Dreams

[nibot]

I woke up from a dream, feeling well-rested and generally refreshed, with sunshine streaming in through my window onto my face. The sunlight appeared in my dream, as my vision in the dream had become very strange. Horizontal bands of light or something.

I think that being woken up `gently` really helps with the remembering of dreams. I rarely (a small number of times per year) remember my dreams, or even that I had been dreaming. However, a few times this year I remembered my dreams after being woken up by the radio; but these memories were only ephemoral, and faded quickly. The alarm clock is a harsh jolt into reality, involving the piercing noise and a walk across the room. I wonder how difficult it would be to make a home-made EEG (electroencephalograph) to monitor sleep patterns. This could be monitored by a simple device which could produce external stimulus (sound, light) in pursuit of a number of goals: a) wake up optimally so as to remember dreams; b) wake up at the proper point in the sleep cycle so as to feel optimally refreshed; c) investigate lucid dreaming.

When I was much younger, specifically in the third grade, I remembered my dreams vividly, and could usually influence my actions in the dream. This was very exciting not only because the laws of physics did not apply (I could usually fly) but also because my dreams frequently verged on the nightmarish. This phenomenon suddenly disappeared towards the end of grade school and since then I've never really remembered my dreams at all, and I've always wondered why.

Feynmann did some personal `research` on the matter, and his main conclusion was that it is simply necessary to train your memory (by writing down everything you can remember about your dreams when you wake up, for example) in order to (re-)develop the lucid dreaming capacity.

I've talked to my roommate a little about it, and we both have noticed that we tend to remember our dreams a lot more frequently when we're on some kind of vacation from school; somehow the daily stress of school destroys the memory of dreams, but perhaps this is just a result of the sudden-return-to-awakening addressed above. I dunno. It would be fun to make an EEG and investigate the phenomenon quantitatively.

Comments

Re: Electroencephaloscope project

[tjernobyl.livejournal.com]

Yes, we need some sort of DIY EEG community...

Just found eegspectrum (http://eegspectrum.com) today, looks interesting...

Hamfests and other surplus electronics retailers tend to have cheap scopes... though they've never been cheaper new. Radio Shack has handheld LCD scopes, good for getting a rough idea of what's going on anyway...

Bitscope (http://www.bitscope.com/) is an interesting option as well. 100mhz open design scope with computer interface.

Re: Electroencephaloscope project

[(Anonymous)]

you can count audio frequencies with your soundcard. i once made a capacitance meter with a 555 timer, a speaker, and a microphone plugged in to my soundcard, which was attached to FFT software. you could figure out the capacitance of an unknown capacitor by plugging it in to the 555 circuit, and using the sound card to measure the frequency of the output if you can figure out how to vary capacitance or resistance from your input signal, you could in theory use your puter as an oscilloscope in the audio range of frequecy for a couple bucks. not sure if this translates down in frequency, obviously have to find a different interface than the mic and speaker combo. optoisolators, anyone?
Tom Watts