Lucid Totem - Application for Staff Pick

[Mrch]

Hello everyone,

In the past 9 months I've been developing a very special watch face that adds a whole new layer to your FitBit Versa and Ionic, turning it into a Lucid Dreaming device.

Lucid Dreaming, a very old concept, is the act of dreaming while being aware you are in a dream, and being able to control your environment.

It is an exhilarating experience and while it comes natural to some, it's can be harder for others. I was part of the second group. To achieve lucid dreaming you need consistency, mindfulness and constant awareness of the world around you. I tried and I tried with little to no result, so one day I decided to develop a watch face that would help me achieve Lucid Dreaming and after after 9 months of hard work, I created Lucid Totem.

The main page of the watch face offers all the basic information you need, including your daily stats and the weather (Requires location permissions set to Always). In the top right you can see whether you are in Day or Night mode. We will get to that shortly.

Touch the time to open the second page of the watch face:

Here is where you can switch from Day mode and Night mode, and keep track of everything that happened as well as what are the specific settings you had selected.

So what do Day mode and Night mode actually do?

DAY MODE

This mode will make the watch give you reminders to check if you're currently dreaming or not. This is one of Lucid Dreaming basic techniques called Reality Check (RC). An RC is simply the investigation of reality, trying to ensure we are in fact awake and not in a dream. Classic reality checks are pushing your hand through your palm or focusing on your hand for a few seconds. How many fingers do you have? Perhaps you have 7, perhaps one of them is made of LEGO, or your whole hand is covered in Avocado skin. The laws of physics don't apply in dreams, so anything is possible.

Practicing reality checks during the day greatly increases your mindfulness and awareness, a fundamental aspect to becoming a proficient lucid dreamer, together with keeping a dream journal.

Once you have created this habit of "questioning reality", it will slowly seep into your subconscious and transfer to your dream self.

To increase the chances of this happening, Lucid Totem monitors your HR, looking for any spike, in order to catch specific moments of your day when something noteworthy happens. Did you have to make a run to catch that bus? Did an angry dog scare the hell out of you at the park? Your FitBit will pick up on that and prompt you to do a reality check.

Ideally, next time you experience a strange and exciting dream, you will remember this and do a RC on your own. If that's not enough, this is when Night Mode comes in.

NIGHT MODE

There are 2 options you can select in Night Mode:
Reality Check and WBTB

• Reality Check, currently in beta, monitors your sleep to detect REM sleep, and makes the watch vibrate with the same pattern used during the day, provoking a Pavlovian response. If your "dream self" feels the vibration, you will be prompted to do a reality check that will necessarily fail in the dream, allowing you to gain lucidity. Once you are lucid, the options are literally limiteless.
• WBTB is one of the most hardcore and failsafe Lucid Dreaming Techniques. Instead of a light vibration multiple time throughout the night, the watch will only detect the last REM cycle, and vibrate insistently for a full minute until you wake up. Launch any shortcut to stop the vibration. Once you are awake, lay back in bed, trying to keep your mind awake. At this point there are multiple techniques you can pick from. You can envision the place you want to dream (VILD), you can repeat a mantra such as "Mind awake, body asleep" (MILD), you can keep your mind engaged by applying an alternating ever-so-slight pressure to your index and middle fingers (FILD) or can simply focus on your breathing until Hypnagogic imagery appear. You're entering the dream world.
  All the techniques are detailed in the watch face Settings, in the FitBit App. Let's have a look at that: 

SETTINGS - FITBIT APP

While Day and Night mode can easily be switched directly from the watch as seen at the beginning, you can (and must) select all your settings from the FitBit companion app on your phone.

- In DAY MODE you can choose between the 4 the frequency of the reality checks and select the vibration pattern. Go to Learn More to understand the minimum and maximum time between reality checks for each frequency 

- In NIGHT MODE you can select between the two options discussed above, RC and WBTB. Open Learn More to get a brief explenation and a rundown of the most ypical techniques for WBTB (FILD, WILD, VILD and MILD)

- SWITCH allows you to switch mode directly from the phone.

- CUSTOMIZATIONS allows you to change the background and customize all texts on the watch face, including Time, Date, Battery and all the icons and numbers for your stats.

That's it! A basic rundown of the last 9 months of my work. I hope you guys will give it a try, and should you deem it worthy, I would love for it to be showcased in the "Staff Picks" section on the Gallery.

Here is the link to the watch face Lucid Totem

Thanks for reading!