Lucid Dream Induction Devices

Original video by Stephen Berlin. Official website of Stephen Berlin's Lucid Dreaming Discourses: here, YouTube account here. The following text in this entry is a transcript.





Hello, everyone, and welcome to the beginning of the end of my lucid dreaming discourse series. I’m Stephen Berlin, and I said in my very first talk that this was going to be a short series. And now this is number twelve, and I’m at risk of pushing my luck, here, or pushing the limits of your patience. So, I'm going to wrap this up with dream devices. I will have one other segment where I kind of give the rules of engagement and protocol for when I open this up to comments and video responses. So, let me get moving here… I also wanted to say that another reason I need to wrap this up, I know, I’ve gotten a lot of really nice letters from people, and I want to really thank you for those, they’ve meant a lot to me over the period of doing these, you know, to continue…but, I’ve gotten out my transcendent dreams, which was my primary purpose in doing this, and I’ve also gotten out a lot of really important information about advanced lucid dreaming fundamentals, I think. So, I don’t want to overly influence you and your lucid dreams. When I talk about my dreams moving forward with major transformotion and very quickly, well, I’m sure there are Buddhist lucid dreamers, and their dreams are still and tranquil and serene.

So, there’s room for all of this. I want to hear about those experiences, and then I have, you know, how—the way my mind, and my dreams work, and share my experiences with you. So, I think I’ve done that, and I will start another series. A little bit more expanded on lucid dreaming, in a couple months. So, for those you who want to deal with my any more, you can look forward to that.


Okay, dream devices. Let’s start going. This is the Nova Dreamer, which was produced by The Lucidity Institute, and there are other ones like this on the market. I don’t think this is sold anymore, it might be, but there are some made in the United States, some variations of this, and some made in Europe. So, if you want to buy one of these, I think they’re not cheap but they might be worth the money to you, and check into customer service, technical support, and read reviews before you buy.

The premise of the Nova Dreamer was to cue you that you’re dreaming. This is a mask that you wear to bed at night, and it’s got foam cutouts, it’s very comfortable, it attaches with Velcro at the back of your head, and it has a little device that slides into the front of the mask, powered by two triple A batteries, and what it does is you set it by pushing the button at the front of the mask like five times, and it will wait, like, fifty minutes, ten for each push, before it starts scanning your eyelids—or ninety minutes, which is when you usually have your first dream period. And then there’s a little infra red sensor in the mask that detects your jittery rapid eye movement eyes, it knows you’re dreaming, I think it gives you a minute or two to get you securely in your dream, and then the mask starts flashing lights at you in your dream. And, it flashes lights in any way you want to program them. You can have them alternate, you can have them simultaneous, you have make them long, you can make them short, you can do it three times, you can make it twenty times, you can make them dim, you can make them intense, all kinds of programmable features, and with sound. Beep, beep, beep—they even do that. So, the idea is that when the mask notices that you’re dreaming, that you will go, “Oh, that’s my dream mask going off! I’m in a dream!” And become lucid. That’s the advertised premise of these. Does it work? Well, yes, I’ve had cases where it’s done exactly that. Does it work all the time? No. Matter of fact, ninety-nine out of a hundred times, it doesn’t work. I’m going to explain to you why. All right, now, for me, my mask—When I started seeing flashing lights in here—(aside) you know, I’m a recovering alcoholic, you ought to know that by now—When I started seeing flashing lights in my dream, I look in my rearview mirror and there’s the cops chasing me! And I was even flying, lucid, in a dream once, and this—my mask—started to go off…and I looked around, and the police were even in helicopters coming after me! I thought, hey, what’s the deal? Was I featured on America’s Most Wanted: Dreaming Drunk? Come on, leave me alone!

So, I tried to outwit my mask, so, I set it on the—since that was the typical reaction I was getting, was the cop thing—so I put it on the highest possible intensity, and the longest possible pulse. So. And it was like, blinding, like, these lights could really be bright, right through your closed eyelids. So I thought, let’s see what my dream comes up with there, because that certainly can’t be police lights. Well, in that particular dream that night, I was standing in the nursing station at the Las Vegas tate mental hospital where I work. And I was standing— (correcting) Where I worked. (laughs) And I was standing inside the nursing station, talking to fellow employees, and suddenly this (referring to the Nova Dreamer mask) goes off. And I was just blinded! Just—the whole scene, the whole dream scene just went away, and I thought to myself, “There’s a power failure! The floodlights are blinding me! Oh, man, where did they get these floodlights?” An immediate explanation.

Now, let’s move on to the dream speaker, to give you another example of the same phenomenon. They made a dream speaker which plugs into your dream mask, and it will—you can record anything you want, “You’re dreaming, this is a dream, do a reality check” blah blah blah—well, none of that worked for me. So, I decided, well, I'm going to outwit this again. So, I launched into this every terrible, perverted, expletive I could come up with. I called myself every filthy name in the book. And I do swear, but not to that extent. So I thought, you know, that’ll be interesting to see how my dream interprets that.

Well, sure enough, I’m in my dream and I’m talking to two ladies. (laughs) And I’m talking to them, and this—my dream speaker starts going off, and all of a sudden all of these really horrific terrible words, in my voice, start coming out while I’m talking to these two ladies—and they look at me, and they’re dream characters, but their eyes get really big, as if I’m Charles Manson with Tourette’s Syndrome.

Fortunately, I looked down, and—thank God for dreams—I looked down and there was a suitcase on the floor, and I said, “I’m sorry, ladies. You know, in my carry-on luggage, I brought my dream speaker with me, and, you know, it’s going off in my suitcase—” and I started fumbling with my luggage there, trying to get it stop. So.

Now, what’s happening here? What’s happening is your dream is coming up with a homologous variation. A pattern recognition. It sees lights and its searches through your past, it searches through all the day residue of your past, and it finds something that it can use as a plausible explanation in your dream—and therefore, you don’t notice it! it’s incorporated in your dream. And this has nothing—in my opinion—to do with intelligence. I don’t care whether you’re high on the I.Q. scale or low. It’s the way the brain works. Now, I’m pretty sure that for some people who are really focused—and I’m not—can train themselves to recognize every light source in their dream as possibly being their Nova Dreamer…well, this may work to make them lucid very often. But for me, this is the best device on the planet to prove to you what I talked about in discourse eleven and ten, “The Dynamics of Dream Emergence” and “Navigation in Dreams”—how things move forward by homologous variation.

Now, I want you—very quickly, I want to point out that—watch my discourses again. I’m not just trying to get views, but if you go back now to discourse number seven when I talked about Day Residue—now, you’ll realize that when I talked about that brown substance which was chocolate, and mud, and some other brown substance— that they’re homologous variation. And I also say things in my discourses like, “a pitfall in ground transportation is sexual temptations” well, the message hidden in there is, if you want sexual temptations, ground transportation’s probably the place to be! Although, I’ve been flying in a dream, and, you know, and had sexual temptations and that—I—that’s not really—I’d rather be on the ground, because otherwise I’d end up on the back seat of a thunder bird. And I don’t want that to happen.

So, that’s it! And, you know, I can’t do anything about the waking world, but I certainly thank all of you that have watched me, I’m really grateful, and I wish you—in the dreaming world, at least—peace. (gives the peace sign)