 So like my dream last night was... Aliens invaded and Angelina Jolie was like a general and she just starts getting bigger and eventually she's like 800 pounds. And it got to the point where my only out was to jump in the toaster. Suddenly one of these prehistoric giant birds just comes up and just eats my mom. Graphically it just visually rips her apart. We had to deal with the repercussions of this like mangled body of my mother. And like walls start disappearing and like people are watching me. But at some point I was flying. You're just airborne and you came down and like landed on a ramp. And like Bob Balaban is standing there. And I'll just say, hey Bob. And then they kind of like did like a cross section so you see the dead baby in the center but there's like layers and layers of paint around it. And then there's this kind of weird crazy flip where like... I bring Ben Franklin with Time Machine into the present day and I'm just like showing him around. And he's like I was saying you know his mind is blown by everything. I showed him his Wikipedia article. He was like, yeah I had syphilis. What happens when we go to sleep at night? I've always been an advocate for a good night's rest. When most of my colleagues are still dashing off emails or enjoying a nightcap, I'm usually in bed by 10 to clock a solid nine hours. But beyond appreciating the benefits of rest, I have to admit that I'm also drawn to the fanciful imaginings that often come with it. Dreams. But not just any dreams. Dreams I can control. Dr. Andrew Varga is a neurologist at the NYU Sleep Disorder Center. And sleep is a really evolutionarily preserved phenomenon from creatures that you wouldn't even think would have sleep. Things like C. elegans, which is a little worm, to fruit flies. You get bombarded with all this experience during wakefulness. And sleep is thought to maybe help you sort of figure out like what's worth filtering out and what's worth kind of retaining. Do we know what is going on in the brain when someone has a lucid dream? Lucid dreaming differs from regular dreaming during REM in that certain frontal areas bilaterally seem to get much more activated during lucid dreaming. You know, the idea I think to some extent behind lucid dreaming is that you create a little bit of a hybrid state that doesn't otherwise exist. Part of your brain essentially remains asleep and remains dreaming, but part of the brain actually enters a state of wakefulness. Lucid dreaming. It's the holy grail of sleep. Imagine having complete control over the world around you. It's like the most immersive virtual reality experience and it doesn't cost you a dime. Just a warm blanket and lots of practice. I've always had weird dreams like most people and been curious about what they meant. Was my psyche trying to process some earlier life trauma or teach me important life lessons? Or was my gray matter simply performing various restorative functions with dreaming simply an arbitrary side effect? In trying to figure that out, I read a book about lucid dreaming written by Thomas Peisel, a very active lucid dreamer. And it made me think lucid dreaming could help me figure out what it all means. And even if it can't, well, it sounds pretty damn fun. Do you ever get confused about whether or not you are awake or asleep? Yes. Do you think you're awake right now? I am awake. Are you? Am I dreaming? I'm also dreaming, I think. I mean, what are some of the most intense or crazy or profound lucid dreams that you've had? I mean, do you remember them in a vivid way or do they tend to sort of fade? I was once told by an oak tree, I asked, how are you so strong? How can I be like you? And it said, build something that will outlast your body. I've gotten great advice from an eight-foot tall Abraham Lincoln. A whale made of light told me all matter has its origin in spirit. And it showed me that if you make changes here in the dream world, you can actually affect the physical world. These are two parts of the same whole. Also, if I said the word cozy spasm, does that mean anything to you? You know when you get into bed and it is so cozy that you just have to like kick your feet and like do a little freak out? Like it's so warm in the bed. That's the kind of spiritual practice I'm talking about. So I want to be a lucid dreamer. What do I need to do? Well, you already are a dreamer. So you got that down. I am. So knowing you are a dreamer, that every single night you have access to this rich inner world. The next thing is about remembering your dreams. So go to bed with a paper and pad next to you, next to your bed, wake up. And you know that you will have a dream. So keep that journal next to you. Perform techniques like the wake back to bed. So if you set your intention in the beginning of the night, I'm going to become lucid. You're not going to become into a dream for another 90 minutes. So the goal with the wake back to bed is to sleep for six hours straight. Wake up in the middle of the night or six hours later. And now you're going to stay up for about 15 minutes setting your intention that the next place I'll be will be a dream. And I will become lucid. And then you're going to go back to sleep. And essentially you're going to go right directly into this REM cycle. And with a strong intention you can carry right over into a lucid dream. And I would say more than all of that, it really is about waking up and being present more in your waking life. That presence will carry over into your dreams. Because that's essentially what you're looking for is to wake up to the present moment of a dream. So when you're doing these practices, yeah, get into your pajamas and get into that cozy bed. You know, you're not just a spasm. Cozy spasm. Okay, it's time to dream. For the sake of this experiment, I've also set up a camera in my room to document my dreams the second I wake up. Shadow wants to make the dream journal a mobile experience. While the app does allow me to easily type out my dreams, the dictation function fixes that middle of the night confusion that makes writing in a dream journal difficult. Shadow also pulls out keywords from my dream and creates a more visual experience. One that will help me train my brain to recognize patterns in my dreams. Good morning everyone. So I just woke up after falling back asleep for another hour. I had a really intense dream and I feel like it was the closest I've come to having a moment of lucidity in a dream. It was just like a normal dream. I'm already starting to lose it, but I was in a car, like a sports car. Next to someone that, a dude that like I knew but I don't know who it was. But in the dream I felt like I knew him. And he was speeding through an empty city and then I had this moment of like, where I just felt like really in the car. Like the wind, temperature from outside coming in and like feeling the car around my body. And then I was like, slow down and turn around and take me to this house. So he like turned around and parked in front of a two-story house and I got out of the car and then I woke up. So now I'm already forgetting the dream, but it felt like very, very real. It was really weird. So, a good step. It feels like I'm making progress, but I think it might be time for an upgrade. This is the Remy sleep mask. Created by Duncan Frazier and Steven McGuigan of Bitbanger Labs, the project was funded in 2012 through a successful Kickstarter campaign. Remy is a device that gives you this kind of predictable signal in your dreams. It flashes lights through your eyes while you're in a dream and you can kind of latch on to the light patterns and it helps you recognize the fact that you're dreaming. So you can say, oh, there's the lights. I'm in the middle of a dream. Like now I can start to control the world around me. Originally, and when we had started looking into it, the main method was sort of to brute force train your brain to always check whether you're in a dream. Throughout your day, you'd have some kind of action you would repeat. Look at a clock, look at text, count your fingers. Typically, if you did that enough during the day, you might do it in your dream. However, in the dream, you look at a clock and you look away and you look back, the time has changed or text is very hard to read. So what you were doing is you were creating almost like a tick or a habit in your waking life that would then carry over into your dreams and would cue you. And Remy kind of automates that reality check process. You don't have to train yourself necessarily all day to check your watch or read words. Remy continues giving you predictable signals that are of your own design. So when you first turn on Remy, you'll get a little signal, just a back and forth pattern to let you know that it's on and all the lights are working. At this point, it's in regular mode, which in default settings means it's going to just not do anything for five hours. After five hours, it's going to start showing you signals every 15 minutes with what, like a two-minute wiggle. Some of them are more jarring. You'll get just all full-bright in one eye flashing back and forth. And some of them are just more like fading back and forth like a Knight Rider type pattern. Most people say, I saw it manifested as some sort of other light source in a dream. They'll say, I was standing there and suddenly my kitchen lights started going like this or an ambulance went by. For me, I generally see them as lights, as lights overlaid in a dream, like nothing incorporated into the dream itself. There's still an interplay. It's not like suddenly nothing's there unless you will it to be there. It's more like you're in a movie, but all of a sudden you don't have to say your lines and take cues. You can just do whatever you want. I had talked about lucid dreaming. He talked about flying into space. I had just never done that. The next time I was in a lucid dream, I flew into space, but I hit a painted space ceiling, like a diorama. It was really fascinating just to see how I was able to do what I wanted to do to a point, and then there was this sort of third-party interpretation of that. It's like a Wile E. Coyote thing. Yeah, I think that's really interesting when you can kind of bounce against your subconscious like that. Good morning. Night two with the Remy mask. No lucid dreams, but I just woke up from a dream that I was getting ready to get married. I dreamt that I was in a house. It was like my house or a house I was familiar with, with Carl, and we were getting ready for our wedding because we were getting married that day, and we were making food. I don't know why, because it was some other wedding that is not the one we're planning. We were getting ready for our wedding, and then my oldest sister arrived, and I was all excited to see her. Then we were lying on the grass, and then my mom got there, which is unusual because she's dead. She was wearing the same clothes she always wore, which was total mom pants with the waist up really high, and then a tucked in button-up shirt. She was there. She got there, and we were really excited to see her, and she was lying on the grass with us, and then she turned over and gave me a really big hug, and then that was when my alarm went off, and I woke up and I was crying. So not the kind of dream I have every day. I don't have dreams about her a lot, and it was actually rather unpleasant. It was a very, very vivid dream. I feel like the last two nights with the mask, I don't know what it is, but the dreams have been pretty intense. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. Using Remi and Shadow helped me to have more vivid, intense dreams, but I was still unable to have a lucid dream. That will come with weeks, months, or maybe even years of practice. Whether I'm using my smartphone and LED mask, or pen and paper, my brain is my only tool in the end. And while scientists continue to wrap their heads around what dreaming is and why we do it, developers and lucid dream enthusiasts will continue to do their part, creating whatever gadgets and apps are needed to better understand this bizarre, tranquil, even frightening experience that happens when we're trying to catch some Zs. In the meantime, I'll keep dreaming.