A team of researchers at MIT’s
Dream Lab, which launched in 2017, are working on an open source wearable
device that can track and interact with dreams in a number of ways — including,
hopefully, giving you new control over the content of your dreams. The team’s
radical goal is to prove once and for all that dreams aren’t just meaningless
gibberish — but can be hacked, augmented, and swayed to our benefit. A
glove-like device called Dormio, developed by the Dream Lab team, is outfitted
with a host of sensors that can detect which sleeping state the wearer is in.
When the wearer slips into a state between conscious and subconscious,
hypnagogia, the glove plays a pre-recorded audio cue, most of the times consisting
of a single word. Hypnagogic imagery or hallucinations is a normal state of
consciousness in the transition from wakefulness to sleep. Hypnagogia may be
different for different people. Some say they’ve woken up from hypnagogia,
reporting they experienced strong visual and auditory hallucinations. Others
are capable of interacting with somebody in the state. But the Dream Lab might
be on to something with its Dormio glove.
In a 50-person experiment, the
speaking glove was able to insert a tiger into people’s sleep by having the
glove say a prerecorded message that simply said tiger. The device is meant to
democratize the science of tracking sleep. Step-by-step instructions were
posted online with biosignal tracking software available on Github, allowing
everybody to theoretically make their own Dormio glove. A similar device built
by Dream Lab researcher relies on smell rather than an audio cue. A preset
scent is released by a device when the user reaches the N3 stage of sleep, a
regenerative period when the body heals itself and consolidates memory. The
idea is to strengthen this consolidation using scents. They hope to let
sleepers take full control of their dreams as well. The problem, however, is
that the science behind lucid dreaming is still murky. Only an estimated one
percent of people are capable of entering this state regularly, making it
difficult to study. The brain state during lucid dreaming is also not understood
very well yet. But other researchers are convinced there’s plenty to gain from
learning from our subconscious — rather than commanding it with prerecorded
messages or scents.
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