Learning to become lucid in your dreams, like learning any new behavior, requires remembering your intention to do so. If you are learning to improve your posture, you need periodic reminders to sit up straight! The difficulty in applying this to lucid dreaming is, how do you get reminders to the dreamer during the dream?

The answer is to use sensory cues. Most will have had the experience of an "incorporation," a sensation, typically a sound (a leaf blower or ringing phone) working its way into a dream. Through laboratory tests, we found that visual stimuli, flashes of light, were most likely to show up in dreams without causing awakening. The next task was figuring out how to deliver cues at the right time (in REM sleep) without using a sleep lab and someone watching and waiting to trigger the cues when the sleeper entered REM sleep.

Like its predescessor (the original model), the new NovaDreamer works by detecting the rapid eye movements of REM sleep and delivering flashing light cues to the user at the right time. The would-be lucid dreamer must be prepared to recognize the cues (we have devised exercises to learn to do this). The dreamer, upon seeing lights flashing in the dream, regardless of whatever else is going on, can then realize that "This is a dream" and thereby become lucid.

The principle is simple. The execution took a lot of research and hard work to find optimal methods of detecting eye-movements, developing algorithms for distinguishing REM sleep from waking or other sleep states, and optimizing the cues for different types of sleepers. Over the years, as microprocessor technology has advanced, we have been able to build more sophisticated and effective devices.

Dr. LaBerge and collegues have been working hard over the last few years to bring out the next generation of NovaDreamer. The new device will work on the same basic principles as previous versions, but will have additional features. It is designed to work in concert with a personal computer, which makes record keeping and individual programming more comprehensive and easier. The software will be flexible, allowing updates and new features to be downloaded by the user. The reliability and comfort will also be significantly better than for the original NovaDreamer.

The NovaDreamer package will include an updated version of Lucidity Institute's Course in Lucid Dreaming, a comprehensive training program that prepares you to recognize the NovaDreamer cue in your dreams. The exercises and techniques introduced, are essential to learning how to consistently and effectively lucid dream.

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