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| © MIT Dream Lab Researchers say they can tweak your dreams so your time asleep isn’t just for resting. By wearing a special glove, sleepers can optimize their snoozing. |
By Caroline Delbert, Popular Mechanics
- MIT's Dream Lab is using a special sleep glove setup to tell your dreams what to do.
- Many Americans don't get enough sleep, and "optimizing" probably isn't the answer.
- Suggesting themes into lucid dreams is similar to posthypnotic suggestion.
Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) say they can tweak your dreams so that your time asleep isn’t just for resting. They also say turning dreams into usable data can benefit your waking life.
By wearing a special device the MIT Dream Lab has named Dormio, sleepers can purportedly optimize their snoozing. Here's how it works, from a OneZero report:
“With sensors wrapped around the user’s wrist and fingers, the device tracks muscle tone, heart rate, and skin conductance to identify the various stages of sleep. When the user slips into hypnagogia, the device plays a prerecorded audio cue, usually consisting of one word, and records anything the user might say in response.
In a 50-person experiment with Dormio, [researchers] found that the content of the audio cue successfully showed up in people’s dreams—if the word was 'tiger,' for instance, users reported dreaming of a tiger. But more than altering dream content, [researchers] also found that this extension of and interaction with the hypnagogic state improved users’ performance creativity tasks.”
Hypnagogia is the phase between being awake and asleep that you can manipulate by lucid dreaming—where you're asleep, but you have dreams where you feel aware, conscious, and in control of your actions. In Richard Linklater’s 2001 film Waking Life, several nested scenes are progressively revealed to be convincing lucid dreams instead of reality.
“The hero complains to a friend that he feels trapped in his dream, and keeps waking up into another dream. How can he break free? The friend warns him it is easy to be deceived by dreams,” Roger Ebert wrote of the film in 2001. “The one thing you can't change, his friend says, is the lighting. If you try to turn a light switch on and off, and it doesn't work, you're dreaming. It's a test that never fails.”
Indeed, it’s this hook point from wakefulness into “lucid dreaming” on which the MIT Dream Lab researchers focus. And other researchers have studied the relationship between posthypnotic suggestion—the kinds of instructions given to people who seek hypnosis to quit smoking, for example, or to help soothe a troubling phobia—and ways to induce lucid dreams. Both involve lulling people into a liminal state before introducing a suggestion and trying to direct their behaviors.
“Whether you’re talking about memory augmentation or creativity augmentation or improving mood the next day or improving test performance, there’s all these things you can do at night that are practically important,” researcher Adam Horowitz told OneZero. But our understanding of what dreams really are or what they mean is rudimentary at best, subject to interpretation that seems as much like fortune-telling or cold reading as anything like science.
Sleep itself is vital to health, and about one-third of American adults consistently don’t get enough. If the idea of adding a clunky science glove and trying to hypnotize yourself during your typical regimen sounds tiresome in a bad way, you aren’t alone. Instead, try going to bed a little earlier tonight and giving your mind a break.
See more at: Popular Mechanics
By wearing a special device the MIT Dream Lab has named Dormio, sleepers can purportedly optimize their snoozing. Here's how it works, from a OneZero report:
“With sensors wrapped around the user’s wrist and fingers, the device tracks muscle tone, heart rate, and skin conductance to identify the various stages of sleep. When the user slips into hypnagogia, the device plays a prerecorded audio cue, usually consisting of one word, and records anything the user might say in response.
In a 50-person experiment with Dormio, [researchers] found that the content of the audio cue successfully showed up in people’s dreams—if the word was 'tiger,' for instance, users reported dreaming of a tiger. But more than altering dream content, [researchers] also found that this extension of and interaction with the hypnagogic state improved users’ performance creativity tasks.”
Hypnagogia is the phase between being awake and asleep that you can manipulate by lucid dreaming—where you're asleep, but you have dreams where you feel aware, conscious, and in control of your actions. In Richard Linklater’s 2001 film Waking Life, several nested scenes are progressively revealed to be convincing lucid dreams instead of reality.
“The hero complains to a friend that he feels trapped in his dream, and keeps waking up into another dream. How can he break free? The friend warns him it is easy to be deceived by dreams,” Roger Ebert wrote of the film in 2001. “The one thing you can't change, his friend says, is the lighting. If you try to turn a light switch on and off, and it doesn't work, you're dreaming. It's a test that never fails.”
Indeed, it’s this hook point from wakefulness into “lucid dreaming” on which the MIT Dream Lab researchers focus. And other researchers have studied the relationship between posthypnotic suggestion—the kinds of instructions given to people who seek hypnosis to quit smoking, for example, or to help soothe a troubling phobia—and ways to induce lucid dreams. Both involve lulling people into a liminal state before introducing a suggestion and trying to direct their behaviors.
“Whether you’re talking about memory augmentation or creativity augmentation or improving mood the next day or improving test performance, there’s all these things you can do at night that are practically important,” researcher Adam Horowitz told OneZero. But our understanding of what dreams really are or what they mean is rudimentary at best, subject to interpretation that seems as much like fortune-telling or cold reading as anything like science.
Sleep itself is vital to health, and about one-third of American adults consistently don’t get enough. If the idea of adding a clunky science glove and trying to hypnotize yourself during your typical regimen sounds tiresome in a bad way, you aren’t alone. Instead, try going to bed a little earlier tonight and giving your mind a break.
