Scientists in the US have found a way to plant ideas in people’s heads as they sleep to make them have bizarre, abstract dreams.
Using so-called targeted dream incubation (TDI), experts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have been able to guide people’s dreams toward particular themes by repeating information during the earliest stage of sleep.
This stage is known as hypnagogia, and is generally associated with dreams about psychedelic phenomena.
The technique uses a basic set-up consisting of a wrist-worn electronic sleep-tracking device called Dormio, which tracks when the wearer is asleep, and an app, which delivers audio prompts.
In trials, the scientists were able to influence the dreams of most study participants to dream about a tree during hypnagogia.
Researchers also used the ‘Dormio’ system to induce a dream about the chocolate fountain from the classic 1971 film ‘Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory’.
The Dormio technology, which is worn on the hand, works together with an app to manipulate the contents of the wearer’s dreams
Hypnagogia is similar to the deepest sleep stage, known as REM, in terms of brainwaves and experience.
However, unlike REM, individuals can still hear audio during hypnagogia while they dream, which can influence the content of dreams.
That’s why the sound of music playing or people talking can often play a part in our dreams during the lightest sleep stages.
‘This state of mind is trippy, loose, flexible, and divergent,’ said co-author Haar Horowitz at MIT Media Lab.
‘It’s like turning the notch up high on mind-wandering and making it immersive –being pushed and pulled with new sensations like your body floating and falling, with your thoughts quickly snapping in and out of control.’
The system in use. Upon awakening from hypnagogia, the earliest stage of sleep, participants were asked to submit dream records
MIT designed and developed their sleep-tracking device that can alter dreams by tracking hypnagogia.
The user decides what they want to dream about, from creative problems they are working on to an experience they want to reflect on or an emotional issue they want to address.
They then record themselves speaking an audio prompt using the app, which gets replayed during multiple stages of consciousness including wake, sleep onset and sleep.
These audio prompts can consist of anything the user decides they want to dream about, but in the case of MIT’s experiments, they consisted of sentences including ’remember to think of a tree’ and ‘remember to observe your thoughts’.
The hand-worn sleep tracker then monitors the wearer’s heart rate and electrodermal activity – changes in the resistance of the skin to a small electrical current based on sweat gland activity.
These changes helped researchers detect when the wearer entered hypnagogia and was liable to incorporate ‘information into dream content’.
At this point, the audio prompts were delivered to the sleeper at precise times in the sleep cycle, ascertained by the incoming physiological data.
Upon lying down, the web app instructed these participants to ‘think of a tree’.
Once entry into hypnagogia was determined by the app, a timer was triggered, which woke participants up at various times between one and five minutes, to allow participants ‘to experience different depths of sleep’.
At the end of this time, participants were woken up with the words ‘you’re falling asleep’ and were asked to report what was going through their mind, with verbal responses recorded.
The app then instructed them to ‘remember to think of a tree’ and that they could go back to sleep.
‘This loop of events was repeated for 45 min, enabling the collection of multiple hypnagogic reports’, the experts say, at which point participants were fully awoken.
‘Dream reports’, which were then collected via audio and transcribed into typed text, revealed some far-fetched tree-related dream settings.
Overall, 67 per cent of dream reports from sleeping participants mentioned dreams involving a tree.
The glove, named the Dormio, records users as they begin dreaming before falling fully asleep – a state known as hypnagogia
An audio prompt of Oompa Loompas singing their signature song was enough to trigger dreams of the chocolate factory
One subject said of their dream: ‘I was following the roots with someone and the roots were transporting me to different locations. At each location I was trying to find a switch.
‘I could hear the roots of the tree pulsating with energy as if they were leading me to some location.’
‘Dream reports increased in bizarreness and immersion with each awakening’, according to the experts at MIT.
The dream of the earliest awakening simply consisted of ‘trees, many different kinds, pines, oaks’.
Whereas on participant who dreamed longer reported: ‘I’m in the desert, there is a shaman, sitting under the tree with me, he tells me to go to South America…’
Tomás Vega at MIT Media Lab tested the system by prompting himself to dream about one of his favourite films – ‘Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory’.
His audio prompt consisted of the chocolate factory’s workers, the Oompa Loompas, singing their signature song.
‘I started dreaming about being in a chocolate waterfall, surrounded by Oompa Loompas singing ‘Oompa Loompa, doopity doo,’ Vega told Live Science.
But the chocolate waterfall in his dream was dark chocolate, which suited the lactose intolerant computer scientist.
‘So, is my lactose-intolerance knowledge in my consciousness or in my subconscious?’ he said.
‘I induced this dream content, but there were still some constraints, like, you cannot just dream about milk chocolate because that’s going to harm you.’
Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening by Salvidor Dali, who often drew on themes of dreaming
Upon awakening, a person’s guided dream content could be used to complete tasks such as creative story writing.
‘Most sleep and dream studies have so far been limited to university sleep labs and have been very expensive, as well as cumbersome, for both researchers and participants,’ said study author Pattie Maes at MIT Media Lab.
‘Our research group is excited to be pioneering new, compact and cheap technologies for studying sleep and interfacing with dreams, thereby opening up opportunities for more studies to happen and for these experiments to take place in natural settings.’
Historical figures like writer Mary Shelley and artist Salvador Dalí were inspired creatively by their dreams.
For example, Dalí’s 1944 surrealist masterpiece ‘Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening’ depicts a dream of his wife Gala in the moments before awakening.
Dali also created a memorable dream sequence in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1945 thriller Spellbound.
But MIT’s technology could also have more serious uses, such as helping people confront sources of stress and trauma.
‘Apart from benefiting scientists, this work has the potential to lead to new commercial technologies that go beyond sleep tracking to issue interventions that affect sleep onset, sleep quality, sleep-based memory consolidation, and learning,’ said Maes.
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