daranpet5: Crazy DIY Goggles Let You Take Control of Your Dreams

Sunday, April 22, 2012

Crazy DIY Goggles Let You Take Control of Your Dreams

[Photo: William Finucane via Mad Science]Whenever you dream, you go into a world completely of your own imagination’s creation. In most cases, you don’t know when you are dreaming, but when you do, it becomes something known as a lucid dream, which leads to a whole other “god-level” of dream control.

There are ways to psychologically train yourself to recognize when you are dreaming. But for those of us who are less mentally trained, William Finucane of the Revolt Lab has shared a way to build a pair of goggles that will help you trigger a lucid dream whenever you want.

The build consists of a pair of safety goggles with some red LEDs that shine light on your eyes. The lights are connected to an ATtiny85 microcontroller and an Arduino board that’s been programmed to start blinking the lights every 10 minutes after a two-hour delay.

The idea is that the system will start blinking the lights once you've gone into Rapid Eye Movement sleep where dream activity is more likely. The lights will, theoretically, catch your attention without fully wake you up, and then you will know that you’re dreaming.

In a lucid dream, you supposedly can take full control of your dream world. So you can climb a vertical hill, get attacked by a waitress holding two trays who starts spinning like a toy top of doom (I’ve had some weird dreams…), turn the world on its head like Ellen Page did in the movie Inception, or act out whatever fantasies you have.

Be sure to check out the full build of Finucane’s Lucid Dreaming Goggles on Mad Science.

What would you want to do in a lucid dream? Leave a comment or dream diary entry.

[Mad Science via Hack a Day]