Lucid dream tracked by my Zeo
What you see above is a graph supplied by my Zeo sleep headset showing how I slept last night. The green bars indicate dream sleep while the orange bars indicate wake events. My Zeo does a fantastic job of tracking my sleep but there are moments when it gets confused. For instance, the two orange bars to the left don’t indicate when I was physically awake, they show when I was experiencing lucidity in my dream. You see, my mind was fully awake and aware in my dream. I became aware that I was dreaming while I was dreaming!
I used this time to explore the dream environment, in this case a sprawling mountain vacation home. I floated off the ground, plunged my hands and head through the wall to see how it felt, and explored .. um, a few other fantasies. Maintaining lucidity takes a delicate balance, so I kept seeking out clocks to see if the numbers would change unexpectedly (a common dream sign). I also called for “clarity now!” but this didn’t enhance my focus as it sometimes does. I drifted back into dreaming, a bit confused about why I had difficulty maintaining lucidity. Only after waking for real did I remember the spinning technique.
The Zeo is great for tracking sleep but after four months of sleep tracking I’m growing a bit bored of just that. Where the Zeo would be immensely valuable is in signaling me whenever I enter dream sleep. That would make it easier for me to realize that I am dreaming and launch into lucidity. As of yet, Zeo does not offer this feature, though some enterprising Zeo owners are working on their own tools to do this.
In the future I hope to see more wakefulness spikes in my dream cycles!