Remee is a scam, and here’s why:
When I first learned about Remee in May 2012 from a reader of my blog, I was excited. I thought that the future is here, and the 80$ lucid dreaming aid is reality. I even put up a link to their kickstarter page on my site. When my Remee finally arrived, I realized I was wrong.
Yes, I own remee
You see, over the last 6 months or so, I’ve heard about Remee mentioned next to real lucid dreaming induction masks, like NovaDreamer and REMDreamer so many times, that I started to believe I’m getting the real deal…cheap.
With the name like Remee, it’s easy to get confused. It turns out I was wrong, and should’ve read the fine print. The fine print (somewhere in the comments section) says:
“Remee does not detect REM(Rapid Eye Movement) sleep”.
What is this REM sleep?
Rapid Eye Movement sleep is when you are most likely to dream, and most likely to remember your dreams. The amount of REM sleep is unequal throughout the night, with the majority of it starting to appear towards the end of the night. REM sleep occurs as a part of sleep cycles, which are roughly 90 minutes long. Later sleep cycles have more REM sleep, thus more intense and long dreaming. A person can dream in non-REM, but is less likely to remember such dreams. A person can stay in REM and not dream coherently.
Real Lucid Dreaming Masks – what do they do?
Real lucid dream induction masks(300$+), like NovaDreamer and REMDreamer are built around these two principles:
- Detect when the user is experiencing REM Sleep by monitoring eye movements
- Produce a signal to the user
A real lucid dream induction mask uses eye movement sensors to actually detect when the user’s eyes exhibit slow rolling or other kinds of movement that is frequently observed in REM sleep. The only need for timer in such masks is to enable detection after some time delay. Unlike the real ones, Remee simply starts flashing after a timer has counted down 4.5 hours.
The intention of the real masks is to limit lucid dream induction attempts to the REM phase only, and to minimize the disruption of regular sleep. Signals sent during non-REM sleep are at best harmless, at worst they wake you up and you cannot go back to sleep. Because Remee does not detect REM sleep, it is just a bunch of LED lights sewn into a mask, with a timer circuit attached. It will flash light whenever the timer fires, without regard for whether you are dreaming or not. In vernacular, Remee is a scam, if pitched as a real lucid dreaming mask, which it frequently is.
Why random timers do not work.
I’m a sleep researcher. I built two lucid dream induction apps for Android and iPhone. I look at my sleep cycle graphs with Zeo Sleep Manager’s EEG, and over the last year I’ve recorded over 700 dreams times in my electronic dream journal, like in the screenshot.
Each green marker stands for the time when I’ve woken up from a dream. I have complete 90 days of sleep history published, if you wish to review it.
I hope this gives me some authority to speak on lucid dream induction, and what I have to say is:
- The dreaming period is short.
- Even if I remember 6 dreams in a night, they are less than 15 minutes long, with most being about 5 minutes.
- The times of dreams shift from night to night
Why I’m upset at Remee.
It’s a harmless gimmick, right? So what if people put 80$ for a harmless sleeping mask? The answer is simple – such scams hurt the public’s good faith in development of real, evidence and science based lucid dream induction aids, like halographs. The incredible amount of hype and publicity around the Remee will easily turn sour, once people realize that the mask does not work as advertised.
For example, I’ve bought several “lucid dream induction pills” on the web. They were all crap. Will I buy lucid dream induction pills again? Highly unlikely, unless there’s a ridiculous amount of evidence that pills work safely. Now lets say a biohacking team comes up with a semi-working lucid dream induction pill. To market this pill, they have to fight an uphill battle against all the crap publicity that will remain on the web forever from the previous scammy lucid dream induction pills. The public’s good faith in the product has been tarnished.
Another example – a lucid dream induction app comes along that is marginally effective. Now it has to fight against all the existing publicity and hyperlinks to this site, and my apps. Will a user download another lucid dream induction app after the first X failed? Possibly, but not for 9.99$. This means a lot of effort put into marketing, something that most engineers, scientists and hackers are not accustomed to. As such, a new semi-working lucid dream induction app is less likely to get off the ground, and is less likely to be completed and made functional.
Finally, the Remee, a lucid dreaming mask. It’s cheap, so many people may get it. But without REM detection, most people would just put it on the shelf after less than a dozen attempts. Would these people buy another lucid dream induction mask? Would they buy the new and improved Nova Dreamer and support real lucid dreaming research? Something tells me that these people would be wary of spending money on lucid dreaming products.
Real lucid dream induction masks are built by researchers who spent quite a lot of time on… research and development. Such people are not the best at marketing, and the high product cost of their products keeps amateurs away. With 80$ Remee, which will soon flood eBay for like 30$, novices are exposed to the mask, that looks like a lucid dreaming mask and shines light. Such novices will not know better to distinguish between the real mask that detects REM and a gimmick that only shines light, because they look the same. Think the following conversation:
- “What do you think of Lucid dream induction masks?”
- “Oh, they don’t work, I got one”
What is REM enhancement anyway?
The project’s name is Remee, an REM (rapid eye movement) enhancing mask. The first thing that bothers me is the name Remee. Each lucid dreamer will recognize the term REM in the name. Why is REM there, if the mask is just a timer? It simply confuses potential customers, sure did trick me into seeing what I wanted to see.
One might ask, what is REM enhancement? How can the interaction of 100 billion neurons, making 100 trillion connections, and exhibiting a cyclical pattern of activity each sleep cycle be enhanced by 6 light emitting diodes? Hmm. I’m out of ideas here. What I would be concerned about is that it does not disrupt my sleep.
Wrong, oh so wrong
I’m amazed at the amount of hype and publicity that surrounds the release of Remee, a lucid dreaming aid that does not even detect REM, even though articles like the one below might make you believe a whole bunch of things that the mask might do. They make you hear what you want to hear:
With Remee, a series of flashing red lights on your sleep mask will appear within your dreams, reminding you that you’re in a dream state. Once those stimuli are acknowledged and understood, a user can begin lucid dreaming as they say see fit. From person to person, lucid dreaming can be a great many things — a means to fly, teleport or meet famous people.
This is wrong, because light cues will occasionally integrate into your dreams, and will appear as random light. Not red. Not flashing. Random. Occasionally the user will recognize that the lights are out of place. From what I’ve heard, the effectiveness of even the “real” lucid dream induction masks is from 13-30% for a trained user, on nights when the user puts effort into signal recognition.
The Remee mask will target the parts of your sleep pattern — typically toward the end — that fall under REM, where dreams occur. It is then that the six red lights under the mask will begin their work. If you’re not in REM, the lights will not effect your sleep, but if you are, it will present the opportunity for the user to become lucid.
What it should read: Remee is a hit and miss timer. It will fire after a static amount of time, with the possibility of some “wiggle”. As a developer of two lucid dream induction apps, I can tell you that this simply does not work that way:
- REM times are not static
- Dream times shift over the course of several days
- REM times are dependent on how long it took you to fall asleep, and when you went to bed.
This means that using Remee after a delay is like tossing a dart in the dark and hoping that it sticks into something. There are a few free timer-based lucid dreaming apps available for your smartphone – try them and see if they work for you. But I would not drop 80-100$ on Remee, because in its current state, it’s a gimmick, or a scam, depending on what you expect. I remind you that I backed the project 6 months ago and even posted links to the project.
Upgrade potential?
I checked reddit and see that people are excited about Remee and Zeo, Remee and EEG headband X. So I opened up my Remee and checked what’s inside. How upgradable it is? As an electrical engineering student, who has experience assembling electronics, I say: Looking inside the mask leaves a slim hope for this version.
The “flexible printed circuit board” that causes so much of a delay in production is actually just 2 pieces of regular circuit board, connected by a cable ribbon. There’s really no space for additional electronics, like a bluetooth module, and the 3.3 volt watch battery would not be able to support wireless data. I guess we get what we paid for.
Is there anything right about Remee?
You bet, the simple fact that a couple guys were able to
- raise half a million dollars
- put a product on the market with public funding is good.
- It’s good that they were able to develop a product that is wearable.
This shows that there’s an unfulfilled need for a lucid dreaming aid at affordable prices. It shows that Kickstarter projects can succeed.
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You are an electrical engineer by training. Your argument against Remee is quite sound. Maybe you could give making a cheap LD mask a shot? I’d back it.
Just wait for novadreamer 2. Maybe it will work.
The NovaDreamer 2 has been ‘coming soon’ for years. LaBerge was a great pioneer, but I get the impression he’s content whiling away the rest of his years with the occasional seminar in Hawaii.
The simple answer is that sleep is extraordinarily complex. Just take a look at this article: http://zcam.tsinghua.edu.cn/~jzlei/teaching/sysbio2009/Reppert_Nature_2002.pdf It describes processes that are stared when human eyes receive no light. It affects all cells of the human body. LaBerge is not here to make a quick buck by publishing something that doesnt work. I think he really cares about lucid dreaming and would not publish a product that does not work.
Instead of looking into masks that detect REM and send a signal to the dreamer I believe we should be researching compounds that leave a level of awareness with a person but allow there body to sleep, I’m no chemist so I’m not sure of specifics. But as dream time changes and times vary it just appears to me that any device up to a point is just hit and miss.
Hy man, you still have the Remee mask, I want to buy it from you at low price.
i dont think you understand how remee works. looking at your own sleep data, you can see that there are heavy periods of rem going on towards to end of your sleep, that’s where remee comes in. it blasts led at a interval of your choosing after an initial delay of 4~5 hours. even if you think your dream last about 5 minutes each, you can set remee to flash lights @ 1 min interval, and it wont affect non rem if the brightness is set to low but you will see it in your dreams when you’re in rem.
and there’s a nap mode, where the lights start to flash after X minutes.
so when it might not be as good as masks that actually detect rem, it’ll do a fine enough job of alerting the dreamer that s/he is asleep.
I’ve done plenty of experiments with random timers, repeating timers, etc to say that they don’t work. It’s as simple as that. You need to know when the REM is happening and when it has fully stabilized. Just flashing light at random times after a delay is at best ineffective. At worst, it will tear the dreamer from a half-formed dream, which is quite unpleasant, as I’ve discovered during my own experiments.
You’re stating these things from a subjective point of view, i doubt everyone will have the same problems or inconveniences you have. Its quite possible that your the type of person that just isn’t suited for these kinds of masks.
Your are right. I’m working in building a cheap rem detector with arduino. I have found no one on internet that have achieved this cheaply…
Thanks for the article. I wasn’t aware that Remee doesn’t have REM detection. Regarding lucid dreaming pills, I must disagree. In my experience, Galantamine plus Choline, when taken about 4 hours into the sleep cycle, followed by about 30 minutes of wakefulness and then by a meditative attitude as one falls back asleep, has consistently induced high quality lucid dreams. The only exception was the first time I tried it, and then the first time I tried it after a lapse of over 6 months. A caveat is that the Wake Back to Bed technique appears to be the most reliable method for inducing lucid dreams, regardless of what is done during the 30-60 minutes of wakefulness. I have had lucid dreams of similar intensity using various other methods during the WBTB interval, such as pipe tobacco and meditation. However, it seems that no method has been as reliable as the Galantamine plus Choline combination — again, taken after a 4 hour interval but not when taken at bedtime as the instructions on at least one container for some reason recommend.
Hello, Mr. Stone! I think you’ve done a great job thus far with your projects; they look sound and promising. I do, however, have to agree with nait. I do not intent to sound like a jerk or have any intention of comparing your product to the remee product, but there are some words that require attention.
Firstly we have to recognize that everyone’s sleep pattern is not exactly the same, and thus it -is- important to have a tool that is flexible and able to be used during REM correctly (waking up during deep sleep would indeed be frustrating). A device that is able to sense REM sleep such as the NovaDreamer is an ideal tool and would clearly be preferred. Without that, though, the remee product has done nearly as well as can be done, in my opinion.
You clearly have experience and knowledge of sleep cycles. You acknowledge at first that longer REM sleep happens during the later cycles of the night, but as you progress in the article you say that sleep cycles are only fifteen minutes long (“Even if I remember 6 dreams in a night, they are less than 15 minutes long”). While, true, the REM period might only be fifteen minutes long for roughly the first two cycles in the night, the later cycles in the night include -much- more REM time (http://www.tc.gc.ca/media/images/innovation-eng/figure2.jpg). They can include thirty minutes to an hour’s worth of REM sleep for every hour and a half cycle. That’s not really a small window. I understand the patterns are still irregular, and what works one night might not the next night; however, patterns are “clear and predictable” and the chances of the correct timing are very high if you aim correctly past the 4.5 hour cycle, and much higher if you wait until after the 6 hour mark. remee is customizable, and the timer delay can be set up to 7.5 hours after you fall asleep.
Perhaps you have not realized that the remee is customizable! (http://remee.com/program) I understand your major qualm is that it does not detect REM sleep and is therefore unreliable (a “scam”). That point hinges on the fact that you think predicting REM sleep is not possible, when it is (“clear and predictable,” right?). I can almost assure you that you will be in REM sleep for roughly the last thirty to forty-five minutes of cycle 5 and 6 of sleep (roughly 7h-7.5hrs in and 8.15h-9h in). That said, with knowing how many hours one is going to sleep and a rough breakdown of 1.5 hour cycles in mind, a user can easily and quickly program settings to benefit him or her.
I agree $80 is a very high price for this product, especially considering the excellent funding they have received. I value the product at around $35 at most. Moreover the “upgrades” that are supposed to be available are questionable, and I really do wonder if that has any merit. I agree the term ‘REM enhancement’ might appear misleading, but it is fitting in a sense, and they are straightforward with their claims otherwise. Also – no red lights? The videos I have watched include red lights, and even the customizable settings include red lights with the examples.
Sorry again if this appeared rude, as that was not the intention.
-charles
Since I wrote that article, I learned that the modern sleep science found out that REM is not equal to dreaming. Another activation of the dopaminergic system has to take place to initiate dreaming. So even if the morning REM period is 60 minutes long, it does not mean that there are 60 minutes of dreaming. There’s likely less.
You make some good points here; one is that new masks should have bluetooth for connectivity and social dreaming adventures.