Oculus Rift & Vivid Dreams

Sadly I've not yet tried any version of the Rift. But this interests me greatly. I'm just going to sit here and watch :D

I hope people answer soon.

This is a damn interesting subject...

Well if you feel like you ARE the character in the game then you might have lingering memories hanging around which will intensify your dream vividness. The more vivid the dream is then the better your recall will be.

Try researching into Lucid Dreaming some. :) If you want to remember your dreams better then when you wake up don't move and just review over what you dreamt about and possibly write it down, this can be great for inspiration or just something cool to look back at.

I had a strong feeling that VR would have this side effect, because their is some statistic I read about that said that gamers have more vivid dreams. That statistic could be opinionated but games can increase your creativity so it makes sense.

It's funny you should mention these things, as the very root of my long obsession with extreme game tech and VR is growing up being a strong lucid dreamer(Would occur roughly 3 times a week for me). The quest for a shared 'waking dream' has been my motivation since I was about eight years old or so.

Hi Nlholman,

I am going to give you the strangest answer you have ever received. I actually expected to hear reports of unusual dream activity among users of the rift and here is why.

When I saw demos of people using the rift I noticed something that instantly fascinated me. After coming out of the rift many people state that they feel like they have been transported from one physical space to another and they have this look in there eyes of being disconnected. There eyes have a certain shine to them that most peoples eyes don't have. I have seen peoples eyes shine like this only in one other place. Let me explain...

Back in the late 60's there was a series of books by an anthropologist named Carlos Castaneda. He was a P.H.D. student doing his thesis on the use of psychotropic plants by the Indians of southern Mexico. To make a long story short, he met a Yaqui Indian named Don Juan Matus who claimed to be sorcerer who inherited a hidden knowledge passed down for thousands of years and because of certain omens that manifested he decided to share the knowledge with Carlos.

He explained that humans are not really objects in a physical world like we have been taught that we are. Rather,that when perceived from a condition called inner silence, we are actually energetic beings which appear as a luminous ball of energy to seers who have achieved a certain level of expertise.

He said that the universe consisted of an infinite number of luminous filaments that are actually aware and alive. These luminous fibers are actually all there is and when they see energy directly they are able to perceive human beings as a group of these luminous fibers. Out of the vast infinite number of fibers which exist in their luminous egg there is a small group of fibers a person is focused on at any given moment which is called the assemblage point. And it is seen as an intense bright ball behind the shoulder blades at an arms distance back on the periphery of the luminous sphere. This point is where they say perception and interpretation really take place. If you align new filaments you manifest a completely new view of the world.

OK, so what does all this have to do with the Oculus Rift? LOL

Well, they said that the state of "Inner Silence" can be achieved by many different methods. But one of the most direct methods is by doing something called "The Right Way Of Walking". While doing the right way of walking they simply walked for hours on end while staring above the horizon and taking in all the perceptions of the surroundings without focusing on anything. By doing this they bombarded there minds with countless perception without having a direct one-to-one relationship with anything in particular. In short, they caused sensory overload that there mind could not process and therefore it shuts down into a state of inner silence where you have direct perception of energy without the filter of the mind.

In this state of inner silence they say that their eyes take on a peculiar shine, which they called "ruthlesness" or the place of no pity, where humans no longer are saturated with self-concern.

Now if I had just read about this shine of the eyes in a book, then I would be totally clueless by saying that it is the same shine rifters undergo. But as it is I knew Carlos very briefly and practiced many of his methods to obtain "Inner Silence" with his Sorcerers Party. Ok here is where you laugh :-)

They were a group of about 15 people who he shared his knowledge with and applying it is what they considered the most important task of there lives. They were by no means a group of weirdos or kooks by any-ones standards. They all were extremely sober, level headed, and intelligent each having advanced degrees in their respective fields. There sobriety and sincerity left no doubt that they had something that most people are missing. While practicing with them I saw the "shine" very many times. I experienced it many times myself and can truthfully tell you that when the internal dialogue shuts off anything is possible!

We do indeed live everyday in a sort-of virtual reality,

Anyways, the sorcerers of ancient Mexico knew through there deliberate "seeing" that the assemblage point of all humans moved at night when people fell asleep. They saw dreaming not just as a random happening of the subconscious mind, but rather it was random movement of the assemblage point where dreamers were making new energetic alignments - sometimes to whole new worlds. They learned to control their assemblage points movement deliberately and enter total new worlds body and all. Sometimes never returning but that is a different subject all-together.

So to wrap things up, when you use the rift it is blasting you with a vast amount of sensory data that you can't relate to directly. There is too much going on at once and your mind is taking a tiny little pause during the tsunami of data overload.

This gap of inner silence is creating an opening where you are no longer rigidly fixated on your customary position of your assemblage point. When you sleep your assemblage point is now more fluid and your normal dreamless state vanishes.

The Oculus Rift might truly be an opening into new worlds like nobody ever expected. Hold onto your hats guys and girls the ride might get a little bumpy from here on out. hahahahahaha

Free at Last! Free at last! Free at Last!

YES.

My dreams were noticeably affected when I was playing Doom 3 BFG on my DIY rift prototype.

Alot of my time in D3BFG was spent exploring very slowly with all the monsters removed. I had headbobbing disabled, so visually it looked like I was just gliding back and forth between various points on the map.

When I had dreams, my movements in the dream were exactly like the gliding movements in the game, and the areas in the dream had a lot of the space-station architecture that D3BFG has. Also for some reason there was a feeling that there were velociraptors in the space-station.

But yes it was very vivid.

edit:
@360FOV
That's hella trippy, man.

I am well versed in the works of Carlos Casteneda, and Robert Monroe. The experience of using the rift is so akin to "lucid dreaming" and "out-of-body" experience, that I'm not surprised at all that people's dreaming activity is being affected. I think the Rift experience has a lot of potential to be used for "tricking" our brain into certain states of consciousness, and combined with certain audio frequencies, could be used for some very interesting applications, gaming being just the tip of the iceberg. ( although, I love gaming immensely, and if that's all it's ever good for, it's still the bomb) :)

um not entirely sure i agree with the balls of energy thing. bit far out there for my little brain but. none the less this topic is an interesting thing. For sure it will be something that will change our perspectives on many things. I mean. Think about it if all your life you know about experencing things by where you are and all and then all of the sudden you feel like your transported into another "world" thats gotta be a litlte of a earth shocker for you. Sure it isnt "real" and the graphics arnt quie there yet but with headtracking + wide feild of view and 3d depth even with those smaller rez screens i imagine it really does give you a real since of space. And most likely will end up blowing a lot of peoples minds. hah so yeah i bet a few interesting dreams might come .

(hopefully not too many nightmeres though ...ahh ahha cobras cobras! (homer SImpson) :-p)

perhaps the line from the Matrix about "what is real......how do you define real" will come into play more :-).

though you wont be able to smell or touch the virtual world yet.....its still a step in the right direction!

Curtrock,

It's funny that you mentioned Robert Monroe. He is the only other book I have read about "new-age" type mumbo jumbo stuff. LOL

When I was 14 I actually acheived the "vibrational condition" after reading half of his book when I found it in the school library earlier that day. Needless to say it scared the crap out of me! I was in such shock that it took 5 years after that to achieve my first out-of-body experience.

I experimented with Robert Monroe's Hemi-Sync technology but it had no effect on me even though I have heard it helped many. I think you are right about VR having the ability to trick the brain. We are entering a new era of electronic shamanism.

"nlholman" wrote:
I don't remember the last time I had a dream.
...
a night full of crazy detailed dreams that I can actually recall.

Seconded. (or 8th'd I guess as the posts fly).