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, according to OneZero.
Think “Inception,” in other words, but with a Nintendo Power Glove.
“People don’t know that a third of their life is a third where they could change or structure or better themselves,” Adam Horowitz, PhD student at MIT Media Lab’s Fluid Interfaces Group and a Dream Lab researcher, told OneZero.
“Whether you’re talking about memory augmentation or creativity augmentation or improving mood the next day or improving test performance, there’s all these things you can do at night that are practically important,” Horowitz added.
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.
“Hypnagogic imagery or hallucinations is a normal state of consciousness in the transition from wakefulness to sleep,” Valdas Noreika, a psychologist at Cambridge who is not involved in the research told VICE back in 2018.
Hypnagogia may be different for different people. Some say they’ve woken up from…
