Lucid Dreaming - Sending a Signal to the Waking World

Lucid Dreaming seems to be a bridge between the waking and dream worlds. You are dreaming, yet you are conscious of dreaming and capable of having rational thoughts during a jumbled dream.

Being lucid doesn't mean that you have full control over your dreams, despite being aware that I'm dreaming I still find that I am compelled to "play along" with the dream that I'm given. So, for example, if I find myself dreaming of a street scene, I can't magically transform it into countryside. In order to change the scenery I have to make the change fit into the story somehow, even if the scene-change is something as crude opening a shop door and "knowing" that it takes me to the countryside.

All this is wrapped in the fact that (for me at least) lucid dreaming is a constant struggle to remain lucid, it doesn't take much to lose lucidity and slip back into a normal dream. 

So when I suggested sending a signal from a dream in this blog-post, I thought it unlikely that I'd ever be able to remain lucid and have the presence of mind to consciously send a signal to the Zeo Raw Data (via ZeoScope) marking the lucid dream.

I'd been briefly practicing what sort of a signal to use before going to sleep every night, hoping that it'd stick inside my head if I was fortunate enough to have a lucid dream. Given that the signal has to be based on eye movements I was fairly limited in what I could do, but the practice sessions showed me that flicking my eyes from side to side just seemed to produce a very noisy signal and something that could be interpreted as EMG noise from my forehead, so I settled on eye movements to the right, then centre, which produced a nice peak on the raw EEG data (it is this type of peak that the Zeo filters to use for its EOG signal).

Because the eye movements were forced as far right as I could manage the amplitude of them rose above the normal eye movements of waking and REM. 

(Normal eye movements during a period of REM (right to centre first, followed by left to centre)

On Wednesday night I became lucid in a dream and managed to stop and send a signal using my eyes that was picked up by the Zeo.

The first thing that I remember about the dream was that I was late to get to a party and I still had to stop off and buy a bottle of something to take along. I lifted up and flew along the coast of the Thames Estuary not far from where I live. 

This was the thing that prompted me to become lucid. Flying is such a break from the everyday laws of physics that it jolted me into realising that I was dreaming.

So, I went along with the dream, flying to the party but stopping off at a small stone-clad Welsh off-licence (I have no idea why I ended up in Wales). As I landed and my feet touched the ground I remembered that I was wearing the Zeo headband and recording the raw data, so I darted my eyes sharply to the right and centred them again.

Then I thought, "That's just one, maybe it'll get lost in the other data", so I repeated it 5 more times, then bought my wine and Jaffa Cakes, lifted into the sky and headed for mainland Europe (where the party was apparently).

Shortly after arriving at the party (which turned out to be in a 1970s church hall), I woke up and glanced at the clock before falling asleep again.

In the morning I found it easy to see the signal that I'd recorded. The peaks were a lot larger than my typical eye movements. The first peak is my initial signal, then after a pause I gave 5 more right-eye movements.

So, not as significant as a signal picked up by SETI but still, this is a signal from the dream-world to the waking world. It actually reassures me because several people have asked me, "How do you know that you're not just dreaming that you know you're dreaming?" implying that lucid dreaming is itself a dream. This shows that it isn't. At the time of the signals, I remembered that I was actually asleep in bed and not outside an off-licence in Wales and although I was still standing on the cobbled street and not able to sense the waking world I was able to make an impact on it via this signal.

From the Zeo raw data it seems that a broken night played a part in triggering this dream, and I suspect that respiratory arousals were the cause again as I wasn't wearing the Rematee belt. A rough breakdown of the time surrounding lucidity is as follows...

• 04:34:45 Woke from a long stable period of N1/N2 (light) sleep
• 04:39:15 Entered REM (from wake)

Repeated awakenings and a mixture of N1/N2 and REM until... 

• 05:00:15 Entered stable REM
• 05:03:26 Began to signal lucidity
• 05:03:37 Gave last eye movement of lucidity
• 05:06:14 Woke and looked at the clock before going back into REM again
• 05:11:14 REM ended

So this places my lucid dream within REM, which was the subject of speculation for years until Stephen LaBerge confirmed that lucid dreams are actually REM dreams. 

Jeff Warren also has a good explanation of the technique in this exerpt from his book, "The Head Trip". 

Stephen LaBerge, William Dement, Lynn Nagel and Vincent Zarcone took things a lot further and even recorded morse code signals from a lucid dream via muscle-movements.

I'm still not any closer to seeing a trademark brainwave pattern of lucid dreaming, but I suspect that this is due to the single site EEG. 

I'd like to practice this further and if I'm fortunate enough to be able to do this again I'd like to try to repeat the signal every 60 seconds (as it appears to me in the dream), or at key points in the dream (such as taking off and landing, meeting a person etc etc) it would be interesting to see if these signals can be used as markers to chart the flow of time through a dream.  

Zeo Sleep Monitor

In many blog-posts I'm going to be talking about some devices that I use to monitor my sleep. So I thought it best to explain a bit about them. The first one is the Zeo.

There are two flavours of Zeo, a bedside unit and a new mobile version that pairs with your smartphone.

 

 Both devices consist of a wireless headband containing fabric electrodes which are used to measure your brainwaves using EEG technology. Previously EEGs were confined to sleep laboratories and hospitals. They involved gluing electrodes onto your scalp and connecting them to a computer in order to detect the voltage changes that take place in your brain. Interpreting these EEGs is a skill in itself.

During a full polysomnography sleep study, a sleep technician will manually look at each 30 second chunk of data (epoch) from the EEG (then combine it with data from what your eyes were doing and how tense your muscles were) in order to determine which stage of sleep you are in. Zeo is much neater and doesn't involve glue or wires.

A typical night with Zeo goes something like this:

• When you are ready to sleep, remove the headband from it's magnetic dock/charger
• Place the headband on your head with the block roughly central on your forehead
• Wait for the little symbol of a head to illuminate (that means it has detected a brainwave pattern - always a relief)
• Sleep
• Wake, remove and re-dock headband

Both versions allow you to instantly see how you slept last night but you can also upload and view the data via the Zeo website. The site allows greater analysis of how you slept; you can also complete a sleep journal detailing coffee and alcohol intake, your "morning feel" and various other factors to help you see a cause-and-effect relationship between them and how you sleep.

A device that reads your brainwaves... you know you want one. This is where you can get them from in the UK: http://myzeo.co.uk/

So, what does the Zeo actually measure?

As previously said, it uses an EEG, combined with an EOG (eye movements) and EMG (muscle tone) to determine which state of sleep you are in. It then presents this to you in a colourful graph called a hypnogram.

Whereas a sleep technician looks at every 30 seconds, Zeo examines every second of data and makes a decision, it then amalgamates these into 30 second chunks using a proprietary scoring system.

The makers of Zeo have released a special firmware for the bedside unit that allows you to plug a computer into the port on the back and see the actual EEG and play it back in the morning. You can see all the little blips and squiggles and how they relate to your sleep.

 This, for example, is a "Sleep Spindle" it signifies that I was in stage 2 sleep...

Sleep consists of cycles of deep, light, wake and REM (Rapid Eye Movement). On a formal hypnogram you may see these listed as an N and a number. The N simply means Non-REM. N1 and N2 are considered to be light sleep. N3 (and sometimes N4) are considered to be deep sleep.

Early in the night is when you get the most deep sleep, which then decreases through the night and is "replaced" with increasing amounts of REM

 Hence, a normal hypnogram (sleep stage graph) should look something like this:

Graph taken from "A good night's sleep part one: Normal Sleep" by Dr Sue Wilson.
"Nursing & Residential Care", November 2008

Zeo's hypnograms display data at resolution of 5 minutes. The 30 second resolution graph is available by exporting the data into a spreadsheet program.

This is one of my recent hypnograms from Zeo, and as you can see it's a mess...

That's where the Zeo's journal comes in... WHY is it a mess? Too much coffee in the afternoon? Too much wine in the evening? Is the room too warm? Do I always wake up at the same time in the night? Why is that? Could it be the heating making noises? etc etc.

By looking at the patterns, you can aim to work out why your night is disrupted (if it is). If you are one of the lucky ones who seem to sleep normally then you can aim to improve on that sleep to make sure you feel bright and energetic in the mornings.

What's wrong with my graph?

Looking at the the night shown above, there are a couple of things that jump out:

• Deep sleep - not enough of it, and doesn't follow the pattern of decreasing through the night. This is clear because my body obviously tried to catch-up on deep sleep at 7:30am!
• I have WASO (Wake after sleep onset), but it seems that they are not random, they seem to be clustered around what should be solid chunks of REM. 

These REM disturbances are what I believe leads to episodes of sleep paralysis. I will do a blog post on that later, but there is a good article on Wikipedia about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_paralysis

So all in all, much to improve on.

I did suspect that I had REM related issues. Maybe a small part of my son's condition is hereditary? Maybe not, maybe it's just coincidence.

For the 10 years that it took to get my son's sleep and breathing under control I was forever listening out for his oxygen alarm. He would stop breathing during REM sleep and the alarm would sound to alert me to it.

I'd then wake up, glance at the alarm on the camera that I'd installed and then go in to rouse him from sleep and get him to breathe again.

This would happen many times a night. Children have a lot of REM! 

Maybe in some way my brain had adapted to not be quite asleep, forever on the lookout for my son's alarm that everyone else in the house slept through (including him)!

My son's breathing is now regulated by BiPAP (A breathing machine that delivers alternating pressures of air via a mask - more about that in another post). That started about 6 months ago, so I thought I would have settled down into a decent sleep routine now. 

I decided to explore and used some of the cameras and monitors that I had used for my son on myself. After a couple of nights I now have a fair idea of why I wake in REM. So, I've decided to be a bit more disciplined about collecting data and recording what I'm up to.

This week I'll be gathering data for 5 nights (Mon - Fri) and will post the data and its mean as a baseline for my sleep, then I am going to try a different method of "fixing it" every 5 nights (Mon - Fri) and average for consistency.

I'll blog the results as I'm going along.

Next post: baseline sleep scores.