New device can control your dreams, marketers try to hack

Working with technologies capable of mining the subconscious, a team of scientists has invented  a device that can communicate with sleepers and interfere with their dreams.

Dream incubation has been in  labs for decades, but now individuals are getting closer to controlling the inspiration residing in their own dreams. Many people would be interested in immersive tools designed to facilitate flying dreams or to induce lucid dreaming.

Some of us would endorse dreams of superheroes for our children for fun purposes, and some would embrace dreams of walking through cities in Turkey for tourism or through cities in Spain for language learning.

Dream engineering technologies could potentially be used to foster creativity to become better athletes or artists, or helping people to confront their fears, alleviate nightmares, help treat sufferers of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), or alter harmful behaviours such as cigarette smoking.

Wearable device

Researchers at MIT’s Dream Lab, launched in 2017, have worked on a wearable device that can track and interact with dreams, giving people control over the content of their dreams.

According to tech writer Tessa Love, researchers’ goal is to prove that dreams aren’t just meaningless gibberish, but can be hacked, augmented, and swayed to our benefit.

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.

Dormio combines standard sleep-tracking technology, which monitors an individual's heart rate and electrical changes occurring on the surface of the skin, along with finger movements that indicate if a person is starting to enter a sleep state.

When the wearer slips into a state between conscious and subconscious—called hypnagogia—the glove plays a pre-recorded audio cue, most of the time consisting of a single word.

In a 50-person experiment, the speaking glove was able to insert a tiger into people’s sleep by having the glove say a prerecorded message that simply said “tiger.”

Two-way communication

Scientists implemented procedures for two-way communication during rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep in dozens of individuals.   In the midst of a lucid dream, the test subjects perceived questions from an experimenter and provided answers using electrophysiological signals.

For a proof-of-concept demonstration, scientists presented math problems and yes-no questions. Dreamers answered in real time with volitional eye movements or facial muscle signals.

Repeated observations of interactive dreaming, documented by four independent laboratory groups, demonstrate that phenomenological and cognitive characteristics of dreaming can be interrogated in real time.

This unexplored communication channel can enable a variety of practical applications and a new strategy for the empirical exploration of dreams.

Researchers and psychologists alike have used existing low-tech methods to influence dreams for research purposes or help people rewrite their nightmares.

READ MORE: Why we don’t remember most of our dreams

Injecting ads into dreams

According to a recent survey, 77 percent of marketers plan to use dreamtech advertising in the next three years.

A team of researchers at Harvard, MIT and the University of Montreal has , however, warned of dream hacking.

“Multiple marketing studies are openly testing new ways to alter and drive purchasing behavior through sleep and dream hacking,” the team writes. “The commercial, for-profit use of dream incubation — the presentation of stimuli before or during sleep to affect dream content — is rapidly becoming a reality.”

Two of the essay’s authors previously worked on an MIT device designed to communicate with sleeping subjects and even “hack” their dreams, lending them credibility on the topic.

It’s only a matter of time before tech companies that make watches, wearables, apps and other technology that monitor our sleep start to sell that data for profit, or use those tools to hack our dreams while we slumber.

The researchers referenced a study that found mixing bad smells with cigarette smoke as regular smokers slept, reduced their smoking the next day — but they couldn’t remember smelling anything.

Multiple marketing studies are openly testing new ways to alter and drive purchasing behaviour through sleep and dream hacking.

The American Marketing Association New York’s 2021 Future of Marketing study found that, of more than 400 marketers from firms across the United States. 

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