Technology

Attain Nirvana in 23 Minutes or Less!

Has Deepak Chopra found a shortcut to Zen?

Trying out Deepak Chopra's meditation app

Illustration by Rob Donnelly

Propped against my bed’s headboard, I let a kaleidoscope of lights from my iPhone dance across my closed eyelids. New Age–y synths surged in my ears. I was on a vision quest for enlightenment. But it had to be a quick vision quest: I had plans in 40 minutes. Luckily, this particular path to Zen was timed precisely at 22 minutes, 57 seconds.

Such is the promise of Dream Weaver. A meditation app recently conceived by alternative medicine guru Deepak Chopra, it posits that Zen might be a pit stop on the way from the pharmacy to the dog park or coffee shop. Dream Weaver (available at the App Store for $14.99) is a “light and sound program” that uses the LED strobe on your smartphone in conjunction with a soundtrack. The combination of soothing music, narration, and psychedelic twinkling is meant to induce a trance state, entailing relaxation and perhaps visions; Dream Weaver’s online promotional materials compare it to LSD.

The app uses brainwave entrainment, which co-creator David Mager defines in the Huffington Post as “any procedure that causes one’s brainwave frequencies to synchronize with a periodic stimulus (sound, vibration or light) having a frequency corresponding to the intended brain-state.” The idea is that different frequencies of brainwaves map onto different levels of alertness: Spiky beta waves are associated with hyper-vigilance; alpha waves with relaxed attention; theta waves with deep tranquility and REM sleep; and delta waves with dreamless sleep. Dream Weaver works by flashing light at you, at lower and lower frequencies. Your anxious beta-brain supposedly follows the light down to theta-Wonderland like Alice behind the White Rabbit. (Or maybe like a sailor waylaid by St. Elmo’s fire—the metaphor you use probably depends on your feelings about insta-serenity.) In any case, the testimonials are inspiring:

“I could literally feel the waves of energy and shifting of my brain into the altered state. I especially felt a definitive awareness in my 6th chakra, or third eye. After the strobes stopped, I could see many colors and shapes and what seemed like sparkles …”

“I exploded into an archetypical state of releasing sadness and fear. Even now when writing the lines of this text my eyes get wet and I am filled with joy and compassion.”

“I saw several darkly clad strangers come out of a room. I tried to offer them a message of peace telepathically. They immediately circled around me and zapped me into a state of the most joy and ecstasy I have ever felt in my life.”

“I seemed to be visited by curious balls of light that just wanted to say hello.”

“I was in Aruba, on vacation in Aruba!”

Methods for steering the mind into consciousness’ deeper waters have existed for ages: Gregorian chanting, Native American drum circles, Hindu kirtan, Tibetan prayer bowls. But Dream Weaver marries spirituality and “science” in a way that feels peculiarly of-the-moment. Obsessed with holistic health, we are also susceptible to pitches about the mysterious efficacies of neurons and transmitters. Many of us are willing to believe that the secret to transcendence lurks somewhere in uncharted brainwaves, just as the key to living longer might have something to do with quantum mechanics. (Not coincidentally, Chopra is also famous for his theory of “quantum healing.”) What’s more, Dream Weaver presents itself as a life hack, a technology for improving productivity by making us more creative and relaxed. Attain nirvana in under 23 minutes! You’ll be all enlightened in time for your board meeting.

Yet there is something contradictory, or at least counterintuitive, about a meditation app. Smartphones are great at filling our brains with information; are they also suited to wiping them clean? And while technology in general exists to smoothen and streamline, isn’t climbing the path to enlightenment supposed to be hard? What happens when you reinvent an ancient, effortful practice for a medium that’s all about finding the perfect shortcut?

David Mager first met Deepak Chopra on a sidewalk on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Mager, who worked with companies to “green” their operations before he developed Dream Weaver, was driving down the street when he heard a woman screaming. He jumped out of his car to find her pointing at a baby bird that had fallen from its nest, which sat on a ledge 15 feet above the ground. Mager scaled the side of the building, retrieved the fledgling, and just happened to look down as Chopra exited the same building. “It was synchronicity,” Mager told me on the phone. “Some things are simply meant to occur.” 

Mager sees nothing incongruous about a digital fast track to Zen. Dream Weaver “makes meditation accessible to more people,” he says. “The notion that anyone can become an expert in anything is how we manifest ourselves in our time. When you think about spiritual practices, you used to have to follow a guru for 30, 40 years. Some people walk to the top of the mountain, and that’s great, but others take the turbo-elevator.”

He explains that Dream Weaver uses Schumann resonances, the “background frequencies of planet earth”: “Before there were cellphones, strobes, and incandescent bulbs, these were what you chilled with at the end of the day.” The app, he says, mimics the quiet rhythms of firelight that calmed our ancestors, kindling in us a response called the flicker effect. When I ask him if he’s ever heard of a bad trip with Dream Weaver, he booms with laughter. “Bad dreams have an EEG signature of about 30-40 hz. The app creates a vibrational firewall that doesn’t let you get there.” Incidentally, that’s also why people using Dream Weaver don’t drift off into sexual fantasies: The brainwave frequencies required for erotic arousal are too high for Wonderland/Aruba/the turbo-elevator.

I feared, though, that I would be incapable of having a trip at all. Past attempts to sit quietly and clear my mind have never gone well: Is there anything less relaxing than monitoring how (not) relaxed you are? But Dream Weaver is designed specifically for people like me—spiritual slackers who lack the discipline to achieve nirvana without a tech boost. Preparing to test out the app, I felt hopeful. I reclined in bed with my eyes closed and got ready to plunge into the void.

Or, more accurately, to stand in the woods. Dream Weaver has several storylines to choose from; I downloaded one called “A Trip to the Forest.” It includes avian chirping, a gentle rainstorm, and lots of gauzy, vaguely Eastern-sounding music. Toward the beginning, a female tour guide announces herself with loud knocking, which terrified me because I thought someone was actually banging on my door. Her job is to douse you in “anti-gravity dust” (“Don’t worry, it won’t stain your clothes”) so you can fly to the forest; I wondered why Chopra, who narrates the rest of the trip, couldn’t administer the dust himself. Throughout all this, the LED strobe drew forked golden lines on the inside of my eyelids, which was nice. But transcendent? Not really.

Since that first, perfectly pleasant visit, I’ve journeyed to the woods several times with Dream Weaver. I have never hallucinated, or even fallen asleep, but the app usually calms me down a little (with the exception of the most recent trip, during which I was hopped up on coffee and stressing over how late this article was). I have come to appreciate the delicate branch work of the light patterns, though I suspect they pull me somewhat out of the zone—it’s hard to surrender completely to Zen with an LED strobe flashing in your face. Still! Just because my experience has been short on “darkly-clad strangers” and trips to Aruba doesn’t mean a more advanced meditator/haver-of-reveries wouldn’t love Dream Weaver. Online or off, we probably all get the enlightenment we deserve. (Perhaps if I practice, put in the hours, I’d get more out of it? But if I had time for that I wouldn’t need the app.)

I should note, however, that there is a workaround to Chopra’s workaround. One day last week I got home feeling tired and tense. As per the Dream Weaver instructions, I secluded myself “in a dark, quiet space.” I closed my eyes. I played some relaxing music. And I took a nap. It may not have been nirvana, but it felt pretty awesome.