Sorry for messing up your sleep with so many bugs. You just hit almost every currently known problem with the Dream Director in a single session.

Sweet dreams!

The Impact of Olfactory Stimulation on Dreams
Boris A Stuck, MD (presenter); Desislava Atanasova;
Kathrin Frauke Grupp; Michael Schredl, PhD
PROBLEM: Only a limited number of trials is available regarding the impact of external and internal stimuli on human dreams. Current research focuses on the question whether these stimuli (acoustic or mildly painful stimuli e.g.) are incorporated into dreams and whether they influence their emotional coloring. In a recently published trial we were able to demonstrate that isolated olfactory stimulation does not lead to arousals. Aim of the present study was to investigate whether olfactory stimuli of different hedonic characteristics influence dreams in humans.
METHODS: 15 young healthy female volunteers were investigated during 30 nights of testing. Standardized awakenings were performed during REM sleep. During REM phases, subjects were exposed to non-odorous control, a positive odor (PEA, 20%) and a negative odor (H2S, 4 ppm) for 10 seconds each in a randomized fashion using a computer olfactometer.
After the awakening, subjects were advised to report the content of their dream in a standardized fashion and to assess the emotional coloration (positive and negative) on a four digit scale (0 / 1 / 2 / 3: no / little / moderate / strong feelings) to calculate the overall emotional coloration.
RESULTS: In all subjects, three REM awakenings were performed. For 40 out of 45 awakenings, a dream was reported by the subjects. Mean emotional coloration after control stimulation was slightly positive (+0.5). After negative stimulation, the mean emotional coloration was shifted to negative values (- 0.4) while the mean emotional coloration was significantly more positive after positive stimulation (+1.2).
CONCLUSION: Standardized REM awakenings can be performed successfully even under the conditions of an olfactory laboratory with intransal stimulation. With olfactory stimulation, the emotional coloration of dreams can be significantly influenced in accordance with the hedonic aspect of the stimulant.
SIGNIFICANCE: The study opens a potential field of therapeutic intervention with nocturnal olfactory stimulation.

Here’s a link to the official press release about the study:
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-09/aaoo-osm091508.php

When using the erection switch it is best to leave the switch unplugged untill it is properly attached. Otherwise it may come undone and your induction cue will begin to play. The switch over-rides the control buttons so it become impossible to turn off the controller until the switch is closed. So attach the switch first to your body first, then plug it into the controller.

To be continued…

Since I’ve mentioned using the Tilt Switch in my most recent dream report, I thought I might should add a few helpful tips about its use.

I always believed that my dreaming process was clearly defined. First, I lose consciousness, then I begin to dream. In reality, at least for me, it doesn’t really work this way. When I began using the Tilt Switch, I was amazed to discover how deeply I could get lost in hypnagogic sleep while still being acutely aware that I was still holding the Tilt Switch. At first I seemed to get trapped in this space in between sleep and consciousness, then I decided to simply go with the flow and enjoy the experience. To do this I had to let go of my desire to “witness” the edge of sleep where I believed I would drop the tilt switch, and progress into a hypnagogic dream. Another thing I found helpful was the practice of “Dream Spinning” suggested by Stephen LaBerge to help Lucid Dreamers remain lucid. As I feel the edge of sleep approaching, I mentally begin to turn my body and spin into a dream state. This enables me to slip away from my body awareness of hand on switch, and give in to the pull of the free flowing thoughts that feel very similar to a daydream.

The process of learning to release the mind into sleep is one part of this. The more important lesson, in my opinion, is an understanding about the state of consciousness Edison and others were seeking to achieve. After reading the story about Edison in Jeff’s book, I was under the mistaken impression (because of my own preconceptions about the separation between consciousness and dreaming) that the creative dreaming experienced by these artists and scientists occurred during the brief moment between the time they lost consciousness, and the time their body let go of the spoon or ball. In reality, it now seems to me that they were able to remain in a state of dreaming consciousness for extended periods of time while remaining full awareness of the object they were holding. When using the Tilt Switch, hypnagogic imagery always begins well before I ever lose consciousness of my hand holding the switch. My previous conceptions about hard fast lines between consciousness and dream sleep have now changed. I think I now understand a little better the concept of looking at various mind states as nothing more than just little shifts around the wheel of consciousness. Meditation, Hypnosis, Dream Sleep and Daydreams are states that require just tiny little changes in the areas of our mind we allow to remain aware and the parts we choose to ignore. I now suspect that if I wanted to, I could train myself to hold the Tilt Switch upright all night long. I realize that I’ve actually done this when my wife and I would sleep all night holding my baby daughter without rolling over and smothering her.

Fortunately, the Tilt Switch is flexible enough for you to use it for exploration of this interesting hypnagogic state, while also using it as a way to accurately determine the moment of sleep onset (allowing you to more accurately predict your 90 minute sleep cycles and thus the beginning of REM). But you may still need to train your mind to let go of its physical awareness as you drift off to sleep for this to work. The best way to do this is to relax and become comfortable with the idea that there are no lines between consciousness and sleep, only gray areas that often shift and fade.

This isn’t a particularly impressive dream, but I thought I would post it anyway since it’s typical of the type of dream users may have when they first try the Dream Director. After staying up late last night to work on sound files, I woke up early and had to pee (sorry if that’s TMI). When I went back to bed, I figured I might as well try out the cue for Wicked Game I had loaded into my Dream Director. I held the Tilt Switch and quickly fell back asleep.

In my dream I was running on my elementary school playground. Our playground was just a huge open grassy field. As kids, we used to play a simple game of “running away from the shadows”. Little puffy clouds would pass over the school and we would run from their clearly defined shadows as they drifted slowly across the playground. In my dream the clouds were like big tightly-stretched rubber sheets that acted like a drum with guitar strings attached to the middle tht and ran all the way down to the ground. The strings vibrated and flashed like lightning and the vibrations shook the air and the clouds, turning them into giant speakers (like a telephone made by attaching string between two plastic cups). As the vibrating strings came closer, the sound grew louder and the ground also began to shake. I wasn’t afraid, it all still seemed like a normal part of my playground game. But it became harder to run and I noticed that the grass was now beach sand. The vibrating strings came closer and I woke up to the guitar twang of my Wicked Game audio cue.

The entire dream probably lasted less then 2 minutes, so I probably only had incorporation of two induction cues. I didn’t dream of sex on the beach with Helena Christensen, but I did manage to slip in a little beach sand. It’s pretty obvious that the strings represented the sound of the guitar and the idea that they were approaching and coming after me relates to the idea of an ever increasing stimulus coming to take my sleep away. The sound from the clouds was not like thunder, but more like a hum. Not quite music exactly, but fluctuations in sound matched the fluctuations of the song if the music were expressed as a single tone. I also remember being engaged in another earlier dream before this one began. I don’t remember the details, but I know that it involved me as a child at the same age as the inducted dream.

In retrospect, I can see that these images are very true to my internal mental associations to this music. I’ve probably spent over an hour looking at graphical representations of this song on my computer screen and all of my thoughts about it have been about the progression of growing volume growing louder until the sound captures the dreaming mind before overpowering its ability to remain asleep.

I think the lessons learned from this dream are twofold. First, “Dream Weirdness” is always fascinating. The mind has an amazing ability to creatively weave external stimuli into an existing dream narrative (such as me as a child in my previous dream). Studies have shown that stimuli presented at the beginning of REM have a better chance of determining the content of a dream while stimuli presented at the peak of an REM cycle tend to be woven into the existing dream narrative.

The second lesson learned from this dream is that I need to spend a little less time looking at computer audio graphs and a little more time looking at internet porn. LOL