It sounds like a story out of science fiction. Technology that can influence how we dream and what we dream about. This fascinating new field is known as dream engineering and it’s creating lots of excitement and some concern among the people following it closely. The idea is that an enhanced sleep tracker can not only measure when you drift into various stages of sleep, but influence what you dream about through verbal prompts. In turn, this could help with better sleep, improved health and all sorts of other wellness benefits.
Thankfully, the early tests of this technology involve a user recording their own verbal prompts that get played at the right moment to influence the eventual dreams that come later. The process is getting even more sophisticated than just voice also:
“Today, technology allows dream scientists to use tools like Dormio to target different sleep stages and attempt to influence dreams across the night. Beyond incubating on a certain topic for creative inspiration or problem solving, dream-engineering techniques aim to rewrite nightmares, facilitate lucid dreaming, consolidate memories, and boost learning. This is done using different kinds of external stimuli, like sound, smell, or touch, which are introduced at certain stages in the sleep cycle.
Dream engineering is now moving beyond the lab as scientists design apps and other tools that we can use at home.”
The concerns so far seem to center around how this might be used by companies to influence your perceptions about everything from their brand to reality itself. When you can influence people in such an intimate way through what they dream about, the appeal of this may attract so much funding that “dream influence” may become a real thing. But for now, it feels more experimental. There’s even an app called Dust available where you can try it for yourself (currently available in private beta only).