Lucid Dreaming App for iPhone helps you understand sleep and have lucid dreams!

Let's face it, if you are a hardcore lucid dreamer, you will take any help that you can get in order to achieve lucid dreams. Supplements, timer programs, wacky google gadgets. Over the years there have been a large number of supplements, audio CDs, hypnosis, binural beats, and it seems that every month something new pops up on the market.

Unfortunately a lot of these programs do not work much better than a placebo, and a lot of higher end accessories are too expensive to test.

The situation seems to be improving with the introduction of smartphones, these little guys pack enough processing power and electronics, promising to evolve into the next generation lucid dreaming accessory.

iPhone or an iPod 4 can monitor your sleep using built-in motion sensors. This has been widely used in the so called "Smart Alarm" clocks, which are intended to make awakening easier by detecting light sleep stage and setting off alarm at that time.

But can the concept be applied to lucid dreaming?

Yes it can! Singularity Experience: The Lucid Dreaming App is a brand new app to hit the app store in December.

The app:

• Detects different stages of sleep
• Plays reminders during dreaming
• Helps you keep a very valuable dream journal
• Includes a hypnotic script
• Sends you your sleep data by email
• Is developed by a lucid dreamer

The app greets the user with a complicated looking gadget with arrows and bubbles spinning around the screen. Apparently sun has a serious impact on human sleep, and the author attempted to illustrate this fact by including a solar clock with sunrise and sunset times (these are calculated with the help of GPS).

The logic here is simple: your body wants to go to sleep about 3 hours after dusk, and wants to wake up shortly after sunrise. The gadget uses an orange arrow to track the position of the sun in the sky, helping you estimate how many hours of light or darkness are left in a given day.

A couple extra arrows track last bedtime and risetime, helping you pick a predictable bedtime.

The floaty bubble thingies on the left side of the screen are reminders, and also dream indicators. They can be rotated freely around the bio clock thingie. By aligning the black marker with your bedtime, you see when you are most likely to dream in that night (each marker aligns with possible dream time).

I really like this feature, as it helps me quickly understand when I will be dreaming without ever touching any kind of time setting mechanism.

Here comes the magic : by tapping on each marker, you can set an audio track to be played during that sleep cycle.

When the app detects dreaming, the app pops up a screen like the on the right and starts flashing light, then playing the audio that you've selected.This either influences your dream, or wakes you up.

In the case of forced awakening, the developer suggests a special technique for re-entering dreams consciously, actually the whole app seems to be developed just for that technique.

The interface is complicated, but the amount of customization is enormous. You can change the color of light and let the app play a default audio reminder (different moods), or combine up to 4 tracks of your own.

I find that typing on an iPhone is a huge pain, and never thought that I would be keeping an electronic dream journal, until I found out how useful an electronic dream journal can be.

Here's how it works:

1. most dreams are recorded upon awakening.
2. The app lets you mark a dream upon awakening, remembering dream time
3. You can edit the dream's content later

Together, this lets me keep an accurate log of when I woke up, when I remembered dreams, and even have dream journal entries associated with each awakening. I can quickly traverse my dream journal and see when I've seen certain types of dreams. For example my dream sign seems to pop all over the place without any rhyme or reason.

I found that paying close attention to a dream journal like that has improved my dream recall and clarity. Sometimes I even have spontaneous dream control in dreams!

The app is priced at a steep 5$, which is quite a lot for an iPhone app, but compared to 250$ novadreamer or REM Dreamer it is a steal. The app provides a lot of very good information about sleep that is not available from any other source. If you are a serious lucid dreamer who's in it for the long term, you simply cannot bypass this app! It is available on iPod4 and iPhone 4