Dream Recorder 2 is a software program for Mac OS X that measures your sleep states by detecting your motions with enhanced night vision. And it does all this with your iSight or certain video cameras. You can set Dream Recorder to wake you up at precisely the right time, at the end of a sleep cycle, so that you feel full of energy in the morning.

You can also have Dream Recorder gently wake you up with a dream feedback sound, just after a dream. You can then speak your dream and Dream Recorder will detect your voice and record. You can later hear your dream again and annotate it. We’ll talk more about inspirado in a bit.

Easy To Use

I downloaded & installed Dream Recorder and had it up & running in minutes. It has a beautiful and logical GUI which quickly felt familiar. Dream Recorder is a feature rich program. Here are some of the exciting things it can do:

• Make a quicktime movie of your night with time stamping. What happens during the third of your life ?
• Control your nights with accurate statistics, including night time, recovery and dream periods. Ideal for sportsmen.
• Snoring detection system with integrated anti-snoring whistles.
  A must.

• Sounds while you dream… are sounds influencing dreams ? Well, try the waterfall ambiance
• Full iTunes integration for importing your own sounds for relaxation, waking-up or dream feedback.
• Voice controlled notepad for your dreams. Just speak and your voice is recorded. Annotate them next day.

Inspirado

Dream Recorder can be used by creative types to capture dreams. Salvador Dali used to take naps while sitting in an arm chair holding a spoon over a pan so that when his muscles relaxed he’d drop the spoon into the pan which would wake him up and he would have the vivid hypnogogic images fresh in his mind for him to paint. Einstein’s notion of relativity is said to have come to him early one morning as he got out of bed, after having researched the matter for ten years. Thomas Edison is known to have made use of the hypnagogic state to help him formulate ideas for his inventions.

Hypnagogic experiences occur as one is falling asleep, while hypnopompic experiences occur as one is waking up - both experiences occur within the time period between sleep and waking (or vice versa).

Dream Recorder uses the difference between successive reconstructed images for computing the quantity of motion (see image on the right). Quantity of motions are reflected by the colored bar graph. High peaks mean motions. Very low peaks are just in the detection noise base level.
Dream periods are lit up by spotlights. Normal sleeps are represented by the dark blue shades. Deep sleeps have no lights nor shading.
Night events are displayed under the time line, here a dream feedback followed by a voice recording. Sleep profiles are easy to read when you get used to the program.

I feel that too many people pay attention to their dreams or use them for creative and inventive purposes. Obviously dream had an impact on some of the great creative minds in history. They understood that we spend as much as a third of our lives sleeping, but our mind is still working and creating. Maybe even more creatively working, as we’re using less of our analytical, left-side of the brain. Dream Recorder 2 is an awesome tool and the best way to help us get as much out of those “wasted” hours as possible.