Technology for On-Demand Lucid Dreaming
Why isn’t lucid dreaming more popular? It’s hard to routinely access for most people.
This presents an opportunity. If we develop techniques and technology to enable on-demand lucid dreaming, it would go mainstream overnight.
What’s on-demand lucid dreaming? There’s no official definition, so let’s make one up: use a simple solution to experience a lucid dream in more than 50% of nights without any prior training.
I think we’ll achieve on-demand lucid dreaming within the next two decades, if not sooner. Solutions may arise from a combination of these three categories:
1.) Mental techniques
2.) External supplements
3.) External stimuli
Mental techniques include dream journaling, daytime reality checks, and others. These foundational techniques improve the chances of lucid dreams. However, lucid dreams can still be elusive, lessening motivation to maintain these techniques as a long-term habit.
We must go beyond mental techniques to achieve on-demand lucid dreaming for the masses. For this, we look to external influences to impact our inner states. New solutions using external supplements and external stimuli show promise.
External supplements alter the biochemistry within our brains, and can alter the nature of our dreams. Supplements like galantamine have shown promise for inducing lucid dreams by altering the amounts of certain molecules in our brains while we dream. A 2018 double-blind, placebo-controlled study with 121 participants showed statistically significant increases in lucid dreaming frequency at 4-mg and 8-mg doses of galantamine. Lucid dreams were reported 27% of the time at the 4-mg dose, 42% of the time at the 8-mg dose, and 14% when using mental techniques alone (i.e. 0-mg dose).
Combining different supplements could potentially further increase the frequency at which people experience lucid dreams. Such supplements include, but are not limited to: choline supplements (e.g. Citicoline, Alpha GPC), vitamin B6 for enhanced dream recall, mugwort, and others. Given the lack of controlled studies in this domain, none of these supplements are well proven and should be taken with caution and only sporadically to avoid building a dependency.
External stimuli show promise alongside external supplements and mental techniques, but still have a long way to go before achieving on-demand lucid dreaming. The first generation of lucid dreaming devices resemble sleep masks and fittingly emerged from the lab of Stephen LaBerge. Beyond blocking light from the wearer’s eyes, they also shine lights against the dreamer’s eyelids selectively while REM sleep is detected. For some dreamers, this is enough to trigger the start of a lucid dream.
Over the years, various masks and headbands progressed their stimulation beyond light with sound and tactile stimuli in an effort to raise dream awareness without waking the dreamer. Sounds ranged from tones to pre-recorded mantras (e.g. “I am now in a dream.”) to binaural beats designed to modulate brainwave activity.
Real-time REM detection is now becoming acceptably accurate. Devices include more advanced sensors including EEG, infrared eye motion sensors, optical sensing for heart rate, heart rate variability, respiratory rate, accelerometers to track movement, and temperature sensors. Advances in processing power and memory components allow more complex on-device calculations in real-time.
Where do we go from here? The remaining barrier is getting the stimulation right.
Electrical stimulation may currently hold the most promising means to induce lucid dreams, but past studies — including Voss et al. 2014 — have failed to demonstrate the ability to induce lucid dreams.
Well-designed studies with different stimulation approaches will move the field forward. An on-demand lucid dream induction device must use a stimulation modality (e.g. tACS, tDCS, TMS, light, sound, etc.) that’s effective, targeted, safe, and able to be incorporated into a small, comfortable, simple consumer device. With a poor understanding of how the brain functions — let alone how lucid dreaming arises in the brain — this is easier said than done. We might need a well-powered brain imaging study to better understand where to even begin.
On the bright side, many of the newest devices have received an enthusiastic response, raising much more money than they originally targeted on crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo. The Aurora headband raised almost $240,000 after asking for $90,000. Neuroon Open raised almost $360,000 after asking for $100,000. Even though these products have not delivered on-demand lucid dreaming, this type of response demonstrates the demand and excitement for devices that induce lucid dreams.
This space is like dry wood waiting for the right spark. What will it take for lucid dreaming to catch fire?
Join the discussion of how to move lucid dreaming technology forward with Tech for Dreaming in our Discord, Twitter, and one of our future community events.
[Note: this was adapted from a longer-form article I wrote in the Spring of 2020.]
