A device called 'Dormio' advances the study of dreams to a new level. The device not only helps in documenting dream reports, but directs dreams to certain subjects * Dormio communicates directly with a person's dreaming mind and influences the content of their dreams," says Robert Stickgold, director of the Center for Sleep and Cognition at Beth Israel Medical Center in Deacons, Massachusetts.
A device called 'Dormio' advances the study of dreams to a new level. Illustration: Helen Gao, MIT
The study of dreams has entered the modern era in exciting ways, and researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and other institutes have created a community that dedicates itself to promoting the field, establishing its legitimacy and expanding it further towards additional research possibilities.
In a new article, researchers from the "Fluid Interfaces" group from the "Media Lab" presented an innovative method called "Targeted Dream Incubation". This protocol, implemented through a combination of an applet and a wearable device with a sleep tracking sensor, not only helps to record dream reports, but also guides the dreams to certain topics by repeating focused information at the beginning of sleep, thus enabling the integration of this information into the dream content. This method of incubating/engineering dreams and the technology that accompanies it, are tools used in experiments in controlling dreams and expand the ways in which it is possible to study how dreams affect emotions, creativity, memory and beyond.
The article "Dormio: a device to incubate focused dreams" was jointly edited by the lead researcher of the study Adam Haar Horowitz and Pattie Maes, professor of media arts and sciences, who is also the head of the "Flexible Interfaces" group. Other authors of the article are Tony J. Cunningham, a postdoctoral fellow at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School and Robert Stickgold, director of the Sleep and Cognition Center at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and professor of psychiatry at the School of Medicine of Harvard.
Previous brain studies by expert researchers such as Stickgold, who deal with sleep and cognitive science, have shown that hypnogogy (the most initial stage of sleep) is similar to the REM stage in terms of brain waves and experience; However, unlike in the REM stage, people can hear a sound in the hypnogogic stage, while dreaming.
"This stage of consciousness is delusional, flexible and diverse," says Har Horowitz. "It's like turning up a little a state where our thoughts wander and making it more vigorous - when new sensations push and pull us as if our bodies are floating and falling, our thoughts go in and out of control quickly."
To implement the protocol and make dream guidance possible, an interdisciplinary team at the Media Lab designed and developed Dormio, a sleep tracking device that can change dreams by detecting the hypnogogic phase and playing sound signals based on physiological information, which are timed to precise moments in the sleep cycle. Upon awakening, the guided content that appeared in a person's dreams can be used by him to complete tasks, such as, writing a story, a creative task, and this content can be experimentally compared to the content of waking thought.
"Dormio advances the study of dreams to a new level, it enables direct contact with a person's dreaming mind and influence on the actual content of his dreams," says Stickgold. "Dormio's potential for increasing learning and creativity is literally mind-opening."
The Media Lab team's first run study using Dormio showed dream engineering and creativity expansion in six people, and was presented at alt.CHI in 2018. Several scientists approached the research team and expressed interest in replicating the dream control experiment. These requests led to the first dream engineering workshop, held at the Media Lab in January 2019. The workshop was organized by May, Har Horowitz, and Judith Amores, from the Flexible Interfaces Group, and Michelle Carr, a visiting researcher from the Sleep and Neurophysiology Laboratory at the University of Rochester. The workshop brought together many of the world's leading dream researchers for a brainstorming session on new technologies for studying dreams, documenting them and influencing their content. Among Bai Hasada were also the pioneers of the field, and they are: Deirdre Barrett, Bjorn Rasch, Ken Paller, and Stephen LaBerge.
Following the talks held in the workshop and the technologies presented in it, a special issue on dream engineering was published in the journal Consciousness and Cognition, May, Har Horowitz, Amores and Carr served as guest editors.
"Until now, the study of sleep and dreaming has been limited to university sleep laboratories and has been very expensive and cumbersome, both for the researchers and the subjects who participated in the experiments," May says. "Our research group is excited to launch new, compact and cheap technologies for studying sleep and interfacing with dreams, thus opening up opportunities for conducting more studies and enabling experiments to be conducted under natural conditions. Beyond the benefit to researchers, this work has the potential to lead to the development of new commercial technologies, which will allow the creation of interventions that will affect falling asleep, sleep quality, the creation of sleep-based memory and learning.
The research itself is central to Har Horowitz's work thesis in the "Media Arts and Sciences Program". In the last year, he conducted a more comprehensive dream study, in which 50 subjects participated, which replicated and extended the results of the previous study.
"We showed that incubating dreams is linked to benefits in performance in three creativity tests, according to both objective and subjective dimensions," declares Har Horowitz. "Dreaming about a certain subject seems to have benefits after sleep, for example, in performing creative tasks related to these subjects. This is not surprising in light of the testimonies of historical figures, such as Marie Shelley and Salvador Dali, whose creativity was inspired by their dreams. The difference is that we produce these dreams, which benefit creativity, deliberately and in a focused manner."
An improved Dormio device has now been built, as well as platforms for analyzing and streaming data, an iOS applet for capturing and feeding audio, and a network applet for capturing, storing and streaming audio. These mobile and online platforms make it possible to share the method with a variety of open source technologies.
Several other universities have begun Dormio-related studies, including Duke University, Boston College, Harvard University, University of Rochester, and the University of Chicago.
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Is it possible to order a dream in Asfemia?
The writing is terribly unclear. You need to detail less about the participants and more about the content - I couldn't understand what exactly they did and how. Did the subjects just read instructions? What is the direct interface to the brain? It would have been worthwhile to elaborate