For millennia, humanity has been entranced by the secret inner workings of our minds when we fall asleep; particularly when we dream. Dreams animate us as we rest, leading us into adventures and events ranging between the mundane and the otherworldly. Nothing in this world is so fascinating as the world of our dreams. But what if we could actually harness our minds while we slumber and manipulate our dreams into whatever we want them to become?
That concept is something many are endeavouring to do, and Adam Horowitz at MIT is making progress on the frontier of dreams.
As a part of MIT’s Media Lab Fluid Interfaces Group and a Dream Lab researcher, Horowitz and his colleagues are developing devices that can allow scientists to effectively ‘hack’ into a person’s dreams.
The Idea
This might sound like something out of the movie Inception, but the concept is much simpler, and actually has its roots in practices thousands of years old. When our mind drifts off to sleep, it passes through several different stages of sleep, passing from awareness into a semi-lucid state known as hypnagogia and on into the lucid, REM sleep that every parent covets jealously. In REM sleep, we know we are dreaming and can even interact with the dream, whereas hypnagogic dreams are more likely a flood of dream-state images.
Accessing this state is a practice many great minds have utilised, from Salvador Dali to as far back as Aristotle. The process is simple as allowing oneself to drift off into sleep while holding an object. When you drift off, you release the object in your hand, making a clattering sound that awakes you and grants you access to the creative state of mind that is fast at work forging your dreams. Edison was a firm believer in making the most of hypnagogia and claimed it solved a number of difficult puzzles for him. He would take regular naps with a steel ball in his hand, frantically recording what happened once he awoke from the sound.
Horowitz has worked with his colleagues to develop the 21st-century version of Edison’s metal ball. Its name is Dormio, and this glove-like contraption is wired with sensors and circuitry that monitor everything from heart rate to skin conductance to indicate what stage of sleep a person is in. When hypnagogia is achieved, Dormio plays an auditory trigger of a word or sound and then records the response.
It seems that this method may have some success. In an experiment with fifty test subjects, the auditory cue was very regularly incorporated into the test subject’s dreams. Not only that, but the monitoring of hypnagogia revealed that creativity increased when it was interacted with or the subject was brought out of that state.
The hacking of dreams does not stop with sound, either. Judith Amores is another MIT Media Lab and Dream Lab researcher who is exploring how the sense of smell can impact our dreams. Using a mobile scent diffuser that monitors the stages of sleep, preset smells are released during the memory consolidation stage of sleep (N3). Because the smell is less jarring and still sensorily rich, the dreamer remains asleep, strengthening the memory of the dream.
Why would Amores hope to access this level of dreaminess?
She is hoping that at this level of lucid dreaming, night terrors and traumatic memories from people with PTSD could be moderated by a positive association with a pleasant smell. For people suffering from PTSD, recurring night terrors can become a hindrance, disrupting healthy rest and allowing for a better mental state. With any luck, the mechanism may someday allow PTSD patients to have their neural pathways integrate more pleasant associations and resolve the trauma loop in their minds, giving them a good night’s rest and better peace of mind.
There is no substitute for healthy, uninterrupted REM sleep, to be clear. Very often when Salvador Dali and Thomas Edison would access their hypnagogia, it was during the day in addition to their normal sleep routine.
If you are curious and wish to see if your creative mind may flourish from a little shut-eye, step into the unknown and see where it may take you.
