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.
Hypnagogia may be different for
different people. Some say they have woken up from hypnagogia, reporting they
experienced strong visual and auditory hallucinations. Others can interact with
somebody in the state. But the Dream Lab might be on to something with its
Dormio glove. For instance, 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 bio signal tracking software available on Github, allowing everybody to
theoretically make their own Dormio glove. A similar device built by Dream Lab relies
on smell rather than an audio cue.
More information:
https://futurism.com/mit-scientists-devices-hack-dreams
