How To Hack Others' Dreams? MIT Scientists Got The Answer

Anil - Apr 14, 2020

Dreams can be hacked, distorted, and influenced as what we expect.

A wearable device that helps people take control of their dreams has been developed by a team of researchers from MIT’s Dream Laboratory. In a nutshell, the prime purpose of this "invention" is to conclusively prove that dreams are not entirely meaningless - it can be hacked, distorted, and influenced as what we expect.

MIT dream hack device 1 — A device from MIT’s Dream Laboratory

You can imagine the device nearly similar to the “Inception”, and you can control it with the help of a Nintendo Power Glove. Added by Adam Horowitz, a Ph.D. student at MIT Media Lab, there’s hardly anyone aware that a third of their entire life is something that they can change, structure, or even improve by themselves.

Moreover, Horowitz emphasized the importance of dreaming about activities you expect to do in the following day, such as memory augmentation, creativity augmentation, and mood improvement.

The device created by the Dream Lab team is called Dormino, which has an appearance similar to a glove equipped with a host of sensors used for sleeping state detection of the user. When that person falls into a state between conscious and subconscious called hypnagogia, a pre-recorded sound which is usually a single word will be played by the glove.

A further explanation for the hypnagogic imagery or hallucinations was provided in 2018 by Valdas Noreika, a psychologist at Cambridge, which indicated those states were an ordinary condition when the body transits from wakefulness to sleep.

But the MIT Dream Lab team has installed something inside its Dormio glove. To exemplify for it, they have conducted an experiment on 50 individuals, which did insert a tiger into their sleep via the glove’s repetition of the prerecorded word “tiger”.

Notably, everybody who is enthusiastic about the device can theoretically build up their own Dormio glove, based on the detailed instructions posted online along with biosignal tracking software on Github. This process represents the expectation of the Dream Lab team in their vision of making science more democratic with people in the whole world.