Lucid Dreaming & OBE alarm program

[kiwibonga]

I thought I'd post this here as well...

I made this tonight...

http://www.kiwibonga.com/DreamAlarm_0.1Beta.zip

It's a beta, it might be buggy, etc... So don't blame me if your eyes fall out of their sockets as a result of using this program... But do submit a bug report and suggestions

This program is designed to wake you up during the night at regular intervals to make sure you can't ever reach deep sleep. Obviously, don't use it if you want to feel rested the next day.

Waking up and drifting back to sleep without having to move to stop the noise is a great way to induce lucid dreams and/or false awakenings. It is my belief that Robert Monroe experienced his first OBEs as a result of being disturbed in his sleep by the tapes he was playing when studying "sleep-learning."

The difference between you and Monroe (at the time), though, is that you know what lucid dreams and OBEs are, and you're prepared to experience them.

This program is not primarily meant as a method that'll help you exit the body or have lucid dreams per se... It is more of an "awareness enhancer" -- it will help you practice trance without having to do the "arm technique," and will give you more OBE attempts each night you use it.

Press "Test ring" in order to hear the alarm in advance. Finetune it with the different controls, and make sure it is sharp enough to wake you up, but not annoying to the point that it'll prevent you from going back to sleep.

When you get woken up, wait for the alarm to finish. You are in the perfect state to reach trance in a matter of seconds. Trance is the state between awake and asleep state, your mind is half awake, and your body's half awake. You want to offset that balance by awaking the mind but making the body go to sleep. Assuming that you don't move and are ready to fall asleep right away, you will get a nice chance at leaving the body or controlling a lucid dream.

NOTE: This software uses the PC speaker. This is the device that goes "beep beep" when you first turn on the computer. It does not use the regular speakers. This is because it's much easier to program, and it sounds like an alarm on everyone's system. You need to enable on-board sound if it's disabled.

This software caters mainly to people who have a PC in their room... sorry, other people

Eventually, I'll make this compatible with regular speakers, and later on, hopefully, it will be possible to create MP3s (or WAVS :/) of a full night of alarms for earphone use.

Explanation of the controls:

Minutes between rings: the number of minutes the program waits between two rings. Default value: 30 minutes. Make this about as long as you think it'll take you to fall back asleep after each alarm, and add some extra time for the eventual OBE/lucid dream. It should take about 1 or 2 minutes for most people to fall asleep again... I think a value between 20 and 40 minutes is optimal for most.

Total number of rings: the number of times the alarm will actually ring.

Minutes before first ring: the number of minutes before the first alarm's ring. Set this so that the alarm doesn't start ringing until about 10-20 minutes after you are sound asleep. If you think you'll be asleep in 30 minutes, set this to 40-50 minutes.

The formula to find out the total duration of the experiment is: [time before first ring] + [number of rings - 1] * [time between rings]

i.e. if you set the waiting time to 60 minutes, set an interval of 30 minutes, and set it to 10 rings, you will get 60 + 30 * 9 minutes = 5.5 hours

Beep frequency: This controls the frequency (pitch) of the alarm sound. When you move the slider you'll hear a little preview of the actual sound. It's fun to move the slider and try to play music! Lower values give lower sounds, higher values give higher sounds. Higher pitched sounds are louder, but low pitched sounds are scarier. Find a sweet spot! (Note: 440 Hz for the computer's error sound, 900 Hz for the bootup sound)

Beep duration, time between beeps, number of beeps: These three controls are meant to allow you to shape your alarm ring. The beep duration corresponds to the length of each individual beep, in milliseconds (thousandths of a second). The time between beeps is pretty self explanatory, but this one is in tenths of a second. The number of beeps is also self explanatory.

Make sure you gauge these settings so that it rings long enough to wake you up (and it can take up to 10-15 rings if you're tired!), but not so long that you'll be wasting precious trance time waiting for the alarm to stop.

I hope this will be useful to some people. Please do post your results if you decide to try it!

[kiwibonga]

Sorry for bumping, but...

Has anybody tried this yet?

I'm getting some pretty good results so far. About 10 minutes after one of the rings today, I went into a trance and dwelved into a dream. It was a rather unique feeling... I knew I was awake, but at the same time I was dreaming. I did not have conscious control of either the physical or the dream mind... I was just in this half-asleep trance state. It was pretty interesting... When I "woke up" (i.e. came to my senses, rather ; I didn't fall asleep), I had two memories ; one of lying down in bed, and a dream memory.

I think the program is indeed working the way I intended it to work, an effective "trance tutor" of sorts.

The best part is, it doesn't make you as tired as I expected it to... Yesterday, I slept for 7 hours, 4 of which involved rings every 30 minutes, and I didn't wake up feeling all groggy and tired.

With it, I've gone from one or two dream memories a night to one dream memory every 30 minutes. Each time, I replay the dream in my mind, and if it wasn't an OBE, I "throw it away" -- it's really fun to select which dreams you want to save and which ones you don't!

So, I highly recommend you give it a try, and give me some feedback :O

[Grigori]

Not to be overly critical but wouldn't it be better to just create an mp3 file from a program like Audacity from http://audacity.sourceforge.net then put it in an mp3 player? All you need is a pleasant tone, either something recorded or generated by the program and a lot of silence. Then you could put pleasant sounds in the back, homemade subliminal messages, whatever in the background. You wouldn't need to have your computer on, it's small and compact, and if your player is like mine it will automatically turn off when it's done. Plus with the built in mic you can record your dream if ya want.

[kiwibonga]

Yeah, that works too...

I'm going to expand the program soon to play WAV files and to allow you to make lists of "events" ; this way it'll be like a customizable soundtrack, pretty much.

If I were to make it output MP3 files, I think I would need to port it to C/C++ ; but I'll most likely only do that if the program turns out to be popular and "works..."

For now that's my primary focus -- seeing if it's an effective method for more than just myself...