Turning Pillow Talk Into Films with AI

Do dreams have meaning, or are they the result of random electrical signals firing in the brain during sleep? I most certainly do not know the answer to that question, but in either case, it seems that there might be something we could learn by taking time to reflect on our nightly dreams. But the problem is that the memory of even the most vivid dreams usually fades away to nothing by the time we get out of bed.

A potential solution to this problem has recently been offered up by a group of engineers and designers at Modem Works in Amsterdam. They have developed the Dream Recorder, which they bill as a portal to your subconscious. It is a device that sits by the bedside, waiting to capture one’s spoken description of their dreams the moment they wake up, before the memory has a chance to fade. These descriptions are converted into AI-generated videos that play on its display throughout the day to provide opportunities for reflection.

The Dream Recorder is powered by a Raspberry Pi 5 8GB single-board computer, and it uses a Waveshare 7.9-inch HDMI display with a 1280x400-pixel resolution for the interface. A USB microphone allows for recording of the user’s voice when they wish to describe a dream. The hardware components were installed in a 3D-printed case. All of the work has been released under a permissive MIT license, so anyone can build their own copy of the Dream Recorder.

After a dream description has been recorded, it is transcribed into text via OpenAI’s Whisper automatic speech recognition system. This text is then fed into a GPT‑4o mini large language model along with a system prompt instructing it to transform the dream description into a cinematic video prompt. The prompt it produces is then fed into a Luma Ray2 Flash video generation model to produce an artistic representation of the described dream.

The Dream Recorder stores a week’s worth of dreams locally and cycles through them continually. The total hardware cost is around $300, and each prompt/video generation costs about $0.15. Full instructions for device assembly and programming, as well as the source code, can be found in a GitHub repository.

Whether or not the device will actually lead to any insights, or if the AI-generated dreams look anything like the user’s actual dreams, are still open questions. But even if it does not provide much real utility, the Dream Recorder is still a very interesting and thought-provoking build. There is no question that it would look great on anyone’s bedside table.