You can fly, sing, dance – it's better than virtual reality.
A team of researchers from the MIT lab is working on an open source wearable device that can track and interact with dreams in a variety of ways, including controlling the content of your sleep.
The team’s radical goal is to prove once and for all that dreams are more than meaningless gibberish, but they can be “hacked, augmented, and influenced,” the researchers said.
“People don’t know they’re missing a third of their lives — that’s the third when they can change, or structure, improve themselves,” said Adam Horowitz, PhD student at MIT Media Lab Fluid Interfaces Group and Dream Lab researcher.
“Whether you're talking about improving memory, creativity, improving mood the next day, or improving productivity, you can prepare for anything at night,” added Horowitz.
A glove-like device called the Dormio, developed by the Dream Lab team, is equipped with a variety of sensors that can determine what state of sleep a user is in. When the user transitions between conscious and unconscious, the glove plays a pre-recorded audio signal, in most cases consisting of one word.
“Hypnagogic imagery or hallucinations is a normal state of consciousness during the transition from wakefulness to sleep,” said Valdas Noreika, a psychologist from Cambridge.
For example, in an experiment of 50 people, a talking glove was able to insert a tiger into people's sleep by causing the glove to utter a pre-recorded message that simply said 'tiger'.
The device is designed to democratize the science of sleep tracking. The step-by-step instructions were posted online using biosignal tracking software available on Github, allowing anyone to theoretically create their own Dormio glove.
Scientists hope to let sleepers have complete control over their dreams. The Dream Engineering Workshop in 2019, hosted by the Dream Lab, discussed the world of 'lucid dreaming', the state in which people become aware that they are dreaming while they are dreaming.
Sources: Photo: MIT
