Yesterday Neuromodulation Technologies B.V. sensationally pulled the plug on their already successful Kickstarter campaign for their Lucid Dreamer tACS prototype with less than 3 weeks to go, even though the €100k target had been easily met.
It seems that further testing had not gone to plan which seemed to worry the creators. This is on the back of the 2014 Voss tACS study into lucid dreams which had been lauded by the sheep mentality amongst us to be ‘the Holy Grail of lucid dreaming’, ‘the lucid dreamer’s default standard’, or ‘the scientific breakthrough’ bar none.
From Kickstarter:
“Of our initial test group all became lucid within a week. However, during further testing people did not become lucid as easily as we expected”. (Source: Update #6)
The wheels started to come off the wagon a little as early as October 17th where the creators reflect publicly on these poor results for the first time.
“We have found that people who are completely new to lucid dreaming do not become lucid as easily as our initial test group, at least not after a 4 days of trying”. [Sic]
“…it seems that the most defining feature of lucid dreams: the realization that one is dreaming is not so easy to trigger as our initial tests seemed to indicate”. (Source: Update #2)
From this it was decided to use a combination of tACS stimulation, MILD exercises and LED light stimulation to achieve more optimum results. This is after the creators had practically dismissed MILD, reality checking, 4 am meditation and light-emission REM masks as being ineffective dream induction methods in their main crowdfunding campaign, whilst favouring the new hip tACS concept.
However the creators behind the Lucid Dreamer, Neuromodulation Technology B.V. are still keen to carry on development, where they wish to invite people over to the Netherlands as a participant in further testing and research.
I guess we can only applaud the honesty of the creators after the realisation of later testing, which brings the whole idea and concept of tACS associated lucid dream induction into question.
Only further research can provide the answer after all, rather than relying on a single scientific-based report source.
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