I'm not really sure what you're saying I should do. The lamp already works. I can touch the metal rod and it turns on in 3 stages. I just wanted to reroute that through the Arduino so that I could turn on/dim LED strips at the same time. But now I'm getting the impression that I have to just toss that dimmer and rewire it in a very complicated way (it seems) to achieve that. That's why I was just wondering if it would make more sense to make a basic capacitive sensor on the Arduino and attach the wire to the same ground as the one I'm using for the lamp. Then I could turn on the LEDs as the lamp turns on. Not sure if those will interfere with each other somehow. Sorry if I'm misinterpreting and you're telling me how to do that and I just don't realize it.