[ahelwer]

This made me recall some wild online catalog website from the early 2000s that was primarily known (and advertised) for hoverboard sales, where the hoverboard was basically a small noisy gas-powered rectangular hovercraft you could stand on. I think I first saw their ad in Wired, or maybe a gaming magazine. Anyway if you dug into their catalog there was all sorts of wild stuff, from sleep masks that used LEDs to induce lucid dreaming to things more like this. Anyone know the website I'm talking about?

[dr_dshiv]

I don't know the website and I can't speak to lucid dreaming, but the most incredible "sacred geometry" effects can come from "brain machine" or "audio visual entrainment" devices. Mitch Altman had a classic Make Magazine build -- the things are essentially LEDs flickering around 10hz alpha. We built one recently with Arduino to support open eye meditation -- and you see some pretty crazy things generated by your visual cortex.

Interestingly, the effect was discovered by the neuroscientist purkinje while at the beach as a boy. He noticed that waving his open fingers over his eyes produced geometric hallucinations and later published his drawings -- back in the mid 1800s.

[andai]

I can't find anything for Purkinje at the beach, do you know where you heard it?

[dr_dshiv]

A web article with an illustration. I can't find it. But from "Purkinje's Vision: Dawn of Neuroscience"

"The first phenomenon described by Purkinje was novel: He produced flicker, while looking at the bright sky, by waving his fingers in front of one eye and reported seeing checkerboards, zigzags, spirals, and ray patterns (see Fig. 3.2, Figs. 1–4). They were called shadow figures by Helmholtz (1867, 2000b) and are now referred to as stroboscopic patterns (Smythies, 1957), although they were described before the stroboscope was invented."

[toomanybeersies]

Got any links to resources around making one of these things? Sounds like an interesting project.

[tecleandor]

Adafruit used to sell the kit (not anymore), but you have the instructions, parts list, pcb files and firmware (on the download section) and everything here:

https://learn.adafruit.com/brain-machine/overview

[macrolime]

This site maybe? It's from that time and still exists https://www.amazing1.com

[ahelwer]

I could believe this is it! Looks somewhat familiar in the internet archive, although things get hazy since this was nearly 20 years ago: https://web.archive.org/web/20040624143153/http://www.amazin...

[dmix]

A video of the “anti-gravity” hover board, using pulsed DC, similar to what’s used in spacecraft: https://youtu.be/006d36WWyaQ

[emmelaich]

I love how one of their categories is "Exotic Devices"

Just below ... "Anti-Gravity" :-)

[philwelch]

Do the LEDs “induce” lucid dreaming or are they just a cue for you to look for? Because the cue thing might be slightly less absurd. If you get in the habit of performing “reality checks” (is checking for things that would be present in reality but not in a dream or vice versa), you would notice when you were dreaming and would hence have lucid dreams.

Of course, it’s still a dumb product since you can just check whether written text changes when you’re not looking at it, but it’s not necessarily as dumb as it sounds.

[jacobush]

My dreams are often pretty chaotic. It would be very uncharacteristically solemn for me to write something and check if it's there when I look again.

I haven't tried, but I can imagine blinking lights always present would be a much bigger clue to me.

[pharke]

Same, it's pretty difficult to take notes while attempting to rescue someone from a possessed building that looks a bit like a brutalist interpretation of the Globe Theatre, what with having to fight your way through its zombie-like denizens and arguing with a disembodied voice that seems to be controlling the lighting.

I'm not really sure what I'd do differently in a lucid dream anyways, my subconscious seems to have a better imagination than I do. Remembering more details from dreams would be more important for me I guess.

[pavel_lishin]

> since you can just check whether written text changes when you’re not looking at it

To throw an anecdote into the bucket, I've had a dream where I read a word, and it didn't seem to change on closer inspection, and I remembered it when I woke up. But it didn't cue any lucid dreaming.

But I'm also out of the habit of checking.

[EamonnMR]

Clocks are a good one, except if you're office happens to have a broken clock hanging up in a meeting room.

[Infernal]

It’s light switches for me. They never work in dreams.

[0x8BADF00D]

There are a lot of wearables promising to do everything, it wouldn’t surprise me if you were talking about this site. Although it wasn’t around in the early 2000s.

[dr_dshiv]

The hapbee wearable comes to mind. "Choose how you feel"

https://hapbee.com/

Endorsed by founder of bulletproof coffee, which says something.

[avalys]

amazing1.com comes to mind.

[wyager]

Yes! I remember browsing this site as a child. They had all sorts of whacky stuff for sale, like “anti-gravity” devices. I think I found it through the ads in the back of Popular Science.

[ahelwer]

I think this might be it! And yes, I think it was also Popular Science in which I saw the ad. What a blast from the past!