Ever since I got Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, and saw the awesome wood carving on the front which looks like a G, E, or B depending on your vantage point, I’ve wanted to make my own.  So here it is.  I made a G, J, and R because those are my initials, obviously.  The planning was fairly simple and straightforward.  I drew each letter on its respective side, and backwards on the opposite side.  The execution was technically tricky, but still pretty easy to understand – all you have to do is cut out each letter’s profile and this will create the complex three dimensional shape automatically.  Unfortunately, I managed to drop and break the thing like ten minutes after completion, but a little bit of wood glue has made it reasonably sturdy.  Cool!

A painting of someone experiencing sleep paralysis. The pressure on the chest, feeling of a presence in the room, and inability to move conspire with hallucinations to create terrifying experiences like this one.

Advance warning: I did not reach a dream state, and nothing really amazing happened. It was just an interesting experience and I decided to write about it so I wouldn’t forget what it was like. You will probably find this boring and uninteresting.

For those of you who don’t know, a WILD is a Wake Induced Lucid Dream. Basically, you keep your mind alert and conscious while your body falls asleep, allowing you to transition from a waking state to a dream state with no lapse in awareness. It involves not moving a muscle for a very long time in order to fool your body into thinking your mind is sleeping. It’s also a bit dangerous in that you can end up in sleep paralysis with powerful hallucinations, a strong feeling of a presence in the room, and unadulterated terror if you don’t know what to expect.

I’ve tried WILDs before, but invariably I lose control of my mind and it wanders into nonsensical dreamy territory. I wake up a few hours later. Fail. This time was a bit different.

The first part of a WILD is to WBTB – Wake Back To Bed. You simply sleep for a few hours (6-8 is best, I think), then wake up for a short period (5 minutes to an hour), and then go back to sleep, trying to WILD. This is so that certain chemicals associated with consciousness are at peak when you try, and so that your REM cycle is well on its way. Tonight, I went to bed around 6:30 and woke up at midnight. I stayed up for a while messing around online, and then decided I should try a WILD, since it was such a nice set up.

I used a new method this time – usually I did the alphabet method. You picture each letter of the alphabet and then picture something that starts with it, cycling through and never repeating yourself. I think the issue with this is that you have to search for an object, which is an easy place to lose concentration and wander off into oblivion. This time, I used my breathing to govern my thoughts. On every breath inwards, I would count off a number and picture it. On the breath out, I would say “I will become lucid”. When I got to 100, I started at one again. The great thing about this method is that you can really tell when you’re about to lose it. Any time something becomes associated with the numbers you’re counting, you have to kill it. This is usually fairly easy since the next breath will interrupt your thoughts and guide you back on track. Some associations are particularly persuasive, so be careful: at one point I nearly became convinced that I was somehow counting the wrong numbers, and wanted to stop counting for a minute to try to remember what I was doing wrong. BAD! As soon as you stop counting, you’re gone. Anyways, here’s what I remember of the events.

The first 100 was a bit tough. I kept getting weird associations, the numbers were inmates or recipes or train stations, whatever. I had to fight to keep the numbers totally abstract and meaningless. By the time I reached the 1–s, I felt a bit more confident and focused. Nearing 200, I noticed my body start to feel odd. It felt like the first stages of your foot falling asleep, but all over… a warm, fuzzy static sensation. Around 225, something interesting happened – until then I had been consciously breathing. Suddenly, I felt my breaths deepen as if in sleep. It was as if I had managed to initiate the “automatic breathing” program, but still pay attention to my breaths. This made things a bit easier, as I could just count the breaths pass instead of having to breath on my own. I began to feel distinctly as if I was inside of a shell of my body. Somewhere between 300 and 400, I started losing feeling in my body. It reminded me of the Ganzfeld effect, and I assume it happened because I was getting the same sensations from my body for such a long time with no change. I could no longer distinctly tell where my fingers were, they almost blended together in my mind. I couldn’t resist trying the “throat block breathe” test to see if I was dreaming yet a few times due to the weird sensations I was getting. This may have contributed to my failure. Around 375, my entire body convulsed suddenly and without warning. It was like those “falling” dreams when you’re going to sleep, except I hadn’t thought I was falling. This was such a sudden and odd experience that my head reeled for a while afterwards. I didn’t regain sensation or lose the static feeling though. After 400, things got rough again. I would frequently forget what number I was at and wander off briefly in thought until my next breath reminded me of my duty. My body started to feel heavy, coated in something stiff. Where before my body was something I had to be careful not to move by accident, it seemed like it would take a good deal of effort to rouse any bit of it now. My tongue slid back ever so slightly in my mouth, making breathing a bit difficult. I lost the automated breathing and the need to swallow swelled up. It became so strong that I swallowed half-automatically. I’m afraid this still ruined my efforts to some extent. After that, I struggled onwards for a bit until my eyes started to open without my consent (this must have been around 800 or so). My body still felt heavy and stuck, so I tried to move around, hoping to at least get sleep paralysis. No dice. I was awake. Fail. I’ll try again some other night.

PS – I started this at 1:23 AM and my eyes opened at 2:12. An oddly peaceful experience on the whole, I bet this would make for good meditation =P

Headphones for static, ping pong ball halves and lamp for diffuse white light, and gloves for decreased tactile sensations.

http://mindmodifications.com/2008/02/09/ganzfeld-effect/

I stumbled upon the link above earlier, and was immediately determined to try it myself. Basically, the Ganzfield Effect is a form of sensory deprivation, but instead of depriving the sense of input, you drown it in constant, meaningless input. Practically speaking, it’s a lot easier to listen to white noise in headphones than to get a room to be absolutely quiet for any length of time. I fetched some pingpong balls, some gloves, downloaded the “brown noise” clip from that link, and set to ganzfielding. Here is a description of the experience. Nothing much happened, but I hope to try again with a better setup soon.

As soon as I was settled in, I immediately resented not having cut the pingpong ball along the seam. The seam made a dark beige line across my visual field in both eyes – worse, they weren’t aligned. Within a few moments, however, I noticed that the insides of the balls seemed to be fading together, blurring, pulling away, and before I knew it I was only aware of a pale luminosity, as if I were in a smoke-filled room. I wondered if the brown noise was working – as odd as my vision was, my ears didn’t seem unusual. I had vague memories of my headphones creaking a bit as they settled, but otherwise there was nothing to hear but my own voice in my head. The seams pushed through the fog if I moved my eyes abruptly, but for the most part I was unaware of them. A muscle in my thigh twitched. I seemed to have forgotten that I had legs. My arms had stayed with me, perhaps because of the slight warmth of the desk lamp shining on them. As these thoughts went through my head, I suddenly realized that I had stopped seeing. For a moment there had been no gently luminous fog, no darkness… just… nothing. Now, shimmering colors floated across my vision like oil slicks – the same lights that usually dance behind closed lids, in front of my open eyes! My right elbow was making contact with the desk lamp, and the hard sensation seemed to pull my consciousness towards it. I readjusted my arm, and a few moments later I forgot about it, along with my legs. I thought about how odd I must look, and hoped the phone wouldn’t ring. I opened my eyes. I didn’t know when they had closed. The static was finally affecting me, I had almost tuned it out completely and the lack of meaningful noises made me feel strangely disconnected from the outside world. The phone rang. I swore and gave up. I will try again with a new ball sometime later. Yay for fucking with my brain!