Dreamfall: An experiment in hypnagogic dreaming

The project page is here: https://www.willdowd.net/dreamfall. (I've also nicked its title to replace the OP's less informative one.)

"A user wears a glove-like device with sensors. These sensors collect biosignals from the hand to measure changes in muscle tone, heart rate, and skin conductance. In past research, all of these biosignals have been shown to change during the transition from wakefulness to sleep. When the biosignals signal the onset of sleep, a timer of a few minutes starts. At the end of the timer, an audio recording is played to ask the user for a dream report, bringing the wearer back into wakefulness, but ideally not into full wakefulness. We record everything the user says during their dream report, which could be useful for users to play back later to avoid forgetting a potentially useful idea. Following their dream report, the system then plays an audio cue, reminding the wearer to think of certain words (like "fork" or "rabbit"), in the hopes of integrating the cued topic into their next set of dreams. The user then drifts back to sleep, with the cue in mind. In our laboratory testing, we have found that the cued words reliably entered the hypnagogic dreams of our users. The system continues to track the state (awake or asleep) of the user, repeating the process described above of waking them up after a few minutes of sleep to collect a dream report. This protocol is carried out repeatedly to guide dreams and collect dream reports." https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/sleep-creativity/overview...

This is about a poet using technology (the dormio) to experiment with dream seeding: reading a sentence then going to sleep and have the dormio wake you up when you are done with the dreaming phase so that you can take notes on what you dreamt.

Dream seeding does work in the sense that what you do / read before going to bed / during the day can influence you dreams. It is however limited in the sense that you cannot predict what your mind will do at a particular point in time with a particular seed.

I would also note that some creators (such as Nikola Tesla if I remember correctly) played with a low tech version of this: thinking about an idea then sleeping in a chair with a heavy ball in your hand. When you get into deep sleep the ball falls and wakes you up. This keeps you at the edge of deep sleep, in what some consider a very creative state.

There's a tutorial how to build the device that monitors the onset of sleep ("Dormio", version 3"):

https://makezine.com/projects/dormio-dream-incubator/

And here I think I dug up the details and schematics of the Dormio hardware prototype:

https://web.archive.org/web/20221007074902/https://www.fab.c...

I learned about hypnopompia and hypnagogia a few years ago and finally found and explanation to absurd situations in my childhood.

If you've ever been awake but still encountered dream like absurdness, I'd highly recommend reading the two articles below.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnagogia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnopompia

I'm surprised Dormio (the hardware that is facilitating this dream seeding) is trying to interact with the early stages of sleep, which is more likely to be NREM.

We get more REM sleep later in the night, which is the more opportune period to interact with dreams.

There are challenges to detecting the difference between REM and wakefulness, but as long as the interaction is not invasive, I would assume you could simply flex your finger to assert that you are not in REM sleep.

Safari won't load some of the images in this page.

Looking at them, it seems they are serving HEIF with PNG extensions here: https://assets.nautil.us/sites/3/nautilus/aoQtV2D6-French_HE...

Even though https://assets.nautil.us/sites/3/nautilus/aoQtV2D6-French_HE... is a true PNG

Chrome seems to ignore the extension and just reads the file

dream inception? no

external dream manipulation? probably under certain circumstances.

not an expert but you can't ENTER a person's dream, this falls into the category of gemstones having healing powers.