I’ve been doing a free trial of the SleepSpace app (iOS/Android), which aims to help you sleep better. I like the relaxing nature sounds available to help you get ready for sleep, which can also be used to mask noise in your sleeping environment.
The app has a “dream enhancing” function that uses memory association and cueing to try to induce lucid dreaming and/or dream incubation. Details here
How SleepSpace Promotes Lucid Dreaming
SleepSpace enables you to lucid dreaming with our lucid dream inducer by enabling you to play default and custom sounds when you are most likely in a dream state. Based on your body movements and how much you have slept, the app can predict when you are most likely in a dream state. If dream manipulation is set to on, then a calming rain storm sound will play when you are most likely dreaming. This will cue you to the fact that you are in a dream state and that you can lucid dream. This can also help relax you if you are someone who suffers from nightmares, a common cause of awakenings.
Targeted Memory Reactivation
The SleepSpace dream enhancer technology can also be used for something in sleep science called Targeted Memory Reactivation. Various researchers have shown that if you focus on something you want to learn throughout the day while listening to a stimulus like ocean waves or thunderstorms and then if you replay those sounds while you are dreaming, you can actually prime the memories you wanted to remember. The reason this works is that humans are association machines. Similar to the Pavlovian dogs that were trained to salivate when they heard a bell through a process where they learned to associate a bell with food, we can train our brains to dream and encode the information that we most want to remember.
Steps to Use the SleepSpace Dream Enhancer
1) Turn the Dream Enhancer by editing your Sleep Journey (only available to iPhone)
2) Navigate to the tab and hit on the button
3) You should see the dream enhancer sound there. Click the sound.
4) The rain shower will play for 10 minutes. While the sound is playing meditate on what you would like to dream about. It could be something you want to remember for a test, your 10-year vision for yourself, or a solution to a recurring nightmare.
5) When you start your Sleep Journey, SleepSpace will play the rain shower sound that you just meditated on during your REM sleep, priming the thoughts that you were meditating on during a dream state in order to help you entrain and remember those thoughts better.
I haven’t tried this so far but it seems like it could work. In a personal communication with the owner of the company he opined that it could be combined with virtual reality for dream incubation, by playing the trigger sound while doing something in VR that you wanted to later experience in a dream. This also seems plausible.
A 9-day free trial of the app is available here if anyone wants to try it.