This Device Can Help Direct and Enhance Your Dreams
Dormio is a sleep-tracking wearable sensor that doesn't just record dream reports, but guides dreams toward particular themes as well.
Most of us have little, if any, control over our dreams. With the exception of lucid dreamers, we have no real way to direct the content or theme of a dream; we usually can’t even consciously control our own actions in those dreams. But you probably have noticed that your dreams often reflect whatever was on your mind before you fell asleep. Imagine being able to take advantage of that tendency to direct your dreams towards themes that you want. That's exactly what Media Lab’s Fluid Interfaces group's Dormio device is designed to do, and the results are very promising.
We covered Dormio more than two years ago when it was first announced by MIT. It gained a fair amount of attention from the media and dream researchers around the world. Since then, additional studies have been done to evaluate the efficacy of Dormio and to experiment with how it can be utilized to intentionally boost an individual’s creativity. Many writers and musicians have said that some of their best ideas came to them in dreams. A device like Dormio could direct your dreams towards the themes that will enhance your creativity. You could, for example, choose to dream about space travel in order to get ideas for that sci-fi novel you’ve been working on.
Dormio itself is essentially just a sophisticated wearable sleep tracker. It can tell if you’re in REM sleep or deep sleep. It can also detect when you’ve reached hypnagogia, which is the state between wakefulness and sleep when you’re still semi-lucid. Your mind is particularly susceptible to dream suggestion in that state. When Dormio determines that you’re hypnagogic, it will play audio that is intended to direct your dreams without actually waking you up. When you start dreaming, you’re more likely to experience content related to what you semi-consciously heard in your hypnagogic state. More analysis is needed to determine just how effective Dormio is, but universities and sleep researchers around the world have been working on studies to figure that out.