throttle controls on a shopping cart, so when we zoomed into a tunnel and saw that there was a cow blocking the way, it seemed like a crash was certain. But, the shopping cart slowed down, and we steered carefully around the cow, and then continued on the way. These kinds of zooming along dreams are fun, because if you remember them the next day, you can remember the feeling of zooming along magically, kind of flying.

Shortly after the cow incident, I felt like I had awakened, and that I was lying in my bed. But I wasn’t sure. I remembered to check. One way to check if youre dreaming is to read a sign, then look away, and then read it again. If you’re dreaming, the words you read will usually change the second time you read them. Unfortunately, I was lying in the dark and there were no signs to read. I felt like I couldn’t move, which seemed like a good sign that I might not be awake. I tried holding my arms out to the side and spinning - this is supposedly a technique to keep yourself from waking up when you realize you’re dreaming. I felt myself start to spin, and then at that moment it felt like I was truly moving.

I freaked out, and did everything I could to wake myself up. I didn’t know if I was actually moving, or if I was moving inside a dream. It felt like I was really moving, but in retrospect, I coudn’t have been, because the motion I thought I was doing basically couldn’t have been happening while I was laying in bed. Finally, I sat up in bed, this time certainly awake.

I think maybe after another week or so of the Lucidizer, I might be able to have the awareness to steer a flying shopping cart in my dreams, or at the very least, to realize that being in a flying shopping cart with my daughter headed toward a cow is not something to be worried about - the shopping cart will slow down and steer around the cow.