MIT Researchers Developed a 'System For Dream Control' (vice.com)

dmoberhaus writes: Researchers at MIT Media Lab have adapted a centuries' old technique for inducing hypnagogia for the 21st century. Known as Dormio, this system is able to extend and manipulate the period users spend in a transitional state of consciousness between wakefulness and sleep known as hypnagogia. This state is characterized by vivid hallucinations and microdreams, and as the MIT researchers demonstrated, the contents of these microdreams can be manipulated with the system and subsequently result in heightened creativity when the user awakes. Motherboard got the exclusive details on the system.

Comments

I signed up for

[goombah99]

the martian spy adventure dream.

Re:I signed up for

[john of sparta]

did you get it Wholesale?

Re:I signed up for

[thomst]

john of sparta inquired:

did you get it Wholesale?

Someone with points mod parent +1 Funny (for subtle PKD reference), please ...

Re:I signed up for

[Greyfox]

Oooh but you have to pull a 1" diameter locator beacon out of your nose. That kind of sucks.

Queensryche

[Errol backfiring]

So they listened to Silent Lucidity and tried it out?

I woke up

[goombah99]

In a self driving Uber.

Re:I woke up

[forkfail]

You ARE Johnnycab. You have been assimilated. Welcome to Hell.

Re:I woke up

[cayenne8]

So, this is the same thing they're talking about here as "lucid dreaming"...where you know you are in a dream, and can control things?

I love when that happens, BUT, can't ever seem to stay in that state for any length of time....I end up waking up very shortly after hitting that level....

*sigh*

Man, if they could harness that state and allow you to stay in it as long as possible, talk about a money maker.

Trouble is...it is so pleasant that it likely could become the most addictive "drug" in the world, as that no one wants reality when they can have it all in a dream.

Re:I woke up

[Nidi62]

I could see the Johnnycab being the nightmare of a Borg that has finally passed out after 76 hours of straight Starcraft playing as Protoss. Kind of like the opposite of a dragoon.

Re:I woke up

[Bengie]

I've been lucid dreaming since I was 3. Had to learn to control my horrible nightmares. Gotten to the point that when I dream, I try to shut down the dream so I can sleep. I've dreamed nearly everything I've wanted to dream, and dragging out a dream just means I get less sleep.

Re:I woke up

[cayenne8]

I"m the opposite.

I LOVE to dream....even when not lucid, I remember a lot of my dreams after I wake up, and 99% of the time they are pleasant if not downright fun.

I rarely have nightmare dreams....

The worst of them is usually the "waiter nightmare", which is common with folks that worked in the food service business. It's funny that I still occasionally get them even though it has been decades since I was a youngster working in restaurants waiting tables and bartending while in school (I started washing dishes and busboy in HS, and in college and grad school, waited and bartended).

Funny how that sticks with you. Was hard work, but I made great long term friends from those days, and I learned a lot about how to deal with the public and people in general, social skills.....but man, I'd not want to have to do it again.

Re:I woke up

[Bengie]

I haven't had a nightmare of any kind since I learned to lucid dream. As soon as a dream get anywhere near scary, I become god like. This is actually the problem I have with all of my dreams. I immediately become an unmatched all powerful being and instantly bored. The only way to drag it out is to think of ways to make the dream fun, but that takes too much effort.

What's funny is the dream will keep trying to move forward, but I keep stopping it.

The only times I don't interfere with the dream is when it has something to do with a hard problem I'm working on in the real world. I can tell while I'm dreaming when it has something to do with problem solving. Something a person or a thing that I see in my dream reminds me of the problem I am stuck on, like how you see someone's doppelganger and they remind you of someone you know. Every time this has happened, I had the answer to my problem in the morning.

A recent development is like a person in my dream, who is part of the dream, yet somehow not. In the past, I day dreamed a lot and learned how to create persons in my dreams that I did not know what they were thinking. they always played a part of my dream, but I could not directly control them, I could only configure them. This has kind of returned, without any effort of my own, but they're in-between. Sometimes they'll narrate the dream in a way that's hilarious to me or even stop the dream and say something directly to me that is purely unexpected. Some of their witty remarks make for great stories at work that make other people laugh.

Re:I woke up

[Quirkz]

Wait, isn't dreaming part of sleep? How does ending a dream get you more sleep?

Asking in part because, as far as I can tell, my sleep is 100% dreams. I know they say that's not how it works, but it's been decades since I woke up and couldn't tell you what I had just been dreaming.

Re:I woke up

[Bengie]

Depends on which type of dreams we're talking about. If you're talking about the kind you don't remember in any way, that's a normal part of the sleep cycle. If you're talking about lucid dreaming, that requires certain parts of the brain to be active, denying them the ability to rest.

Re:I woke up

[jtgd]

I don't think they are referring to lucid dreaming, but rather that state you pass through as you fall asleep. We used to call it the Alpha State and would enter it intentionally. In lucid dreaming you are fully asleep.

"the palm sensors could only do two states—on or off—even though the onset of sleep occurs as a gradual transition."

Why not have them squeeze a rubber bulb and measure the pressure?

AI sees, AI does.

[devslash0]

That's why I told them not to show The Matrix to AI. AI sees, AI does.

BWOOOOOOONG

[enjar]

I hope nobody tries to steal my dreams.

I always dream of naked family members

[Anonymous Coward]

I was introduced to this phenomenon through Kurzweil's book "How to create a mind". He claims that the brain is massively parallelized pattern recognition machine, with consciousness being a censor that filters results. While in hypnagogia, this censoring function is suppressed and you are able to make "unthinkable" connections between ideas you normally think are unrelated. Of course, you should just take notes of these connections and later evaluate them rationally to see if they have any merit. It's very exciting that technology might be able to prolong and enhance this creative state of mind.

"Forks are colonalism"

[cfalcon]

The article allllllmost gets through itself without going into politics, but out of the all the examples in the infinite noosphere this machine is meant to probe, the one that made the cut was the phrase "forks are colonialism".
-
“I asked him about it when he woke up,” Horowitz told me. “He said, ‘Oh at home I eat food with my hands and here I have a sharp, cold metal instrument that I use to stab the food that goes into me. I guess it has a colonial energy.’
-

The idea of hypnagogia exploitation is interesting, but if all we're going to get is postmodern poetry fragments that decry 2400 year old eating instruments, maybe our thought leaders should stick to microdosing LSD for ideas.

Re:"Forks are colonalism"

[Jeremi]

Different people dream about different things.

Most of what people dream about is silly or irrelevant, even with respect to their own life. Occasionally there might be a nugget of insight that is relevant to the dreamer, but if you're hoping to get something useful to you from somebody else's unconscious, you're just setting yourself up for disappointment.

OTOH, if you were simply offended by Horowitz' subconscious assessment of forks, and felt the need to go on the record about that, then I think there is nothing more to discuss here.

Re:"Forks are colonalism"

[cfalcon]

It's not the anonymous subject's assessment of forks that is silly, it's that it was the ONLY hypnagogic element that managed to pass the filters of both Horowitz (the relaying researcher) and Oberhaus (the article writer), and get reported in the article. A million ideas, but the Critical Theory one is the one that bubbles up?

This is being peddled as a way to increase creativity and by extension help the world in some fashion, hence its write-up on motherboard and article on slashdot, and presumably also hence its funding at MIT. Everyone reading this is hoping it lets someone solve a problem of a thousand generations, not conflate Roman utensils with out-of-fashion actions of certain select European states in the nineteenth century.

Re:"Forks are colonalism"

[CSMoran]

maybe our thought leaders should stick to microdosing LSD for ideas.

Actually the hypnagogic state is more akin to a dissociative experience than to a psychedelic.

Well that explains a lot...

[bobbied]

There are some impossibly crazy folks in this world. Can we PLEASE stop this crazy train? I'm ready to wake up now!

Captcha.. It's only a dream.... A bad dream...

Weird Part of Sleep

[DatbeDank]

I always see all sort of weird and vivid images at that time of sleep. I sometimes hear and have conversations with some beings.

Doubly so, those beings always ruin my path to sleep by forcing me to wake up. I'd like to give them a piece of my mind for doing so!

This already exists.

[Type44Q]

This is already a thing.

Obligatory Futurama

[Nidi62]

Leela: Didn't you have ads in the 21st century?"

Fry: Well sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games... and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts, and bananas and written on the sky. But not in dreams, no siree.

Re:Obligatory Futurama

[Jason Levine]

This reply brought to you by Lightspeed Briefs!

Re:Obligatory Futurama

[jfdavis668]

Shut up and take my money!

System for Dream Control = systemd

[jfdavis668]

Is this an escalation of the conspiracy?

Re:Old Hag

[Nidi62]

I was sleeping last night and my cat jumped up on my chest and sat down.. and I remember thinking, I wonder if this is where the "old hag" vision comes from. (A creature that sits on your chest usually accompanied by a feeling of severe panic like you're going to die) Someone in a state of dreamy hallucination with a cat on their chest could easily invoke that image.

That's actually a sign of sleep paralysis. Sleep paralysis comes with a sensation of something pressing on your chest as well as hallucinations of something on you or in the room. According to wikipedia it's surprisingly common, but rarely occurs regularly. Supposedly it can be really terrifying.

Comment

[WallyL]

I read the title as, "MIT Researchers Developed a 'Systemd for Dream Control'" and thought, "Oh, great. Now they're ruining dreams too! Systemctl stop nightmare.service"

Visualize your dream

[KlomDark]

Record it in the present tense. You won't rely on open eyes to see, the walls you built within come tumbling down, and a new world will begin. Living twice at once you learn you're safe from pain in the dream domain - A soul set free to fly!

It's a place where you will learn, to face your fears, retrace the years, and ride the whims of your mind. Put it into a permanent form: If you persist in your efforts, you can achieve dream control. Commanding in another world, suddenly, you hear and see, this magic new dimension. A round trip journey in your head, Master of illusion, can you realize, your dream's alive, you can be the guide.

Inception

[Stonent1]

Time to really mess with their minds, Inception style.

Re:The Dream Police

[Chris Mattern]

Absolutely the first thing I thought of.