Scientists Achieve Real-Time Communication With Lucid Dreamers In Breakthrough
Updated: 2-22-2021: International scientists have unlocked a new and exciting avenue to explore the world of dreams. Scientists Achieve Real-Time Communication With Lucid Dreamers In Breakthrough
Humanity has been able reach distant vistas, such as the Moon, the deep oceans, and the wild expanses at Earth’s poles. Now, scientists have made a new breakthrough in the exploration of a very different type of frontier—the hallucinatory world inside dreams.
An international team of researchers was able to achieve real-time dialogues with people in the midst of lucid dreams, a phenomenon that is called “interactive dreaming,” according to a study published on Thursday in Current Biology.
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Participants in the study were able to correctly respond to questions, such as simple math problems, while they were deep in the throes of rapid-eye movement (REM) sleep. The research reveals a “relatively unexplored communication channel” that could enable “a new strategy for the empirical exploration of dreams,” the study reports.
“There are studies of lucid dreamers communicating out of dreams, and also remembering to do tasks,” said Karen Konkoly, a PhD student at Northwestern University and first author of the paper, in a call. “But there’s a fairly limited amount of research on the stimuli going into lucid dreams.”
“One thing that surprised us is that you could just say a sentence to somebody, and they could understand it just as it actually is,” she added.
Konkoly and her colleagues recruited 36 people to fall asleep in laboratories located in the United States, France, Germany, and the Netherlands, with the aim of entering a lucid state in which the person was aware that they were in a dream.
The study included several experienced lucid dreamers, including one individual with narcolepsy, as well as people who were less familiar with this type of dream.
The researchers verified that participants had entered REM sleep by placing electrodes next to their eyes, on their scalps, and on their chins. By measuring activity such as brainwaves and eyeball movements, sleep experts can determine if a person had entered this deep sleep state.
Some of the participants were then asked to confirm that they were in a dream with a pre-arranged ocular response in which they moved their eyes in a specific left-right pattern.
These eye signals, along with facial contortions, were used as a means of communication during the sleep sessions. For instance, the researchers asked an 19-year-old American participant to subtract six from eight while he was in a lucid dream, and he correctly signaled the answer “two” with two eye movements from left to right. When asked again, he repeated the correct answer.
Roughly 18 percent of the trials resulted in this level of clear and accurate communication from the dreamer; 17 percent produced indecipherable answers, 3 percent ended with incorrect responses, and 60 percent did not provoke any response at all.
“It’s amazing to sit in the lab and ask a bunch of questions, and then somebody might actually answer one,” Konkoly said. “It’s such an immediately rewarding type of experiment to do. You don’t have to wait to analyze your data or anything like that. You can see it right there while they’re still sleeping.”
What’s more, many participants were able to recall the interactions with the researchers after they woke up, with individuals reporting that the prompts sounded like a voiceover narrator or a radio speaker that was clearly coming from outside of their dream.
We’ve all had the experience of waking up from a vivid dream, only to feel as if its fragmentary details are rapidly receding into our waking minds until we can no longer recount its events.
Along those lines, some individuals remembered different questions and answers after they woke up than the ones they received or gave in the dream, highlighting the difficulty of accurately reconstructing dreams once a person is awake.
The team plans to build on this study with more experiments that will probe the possibilities of two-way communication with lucid dreamers.
“We’ve thought of so many experiments we could do with this,” Konkoly said. “I think one predicate that we’re working on now is: how can we optimize the procedure? How can we have this happen more? How can we have people have more lucid dreams? How can we communicate more reliably?”
“We have a lot of different ideas,” she concluded, “and we’re excited to test them.”
In 1975 lucid dreaming was finally scientifically proven in a laboratory. Psychologist Keith Hearne managed to record an instance with Alan Worsley, a lucid dreamer, at the University of Hull in England.
Updated: 3-21-2023
These Techniques Might Help You Direct Your Dreams
Some strategies to try: Write down what you want to dream. Say a mantra as you drift off.
I recently chatted with a friend about dreams. I said I long to sail in my sleep. My friend was more specific.
“I want a day of fly fishing, then a 1970s-style night on the town with Farrah Fawcett,” he said. “Oh, and to fly, like Superman.”
Is it possible to direct our dreams?
Scientists who study dreams say the answer may be yes. They point to a small yet emerging body of research that shows that we most likely can, at least sometimes, decide what to dream before we go to sleep and then take some control of our dream while it’s happening.
The most compelling research in the field is on lucid dreaming, which is when a person is aware that a dream is happening and can sometimes influence events within it.
Ever noticed you’re having a nightmare and told yourself to wake up? That’s a lucid dream.
Scientists once thought the idea was a sham. But in recent years, they’ve used MRI machines to show that some people do become aware of their dreams while they’re asleep.
They scanned the brains of lucid dreamers while they were awake, asking them to repeatedly clench their right and left hands.
Then they let them fall asleep in the scanner, with instructions to use eye movements to signal when they became lucid and to then dream about moving their right and left hands. It worked.
People get excited about the idea of lucid dreaming because they believe it will allow them to do what they want while they’re asleep, such as visit with loved ones, work on a creative project or have sex, says Matthew Walker, a professor of neuroscience and psychology and director of the Center for Human Sleep Science at the University of California, Berkeley.
“They view their dreams as a kind of virtual reality that’s under their control,” he says.
Yet even if you can influence a dream, you may not be able to control the outcome, Dr. Walker says, adding that just 10% to 20% of people are regular lucid dreamers.
And researchers debate whether it’s beneficial or detrimental to direct our dreams at all. One large study showed that lucid dreamers get less restorative sleep, while a small one indicated that they were more refreshed in the morning.
It’s also not that easy. Just ask my dear mom.
After I told her that I was working on this column, she decided to try to dream about my father, who died last year. For five nights in a row, she says, she looked at pictures of him before bed, whispered his name when she closed her eyes, and snuggled up to “one of his ratty, old T-shirts.” Then she called me, annoyed. “It’s all bunk,” she announced. “Not a damn thing happened.”
Some people say they are successful. In reporting this story, I heard from people who say they have directed themselves to dream about writing poetry, going skiing and figuring out a way to talk to a child about a problem. One woman likes to invent things in her dreams.
A cinematographer who has worked on horror movies, including “Nightmare on Elm Street 4,” reads a script before bed, wills himself to dream about it and wakes up with new ideas on how to film it.
And you think your dreams are scary.
Jay Soled, 59, says he’s been successfully directing his dreams most of his life. As an unathletic teenager, he dreamed that he was a star pitcher on the baseball team, winning the game with a ninth-inning strikeout. “This was an appealing formula because the girls would flock all over me,” he says.
As an adult, the Rutgers University tax professor’s go-to scenarios have changed. Now, he instructs himself to dream of a favorite family trip, romantic dinner with his wife or time spent playing with his late dog.
And often he dreams that he’s a mysterious rock star called “the Unknown” and no one knows his true identity. In his dream, he performs at the old Giants Stadium, revealing himself to be a rock god and impressing thousands, including his wife.
“Why wouldn’t you try to go to sleep this way?” he says. “You get to go to places that don’t exist in real life.”
How can you increase your chances of successfully directing your dreams? Lucid dream researchers say these steps may help.
During The Day
Set an intention. Tell yourself that you want to choose what to dream tonight—and that you’ll be aware that you’re dreaming. Dr. Walker’s example: “Next time I’m dreaming, I will remember I’m dreaming.” Research shows that this technique, called the “mnemonic induction of lucid dreams,” may help, he says.
Perform reality checks throughout the day. Flip a light switch, for example. When the light goes on, remind yourself that you’re awake.
“The idea is that if you keep doing this while you’re awake, it will become an ingrained habit that will bleed over into when you are dreaming,” says Dr. Walker, who hosts a podcast and is the author of “Why We Sleep.” “And in a dream it could trigger lucidity.”
Before Bed
Write down what you want to dream. Be brief. “Dreaming minds do not process language as well,” says Deirdre Barrett, a researcher who lectures about dreams at Harvard Medical School.
Form a mental image of what you want to dream, suggests Dr. Barrett, author of “The Committee of Sleep.” You could also arrange objects or pictures by your bed as prompts, she says.
As you drift off, remind yourself that you want to dream about these objects and become aware that you’re dreaming. A mantra may help. I try: “Sailing, sailing, sailing…”
While You’re Asleep
If you notice you’re dreaming, remind yourself what you wanted to do in the dream. And try to stay calm, recommends Robert Waggoner, who has written books on lucid dreaming. You don’t want to wake yourself up too soon by getting excited.
Unless you’re having a nightmare. In that case, put an end to that immediately.
After You Wake Up
Write your dream down before you get out of bed. This will help record it in your memory, creating a positive reinforcement.
Updated: 3-7-2024
What To Know About Teens And Sleep
One of the first things we need to understand is the teenage years are one of the most critical periods of our development. Most teens experience rapid physical growth, their brains go through crucial transformation, they start firming up their social roles and identity, and they build skills for emotional regulation.
That’s a lot being packed into a very demanding time of life. With health, teens often find themselves at a crossroads: their habits can take a negative trajectory, or they can form positive routines that can help them thrive now and over the course of their lives.
Adopting good sleep habits is critical during this time in a teen’s life and important for their growth, health, and well-being. So, where does sleep fit in the big picture for teens?
For starters, getting enough quality sleep plays a big part in the behavioral and emotional health they’ll need during adolescence and beyond.
But, teens have unique sleep needs that are distinct from both children and adults.
How Much Sleep Do Teens Need?
Teens’ sleep differs from adults’ in that they generally require more hours of sleep to meet the demands of their growth and development. While most adults need 7-9 hours of sleep, teens typically need between 8-10 hours, sometimes up to 11.
Here’s A Wake-Up Call: less than 2 out of 10 teens report getting the NSF’s recommended 8-10 hours of sleep on both school days and weekends.
Teens’ Unique Sleep Schedules
Like all of us, teens have a natural “body clock” or “circadian” clock that affects the timing of their sleep, plus a “drive” for sleep that makes them feel tired. In fact, our internal body clock changes during the teen years.
Circadian rhythms start to shift later after childhood, causing teens to naturally stay up later at night before feeling tired, and then not feel alert until later in the morning.
The take home message here is that it’s normal for teens’ brains and bodies to keep them up later at night and not be quite ready to go until later the next morning (hint: be prepared for this shift to stay in effect until a teen reaches their early 20s).
This natural pattern conflicts with unique social challenges and common practices like early school start times, which are tough on teens for biological reasons.
So, in these situations, it’s difficult for teens to get the recommended 8-10 hours of sleep because they’re not tired early enough at night to sleep and then have to wake up early in the morning while still biologically sleepy.
NSF’s 2024 Sleep in America® Poll highlighted this mismatch, showing that teens are nearly half as likely to get the recommended 8-10 hours of sleep on school nights compared to weekends. And teens themselves feel these effects.
The same study showed teens are over three times as likely to be dissatisfied with the amount of sleep they get on school nights compared to weekends.
If teens’ sleep needs and timing patterns weren’t special enough, pile on the list of other influences like their use of technologies with screens, social behaviors, and busy activity schedules. There’s some evidence that exposure to bright light, particularly blue light, in the evening hours can even further delay when teens feel sleepy.
The Below Chart Shows Evidence Of Sleep Gene Chronotype
Scientifically, light, especially within the hour before bedtime, can delay the brain’s release of the hormone melatonin which might make it harder to fall asleep. While the story of light’s effect on teen sleep is building, it’s even more important to manage the alerting activities teens are doing on screens before sleep.
Social media engagement, exciting or disturbing content at bedtime—including negative social comments and comparisons—all can interfere with healthy sleep. Teens’ use of common technologies also can directly compete with their sleep, like when they purposefully put off sleep to stay active on electronic devices.
Their scheduling challenges, such as extracurricular activities and multiple demands on their time, can make it difficult for teens to allow sufficient opportunities for sleep. They may even compensate for missed sleep with a late-day or evening nap, also making it harder for them to fall asleep at night.
Helping Teens To Set Healthy Sleep Habits
The teenage years are a great opportunity to set healthy sleep habits. Parents and families can be most effective in helping their teens set healthy sleep habits by actively respecting their growing independence and autonomy, helping them prioritize the importance of sleep, and making a caring connection.
* Encourage teens to share their values, goals, and think about how healthy sleep can help them achieve those goals. Give teens the autonomy to decide what they want to focus on in their sleep health.
* Give teens information to understand and prioritize the benefits of sleep and making good decisions. For example, how do their role models and high-performance people use healthy sleep to be at their best?
* Consider the social context in which teens make decisions about sleep, understanding how their peers value sleep, and help them prioritize sleep in a way that actually raises their social status.
* Champion how healthy sleep is practiced and prioritized within the family.
Helping teens establish good sleep habits is doable and worth it. It can require some effort and time, but encouraging them to create positive, healthy sleep habits now can help them be their Best Slept Self® over their entire lives.
Updated: 6-7-2024
The NEXTUP Model: A Science-based Perspective On Dreaming
Dreams have long been shrouded in mystery and associated with the supernatural, often seen as omens, messages from the gods, or glimpses into otherworldly realms. Throughout history, various cultures have attributed profound significance to dreams, interpreting them as divine guidance or as a means of communication with the spiritual world.
However, despite these rich cultural interpretations, it is crucial to approach dreams from a scientific perspective to unravel their true nature and function. Understanding dreams through a scientific lens not only demystifies them but also enhances our comprehension of the human mind, offering valuable insights into the intricate workings of our cognitive and emotional processes.
When Brains Dream: Exploring the Science and Mystery of Sleep by Antonio Zadra and Robert Stickgold offers a profound exploration into the enigmatic realm of dreaming, backed by rigorous scientific inquiry and innovative theoretical models.
The authors, both leading experts in the field of sleep research, unravel the complexities of why we dream and what our dreams signify.
The book delves deeply into the nature of dreams, emphasising their vital role in our cognitive and emotional lives. Zadra and Stickgold meticulously explain how dreams are not merely random occurrences but essential processes that help us navigate and adapt to the complexities of life.
Central to the book is the NEXTUP model, which stands for “Network Exploration to Understand Possibilities.” This model is a sophisticated framework that posits dreaming as a fundamental cognitive process where the brain explores vast networks of stored memories to generate new possibilities.
This model provides a comprehensive framework for understanding the purpose and mechanics of dreaming. Here is a summary of the key elements of the NEXTUP model along with the research methods used:
Element 1: Exploration of Memory Networks: The model posits that dreaming is a process wherein the brain explores vast networks of stored memories. During this exploration, the brain searches for associations and connections among these memories that are not immediately apparent during wakefulness.
Research Methods And Evidence:
Sleep Studies And Experiments: By utilising electroencephalography (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), researchers observed brain activity during REM sleep. These studies showed that memory-related areas like the hippocampus are highly active during dreaming.
Dream Reports And Analysis: Participants’ dream reports were analysed, revealing how dreams often incorporate elements from both recent experiences and long-term memories, supporting the idea of memory network exploration.
Element 2: Possibility Generation: Dreams create new possibilities by combining disparate pieces of information, fostering creativity and problem-solving, and often leading to innovative ideas and insights.
Research Methods And Evidence:
Memory And Learning Experiments: Experiments demonstrated that sleep, particularly REM sleep, improves problem-solving and creative thinking. Participants often showed enhanced performance on tasks requiring creative solutions after a night of dreaming.
Neuroimaging Techniques: Brain scans indicated that regions involved in creative thinking are active during REM sleep, supporting the model’s emphasis on possibility generation.
Element 3: Emotional Processing and Integration: Dreams help process and integrate emotional experiences, aiding in emotional regulation and resilience by replaying and reinterpreting these experiences within a broader context.
Research Methods And Evidence:
Dream Reports And Analysis: Analysis of dream content often shows a strong emotional component, with many dreams reflecting concerns and emotional issues from waking life.
Comparative Studies: Studies of individuals with disrupted REM sleep (e.g., due to sleep disorders) show difficulties in emotional regulation, underscoring the role of dreaming in emotional processing.
Element 4: Threat Simulation And Rehearsal: Dreaming provides a safe space for simulating and rehearsing responses to potential threats, preparing individuals for real-life challenges.
Research Methods And Evidence:
Dream Content Analysis: Many dreams involve threatening or challenging scenarios, which supports the idea that dreams function as a rehearsal for dealing with threats.
Comparative Studies: Research on populations with frequent nightmares (often related to PTSD) highlights how dreams can reflect and rehearse responses to waking life threats.
Element 5: Memory Consolidation And Reorganisation: Dreams play a crucial role in consolidating and reorganising memories, selectively reactivating recent experiences and integrating them with existing memories to strengthen important information while discarding less relevant details.
Research Methods And Evidence:
Memory And Learning Experiments: Participants show improved memory recall and performance on tasks learned before sleep, particularly after REM sleep, indicating that dreaming aids in memory consolidation.
Neuroimaging Techniques: Imaging studies reveal that regions involved in memory processing are highly active during REM sleep, supporting the role of dreams in reorganising memories.
Element 6: Narrative Construction: The fragmented and bizarre nature of dreams results from the brain’s attempt to weave diverse pieces of information into coherent narratives.
Research Methods And Evidence:
Dream Reports And Analysis: Detailed analysis of dream narratives shows that, despite their often bizarre content, dreams strive to create coherent stories, reflecting the brain’s effort to make sense of diverse information.
Element 7: Adaptive Function: Dreaming enhances cognitive flexibility and problem-solving abilities, enabling better adaptation to changing environments.
Research Methods And Evidence:
Problem-Solving And Creativity Studies: Studies demonstrate that individuals who dream about complex problems or tasks often show improved ability to solve these problems, highlighting the adaptive function of dreams.
Element 8: Neurobiological Mechanisms: The model is grounded in neurobiological processes, highlighting specific brain activity patterns during REM sleep, with active memory and emotion-related regions and less active logical thinking regions, facilitating memory exploration and emotional processing.
Research Methods And Evidence:
Neuroimaging Techniques: Advanced imaging studies confirm the unique patterns of brain activity during REM sleep, supporting the neurobiological basis of the NEXTUP model.
When Brains Dream is an insightful and scientifically grounded book that offers a new understanding of the purpose and mechanisms of dreaming. Unlike previous theories, such as Freud’s psychoanalytic model which emphasises unconscious desires, or Hobson and McCarley’s Activation-Synthesis model that views dreams as random byproducts of brain activity, the NEXTUP model highlights the purposeful and adaptive functions of dreams.
This book is essential reading for anyone fascinated by the science of sleep and dreams.
It not only offers a compelling new model for understanding the purpose of dreaming but also situates this model within the broader context of dream research, contrasting and building upon earlier theories to offer a richer, more integrated understanding of this vital aspect of human cognition.
Rohan Is The Director Of The Dubai Science Festival. He Is The Founder Of Intelligent Optimism And Café Scientifique Dubai.
He is currently the Director of Innovation and Future Learning at GEMS Education (world’s largest private education provider).
Dormio: Interfacing With Dreams
Inspiration
Sleep is a forgotten country of the mind. A vast majority of our technologies are built for our waking state, even though a third of our lives are spent asleep.
Current technological interfaces miss an opportunity to access the unique, imaginative, elastic cognition ongoing during dreams and semi-lucid states.
In turn, each of us misses an opportunity to use interfaces to influence our own processes of memory consolidation, creative insight generation, gist extraction, and emotion regulation that are so deeply sleep-dependent.
In this project, we explore ways to augment human creativity by extending, influencing, and capturing dreams in Stage 1 sleep. It is currently challenging to force ourselves to be creative because so much creative idea association occurs in the absence of executive control and directed attention.
Sleep offers an opportunity for prompting creative thought in the absence of directed attention, especially if dreams can be guided.
Scientific Background
During sleep onset, a window of opportunity arises in the form of hypnagogia, a semi-lucid sleep state where we all begin dreaming before we fall fully unconscious. Hypnagogia is characterized by phenomenological unpredictability, distorted perception of space and time, and spontaneous, fluid idea association.
Edison, Tesla, Poe, and Dalí each accessed this state by napping with a steel ball in hand; when the ball dropped to the floor below just as they fell asleep, they awoke to capture the creative ideas generated in their hypnagogic dreams.
Engineering & Experimentation
In this project, we modernize the steel ball technique using a custom sleep onset tracker and auditory feedback which we together call Dormio. With the Dormio system, we are able to reliably influence hypnagogic dreams and collect dream content. We found that active use of the “targeted dream incubation” protocol during hypnagogia can augment human creativity.
This Dormio system enables future research into sleep, an underutilized and understudied state of mind vital for memory, learning, and creativity. Dormio has been published at CHI and in Consciousness and Cognition. It has been used for several studies, both at the MIT Media Lab and in independent labs outside of MIT.
Contributors
This work has been highly collaborative. The following contributors, in alphabetical order by first name, have all made it possible: Abhinandan Jain, Adam Haar Horowitz, Christina Chen, Eyal Perry, Ishaan Grover, Kathleen Esfahany, Matthew Ha, Oscar Rosello, Pattie Maes, Pedro Reynolds-Cuéllar, Robert Stickgold, and Tomás Vega.
How Does Dormio Work?
The Dormio system is conceptually quite simple. The aim of the system is to influence and extend a transitional state between wakefulness and sleep. To achieve this, we must track the occurrence of this transitional state (hypnagogia) and then interrupt the user’s sleep to prevent them from slipping into deeper sleep stages.
In the Dormio system, a user wears a glove-like device with sensors. These sensors collect biosignals from the hand to measure changes in muscle tone, heart rate, and skin conductance.
In past research, all of these biosignals have been shown to change during the transition from wakefulness to sleep. When the biosignals signal the onset of sleep, a timer of a few minutes starts. At the end of the timer, an audio recording is played to ask the user for a dream report, bringing the wearer back into wakefulness, but ideally not into full wakefulness.
We record everything the user says during their dream report, which could be useful for users to play back later to avoid forgetting a potentially useful idea.
Following their dream report, the system then plays an audio cue, reminding the wearer to think of certain words (like “fork” or “rabbit”), in the hopes of integrating the cued topic into their next set of dreams.
The user then drifts back to sleep, with the cue in mind. In our laboratory testing, we have found that the cued words reliably entered the hypnagogic dreams of our users.
The system continues to track the state (awake or asleep) of the user, repeating the process described above of waking them up after a few minutes of sleep to collect a dream report. This protocol is carried out repeatedly to guide dreams and collect dream reports.
What Are Sleep Onset, Hypnagogia, Or Stage 1 Sleep? Do We Dream During Sleep Onset?
Sleep onset refers to the transition from wakefulness to sleep. Hypnagogia refers to a state occurring in the transition between wakefulness and sleep. Stage 1 sleep (also called NREM1 or N1 stage sleep) occurs as you fall asleep and is the first stage of non-REM sleep.
It typically lasts for only a few minutes. Most hypnagogic dreams occur during stage 1 sleep. A healthy debate exists around questions about dreaming during N1 in the scientific community.
Dreams experienced in hypnagogia have variably been called dreaming, lucid dreaming, hypnagogic hallucinations, or micro dreaming.
If you’re interested in a classification of dreaming’s core phenomenology and the placement of hypnagogia along this spectrum, please check out Tore Nielsen’s 2017 Paper on Microdream Neurophenomenology.
What’s New About Dormio Compared To The Steel Ball Technique And Other Past Sleep Neuroscience Tools?
We hope the Dormio both formalizes and extends the scope and capability of the steel ball technique to harness the creative potential of the sleep onset (hypnagogic) period.
In comparison to many other tools for sleep neuroscience, we built the Dormio to be a relatively inexpensive, unintrusive, and accessible tool for tracking sleep onset, while also bringing new capabilities to intervening in this stage to guide and collect dreams.
We’ve expanded on these ideas in more depth below.
The steel ball technique – famously used by Edison to gain insights into his inventions – is inspiring, but limited. Firstly, this technique relies solely on a coarse atonia (reduced muscle tone) signal and can only pinpoint one threshold of sleep onset (a loss of muscle control marked by the ball dropping).
The traditional steel ball technique also requires that people wake themselves up fully to record any dream content (thus reducing potential for further cycles of hypnagogia) and doesn’t facilitate dream theme guidance.
In contrast, the Dormio system improves granularity of tracking sleep onset by measuring several biosignals, expanding capabilities for detecting sleep onset based on electrodermal activity, heart-rate variability, and muscle tension.
Furthermore, the threshold associated with sleep onset for each of these measurements can be adjusted in software, enabling more personalization and the potential to tie feedback to multiple predetermined states defined by bio-signals.
Additionally, the Dormio system has been designed to prompt users for a dream report such that they are unlikely to slip into stage 2 sleep, while also avoiding startling users into full wakefulness, which helps enable users to have multiple rounds of targeted dream incubation.
Moreover, the Dormio initiates automatic audio recording alongside our auditory prompt for dream reports, allowing users to speak their dreams in semi-lucid states, instead of waking themselves up entirely to record reports through writing as would be needed with the traditional steel ball technique.
Compared to other sleep tracking tools, ours offers improvements in being a relatively inexpensive and comfortable formfactor, with the aim of improving its relevance outside of the laboratory setting.
Currently, much sleep tracking is done via polysomnography, which can be both unpleasant to wear and hugely expensive.
In addition to reducing barriers in cost and comfort, our system also offers unique interactions to enable interventions at sleep onset in the form of targeted dream incubation. We use audio prompts and cues to guide dreams and collect dream reports, and our research has shown that these audio cues reliably enter dream content.
Does This Technology Enable Lucid Dreaming?
A lucid dream is any dream in which the dreamer is aware of dreaming. In that sense, some Dormio users may experience a lucid dream. However, the popular culture reference to “lucid dreaming” usually refers to regaining lucidity in much later stage REM sleep many hours into sleep, not the hypnagogia that Dormio users experience within minutes after sleep onset.
A common question is if this technology can be extended to lucid dreaming. In our preliminary experiments with later-stage lucid dreaming, we found a few challenges that made it impractical for interface building.
Some challenges include that later-stage REM lucid dreaming requires a full night of sleep, not just a nap like hypnagogia; as such, it often requires waking you up in the middle of the night and potentially disturbing your sleep schedule.
It also involves full atonia unlike hypnagogia, so people would have much more difficulty describing their dreams without exiting them fully.
Lastly, lucid dreaming is much rarer for people to experience than hypnagogic dreams, and as such, it was really hard to conduct experiments on lucid dreams.
Additionally, when we chose to focus on sleep onset/hypnagogia, we were interested in a state that was semi-lucid (not fully lucid like late stage lucid dreaming) since in fully lucid dreaming, you are fully in control of your cognition in a way that seems less spontaneous than hypnagogic dreams.
We personally found the hypnagogic state more interesting for creative idea generation.
Still, late-stage lucid dreaming is super cool, important to the sciences, useful for self-exploration to so many people, and also just really fun, so we hope future work can eventually include lucid dreaming.
What Motivated The Development Of Dormio?
For Adam Haar Horowitz, the idea that there exists a state of mind which composes and constructs his conscious self, but remains inaccessible to him, was both frustrating and alluring.
Haar Horowitz says, “Hypnagogia is a ‘me’ that I am unfamiliar with, a ‘me’ that slips past memory as we drift into unconsciousness.
Good neuroscience, to me, is effective self-examination.
Good technology in service of making neuroscience relevant outside the laboratory, then, should facilitate self-examination. The ends of this project are both practical and philosophical. I have no doubt that hypnagogia holds applications for augmenting memory, learning, and creativity.
Yet also, after having explored the state myself, I find it to be a deeply valuable and inspiring sort of self-seeing which was inaccessible to me previously. As Nobel Prize winner Eric Kandel said, ‘human creativity…stems from access to underlying, unconscious forces.’
To know myself, and to be my most creative self, I’m interested in building tools for self-exploration in this sleep state.
I would like to create a tool that I can hand people, that they can take home, and on their own explore and augment themselves.”
What Past Work Inspired You? Where Can I Read More About It?
This project is inspired by a very old technique – the steel ball technique – famously used by Edison to gain insights into his inventions.
Our work, which both formalizes and extends the scope and capability of this technique, is impossible without past work investigating possibilities of influencing dreams in the neuroscience lab.
This work includes that conducted by scientists like Stephen LaBerge and Benjamin Baird, who do wonderful work on later-stage lucid dreaming, focusing on the REM state.
Scientists like Jonathan Smallwood and Jonathan Schooler have done work on mind-wandering and creativity, inspiring our idea that fluid thinking outside of executive control in hypnagogia (like mind-wandering) could augment creativity.
Work by Deirdre Barrett compiling moments of inspiration found in sleep, and work by Robert Stickgold and Tore Nielsen on microdream phenomenology, all encouraged and informed us.
Andreas Mavromatis wrote a whole thesis on hypnagogia, and his writing gave us a sense of the poetry and practical applications of this state (as did Nabokov, Oliver Sacks, Yoga Nidra practitioners, and Edgar Allen Poe writing on hypnagogia).
Our sense of this vast work was given to us by the three advisors who have helped us most throughout this work, in and out of the classroom—Professors Pattie Maes, Ed Pace-Schott and Robert Stickgold.
How Did The Team Form And Develop Dormio?
The development of the Dormio device was enabled by a deeply interdisciplinary team composed of members of the Media Lab community, including Ishaan Grover, Pedro Reynolds-Cuéllar, Adam Haar Horowitz, Aby Jain, Tomás Vega, Oscar Rosello, Eyal Perry, Christina Chen, Matthew Ha and more. There is a bit written about that process on this website, and you can see earlier versions of the project there too.
It has been a long process! Ishaan Grover and Adam Haar Horowitz took the Human Machine Symbiosis class with Prof. Pattie Maes, while listening to Prof. Robert Stickgold lecture on dream states. We got together and tried to make an EEG detect sleep stages, and did a decent job detecting sleep spindles with a cheap Muse EEG, but thought that detection wouldn’t generalize across individuals.
We had friends like Rebecca Kleinberger and Sophia Yang who helped with our first glove prototype, and helped think through possible interaction designs. We had awesome subjects like Marie Therese Png who went in and out of hypnagogia and explained how our tech tweaks changed their experiences.
Now we have a team of cognitive scientists, engineers, and makers who create experiments and possibilities.
Plus we’ve had incredible past work to build with and build on from the neuroscience and HCI worlds, and advice and inspiration from mentors including Professors Pattie Maes, Ed Pace-Schott, and Robert Stickgold.
How Can I Get One?
We do not offer Dormio for sale. However, the technology that drives Dormio is open source, meaning that you can build one for yourself with the right materials and tools. The software for our biosignal tracking is on Github and our Eagle file for circuit board design is online. Tomás, who led that build, wrote about it step by step here.
Can I Try Targeted Dream Incubation (TDI) Without These Technologies?
We hope for targeted dream incubation (TDI), the method implemented by the Dormio device, to be technology-agnostic. We have developed an online timer that can be used to self-administer TDI: .
What Are The Main Ethical Concerns Associated With Dormio?
We are deeply appreciative of questions about the ethical concerns about Dormio and the potential impacts of guiding dream content. A common question is whether this technology can be used for mind control. The answer is no; it’s a pretty terrible tool for mind control.
Importantly, in hypnagogia, subjects are not entirely asleep (and not entirely awake), making them much less vulnerable than most people typically assume when they first learn about this project.
Participants are aware that they are in an experiment room, though that awareness drifts in and out. Most, but not all, remember what they said throughout the experiment.
Notably, we have had people wake themselves up when they had a weird enough dream that they did not want us experimenters to hear about it, and nothing in our system or protocol forced people to disclose things that they did not want to share; I
n other words, in hypnagogia, people are able to monitor their environment and be aware of their descent into sleep, limiting the capacity for inserting any ideas people don’t want inserted, or extracting ideas they don’t want extracted.
All that being said, we don’t dismiss these ethical concerns at all. Even in its current state, this technology and the targeted dream incubation methodology raises ethical considerations regarding the impacts it may have on users.
For example, the process of encouraging people to dream about certain subjects may change how they consider those subjects after waking up. We do not discount some diminished capacity for resistance to new ideas presented in hypnagogia.
These are all things to keep in mind, although it is also worth acknowledging that hypnagogia has been known about and used for hundreds of years (for example, by Edison and other creative greats) and not used to nefarious ends, as far as we are aware.
To provide clarity on how this tool can be used, the Dream Engineering community is collectively writing a “Dream Engineering Ethic” in which outline our principles as a scientific community.
We acknowledge that there is a fine line between using dream incubation for creative purposes, and using it for manipulation (such as advertising).
We have expanded on our stance on dream advertising here (in addition to other platforms). We were pleased that the issue was raised on the floor of the Federal Trade Commission and has been written about in law journals.
Where Has This Work Been Shown?
The Dormio device has been shown at the CHI 2018 Conference, Ars Electronica, the Science of Consciousness 2018 Conference, and the National Academy of Sciences. The project has also been shown in MIT’s Museum Studio, covered in Studio International, and shown on ABC’s 60 Minutes.
What Are The Next Projects You’re Planning?
We have many projects in the works. We want to extend our targeted dream incubation protocol to be device-free using online interfaces.
We also want to test whether content we guide into hypnagogic dreams transfers into later stage REM dream content. Finally, we also want to test the memory, learning, and emotion regulation effect of guided hypnagogic dream content.
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Blockstream Launches Bitcoin Mining Farm With Fidelity As Early Customer (#GotBitcoin?)
Commerzbank Tests Blockchain Machine To Machine Payments With Daimler (#GotBitcoin?)
Man Takes Bitcoin Miner Seller To Tribunal Over Electricity Bill And Wins (#GotBitcoin?)
Bitcoin’s Computing Power Sets Record As Over 100K New Miners Go Online (#GotBitcoin?)
Walmart Coin And Libra Perform Major Public Relations For Bitcoin (#GotBitcoin?)
Judge Says Buying Bitcoin Via Credit Card Not Necessarily A Cash Advance (#GotBitcoin?)
Poll: If You’re A Stockowner Or Crypto-Currency Holder. What Will You Do When The Recession Comes?
1 In 5 Crypto Holders Are Women, New Report Reveals (#GotBitcoin?)
Beating Bakkt, Ledgerx Is First To Launch ‘Physical’ Bitcoin Futures In Us (#GotBitcoin?)
Facebook Warns Investors That Libra Stablecoin May Never Launch (#GotBitcoin?)
Government Money Printing Is ‘Rocket Fuel’ For Bitcoin (#GotBitcoin?)
Bitcoin-Friendly Square Cash App Stock Price Up 56% In 2019 (#GotBitcoin?)
Safeway Shoppers Can Now Get Bitcoin Back As Change At 894 US Stores (#GotBitcoin?)
TD Ameritrade CEO: There’s ‘Heightened Interest Again’ With Bitcoin (#GotBitcoin?)
Venezuela Sets New Bitcoin Volume Record Thanks To 10,000,000% Inflation (#GotBitcoin?)
Newegg Adds Bitcoin Payment Option To 73 More Countries (#GotBitcoin?)
China’s Schizophrenic Relationship With Bitcoin (#GotBitcoin?)
More Companies Build Products Around Crypto Hardware Wallets (#GotBitcoin?)
Bakkt Is Scheduled To Start Testing Its Bitcoin Futures Contracts Today (#GotBitcoin?)
Bitcoin Network Now 8 Times More Powerful Than It Was At $20K Price (#GotBitcoin?)
Crypto Exchange BitMEX Under Investigation By CFTC: Bloomberg (#GotBitcoin?)
“Bitcoin An ‘Unstoppable Force,” Says US Congressman At Crypto Hearing (#GotBitcoin?)
Bitcoin Network Is Moving $3 Billion Daily, Up 210% Since April (#GotBitcoin?)
Cryptocurrency Startups Get Partial Green Light From Washington
Fundstrat’s Tom Lee: Bitcoin Pullback Is Healthy, Fewer Searches Аre Good (#GotBitcoin?)
Bitcoin Lightning Nodes Are Snatching Funds From Bad Actors (#GotBitcoin?)
The Provident Bank Now Offers Deposit Services For Crypto-Related Entities (#GotBitcoin?)
Bitcoin Could Help Stop News Censorship From Space (#GotBitcoin?)
US Sanctions On Iran Crypto Mining — Inevitable Or Impossible? (#GotBitcoin?)
US Lawmaker Reintroduces ‘Safe Harbor’ Crypto Tax Bill In Congress (#GotBitcoin?)
EU Central Bank Won’t Add Bitcoin To Reserves — Says It’s Not A Currency (#GotBitcoin?)
The Miami Dolphins Now Accept Bitcoin And Litecoin Crypt-Currency Payments (#GotBitcoin?)
Trump Bashes Bitcoin And Alt-Right Is Mad As Hell (#GotBitcoin?)
Goldman Sachs Ramps Up Development Of New Secret Crypto Project (#GotBitcoin?)
Blockchain And AI Bond, Explained (#GotBitcoin?)
Grayscale Bitcoin Trust Outperformed Indexes In First Half Of 2019 (#GotBitcoin?)
XRP Is The Worst Performing Major Crypto Of 2019 (GotBitcoin?)
Bitcoin Back Near $12K As BTC Shorters Lose $44 Million In One Morning (#GotBitcoin?)
As Deutsche Bank Axes 18K Jobs, Bitcoin Offers A ‘Plan ฿”: VanEck Exec (#GotBitcoin?)
Argentina Drives Global LocalBitcoins Volume To Highest Since November (#GotBitcoin?)
‘I Would Buy’ Bitcoin If Growth Continues — Investment Legend Mobius (#GotBitcoin?)
Lawmakers Push For New Bitcoin Rules (#GotBitcoin?)
Facebook’s Libra Is Bad For African Americans (#GotBitcoin?)
Crypto Firm Charity Announces Alliance To Support Feminine Health (#GotBitcoin?)
Canadian Startup Wants To Upgrade Millions Of ATMs To Sell Bitcoin (#GotBitcoin?)
Trump Says US ‘Should Match’ China’s Money Printing Game (#GotBitcoin?)
Casa Launches Lightning Node Mobile App For Bitcoin Newbies (#GotBitcoin?)
Bitcoin Rally Fuels Market In Crypto Derivatives (#GotBitcoin?)
World’s First Zero-Fiat ‘Bitcoin Bond’ Now Available On Bloomberg Terminal (#GotBitcoin?)
Buying Bitcoin Has Been Profitable 98.2% Of The Days Since Creation (#GotBitcoin?)
Another Crypto Exchange Receives License For Crypto Futures
From ‘Ponzi’ To ‘We’re Working On It’ — BIS Chief Reverses Stance On Crypto (#GotBitcoin?)
These Are The Cities Googling ‘Bitcoin’ As Interest Hits 17-Month High (#GotBitcoin?)
Venezuelan Explains How Bitcoin Saves His Family (#GotBitcoin?)
Quantum Computing Vs. Blockchain: Impact On Cryptography
This Fund Is Riding Bitcoin To Top (#GotBitcoin?)
Bitcoin’s Surge Leaves Smaller Digital Currencies In The Dust (#GotBitcoin?)
Bitcoin Exchange Hits $1 Trillion In Trading Volume (#GotBitcoin?)
Bitcoin Breaks $200 Billion Market Cap For The First Time In 17 Months (#GotBitcoin?)
You Can Now Make State Tax Payments In Bitcoin (#GotBitcoin?)
Religious Organizations Make Ideal Places To Mine Bitcoin (#GotBitcoin?)
Goldman Sacs And JP Morgan Chase Finally Concede To Crypto-Currencies (#GotBitcoin?)
Bitcoin Heading For Fifth Month Of Gains Despite Price Correction (#GotBitcoin?)
Breez Reveals Lightning-Powered Bitcoin Payments App For IPhone (#GotBitcoin?)
Big Four Auditing Firm PwC Releases Cryptocurrency Auditing Software (#GotBitcoin?)
Amazon-Owned Twitch Quietly Brings Back Bitcoin Payments (#GotBitcoin?)
JPMorgan Will Pilot ‘JPM Coin’ Stablecoin By End Of 2019: Report (#GotBitcoin?)
Is There A Big Short In Bitcoin? (#GotBitcoin?)
Coinbase Hit With Outage As Bitcoin Price Drops $1.8K In 15 Minutes
Samourai Wallet Releases Privacy-Enhancing CoinJoin Feature (#GotBitcoin?)
There Are Now More Than 5,000 Bitcoin ATMs Around The World (#GotBitcoin?)
You Can Now Get Bitcoin Rewards When Booking At Hotels.Com (#GotBitcoin?)
North America’s Largest Solar Bitcoin Mining Farm Coming To California (#GotBitcoin?)
Bitcoin On Track For Best Second Quarter Price Gain On Record (#GotBitcoin?)
Bitcoin Hash Rate Climbs To New Record High Boosting Network Security (#GotBitcoin?)
Bitcoin Exceeds 1Million Active Addresses While Coinbase Custodies $1.3B In Assets
Why Bitcoin’s Price Suddenly Surged Back $5K (#GotBitcoin?)
Zebpay Becomes First Exchange To Add Lightning Payments For All Users (#GotBitcoin?)
Coinbase’s New Customer Incentive: Interest Payments, With A Crypto Twist (#GotBitcoin?)
The Best Bitcoin Debit (Cashback) Cards Of 2019 (#GotBitcoin?)
Real Estate Brokerages Now Accepting Bitcoin (#GotBitcoin?)
Ernst & Young Introduces Tax Tool For Reporting Cryptocurrencies (#GotBitcoin?)
Recession Is Looming, or Not. Here’s How To Know (#GotBitcoin?)
How Will Bitcoin Behave During A Recession? (#GotBitcoin?)
Many U.S. Financial Officers Think a Recession Will Hit Next Year (#GotBitcoin?)
Definite Signs of An Imminent Recession (#GotBitcoin?)
What A Recession Could Mean for Women’s Unemployment (#GotBitcoin?)
Investors Run Out of Options As Bitcoin, Stocks, Bonds, Oil Cave To Recession Fears (#GotBitcoin?)
Goldman Is Looking To Reduce “Marcus” Lending Goal On Credit (Recession) Caution (#GotBitcoin?)
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