Shape your Dreams Every Night.
A team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is working on a device that can help others shape what they dream about. This device is called Dormio; it’s made up of a bracelet and an app. The bracelet attaches to a person’s wrist, forefinger, and middle finger; when turned on, it monitors their heart rate, the position of their fingers, and more to track their sleeping patterns. The app uses recorded messages to suggest topics for users to dream about, and lets users play and record audio.
Dormio activates when the user enters the earliest stage of sleep — hypnagogia. People can dream in a hypnagogic state, just like in REM sleep, but can still hear the outside world.
“This state of mind is trippy, loose, flexible, and divergent,” Dr. Adam Haar Horowitz, the lead author of the recent study, said. “It’s like turning the notch up high on mind-wandering and making it immersive.”
The team took advantage of hypnagogia. Horowitz had participants in his study record themselves saying, “Remember to think of a tree.” Dormio played this audio clip as participants got ready to sleep. Once they entered the hypnagogic state, the device played the prompt again. After a little while, Dormio would wake the participants and play a different audio: “Please tell me what was just going through your mind.” The participants would explain what they’d been dreaming about, and the device would continue to cycle through the prompts.
67% of the participants succeeded in dreaming of trees.
Tomas Vega, one of the engineers working on the device, wanted to try it on himself. He decided to make himself dream about Oompa Loompas (fictional characters from the book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory). He recorded the Oompa Loompa song from the movie adaptation of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and set Dormio to play it to him as he fell asleep.
“I started dreaming about being in a chocolate waterfall, surrounded by Oompa Loompas singing ‘Oompa Loompa, doopity doo,” Vega told LiveScience.
The device is largely proficient, but is not on the market yet. Pattie Maes, co-author of the study, said that it could be accessible to the public soon.
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