Article: Your Dreams May No Longer Be Your Own

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“Sweet dreams” makes for a lovely good night wish worldwide. The dream world, long considered a private place of both dreams and nightmares, may become a more public, manipulated space with advances in neurology, artificial intelligence, and sleep science.

As people go off to bed for hours of rest from the waking world, they enter a time of sleep that oscillates between different states, from deep to light sleep to more active sleep called REM. REM stands for rapid eye movement, which characterizes a time of rest when the eyes swish back and forth and vivid dreaming takes place in the mind. Much has been written about dreams, from their interpretation to their role in mental health. Dreams help process trauma and play a positive role in learning and memory. Recent research into sleep and dreaming has veered into new capabilities in external dream manipulation. The growing ability to affect other people’s dreams through technology has spawned a new class of sleep specialists—Dream Engineers.

In an article titled “A Dream Engineering Ethic,” the authors AJH Haar, Pattie Maes, and Michelle Carr from MIT described new scientific developments in the direct manipulation of dream content. (Infinite Zero) “This includes technologies for enhancing specific memories and dampening others during sleep, techniques that allow the formation of new habits and associations during sleep, and protocols that can change the actual subject matter and substance of dreams.” Research has shown that the dream world no longer remains personal and impenetrable. Rather, the dream space is now described as, “porous and available to outside influence.”

A recent publication in The Science of Learning by Nathan Whitmore titled “Targeted memory reactivation of face-name learning depends on ample and undisturbed slow-wave sleep” describes a technique to intervene in sleep to enhance remembering names and faces. (nature.com) The study involved students learning names and faces in two different history classes. After studying 80 different names and faces, the students would nap in a sleep lab that used sensors to measure different sleep stages, such as REM and slow wave sleep. During the nap, the scientists would replay the names of the people studied in class along with soft music. Researchers found that students better remembered names and faces mentioned during the slow wave of sleep than those who did not get name intervention. The work suggests that targeted information delivered during slow-wave sleep can serve as a memory enhancer and supports the porousness of the dream space.

Sleep, and more specifically, the dream space, has long been considered a private space, and dreams play a crucial role in learning and memory as well as working out life’s traumas and difficulties. However, dream interpretation and intervention traditionally fell to psychologists and mystics. Still, the advances in sensor technology and sleep science now make it possible to target specific parts of the sleep cycle to intervene in dreams to enhance memory and even alter the subject matter of dreams. The burgeoning field of technology and sleep science has created a new group of researchers that call themselves “dream engineers.” Dream engineers have discovered that the dream space appears more malleable than ever. One example in memory enhancement shows that targeting slow-wave sleep cycles be used to enhance memory for names and faces.

On the one hand, such discoveries offer ways to help memory function and improve studies. On the other hand, now that dreams appear penetrable and no longer entirely personal, the dreamscape opens up to new visitors, wanted and unwanted. Sensors available today, from wearable fitness devices to smartphones and smart speakers, can listen to sleeping individuals and determine their sleep state, opening the door to dream manipulation. As technology and the community of dream engineers continues to evolve, we need to carefully consider how we will treat the once private space of sleep and dreams.

Dr. Smith’s career in scientific and information research spans the areas of bioinformatics, artificial intelligence, toxicology, and chemistry. He has published a number of peer-reviewed scientific papers. He has worked over the past seventeen years developing advanced analytics, machine learning, and knowledge management tools to enable research and support high-level decision making. Tim completed his Ph.D. in Toxicology at Cornell University and a Bachelor of Science in chemistry from the University of Washington.

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