Things not to say in public if you are an exchange student living in the same house as a classmate of the opposite sex, part n of (n++): “All right! We’re going to do it tonight too!” -even if you are actually referring to playing computer games, which I can certainly understand.

I went to bed later than I had hoped for, and was wide awake, because of the New Year weekend. But luckily I have moved a used stereo into my bedroom. In it I have a CD with brainwave entrainment tracks (LifeFlow from Project Meditation). With my trusty remote control at hand, I set LifeFlow 2 to repeat and laid back on three pillows.

LifeFlow 2 is, as the name implies, 2 Hz. This is in the delta band, corresponding to the brainwaves of deep dreamless sleep. But inducing sleep is not necessary. Rather, by entraining the brain at this level, it will reap some of the benefits of deep sleep, even if you are awake. Obviously you need to not concentrate very hard on solving problems, and you must avoid the primal emotions such as fear, anger and lust which have the power to block the entrainment.  If you just stare at the ceiling, that is fine. It is originally meant to be used with meditation, but this time we want the option of going to sleep when that becomes convenient.

This also came to pass, after a while. I don’t know about you, but for me, knowing that I don’t NEED to sleep is likely to make me more sleepy!

I’ve done this stunt before a few times, and usually I wake up just a little after something like an hour, or perhaps an hour and a half, which is one full sleep cycle.  I just turn off the stereo and go back to sleep. This time, however, it must have been something like 3-4 hours. I assume the brain did not stay in delta all the time – there is a natural cycle to these things and it probably does its best to run its course – but it probably stayed down there longer than usual.

That would certainly explain the extremely vivid dreams I had for the rest of the morning. The most prosaic of these was eating chocolate for breakfast. Even in my dream I did limit myself and stop before I was full, but it was still more than I could safely have eaten in real life and not become sick.

The next dream, however, was extremely complex and more lifelike than life, in a manner of speaking. I guess my brain had to catch up on REM sleep, which is the opposite pole from deep dreamless delta-sleep.  In my dream I lived in a large apartment in a city house with my little daughter, Danielle, who was a bit crazy.  I had to hide the cheese when she was eating, because if she saw cheese she would freak out and get hysterical.

Despite being just an apartment, the place was big. It was spread on two floors, with the upper floor holding mostly storage rooms of various kinds but also a home office where my computer was connected to the Internet through the military’s intranet, which I had to log on every time I was to use it.  It was possible to get into my apartment through at least two different entrances, one on each floor.  This bothered me since we were in the middle of town, where burglars were sure to be doing their thing.

Well, other people’s imaginary homes are not very interesting. The interesting part is that when I woke up, I had to look around and convince myself that no, I did not live in that place, I lived in this place.  It had been that vivid. That is pretty exceptional for me, and of course I “blame” the brainwave entrainment.

And that was that, really. As usual, my friends can stream the tracks from my music collection when it is up, with reduced quality. To buy the real thing you should go to Project Meditation. (Warning: Background sound.)

Oh, and I woke before the clock, wide awake, and stayed that way through the workday.