Mr. Kennedy

You may remember dev-of-all-trades Chris Kennedy from Betabeat's spring most poachable players in tech list. Turns out that Mr. Kennedy's skills are so manifold that he needed to develop an updated version of the tired old resume to better list them. The result is Status Chart, which has already hit the front page of Hacker News, gaining the esteem of productivity-obsessed programmers.

Status Chart is a clean, simple way to display all of the jobs, projects, hackathons and accolades that make you who you are. For avid self-quantifiers, it might get you a little hot under the Fuelband, so NSFW and all that.

"I noticed that my personal resume was a mile long and I thought there had to be a better way," Mr. Kennedy told Betabeat by Gchat. So he decided to break each of his resume elements into categories, then divided those by year and added filters to make it easy to navigate.

"Monday I built it for my own website, Tuesday I showed it around and got a lot of feedback and built the mini site, and today I launched it," he said. So, slow week then we suppose.

Mr. Kennedy works works full time at M. Shanken, a magazine publisher. He said that the survey he published to garner feedback about Status Chart has already received over 450 responses, and that if people were interested, he'd love to hack on the project fulltime. For now, he's working on combing through the responses and thinking about building the tool for others to use.

"After I analyze the surveys and re-read all the comments I will have a better direction," he said. "But I think it is safe to say that it will get built."

Mr. McGuigan (left) and Mr. Frazier from Bitbanger Labs

There are only two rules for the “idea dinners” held by New York early-stage investment firm ff Venture Capital. No side conversations and a strict 8 p.m. end time. Every month, the company invites financiers, founders and other “influencers” to its Midtown headquarters for a catered get-together. The meal is served in a glass-walled conference room, situated just past the rows of adjustable standing desks, where it’s not unusual to see startup employees cranking out code well past dessert.

The conversation often focuses on tech-oriented subjects, but this February, as the group fired questions at veteran investor Esther Dyson, the discussion turned to the subconscious.

Josh Weinstein, the 25-year-old founder of YouAre.TV, brought up his experience using lucid dreaming to get over his fear of heights, noting that he first toyed with the idea while trying to memorize Chinese characters during an immersion program in Beijing—using his nonwaking hours to cram for tests. Later, when he found himself flying above the jogging path along the FDR in a dream, “I just let myself drop onto the concrete,” Mr. Weinstein said. “I would hit the ground, but I wouldn’t feel impact. I kept experiencing that sense of falling without actually feeling the pain of impact.” Above him, the sky morphed into psychedelic swirls. “I don’t do any drugs or drink, so when people talk about their experience being high, this is analogous.”

Lucid dreaming refers to the act of being conscious while in a dream state—you’re in the dream, but you know it. With practice, proponents say, you can harness that awareness to manipulate your surroundings. Think Inception without the corporate espionage, or Neo’s trips to the Matrix after he downed the blue pill. (Tom Cruise’s cryogenically induced affair with Penelope Cruz in Vanilla Sky doesn’t quite fit because, for a good two hours, the poor sap thought it was the real deal.)

A century after the term “lucid dreaming” was coined by Dutch psychiatrist Frederik van Eeden in 1913, the practice is experiencing a major resurgence. For New York techies, already dutifully maximizing their waking hours, it seems sleep has become the last efficiency frontier. “We need to maximize the output that we get from our time, so if I’m not sitting in front of Codecademy or eating, I should be doing something cool, learning something, analyzing things, having cool experiences,” Mr. Weinstein said later.

After two hours that included watching investors whip out their calorie-tracking FitBits (Ms. Dyson’s was affixed to her bra strap) and blood-pressure monitoring iPhone apps, the takeaway from dinner seemed to be that truly self-optimized life-hackers should be quantifying their bodies’ every input and output, standing while they work, learning to code or speak Mandarin in their free time and using their dreams to overcome personal weaknesses or conjure up the next billion-dollar app. Or at least indulge in some mind-blowing virtual sex—often the first stop on a Lucid Dreaming Experience Tour. “It’s rewarding,” suggested psychologist Stephen LaBerge, who spent decades researching the science of dreams at Stanford and then at the Lucidity Institute and has been credited with proving the existence of lucid dreaming, “and people who don’t have the opportunities for getting sex elsewhere in their lives, then why not?!”

Then again, who wants to be conscious all the time? Weren’t bars invented expressly to avoid the burden of 24-hour lucidity?

At the dinner, Rob Cromer, the 26-year-old founder of a stealth startup called Adcade, chimed in with advice about “reality checks” that he picked up from a lucid dreaming coach at a cocktail party. One of the trickiest parts of lucid dreaming is recognizing that you’re in a dream. Thus practitioners train themselves during their waking hours by, say, drawing a dot on their hand as a signal to look at a clock.

New apps are coming on the market to solve the same problem. In less than a month, the Brooklyn-based duo behind Bitbanger Labs has managed to raise more than $330,000 from more than 3,800 backers on Kickstarter, including Mr. Weinstein and Mr. Cromer, to build a sleep mask called Remee that uses flashing LED lights as a “reality check.” Their initial goal was just $35,000. Kickstarter also hosted campaigns for the book Oneironautics: A Field Guide to Lucid Dreaming, funded three times over; and The Lucid Dream Tour, a “multimedia, multidimensional road trip event” that promises to showcase the “entrepreneurial possibilities of today’s consciousness movement.” Soon that will include a video game designed to elicit lucid dreams currently being developed by a grad student in Copenhagen.

Since Remee first appeared on Kickstarter on April 3, the number of people who subscribe to the lucid dreaming forum on Reddit has grown more than 30 percent, up to 33,300 “oneironauts,” as practitioners like to call themselves. The influx of new users got be such an issue that the moderator was moved to create a separate forum for lucid dreaming memes so as not to interrupt discussion topics like “I can’t feel emotions in my dreams” or “Loosing [sic] track of reality quickly, help!”

The fantasy of controlling one’s dreams goes way back—Aristotle and Tibetan Buddhists were proponents—but for the new wave of technologically-savvy acolytes, dreams are seen more as a form of virtual reality. “The brain works so well it’s like the operating system on a Mac,” said Dr. LaBerge. By exploring your subconscious, “You find out how the system works.”

The last lucid dreaming boom had a more spiritual cast. “I think that was the ’80s,” noted Bitbanger Labs cofounder Duncan Frazier. “It kind of got new-aged a little bit. It went away and now it’s coming back and people are trying to make sure it doesn’t go down that weird road of pseudo-science.”

According to psychologist and dream researcher Jayne Gackenbach, hard-core gamers are more likely to both have lucid dreams and be able to control them. She's releasing three books on the subject this year, including a self-published e-book called “Play Reality” told from the perspective of her 27-year-old son, a harcore gamer.

Still, both Dr. Gackenbach and Dr. LaBerge cautioned against getting too goal-oriented with one’s REM cycle. “Dreaming is specifically designed for information processing,” Dr. Gackenbach explained. “It’s when we store new emotions and process negative emotions and try to make sense of them. If you’re trying to optimize it, what does that mean? Do you want to get rid of your negative emotions in an efficient way? It’s a system that’s doing pretty well on its own.” She expressed some skepticism about the idea of maximizing the use of this supposed downtime. “If it’s just about being able to control this alternative reality and go to a Rolling Stones concert,” she noted, referring to a goal articulated by one of her students, “then I have some concerns.”

Mr. Frazier and Steve McGuigan, the 30-year-olds behind Bitbanger Labs, makers of the Remee sleep mask, don’t seem too worried about it. During a late-night visit to Mr. Frazier’s apartment in Windsor Terrace, he talked about flying over the Grand Canyon and being able to push and pull the mountains below him at will, like he was “conducting music.” On the desk next to his left, a handful of Remee prototypes with their circuitry exposed lay in front of a 3D printer Mr. Frazier built from scratch.

Mr. McGuigan plays around with dimension. “I’ve always been into increasing or decreasing my size,” he said. “Shrink down to the size of an atom. Get microscopic and go hang out with subatomic particles.”

Teaching oneself to fly is another favorite pastime of lucid dreamers. “People on Reddit like to ride dragons,” added Mr. Frazier. At the dinner, Ms. Dyson, a trained cosmonaut, said she dreams of weightlessness.

In the late ’80s, Dr. LaBerge actually put out two versions of a mask similar to the Remee, among other “lucid dreaming induction devices,” called the DreamLight and NovaDreamer. But at around $1,000 a pop, he sold only 10,000 or 20,000 in the five or six years they were on the market, though he noted that they “had a disproportionate influence on technical types.”

A standard-issue Remee will retail for $80. The device is simple, using flashing LED lights on a timer—“like the front of Knight Rider,” as Mr. Frazier put it—to prod the dreamer into lucidity without waking him up.

“We’ve had to explain it to most of our friends, and it takes awhile,” Mr. Frazier admitted. “Over beers.”

-ntiku@observer.com

A version of this story appeared in the May 2, 2012 issue of the New York Observer.

Fitbit's blood pressure tracker.

Wow, bikini season really has a way of synchronizing brain waves. Farhad Manjoo has an article in The New York Times today about the futuristic gadgets on the market that help you self-quantify your way to better health. Betabeat touched on the same thing in our feature about New York's 4 Hour Body craze. Mr. Manjoo tested out some of the devices we mentioned, including Fitbit and the Withings Wi-Fi scale, as well as MyTrek, Withings blood pressure cuff, a blood pressure monitor by iHealth, and the Exergen TemporalScanner, which he uses to measure his kid's temperature.

User experience designer Whitney Hess, one of the 4HB-ers we interviewed for the article, also mentioned a new tracking bracelet by Jawbone to us. That device, called "Up", measures Up" tracks your movement, eating habits, and sleeping patterns and then transmits the data back to a smartphone app.

Mr. Manjoo gets to the heart of why these self-quantifying with gadgets actually makes an impact on your health. Basically, it's the shame factor. "Although Fitbit doesn’t explicitly acknowledge this in its marketing materials, the gadget makes you feel bad about yourself," he writes, adding:

"The theory underlying Fitbit is that once you know where you’re failing, you can begin to make healthy changes in your life. And these changes don’t have to be very big — for instance, mulling the Fitbit data, I noticed that on the weekend I recorded more than twice as much daily activity as I had on the weekdays. But I don’t recall working especially hard on that weekend — I’d just walked around the garden a couple times to water the plants.

And this was the point: I didn’t even have to do anything strenuous to get in slightly better shape."

You can see we've had this song in our head all week, right? (Body movin', body movin' . . .)

The Financial Times had a fascinating piece this weekend about a new breed of entrepreneurs who are applying the same metrics-obsessed, data-driven approach to optimizing their start-ups to optimizing their bodies. These "self-quantifiers" seem to embody the credo best-satirized by Radiohead on their 1997:

Fitter, happier, more productive/comfortable, not drinking too much/regular exercise at the gym (3 days a week)/getting on better with your associate employee contemporaries/at ease/eating well/(no more microwave dinners and saturated fats)

There is at least one local devotee of the practice: Aviary co-founder and CCO Michael Galpert. In fact, not only is Mr. Galpert self-quantifying, he's urging Aviary's employees to quantify as well

The Times describes Mr. Galpert's road to Damascus moment:

"Running a start-up, I'm always looking at numbers, always tracking how business is going," he says. Page views, clicks and downloads, he tallies it all. "That's under-the-hood information that you can only garner from analyzing different data points. So I started doing that with myself."

His weight, exercise habits, caloric intake, sleep patterns—they're all quantified and graphed like a quarterly revenue statement. And just as a business trims costs when profits dip, Galpert makes decisions about his day based on his personal ­analytics: too many calories coming from carbs? Say no to rice and bread at lunchtime. Not enough REM sleep? Reschedule that important business meeting for tomorrow.

Maybe the Singularity is coming sooner than Ray Kurzweil thought. The article also describes Mr. Galpert attempts to make converts at Aviary headquarters near Penn Station. Employees can use a mobile app to join a workplace weight loss and fitness contest that uploads daily weight and exercise routines into an shared online database that can be viewed by other employees. Mr. Galpert is convinced that physical competition will spill over into the professional arena:

"When you keep trying for one more push-up, it gets easier," he says. "It's the same at work. You can say 'the project I'm working on is done,' or you can say you'll spend a little more time to make it better."

This is either an ingenious motivational tool or a sure-fire away to speed-up turnover.