Meaning of a Dream

Singularity Experience is a lucid dreaming app for the iPhone that aids dream re-entry.
This classic DEILD technique allows you to dream consciously on demand, with each lucid dream having multiple episodes.

Dream re-entry is not a new technique; it has been independently discovered by multiple lucid dreamers who all swear by its effectiveness. It is known under many names: Dream Chaining, DEILD or WILD Chaining.

The names are different, but the technique is the same: upon being awakened from a dream, you can re-enter the same dream consciously by visualizing the last scene of a faded dream. The body wants to preserve continuity of dreaming, and the dreamer takes advantage of that by falling back asleep consciously. Thus, dream re-entry is a form of Wake Induced Lucid Dreaming, except that the period of wakefulness is typically less than two minutes.

The problem is that normally we do not wake up in the middle of dreams. It requires an external cue or an application of willpower to wake up from a dream in the middle of a dream episode. While a lucid dreamer within a dream may wake up at will, a regular dreamer would not even think about that. Because most regular awakenings happen shortly after
REM, in a light sleep stage that follows, most of us have never had the opportunity to re-enter a dream consciously.
Singularity Experience gives you a tool to successfully wake yourself from your dreams and re-enter them lucidly. It has two key features:
An algorithm to identify when you are dreamingA trigger alarm that is self-disabling
Put the app on your mattress, plug in the power and go to sleep.

The app monitors your sleep by continuously analyzing your movements over the course of the night and detecting REM sleep. During light sleep stages you move more. During deep sleep and REM you move less. The app recognizes this pattern and predicts when you will be dreaming based on your sleep habits.

When the app is certain that you are dreaming, or will be dreaming soon, it starts to play a reminder. This is a combination of light and audio. Light gently fades in and out and wakes you just a little bit. A short audio cue completes the process. The alarm is so short that you do not need to interact with the phone to turn it off; it will turn off by itself. (If you do not hear the reminder, you can adjust the duration or pick one of the more intense audio tracks.)

That's the app's role. The rest is up to you...

Once you are awakening from a dream, you need to remember your intention to re-enter the dream lucidly and quickly recall the last scene of a faded dream. This is a difficult task, as you may be in a semi sleep paralysis state, and it will take a few moments to collect your thoughts.

To help you with this process, I've included a self-hypnosis script along with the app. You can hypnotize yourself with your eyes open by simply reading the script out loud, making it easier to recall your intention of dream re-entry.

Here's the mental technique I use for dream re-entry:
You must be able to recall at least a small fragment of a dream. If you don't, you may not be in the right sleep stage to attempt re-entry. Don't move, and don't open your eyes. You must feel comfortable and not feel like you need to use your bathroom. Don't start thinking about anything other than the dream that you have just woke up from. Don't try to backtrack the story of the dream. While laying still in bed, in the same position as you have woken up from, start to visualize the last scene of a faded dream. Simply keep in your mind the still image of the dream, or at least a fragment of the image. You need a stable environment to visualize. Within that environment, some object or a group of objects are the easiest to visualize. Don't try to visualize movement - instead look for solid, still objects. For example if you think about your computer desk at home, the arrangement of lamps and peripherals is not easily recalled. But the solid plane of the desk with a blank panel of a monitor is easy to recall. Another example may be an intersection of two city streets. The streets intersecting produces a nice plane of solid color which you can visualize easily, while cars, houses, street lamps or the sky are harder to imagine. Soon your brain will start filling in the details within your visualization. Keep at it. Your experience effectively masks the WILD transition phase, and what you are seeing happens as your body falls back asleep, while your brain is engaged in a visualization exercise. Your visual and mental experience may be different from the one I describe, but the end result is the same: you'll find yourself in a stable dream environment. When you feel the environment around you is stable enough, you can actively move your eyes and look at different parts of the scene. The scene is no longer visualized, it exists around you. It is 3-dimensional and has depth. You may or may not feel a story associated with the scene.
At this point you can start to test your state by gently moving your fingers. If you still feel your body in bed, stop moving and just keep looking around realizing that you are looking at a dream. Keep testing your state. When you finally become immersed and can no longer feel your body in bed, you can move your entire dream body and start moving within the dream consciously. If you feel like two minutes have passed and you aren't in a dream yet, open your eyes and perform a reality check on a digital clock. Sometimes you can re-enter a dream of laying in bed and visualizing a dream! A digital clock is an easy way to identify such a dream and allows you to continue the dream lucidly from your bedroom.
While the dream re-entry technique takes quite a long time to explain, when it is performed in real life, it is rapid - anywhere from a few seconds to two minutes.

The key to successfully executing this technique is maintaining an uninterrupted flow of visualization. This helps you re-enter the scene that you are imagining. If you do not visualize long enough, you will find yourself in a dream about a different scene, complete with background history, which will trick you into thinking that you are in reality (a non-lucid dream). By expecting a certain scene to appear, and visualizing that scene, you enter it lucidly, because you associate that scene with your lucid dreaming induction attempt.

Singularity Experience runs on the iPhone4 and iPod4 and doesn't require any external components. It uses original algorithms and design patterns.

Here is a brief comparison of its features compared to a wrist actigraph, a similar tool on the market launched a few years ago. This demonstrates how fast the technology is improving, with a 100-fold increase in functionality at one-hundredth of the cost. I believe this trend will continue with apps, and it is the reason I chose to name this the Singularity Experience.
Costs $500 (annual subscription)Collects 32 sleep scoring metricsCollects 2 sleep scoring metricsFully interactive touchscreen UIRequires data upload in morning
Here are some of those special features in more detail:

Six degree of motion actigraph with multiple sleep scoring metrics - processes data in real time and is able to respond to your sleep stages by playing audio/light/vibration reminders. Or turn off the reminders and use the app to collect data about your sleep. This is like having a mini sleep lab in your pocket. The app continuously collects data and makes it available to you in CSV files that you may plot to see how your sleep unfolds on any given night.

Comprehensive sleep history - simply tap a button at night to mark an event: a dream, awakening or a period of being unable to fall asleep. All information is stored and is presented to you as a sleep history with multiple days of data arranged in a table. This information has multiple uses: it shows you when you dream, helps you estimate your sleep cycles and find your optimal awakening time. I was surprised to find that I often wake up at 9:38 +/- 15 minutes, without using an alarm. Regardless of the time when I go to bed, my body wants to wake up at that time. Knowing this, I can better predict when I would be dreaming, and find optimal bedtime as well.

Astro-Biological clock - a brand new gadget that is an evolution of a clock. It is a sophisticated analog clock which shows when you will be dreaming, helps you pick wake and bed times, as well as estimate the depth of your sleep. The Astro-Biological clock is explained in more detail in this video:

This is an emerging technology. To date I've used it mainly to collect data about my sleep, with limited lucid dream induction attempts. However, I stand by the dream re-entry technique and belief this lucid dreaming app can help.

In my experience the audio and light cues played by the app are frequently integrated into the dream content, but in seemingly random ways. The orange lights have caused me to dream of orange racing stripes on cars, gun muzzle blasts, making PowerPoint presentations about my app, and receiving text messages from dream characters. These are all potential lucid dream triggers.

By adjusting the trigger to fully wake you from the dream, you are provided with the perfect opportunity to induce a DEILD (Dream Exit Initiated Lucid Dream). As a new technology, I am keen to share this with as many people as possible and receive feedback on your app-induced lucid dreams.