Dream engineering: an MIT glove can induce lucid dreams

Adam Horowitz built a glove with which dreams can be influenced. A person can be induced to dream of a tree, a bridge, or a tiger.

The principle under which the Horowitz glove works is simple: It measures muscle tension, skin conductivity and heart rate, and thus can track the transition state between wakefulness and sleep. In this phase, logical thinking slips into a hallucinatory world, and it is precisely there that we become especially impressionable.

As soon as the glove registers that a person goes from waking to sleeping, an application connected to it plays a pre-recorded audio track, for example, with the phrase: “Think of a tree”. Many of the volunteers in the experiment later said they dreamed of exactly one tree. The goal is to enhance, through this device, called Dormio, hypnagogic hallucinations, that is, a semi-lucid dream state where you begin to dream before falling completely into unconsciousness.

The idea of ​​the researcher Horowitz perfectly matches the work profile of the Media Lab of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which has set itself the goal of developing futuristic technologies and recruits “people with the craziest ideas.” There, for example, the Aspen Movie Map, predecessor of the current Google Street View, was created long before Google had conceived that product.

With his invention, Adam Horowitz wants to penetrate a mental state that is usually hidden from our consciousness. Other researchers hope to better understand the brain during sleep, spark more creativity, or provide better treatment for people with nightmares or mood disorders: they are the dream engineersthe sleep engineering specialists.

This is Dormio, the device to influence dreams

The toolbox of sleep engineers is less complex than one might think: while the scent of roses can forge positive dreams, the smell of rotten eggs predictably does the opposite. Through different aromas, certain memories can be reactivated in sleep, so that they influence memory. Other researchers use virtual reality, for example, so that people can fly in their dreams.

Brewing company dreams of dreams about beer

Also the Molson Coors brewing company thinks that influencing dreams is a great idea. However, he failed to convince Horowitz to cooperate in the marketing area, so he hired psychology professor Deirdre Barrett instead.

In the early 1990s, Barrett investigated how integrate everyday problems into dreams, to literally solve them while we sleep. For that, he made his students think for a week before going to sleep on a problem that worried them. One third of the students were thus able to arrive at an objectively understandable solution.

Advised by Barrett, Molson Coors created an advertising video that the company published in parallel with the Super Bowl. In the video he staged a dreamlike panorama with cascading waterfalls, wind blowing in the mountains and, of course, Coors beer.

The company made the video available to 18 people, including 12 professional actors, who watched it shortly before falling into the arms of Morpheus. Five of them later reported that they had dreamed about a beer.

Sleep researchers raised the scream. Suddenly the line between dream engineering and unconscious hacking had become too narrow.

Researchers ask for regulations for the interference in dreams

“We will not engage in dream engineering unless people specifically request and consent to dream,” Horowitz, along with two colleagues, formulated in their Ethics of Dream Engineering, published online with slight modifications. and signed by 38 dream researchers.

“It’s a fine line,” says Antonio Zadra, co-signer and researcher of sleep and sleep at the University of Montreal, and co-author of the book. When Brains Dream (When brains dream). “If I already come up with some off the cuff ideas on how to influence dreams, well-paid marketers can come up with much more effective strategies.”

Studies show that external stimuli presented during sleep can also influence our behavior while we are awake. After a nap, subjects most often chose the snack whose name was played to them while they slept. When sleeping subjects were presented with cigarette smoke along with the smell of rotten eggs, they subsequently smoked less.

The remarkable thing is that sleeping subjects could not recall their conditioning. However, the same experiment with awake subjects did not work. “It’s scary,” says Antonio Zadra, saying that his biggest concern is that our beliefs and behaviors can be manipulated without our realizing it.

Fear of Dream Hacking: Just Scaremongering?

For Michael Schredl, a sleep researcher at the Central Institute for Mental Health in Mannheim, the “38 Letter” sounds more like a marketing ploy than a legitimate concern. It’s a long way from influencing to manipulating, and the topic is getting inflated at the moment, he says. Although it is possible to incorporate external stimuli into dreams, “what cannot be achieved is directing the content of dreams in a certain direction.”

The sleeping brain is no more suggestible than the awake brain, as Adam Horowitz often asserts. In addition, new knowledge is not acquired while sleeping, but existing knowledge is consolidated: people who have played cassettes at night to learn foreign languages ​​actually obtained better language skills the next day. “But only if they couldn’t sleep because of the tape,” says Schredl.

Deirdre Barrett also defends herself against the charge of influencing the unconscious. After all, anyone can fall asleep with the TV or radio on and accidentally hear commercials. “I wouldn’t exactly describe it as high-tech subliminal advertising.”

Horowitz said that, meanwhile, about 10 known companies contacted himfrom airlines and interior designers, to high-tech companies, which they want to invest in the technology of dreams in the next three years.

The question is: who would allow strangers access to his dream world, his unconscious? Some 32 percent of the 500 surveyed by the American Marketing Association rejected subliminal advertising. 38 percent had no problem accepting it.

Perhaps it is not necessary to accept it. “It’s easy to imagine a world in which smart speakers become unconscious advertising tools overnight, with or without people’s approval,” experts warn.

If those speakers were connected to a wristwatch that monitors sleep, they could emit sounds precisely when we are most receptive to external stimuli. But Michael Schredle says those trackers haven’t been sufficiently developed yet. The important thing is not, according to Antonio Zadra, how successful commercial methods are in influencing sleep. Instead, we should make it clear already today if we want something like that.

“Maybe I sound like an alarmist,” agrees Adam Horowitz. “But it’s better to think about it now, before it’s too late,” he warns, because sleep technology is just getting started. (I)