Innovative
gadgets and accessories designed to maximize people’s non-waking hours give those who burn the midnight oil new ways to feel rested despite limited slumber time. More recently, though, sleep technology has extended to encompass a new type of shut-eye product: the dream control app. These dream weavers purport to get sleepers through the night in ways never before thought possible.
Yumemiru: The
Yumemiru (translation: “see the dream”) iPhone app puts people in the proverbial director’s chair when it comes to their dreams. Before going to sleep, users can essentially script the images they’d like to see while sleeping, from among eight different fantasy scenarios (including, ‘flying in the sky’, ‘romance’, and ‘becoming rich’) designed to stimulate the astral plane. Users run the app in their phone’s background, where it plays sounds programmed to trigger the specified illusion. Of course, the app’s roots lie in advertising—it was created by Japanese agency
Hakuhodo’s Future Technology Works department—so don’t be surprised if you awaken yearning to buy something random.
Dream:ON: Many iPhone owners can’t get into bed without their device by their side, but a new
iOS app gives them a practical reason to snuggle up with it. Developed by British psychologist Richard Wiseman,
Dream:ON uses soundscapes to lead sleepers into the dreamscapes of their choosing. (Among 20 options are ‘Space Shuttle’, ‘Wild West’, and ‘A Trip to Tokyo’.) The idea is to provoke lucid dreaming, that state of consciousness where the line between imagination and reality becomes fuzzy. Though its effectiveness is, thus far,
debatable, the hope is that this unique dream database will ultimately provide valuable research for helping sufferers of depression.
Sigmund: Inception may have left
theatregoers scratching their heads, but a more plausible version of the film’s dream invasion premise has hit the iTunes store. Harvard PhD student Daniel Nadler, also a fellow at the university’s
Mind/Brain/Behavior Interfaculty Initiative, designed
Sigmund after conducting a sleep study in which nearly 40% of participants’ dreams were altered by readings conducted during their REM cycles. The app provides users with a list of 1,000 keywords from which they can create a basic dream story that’s read aloud during their deepest moments of sleep. If the app proves a hit, “event dreaming” could become the next hot form of entertainment.
