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Sweet Dreams Are Made By This
schnoz writes "From Takara, the folks who brought you Bow-Lingual the dog translator, comes the Dream Workshop. Before going to sleep, all you have to do is stare at a photograph of what you want to dream of (Natalie Portman maybe) and record the dream plot. When you fall asleep, this gadget waits for REM and then uses your voice recording, lights, music and aroma to help direct your dream."
Why not just sell these pre-programmed with Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera modules?
Maybe Thinkgeek could sell a "Natalie Portman in Hot Grits" version?
How bout if I change someone's dream input?
Hacking dreams???
This is the Constitution.This is the Constitution under the Bush administration. Any questions?
Hey, this thing might work! Back in the dark ages when I was in college I used to tape lectures and listen to them while I was asleep. Amazing results!
My dreams could use a bit of spicing up, but I think I'll opt for Johnny Depp instead of Natalie Portman. Anyone know how much 14,800 yen is in US Dollars?
Linus naked...
I mean....
Darl McBride vs. Darth Maul Ok, on a more serious note, could this replace studying in some way shape or form. I mean a book under your pillow is crazy, but what about making it direct you through a dream in which you learn. This could really help self education. Imagine going further, having it teach you programming. Yes, you would need to record a plot and such, but I bet someone smart could have a computer generate one from an online manual or something. Just my 2 cents
http://www.beyourowneviloverlord.tk
http://www.frozenchickenthrowing.tk
http://www.killercamel.tk
this reminds me of that Tv screen that the Jetson kid used to stare at to contoll his dreams before he slept.
When I was a kid, I got Risk for my birthday. That night, I read the rulebook into my tape recorder (we had studied subliminal suggestions science recently, I recall), and put it on a light timer to come on in the early morning. Next day, I understood the game. I assume that this was partly due to me reading the ENTIRE rulebook (how many kids do that?) and partly the subliminal recording.
I can't wait to see people who screw this one up. The people with pictures of Grandma on their night table.
Karma: Raspberry Kiwi
I want to have a dream about a trip to mars. Oh, wait...
You just know that your alarm clock would go off just as it ogt interesting...
and how many dreams can u actually remember after you wake up anyway, i always remember for about half an hour before the memories start to fade... i think ive lost some good ones, altho i may have been dreaming
How many computers are too many?
Now, I'm not a scientist, psychoanalyst etc... the fact that the unconcious mind can still be affected by external mediums such as aroma and sound is remarkable, ok so we are waken up by loud noises, surprises etc... but the more subtle effects we perceive as outside the unconcious / subconcious state seem to imply a new branch of dream therapy and analysis. I for one am very interested in this new technique... and just so I'm not overtly interested, I'll settle for some pepper spray, a picture of Mars and 6g of thrust, one way ticket!
Seriously, I'm surprised this hasn't been found sooner, kudos to the research into influencing dreams and dream states
You could play some nice pranks with this toy after a scary movie.... aliens perhaps...muhahahahaha
"If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, now would it?' -Albert Einstein-
"From Takara, the folks who brought you Bow-Lingual the dog translator
This isn't that email i get 15 times a week proclaiming "Amazing Breakthrough In Software Technology! Turn Woofs into Words! Free Download!" is it?
stare at a photograph of what you want to dream of (Natalie Portman maybe) and record the dream plot. When you fall asleep, this gadget waits for REM and then uses your voice recording, lights, music and aroma to help direct your dream."
It's probably not recommended to have a device cooking up some grits when there's no one there to keep an eye on it. But in other news, i did hear that they are selling perfume that smells just like natalie portman!
do() || do_not();
Classic flim-flam. Variations of these flashing-light eye-glasses have been around for decades, claiming to be everything from a headache cure to, in this case a dream machine. The nice thing about claiming things about dreams is that most dreams aren't remembered, so there's nothing to be able to go after when it comes to false advertising.
Yes, I'm a skeptic. I suppose I should want to try this product beforhand to be scientifically valid... but testimonial "evidence" with this sort of product does not give me any motivation to hand out money so I can reward these people to test their wild theory.
Ryan Fenton
But wouldn't it be embarrasing if you died in your sleep and the coroner came to pick up your body a week later with a picture of Oprah beside you, while your voice described your dream date, bow-chicka-bow-bow music played, and musky perfume poured out of this thing?
Once I dreamt I was falling and it threw me out the window. Then I was floating down a tunnel of light.
if this really works. I used to sleep with the radio tuned to a news station, and I never got the urge to buy any Preparation H or that itch powder (Gold Bond was it?)
What?
Coca-cola, happy subconscience suggestion!
Combine this with sound rifles, through-wall sonics and lasers...mmm scarrry.
Candy-Coated Knowledge
Would dreams be considered a creative work under US copyright law? If they are, then would a hacked dream be a derived work? Cool. You won't get in trouble for making your victim have nightmares of radioactive hell-lobsters, but you'll go to jail for copyright infringement.
Just stare at the code or architecture diagram and have a recording of your computer reading the code aloud to you. By morning you should have it all debugged.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Wim Wenders's Until the End of the World came up immediately when I saw the article... though this machine doesn't come close to the device in the movie, you'll have to see the movie!, I do recall that once I got a handle on my dreams many of my day-time 'stuff', 'issues', 'problems' were somehow clarified and easier to manage. I kept a dream journal for about six months and those six months were the sanest of my life. I'd be curious to try the dream machine only to see if I could get that kind of clarity back without having to wake up half an hour earlier everyday to write down my dreams...
Although lucid dreaming is not exactly the same as dream control, it does give you the ability to control your OWN ACTIONS in a dream. The advantage of lucid dreaming is that you don't have to buy any gizmos to make it work (although some people do sell things to help you achieve lucidity). The disadvantages are, as I mentioned, the fact that you only control yourself and not necessarily your surroundings and it takes some time to learn the skill of becoming lucid in a dream.
Lucid dreaming is basically a technique for becoming conscious that you are in a dream without actually waking from that dream. It takes some work, believe me. We're talking months here. But it is kinda cool. Once I realize that I'm dreaming, I usually take advantage of that fact by blasting any enemies around me with a Godzilla-like breath weapon! While this is admittedly pretty geeky, I can say that here without being laughed at (right?) because we're all geeks. Plus, it's pretty neat to see Bill Gates go up in flames!
Another advantage of lucid dreaming is that it's a proven technique whereas this new gizmo is just something that someone is trying to sell you.
GMD
watch this
I have used this product. I had a dream I was in the Department of Magical Mysteries, and someone was torturing Sirius Black! And... well, let's just say it didn't work out too well.
An idea I had *Due to my health care background*
Could this technique be used to condition aspects of human concious on a negative scale?
We all know the story of volunteers salivating at the image of a fractal *related to ice cream I believe* but this could be triggered without resistance, a subtle but scary thought
Anyone care to expand on the ramifications and / or way to achieve this?
I want to see someone hack this and connect it to the web. People could then visit the site and upload their own voice tracks.
I think that could turn out to be really really amusing, although I fear what would happen if it ever got slashdotted. I'd probably end up with a dream about hanging Gates while doing naughty things with Natalie Portman on top of a beowulf cluster of hot grits while the goatse man and penis bird watch.
LOL. It got mention on the "selling it" page in the back, where CR publishes small items showing misleading, maybe fradulent ads.
just think about something before you fall asleep. If it's important to you, you'll dream about it.
durring the radio shows when my alarm radio would turn on, I'd sleep through it, and dream that the people talking were really there and I was sitting with them. I didn't know who they were, or ever saw them, but I had my own visualations and an idea of how I thought they looked. I would remember the jokes when I woke up too. I think I heard about this machine on NPR a few days ago though, but didn't dream it, I was in my car....
Sig: I stole this sig.
It's been known for quite a while that what you dream about is usually whatever you were thinking about just before you went to sleep. Staring at a photograph is one way to make sure you're thinking about the person you want to dream about... so who needs the gadget?
if you want to have dirty dreams, do what i do:
kill kittens for a few months every night, then once in a while dont do it, then you get a very dirty dream (it seems to work for me)
Only if you share them on the 'net. Then the DIAA (Dream Industry Assoc. of America) will get ya.
What?
Dream about Lord of the Rings, before you wake up and realise you have just been Tolkien in your sleep.
One model
New and improved - no flashing lights!
If anything, this is just a translation of a much older concept, throwing in pop-psychology in the form of staring at a picture, and self-fullfilling prophesies about dreaming something. It's still flim-flam though - no better than psychic surgery or magic lottery numbers.
Ryan Fenton
Not that anybody should trust redirect URLs, but let me warn you:
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It all goes downhill from first post
Isn't this similar to the phenomenon of waking up and realizing that your dream contained bits and pieces of what was on TV/radio while you slept (eg, your radio or TV is set as a wake-up alarm)? I.E., your subconcious mind picked-up on cues while you were sleeping and inserted them into the dream.
You are now entering a deep sleep [Buy Bowlingual]... you are completely at rest... [Bowlingual is NOT funny]... Natalie portman is coming to you... she is smiling [SCO is in Linux]... she would like you to touch her... [she would like you to make her wear a Bowlingual collar]
he is trying to trick you!
Well to dream of that, you'd probably have to see linus naked in real life first...and unless you're his wife, I think that would probably be a little scary (that you had seen him naked).
Well likely not this particular thing, but the whole fantasy/porn/dreams thing it's going to be the drug of the future.
Keeps people distracted like nothing else.
Sell em for 10 cents a dozen
got sig?
Going through the book and actually reading it out loud probably did more for your long term memory than playing it while you were off in fairyland...
"We are still experimenting, mainly with company employees,"
what can they be doing? overtime work without overtime pay?
Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
Think of all the nice things you can do with those sheep after you counted them...
(No, not that - you pervert!)
...just replace their target image with a picture of a hand in a bowl of warm water.
"We are still experimenting, mainly with company employees," Takara marketing executive Kenji Hattori told reporters in Tokyo yesterday.
I mean, after all, it's just a device to program your unconscious mind. What could possibly go wrong?
Quick, somebody call Michael Crichton!
-Mark
...where I had more time to sleep.
Anyone want to post reviews here to show this company isn't making up stuff?
(I'd try to come up with a punchline myself but I've been dream-deprived lately.)
...There has been a resurgence of Nightmare Killings.
Freddy Krueger is being sought out.
Yes! I listen to NYC Speedcore and do math at 3AM. I suggest you try it too.
In "The Lathe of Heaven" (a book by Ursula K. LeGuin, later made into a movie) the main character ("George Orr") is cursed by the fact that whatever he dreams of becomes truly real.
He is tormented by the knowledge that his dreams, which he cannot control, are destructively altering other peoples' lives, often retroactively. I won't give away the plot, but lets just say that someone tormented by their own unlimited power is probably a better person than someone thrilled by it.
In any case, George would have loved this. (And I really liked the book, and the movie.)
-Mark
Has any one thought of the ethical issues that could arise from this. Directing ones dreams sounds neat and all, but what if the person that you direct in your dreams has told you not to, or they have some kind of restraining order on you.
Sure these are your dreams and controlling them I guess should be your option, but when do you cross the line? Do you need to get permission from people to use them in your dream if it's directed. I don't think they can do anything in a normal dream, but when things are pre meditated does that change things?
I would honestly think that if the average person got a hold of this they could use it for ill. I know that I don't want people dreaming about me without my permission.
One final thought, how would this work if a person has purposefully violent dreams. Has a dream about killing people for instance, would this be allowed into court, and if so would it count as premeditation.
As techs we may think it cool to make our dreams be what we want them to be, but we do have to worry about this at the ethical / legal level.
Oh and for the person wanting to know how much that is in dollars 138.486.
It's a good thing you posted anonymously because it's very possible that that poster could be a WOMAN...heaven forbid!
/. My GF is one of them. :-)
Yes, gals exist on
[move
I've never gotten any spam of that sort, but I know that it is not the same thing.
The Bow-Lingual is a plastic rectangle the size of a very big wallet that you can hang around your dog's neck. I saw one on the local news.
This has got to be the most idiotic thing I've ever read on slashdot. Or, anywhere.
I know that I don't want people dreaming about me without my permission.
...or whatever the hell it's called now. I'll end up patching it in my dreams. Imagine, my perfect dream is about to come true and just before it does, "windows update is ready to install..." Then again, if it were run by linux, I'd get an error message of "this dreams requires the package lib.so.4.508 to continue." Either way, this ain't going to work the way it's advertised.
On a serious note, google up lucid dreaming and read about it. It actually works. Years ago I tried to make one of these things by having a bunch of LED's blink rapidly. It didn't work, but it was a neat form of meditation. But seriously, there's nothing like a lucid dream.
"Time to slowly, painfully ease yourself back into consciousness."
hey, maybe the poster was just gay? Nothing wrong with that.
Darl McBride and the gang from the RIAA/MPAA in a vat of battery acid while Cher karaoke plays in the background
nothing.can.stop.me.now
I can see it now.
Rob Malda aka. "CmdrTaco" infiltrates the dreams of millions, causing a Slashdot effect upon countless idiots. On a brighter note, CmdrTaco is now your overlord.
A sleep-depraved Saddam is forced to stare at a photo of his dead son's bodies. After he's finally allowed to sleep and REM kicks in, a voice-over script explains to him that its all his fault and guides him on how he should cooperate fully.
After steering his dream through freedom, a comfortable exile, and a harem of virgins he is conveniently woken up for his next round of questioning.
"news from spammers. stuff that makes you roll your eyes."
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I was unaware that Michael Stipe was an afficianado of hot grits.
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
You know, I don't know why lucid dreaming isn't a bigger thing. Given all the effort people put into altered conciousness, that is. No hardware required.
I've never been a big one for altered conciousness, but I did do some lucid dreaming for a while. Basically you just get good at recognizing when you're dreaming, and then you can start controlling what happens. Yes, Natalie Portman is an option.
It does take some dedication, though. Keeping a dream journal is essential. There's some basic info out there that will help get you started.
The only downside I found is I sometimes felt I wasn't sleeping as deeply. But it is a great way to explore altered conciousness without worrying about killing brain cells or geting addicted to anything.
Cheers.
One of the theories about dreaming is that your brain introduces random patterns into the hippocampus (the part of your brain that controls short term memory, among other things) and then un-learns whatever state the recurrent connections in the hippocampus converge on. If this is correct, by altering the inputs to your brain during dreaming, your hippocampus may not converge on the strongest attractors (those excessively strong memories or spurious states) and will instead un-learn a more desirable pattern.
So yeah, you won't catch me using one of these even though I'm a computer scientist, not a neuroscientist, and therefore don't really know what I'm talking about.
Look up some references on dreaming in Hebb-Hopfield recurrent neural networks if you're interested in the subject.
The Monroe Institute has something a lot cheaper that will do the same thing. By using sound to alter brain waves, they can induce something that works like mild hypnosis, but give you control over yourself. I researched their "Sweet Dreams" audio suite while I was in college, and though I didn't have enough subjects (only had 4 or so) to have any significant results, there was a very visible trend to suggest that the cassettes (no cd's available at the time) were doing just what they said they would. Personally, I had my dream recall rates go from virtually none to 2-4 long dreams per night. It's a little new-agey, but this stuff is all based in science with lab results, etc. Worth checking out.
Do you really need reason for beer? Wingman Brewers
Well, since it's not as if the Bowlingual device actually translates Dog "speech" to human... So, what are the chances that this same gizmo company can actually come up with a device that can control dreams? Seems to me that all they are doing is helping remove some money from people's pockets! ... Unless that's what they WANT me to think!
This one is definitely going on my list!
i can actually replay my dreams and watch a repeat of them while asleep, and and to some extent control events though it'd still be dreaming... i discovered this almost a year ago and i don't know for sure how i do it but i just do... has anyone experienced something similar...
It's small, but for those curious:
= 63 9
http://www.japantoday.com/e/?content=product&id
Try an OOBE
I'm guessing that's pretty much where they got the idea from, and how they get it to work. I've had this happen rather often, since I go to sleep listen to the radio. The most major time, being sept 11. I dreamed that I was fighting this giant flying dragon in and around the world trade centre. And I first blew giant holes in them, and then threw the giant dragon into the bottom of the two buildings and they came collapsing down. Just after that I awoke, walked out and said something along the lines of "Guess what, I just killed and giant dragon. But I accidentally took out the WTC's as well." My mates looked at me for a second like I had just made a really bad joke, and pointed to the TV screen.
"Sunday, January 18, 2004 14,800 Japanese Yen = 138.694 US Dollar 14,800 US Dollar (USD) = 1,579,308 Japanese Yen (JPY) Median price = 0.009369 / 0.009371 (bid/ask) Minimum price = 0.009361 / 0.009366 Maximum price = 0.009376 / 0.009382 " http://www.bankrate.com/goocalg/calculators/frames /currencycalc.asp
One night, when I was about 7 years old, I was arguing with my Mom about not wanting to go to sleep. I told her I wanted to watch a cartoon first. She then told me that I could watch a cartoon "for free" in my dreams if I wanted to; all I had to do was think really hard about a cartoon before I fell asleep and I would enjoy a cartoon in my dreams. Wow, I thought, this is great! I can decide what to dream in advance! I remember thinking "Bugs Bunny, Bugs Bunny, Bugs Bunny" until I fell asleep.
In my dreams that night I was sitting in the second row of a Suburban-like vehicle with my arms hanging over the front seat where my mom was driving with my brother in the middle seat and my aunt in the passenger seat. We were driving down a dark wooded two-lane road late at night. No other vehicles -- or people -- seemed to be around for miles. That is, until we began to pass a hitchhiker standing on the right side of the road. He was dressed like a pirate with a patch over his eye and a wooden leg. Everyone just looked silently straight ahead without acknowledging the hitchhiking pirate; except me.
As we drove by I waived at the sad looking man out of a mixture of Texas-bred politeness, pity, curiosity and fear. Suddenly he jumped and grabbed a large knife from his belt. As we passed he cocked his arm and threw the knife at us breaking the back window of our vehicle. The knife landed harmlessly in the back and I thought *whew* as we continued to drive on. But then, the man began to run with amazing speed (especially for having a wooden leg) and easily caught up with us, climbed on the back, reached through the broken window, grabbed the knife and looked at me with hatred and murder as he crawled toward me, surely to kill me.
I awoke in sweat and fear; I didn't dare move or turn my head in case he was in the bedroom. I have never forgotten this most-vivid dream nor have I ever tried to manipulate them again.
Oh, and mom, if you're reading this, Thanks A Lot! And, while on the subject, thanks for giving me Stephen King's Nightshift anthology when I was in seventh grade. I still get the creeps at closet doors that don't quite shut. Sheesh....
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
When I'm in a lucid dream I can do some pretty psychotic stuff. Fortunately, I never have such lucid control in the real world.
Yes, what you say makes sense, but you also have to consider that it can be at times very difficult to drift off to sleep while consciously thinking about something. I don't tend to think about anything when I'm falling asleep - it's like hey, this pillow feels allright, hey I'm pretty tired, and then I'm out, within thirty seconds.
Every time I've tried to sort of control the "last thought I had before I fell asleep" I've been to self aware and have noticed I was falling asleep, which of course wakes you the hell back up.
Incidentally though, if one of your last thoughts as you fall asleep is that you will wake up after every dream, it actually works, in my experience. It's the only way I can ever remember any dreams I've had.
I used to have frightening dreams all the time in elementary school before I learned (apparantly on my own, as I don't recall reading anything about the subject until years later) how to lucid dream. It can be more than controlling your own actions: a dream about a murderous burglar isn't as scary when a gun can suddenly appear in your hand, for instance.
It's been a long time since I was able to do anything like that, though; apparantly "necessity was the mother of invention", and once I stopped having bad dreams I needed to change I stopped practicing changing them.
Or, alternatively, just learn lucid dreaming and become master of your dream world.
Didn't we see these tricky kind of things in the back of boys life? Random number generator (dice) for only 5 bucks. I bet this thing doesn't play...how will you know if it works if you are sleeping? (assuming you are single geek)
Yes, but how do lights, music, and smells accurately convey petrification?
The Right Reverend K. Reid Wightman,
and how many dreams can u actually remember after you wake up anyway, i always remember for about half an hour before the memories start to fade... i think ive lost some good ones, altho i may have been dreaming
I've found it very useful to keep a pen and a pad of paper next to my bed for nights when I've had an interesting dream. If I'm not rushed in the morning, I jot down as much of the dream as I can remember, in bullet form. If I have time later, I'll sit down and write out a little synopsis of the dream. I find that I can remember a lot more about my dreams as I've gotten better at the note-taking, and it's fun to sometimes go back and look at all the crazy things I've dreamed. Writing a few details down seems to "freeze" the whole dream in my head instead of it fading from memory as I wake up.
Or brain-washing..maybe it could be used to reprogram the minds of hard-core MS developers and get them to like all things that are good (Unix, OS X, Java)...:)
One of the things I like most about sleep is that I can vividly remember my dreams the next day about 80% of the time. Most of my dreams are so bizarre and unusual that I find it very satisfying trying to remember all of what I dreamt about (I've also realized this is impossible). If I know what I want to dream about I'll do it during the day. Otherwise, I'll keep my dreams just the way they are: surprising, chaotic, strange, exciting, etc...
I also am a big fan of dream control via lucid dreaming, and if I'm maintaining the dream/reality checks and am in practice, I can usually achieve about 3 remembered and controlled long dreams a week, all for free. It took me about four months to get to that level, and I couldn't afford a NovaDreamer (a similiar (and expensive device) for aiding dreamers). I found this link (http://brindefalk.solarbotics.net) which detailed the Kvaser dreammask. If you know your electronics its easy enough to do. You'd have to modify the circuit (to add the extended audio cues) and modify the coding for the additional logic. When people advertise nice electronic doodads that are simple enough, I usually see whether or not I can do it simpler and cheaper, with all the custom additions that I want. If the device is a Mhz or Ghz microprocessor, I'm not likely to get far, but a nice project in the back of a electronics magazine, certainly. And this device certainly falls into that category.
From the same people that brought us 'Bow-Lingual?' Great... Now we'll all start dreaming about talking dogs who use 'People-Linguals' to understand us....
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
Fuck that stuff was disgusting
I just can't fucking stand it! People wanna automate their dreams too?
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
96% of the people I see on a day to day basis are male. Either there is a conspericy at work here or I chose the wrong damn profession.
Well, working in the gay porno section of the newsstand would probably be the reason why you see so few women.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Isn't this the same company that came up with Transformers?
a wife translator :o)
70% women huh?
/cry
Goes back to his EE department that has 9 males for every female.
Great! Now we'll see the old "hand in the warm water" trick made digital. Is there nothing sacred?
Marge: Homer, has the weight loss tape reduced your appetite?
Homer: Ah, lamentably no. My gastronomic rapacity knows no satieties.
I'm surprised you haven't noticed yet just how homophobic many Slashdot readers really are. They'll be open minded when it comes to drugs or violating copyrights, but not when it comes to letting consenting adult males have sex with each other.
(You'd think straight male slashdotters would want as little competition for females as possible, actually)
Get off my launchpad!
I suppose it goes without saying that this is for people who sleep alone.
who live inside of your head?
What's to stop the makers from implanting suggestion to buy more of they're stuff. It may be implausible, but I think its more likely to do that than to actually work as advertised
A few years ago I became interested in lucid dreaming/dream control. I wrote what dreams I could remember in a dream journal every morning and after a few weeks I could control and remember a few dreams a night. A wokeup one morning to realize that I had 5 dreams that night and I could remember each one. It was if I wasn't really sleeping at night, I wasn't really rested.
;)
Sure dream control is a cool thing, but I enjoy feeling rested in the morning more.
oh wait, hold on...
would be if you put images of the goatse.cx in the dream machine.
i swear if someone did that to my machine, i d use a hot iron to brand -1 Troll on his forehead
Hey, now. My school is about 80/20, with total population about 30,000. But that's not the worst part. Seven of those 20 are...well, I call them "probably girls." Because it's hard to tell. Three are pretty average. But fully half the female population of this place are amazing. But every guy faces horrible odds at getting one of them.
I'm not in the market, myself, but I can see the suffering...I can feel the pain.
Who would have thought Natalie's softcore pr0n is the only thing that keeps Lucasfilm afloat?
Glad to see that coldsore on her lip has heeled too.
Well sure, if you go to a well balanced University which has nice departments on Liberal Arts, Law, or such things. But if you go to a school which has a focus on Technology or Engineering, you're screwed.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." -- Hanlon's Razor
I think your friend and mine, Carl Sagan, could help you out a lot:
statistics of small numbers -- a close relative of observational selection (e.g., "They say 1 out of every 5 people is Chinese. How is this possible? I know hundreds of people, and none of them is Chinese. Yours truly." Or: "I've thrown three sevens in a row. Tonight I can't lose.");
we are building a religion
a limited edition
we are now accepting callers
for these pendant key chains
I personally know of two people who are sleep walkers/talkers that have extremely odd dream walking experiences... to the point of dangerous. One time one of these guys tried to strangle his wife in his sleep - needless to say, the marriage didn't work out. The other dude walked out of his house, dropped his blanket on his driveway then returned to bed.
Milder, but still dangerous, is when a woman dreams that the man is cheating, wakes up, and pummels the poor fool lying next to her... what a nightmare to wake up to!!! Ugh, the horrific possible endless combinations of these scenarios are endless. "... but officer, I didn't know what I was doing... I was dreaming and didn't realize I'd chopped off his penis till blood gushed all over the place!" *shiver*
Seems that with so little facts known about the dream state, trying to manipulate dreams seems a bit spooky.
It would be nice to mod this thing up with an enternet connection, and recode to where you can frag in your sleep, or hawt malay cybar
About 25 years ago or so, when I was still in Jr High, I read something to the effect that you could "implant an idea" into someone's head while they were asleep.
/say\ anything.
So.. Being the evil brother that I was, I went to my sister while she was asleep. Very softly, over and over I said "After you wake up, you will not say ANYTHING for one hour."
Next day, I was saying "Hey Sis, Whats Up." "How's it going?", etc.
And sure as shit, she DIDN'T say anything at all for an hour. She nodded, shook her head, etc. But she didn't
This was one of my first scientific(?) experiments. It was great, because it seemed to prove the theory that I heard, and it got my sister to keep her mouth shout for awhile. (If I was was smart I would have said 40 years, not 1 hour.)
To prove the scientific validity of this idea, I propose:
Q: Can we use this to get Darl fly to Antartica on a fact finding mission? And forget that snow is cold?
Q: Can we get Carly to state, in her next press conference, that she wants to have "hot monkey love" with Bill Gates?
Q: Can we get Bill Gates to to state that he has ALREADY HAD hot monkey love with an ugly monkey?
I'd like to see a movie based on the development of this product. According to the article, they are experimenting on a number of company employees, which means a Takara employee's journal could easily read like a crash course in the Twilight Zone.
/.ers saying "That's it, I'm moving to Japan!" or equivalent phrases.
Then again, the employees already live in Japan, home of used panty vending machines. For the curious, the cost is supposedly 1000 per pair.
I now await a slew of replies from pseudo-clever
Happiness is relative, Based upon the way we live.
I used to get a kick out of getting guys to squirm when I lived in San Francisco with my girlfriend. Guys who only heard I was single would look at me weird, like I was contagious, and I'd just laugh, tell them that I loved it there, with so many gays it left more women for me, and they got really upset when I said they must be closet gays because real heterosexual males would rejoice at taking so many good looking sensitive guys out of competition for the women.
Infuriate left and right
It would seem to me that if you go to a school which has a focus on Tech or Engineering, you're not likely to get screwed at all.
Skot Nelson music is my saviour / i was maimed by rock and roll
One of the five advantages of being dead is not caring what other people think anymore.
Most of the other times when I've had good ideas, I'd been in the shower. Perhaps solutions found in sleep were still bubbling up?
beware syntactic cavities
true, there is lore of this unconfirmed rumor, but saying that "it's very possible" defies probability.
by an exageration of the same magnitude I could very possibly wake up next to nat. portman in the morning after such a dream.
ôó
There is a single chemical that is largely responsible for dreams. The more the chemical, the more likely you are to remember the dream, all the way up to and including (and past?) lucid dreaming.
Being as my dreams are usually bare murmurs in the morning, I'd love to be able to get ahold of some of this chemical in commericial form. Some people naturally have more realistic dreams than others - if they can do it for the penis, surely they can do something such as replicate single chemical that they're aware of.
Combine this chemical with some such dream-direction techniques and you'd have some pretty amazing dreams. I've had one or two dreams that were incredibly vivid, almost more so than reality, and it would be nice to be able to have such dreams again - but direct them.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
When Kafka is given his rightful position at the head of the copyright agency they will be.
Of course, getting a conviction on dream copyright violations will be tough. Every time the jury is about to deliver a verdict, everyone will wake up...and you will have to wait for the next night for a new trial.
I don't remember most dreams (maybe one or two a month) so the few I do remember hold more meaning for me. I find it as a window into my unconscious. I have no idea what it means, except that for some reason my brain decided to dream about that topic matter. Whether it's because a subject was bothering my unconscious/me or maybe it assumed I wanted to be relaxed, it's much more interesting to reflect upon the dream when I have no clue as to why I dreamt it. And I like to think my mind is creative enough to make a dream interesting to experience (whether I'm just a viewer in the dream or experiencing an event) that I dont need to plan something while I'm conscious.
In times like these, it is helpful to remember that there have always been times like these. - Paul Harvey
I'm sure some people really do solve problems in their dreams, and goodness knows a good night's sleep always does help me. But I wonder how many people really solve problems in their dream, and how many people just think they've solved problems. I've managed to drag several ideas from my dreams back into the waking world, including quite a few semi-interesting sci-fi plots, but none of them are worth anything when examined in the light of the sun, except perhaps some entertainment value.
I was irritated by all the crumbs in my toaster. It was really starting to look gross.
Then, one night, I had a dream about sticking my toaster into the dishwasher.
In the light of day, it didn't seem so silly. After all, the dishwasher merely sprays hot water.
Now, the toaster can take heat - that's what it's designed to do.
The water was something else. The cord and plug are sealed, and even if they weren't, they'd be fine when they dried out. The nichrome heating elements are very corrosion-resistant, and the mica sheet which supports the nichrome isn't water soluble.
I was worried about the release mechanism. A close look revealed a solenoid, made of about 10 turns of fairly thick enamelled copper wire. When the bimetallic switch warps at the end of the toasting, the contacts open and the full load of the heating element is placed across the solenoid, causing it to release. Worst case, if the dishwasher were to take all the enamel off the solenoid, the toaster wouldn't release, and I'd rewind the solenoid with some old wire kicking around.
Then, detergent - it's quite corrosive and its deposits might be conductive. I decided to skip it, since crumbs are, by and large, going to disappear simply from the water spray.
So into the dishwasher it went, bottom rack. I tied the cord to the rack so it wouldn't get sucked into the pump. Full cycle, pots and pans mode, in my 1970 Maytag WU600.
A sidenote. The WU600 was Maytag's first automatic dishwasher. It has a 1/2hp motor direct driving a two stage centrifugal pump. It will take fried eggs off a poorly-seasoned cast iron frying pan, and it's extraordinarily loud. When it's running, it sounds like the world is coming to an end. When it's draining, the house rumbles like a freight train loaded with lead blocks is speeding by.
(A sidenote)^2. A quiet dishwasher is not a good thing. Since you cannot predict the shapes of the dishes people will stuff into it, nor can you predict *how* they'll stuff dishes into it, you cannot predict the flow of water after it leaves the spray arms. Therefore, you cannot predict the noise the water will make. To counter the noise, you could use insulation for a broad-spectrum white-noise deadening approach - but the dishwasher has to fit in a standard size hole, and 6" of sound deadening all around would massively eat into the dishwasher's capacity for dishes. The other option is to make the water leave the spray arms with less velocity - which will inherently reduce the cleaning power of the dishwasher. Shopping Tactic: Buy the loudest dishwasher you can find, it's the only one which won't require pre-rinsing your dishes.
Waited until the cycle was done. Opened the door, waited for the fog to clear off my glasses, and surveyed the damage... damage to the crumbs, that is. My toaster looked brand new. Even the carmelized brown stains at the edges of the slots were gone.
So, I let the toaster dry for a few hours, clicked down the handle, and plugged it in - briefly. There was a crackle and some smoke. And again... more crackle, more smoke. Seems that water would get between the layers of mica and would boil off when the nichrome heated up. The smoke was coming from fine bits of crumbs which had become wedged between the nichrome elements and the mica. Quick bit of power - more heat, more steam, more smoke, small crackle. Gently, gently tapping it on and off until there was no more crackling sound as water esca
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
From the article:
"Before hitting the futon, all the owners of Yumemi Kobo, or Dream Workshop, have to do is stare at a photograph of what they would like to dream about and then record, in their own words, how the dream is supposed to pan out."
This does not sound appealing to me because my "regular" dreams are far more fascinating than anything I could possibly come up with in my waking life. Some recent dreams:
- a time compressed dream with a thousand years flying by in a minute.
- a dream about a slug/snail that manipulated time and explained to me how he did it.
- a dream about the controllers of our dreams and understanding how our memory is dependent on our physical selves.
- a dream about nothing, non-existence.
- a dream where I was shot and killed, then walked around as a spirit person.
- a dream that made me understand the difference between the love of someone who is fun to be with and the love of someone who truly knows you.
These are things I never would have thought up to dream about beforehand. I fear that limiting dreams to ideas you can "dream up" while awake would severely limit the possibilities in dreams to nothing more creative than video games. No thanks. I'll stick with letting my dreams lead me to ideas, feelings and understandings I never would have thought of otherwise.
Things like this have been around for a while. I first heard about it in an episode of Ed, but doing some research proved interesting. It's called lucid dreaming. And people don't need a device to do it. All you need to do is to be aware that you are dreaming. Things like the inability to read words, or time standing still are cues that let you know you are dreaming. The first thing you need to do is to not wake yourself up. But once you get the hang of it, apparently you can control everything. You can make yourself fly, control scene changes. Apparently there are some things that make it easier to lucid dream including -get this -eating weird combinations of foods (ie pickles and peanut butter). I even came across a freeware program that would help you achieve lucid dreaming... The name and location eludes me, however. http://www.lucidity.com http://brain.web-us.com/lucid/luciddreamingFAQ.htm
REM sleep have been shown to be responsible to encode short-term memory into long-term memory. People who dream, perform better on tasks they have learn the day before. Students scores better if they sleep or take a short nap after a long night of studying. So it does make sense learning during REM sleep can help learning.
9 99 970
Here is an interestine article about dreams
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns
I want Anna Kournikova!
Better have her sexy russian accent too... um, i have to go...
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Dreams are used by the unconscious to express its inner preoccupations, I dont think forcing dreams to be something is a good idea for human psyche health.
And I dont know about you but I find strange chaotic dreams way funnier then dreaming about a girl I can dream of while awake. That is if you like to find the meaning of your dreams (or are in therapy).
Sigs are for morons... Wait a minute...
As we all know, the subconscious is a powerful thing. Of course, this power is what facilitates stimuli becoming a collective dream. However, the subconscious also directs much of our decision-making process during the day. I'm not suggesting that this company would abuse that power, but it's always possible. Even if it wasn't with malicious intent, but a product of unpredictable circumstances in combination with the "life toy", what happens when a person's mind is altered for the worse?
The power of Christ compiles you.
A Random Blog
you take advantage of these "lucid dreams" by blasting enemies like bill gates with godzilla like powers? ARE YOU A FUCKING 10 year old kid?
You can train yourself to become aware and even control your dreams. It's simple, though not particularly easy. It takes a lot of practice. The hardest part is to avoid what I'd call "newbie" mistakes, such as, suddenly you become aware, so you conjure, say Natalie P. or whomever you seek. Because the moment they appear, you realize you're in complete control. This causes you a great deal of excitement which in turn, wakes you up.
You CAN conjure these images, but you have to work up to it, and you need to be a bit more subtle about it so that you don't get the overexcitement that wakes you.
I did a lot of this in high school and my first two years of college. I began simply by waking up at 3:00am every morning and recording my dreams, then going back to sleep and then recording them again when I woke up again.
After a while, you'll begin becoming more aware of your dreams. At that point, you need to start thinking about taking control. This is usually a few weeks after you've started recording the dreams.
I wish I could still do it. It was a lot of fun. It takes a lot of work to get there, though.
Program the unit to dream of what actually will happen and how I could proffit from it.
The plot: "I'm sitting comfortably at my Pentium 4 Linux box reading e-mail as I think back over the events of the last month and how I became indupendently wealthy."
If that works then I'll dream about owning Microsoft and releasing a GPLed version of Windows.
(Windows GPL the new open source edition now on source forge)
I don't actually exist.
First, there is no way to differentiate between whether you are actually lucid dreaming or whether you are dreaming you are lucid dreaming, after the concept has been introduced to you.
Anyone with any common sense can see that any "Doctor" or "Scientist" that has promoted lucid dreaming as real science in the past has also - always - had a product to hawk - usually a variation on the decades-old LED mask sold at 50000% above cost.
Lucid dreaming is as provable as any other subjective religious experience. Please treat it as such and do not reference it as objective fact.
Next time, read everything backwards.
FRA: STFU GTFO
I second that, but I'd rather have Cristina Scabbia.
Just when naked and petrified Nataly Portman is getting ready to pour hot grits down your pants, your win2k BSODs and you BSOD with it.
You can't handle the truth.
Natalie Portman maybe
Frickin pedophile!
And learn to control your dreams on your own. I found this site the other day, and have been doing the first exercise for 3 days now. I've managed to have lucid dreams (or at least semi-lucid) twice already. (lucid meaning you realize that you're dreaming) Once you're in a lucid dream, it's sort of like the Matrix... you know anything is possible, and can do anything you want.
reading about this dream modifier kinda reminded me of the device they used called a Squid... wonder how close they are to making that little contraption.. just my .02
and as far as what dream module? .. cmon now ... Angelina Jolie & Dita Von Teese
I now await a slew of replies from pseudo-clever /.ers saying "That's it, I'm moving to Japan!" or equivalent phrases.
Oh, yeah, you really shut us down. We are filled with shame, so devilishly have you anticipated our response and mocked it ahead of time.
Apparently you seriously overestimate the number of people who give a shit what you think.
Waking up with gooey stuff in your pants !
Hacking dreams???
I already do most of my prgramming while asleep. I get the basic details of what the application should do, sleep on it, type in as much as I can, go back to sleep, type some more, and repeat those steps until it is ready for the client.
It is weird because when I get stuck on an issue, my body wants a nap. If I give in, then when I wake the answer is there and the code starts flowing from my fingers. Of course, sometimes I get tired because I have been coding for 24 hours straight, and getting stuck means noticing that I have a body and that it has left me voicemails asking for food and rest. But for really complicated projects, I may program for a few hours, sleep for 2 hours, program for an hour, sleep for an hour, and keep alternating until all the major issues have been resolved; then clean up the easy stuff. I still wait at least one more night before delivering because my subconcious may notify me that there is a really big bug if I give it the chance.
My regular clients have learned that any major changes should wait at least one night before I start programming. My favorite client will call me with details of what they expect at least a day before I visit the office so my subconcious has had time to work on it before I get there.
When I start programming without having slept on the issue, the code suffers. I answer questions in an online forum, and often have silly mistakes that I would never have in my own code because I put more effort (many naps) when writing my own projects.
I spend my life entertaining my brain.
I already posted that my usual programming pattern involves sleeping to solve the tough issues. But it also has something to do with the way my mind works.
My concious mind is your typical genius type with ADD-like symptoms. My subconcious regularly comes up with world-changing concepts and finds uses for technology that everybody agrees are impossible. Sure, sometimes I find that the idea was from a book by SpiderRobinson or others, but many of them seem to be completely original even after discussing them with other people. Our new product came from me inputing a regular activity that everybody does and asking my subconcious to find a way to use technology to improve it.
As far as writing music/songs, I find that sleep is a poison. My sleep written music is often very much like your two-note composition. Songs do not have need the ONE IDEA that solves the issue; they require a flow of ideas that work together. I usually write music and lyrics after having been awake for at least 24 hours. That seems to break down the walls between my concious and subconscious enough so that ideas can flow. Songs do not require the epiphany required for programming or new products. They just rearrange the 12 notes and the words in the dictionary until something useful comes out. Of course I check the next day with my fully rested mind to see if the song is actually any good before I add it to my catalog.
I've managed to drag several ideas from my dreams back into the waking world, including quite a few semi-interesting sci-fi plots, but none of them are worth anything when examined in the light of the sun, except perhaps some entertainment value.
"semi-interesting sci-fi plots" that only have "some entertainment value" would make you rich. Or did you mean that people would laugh AT you for having written them?
I spend my life entertaining my brain.
It upsets me greatly that I'm not allowed to mod this one +1, Troll. Excellent post.
I did lucid dream stuff pretty regularly for 7ish months (not all lucid dreams, but definetly awareness in most of them) but lately, I've been lazy about it and my dreams have gotten to be both vivid and really screwed up. I've been missing dreamsigns all over the place and even dreamt that I'd been shot in my most vulnerable spot (no, not there). So I guess the moral of the story is that everyone dreams differently, which is why I'm a little dubious about this device. Yeah, it would help, but there's more to manipulating dreams than that. On that note, I need to go back to my dream journal.
Do you want access to their standard of living, too?
So this is like the Ego Trips that people go on in Total Recall?
I wonder if something can go wrong 1/2way between the dream state & awake state, like in that movie...
"From Takara, the folks who brought you Bow-Lingual the dog translator"
Is that why all of my dreams of Britney now involve doggie style?
Sorry. Wasn't me. But the fact that you "loved" it, speaks volumes about you.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
"We've replaced this man's Dream Workshop with a bowl of warm water... Let's see if he notices."