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“Dreaming is just thinking at night. Sleeping transforms you into a new person, but we are not asking questions about this experience,” summarizes doctoral student Adam Horowitz, a Dream Lab researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). There, a team of scientists is using technology to manipulate the subconscious and hack into the process that generates our dreams.
Dreaming is a necessary process to survive, consolidate memories and regulate our hormone levels. But the process can help the human being beyond improving our metabolic processes. Since 2017, Dream Lab has developed portable devices that track the onset of sleep, interact with its mechanism, and change dreams.
The first prototype of the Dormio glove.Source: MIT / Adam Horowitz
The first of these is Dormio, a device used to explore a particular period: hypnagogy, the semi-lucid state between wakefulness and sleep. When it happens, thoughts become dreams, and it is in this transitional state that Dormio acts.
“Dreams are not just” random mental mud “but access points to deeper levels of cognition,” Horowitz told the website. OneZero.
The operation of the device is simple: the volunteer who has his dreams hacked falls asleep with sensors on his wrist and fingers, so that muscle tone and heart rate (which change when sleeping) are detected. When you enter hypnagogy, Dormio activates a Jibo robot, which plays a simple message.
A volunteer sleeps during the Dormio experiment.Source: MIT / Media Lab Fluid Interfaces / Disclosure
When the word “tiger” was used, the figure of the big cat appeared in the dreams of most of the group of 50 people who underwent an experiment with Dormio. According to Horowitz, the same thing was repeated in other words. “More than changing the content of dreams, this interaction with the hypnagogic state improved everyone’s performance on tasks that required creativity,” he says.
Aromas inserted in memory.
While working with hypnagogy, his colleague at Dream Lab Judith Amores wants to go further and change the dream itself, accessing an even deeper level of the subconscious using smells instead of sounds. BioEssence is a portable device that works like Dormio, but instead of making a sound, it is an aroma diffuser.
The goal is to interfere with the stage known as N3, which acts to consolidate memory. When the volunteer reaches him, BioEssence launches a perfume, which will be associated by those who are sleeping with a memory.
As the researcher explained in an interview with the electronic magazine ViceBioEssence can be used as a supplement in the treatment of patients who have memories associated with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). “Smells previously associated with positive things and released during nightmares can lead to patient healing without being fully conscious.”
Attitude considered arrogant
Interfering with the dream generation process is not unanimous among researchers. For the psychologist and sleep specialist at the University of Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine, Rubin Naiman, the importance of dreams lies in their ability to evolve on their own:
Hacking dreams is an arrogant attitude and part of the premise that the subconscious is not intelligent. In fact, he is another type of intelligence. We can learn by talking to him rather than mastering him or trying to guide him in the directions we want. “
