Do you know what dreams are? Dreams are a progression of images, ideas, emotions, thoughts, etc. which our brains visualize involuntarily while we’re asleep. They can be emotional, exciting, supernatural, terrifying, or simply thought-provoking. But I have a simple question to ask you. Have you ever woken up from a deep slumber unable to remember what you dreamt about last night? What if I were to tell you that scientists have cracked a way for you to record and alter your dreams? Yes, you read that right. Let’s take a look at this unbelievable discovery, shall we?
Researchers at MIT have come up with a wearable device named Dormio, and a method named Targeted Dream Incubation (TDI) to study what you dream about. MIT researchers say that TDI and Dormio are “tools for controlled experimentation on dream content.” So basically, these tools will help researchers gain insights into the mechanism behind dream functioning and their effect on your memory and behavior.
Dormio is a wearable tool that operates on TDI to record the dreams of its wearer. Additionally, if you target the wearer continuously around certain ideas using TDI while they’re about to fall asleep, you can alter their dreams. This information is fed to the wearer during an early stage of sleep while he/she can still hear the audio. This sleep stage is known as hypnagogia.
Prof. Haar Horowitz, lead researcher, MIT, says, “It’s like turning the notch up high on mind-wandering and making it immersive-being pushed and pulled with new sensations like your body floating and falling, with your thoughts quickly snapping in and out of control.” This basically explains how our mind is flexible and how it can be molded during the early stages of sleep.
The signals delivered by the wearable device Dormio are based on the physiological data of an individual at particular times of the sleep cycle. During such times Dormio can alter your dreams. Another lead author of the study is Dr. Robert Stickgold who’s a director of the Center for Sleep and Cognition at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and a psychiatry professor at Harvard Medical School. He says, “Dormio takes dream research to a new level, interacting directly with an individual’s dreaming brain and manipulating the actual content of their dreams. The potential value of Dormio for enhancing learning and creativity is literally mind-blowing.”
Dormio has other abilities such as storage, analysis, streaming, capturing, etc. and works on both android and iOS operating systems. The MIT team is also looking to collaborate with artists across the globe to create a new network of art by augmenting their creativity with Dormio. Would you love to record and alter your dreams? If yes, then let me know in the comment section below!
