BINGE-WATCHING DREAMFLIX
Weighing the Pros and Cons of a Device That Can Record Your Dreams
By Gardner Eeden
July 28th, 2018
–ST. LOUIS, MO
Instead of binge-watching the latest viral Netflix series, how about watching yourself in episodes of your own twisted inner dream world on Dreamflix?
As gaming and social media tech companies are rushing to give us immersive, interactive, “first-person” mind-blowing virtual experiences, a handful of smaller startups and researchers are trying to capture the ultimate virtual world we all inhabit naturally—the dream. The idea of a dream recorder (DR) isn’t just fantasy. People are working on it.
A device that can record and display our inner thoughts, imagination, and dream world would be one of the most profound devices ever created–but some may wonder if it should be created in the first place. What are the benefits and consequences of technology that might one day put all our brightest and darkest thoughts on display? How well have these companies considered the ramifications of the technology? Such a device would arguably do as much or more to alter human behavior than psychotropic drugs, Crispr, and gene splicing combined.
Imagine the marketable form of such a device; something that combines the abilities of an fMRI, EEG, and video recorder that’s portable enough to attach comfortably to your body. In essence, a device not unlike a smart phone or smart watch, with tiny electrodes that feed from the brain’s electrical signals in order to record our inner visualization, or that can read biosignals from your skin.
What would actually be recorded? To start, we’d capture an ongoing series of random images as crude visualizations, not unlike how we experience the dream; it would record pure, fractured thought as it’s formulated. It could be calibrated and set to infiltrate our near-subconscious levels of thought, then dive to deeper layers to get to deep stage dreaming. Assuming we are conscious in this state all the time (biconsciousness), whether asleep or awake in the world, we would not necessarily need to be asleep to use such a device.
Would our DR be able to capture sound as well, even if no actual sound waves are generated within the dream? Would it capture our perception of sound and convert it to an audible and understandable track within the device? It would certainly need to be able to provide instant playback and the ability to send the captured video imagery to your laptop or another source.
In one approach, we’d need to establish a baseline of conscious imagery and build a database of our particular visual perceptive data, as has been done in experiments by Dr. Yukiyasu Kamitami, with the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International in Kyoto. We all imagine things—even a ball, a dog, a girl—somewhat differently. Just like Siri and Alexa need to get to know your voice—the intonation and dialect you speak—the DR would need to understand what signals fire when you think of certain objects. After extensive mapping, a subject then sleeps in an MRI machine (no small feat in itself), and her visualizations are captured and matched to her database. With this, researchers have a very rough but often accurately close estimate of objects she sees within her dream.
Another approach is utilized with Dormio, a hand/finger device which collects biosignals that track transitions in sleep stages (such as muscle tone and heart rate change), specifically to study hypnagogia, the stage between waking and sleeping. Adam Haar Horowitz, a researcher with the Media Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, stated in a BBC interview that “The waking you will be more connected to the sleeping you and that connection between the two is a form of self-discovery.”
Then, there’s CloudX, a Los Angeles-based startup that seeks to directly record dream imagery, speech and motor behavior. It would use a combination of EEG, fMRI, fNRIS and EMG to produce a crude taped recreation of your dream. This project is in its startup phase and doing work with the professional dream research community, including the IASD (International Association for the Study of Dreams).
This is all a far cry from watching your last night’s dreams on an app no more complicated than Hulu. None of these projects, whether for research or commercial usage, are promising hi-res, 4K playback—or any meaningful playback at all.
But let’s assume these technical challenges are achieved; we can capture our dream, video and sound both, and replay it on a device. We would have countless hours of video, something akin to watching a cloudcam display that we would desperately try to make sense of (just as we attempt to interpret the dream), because we wouldn’t be able to understand it all. It would give us generations of data to process about our own thoughts; we could easily become obsessed, even addicted, to watching and dissecting our dreams. Indeed, the 1985 Wim Wenders film Until the End of the World gave us just such a scenario, in which people became utterly addicted to watching their own dream replay.
Perhaps most importantly, we are not going to like much of what we see—especially if watching the playback of our lovers, spouses, friends, and children. Even St. Augustine was terrified that God would judge his actions within the dream. Are we ready to experience our darker sides that we rarely acknowledge? Would it open the way for self-reflection and healing, or open the door to new, bolder (or pathological) ways of behaving in the world? It’s possible that our behavior in social media has already given us a clue.
Then throw into the mix an ability to spur lucidity within the dream. With stronger degrees of lucidity, we can be in the dream environment and do whatever we want—exercise our super powers of flight, strength, and speed; conjure any figure we like to interact with them; and have sexual encounters with anyone in the dream or anyone we can imagine. What would we do with a recording of us living out our wildest fantasies? Would we be posting these on Dreamflix or DreamHub?
Let’s consider how culture, industry, and other fields could be revolutionized by DR technology.
The subconscious mind, and thusly all imagery that it generates, is perception, not factual truth. It is both highly subjective and objective, a paradox of self-reflection. Rest assured, if humans can abuse a technology, we will.
HEALTH/MEDICAL
An entire new industry would spring up within the fields of neurology, psychology, and behavioral sciences.
Imagine being able to explore the inner mind of someone, such as an autistic child, who can’t outwardly express themselves in an understandable way. Or, perhaps, someone in a physical coma whose mental activity seems shuttered. What clues would be yielded from unedited broadcasts from the subconscious? Could the DR (Dream Recorder) open ways of communicating with those we couldn’t previously understand?
Imagine how this might shed light on the trapped mentalities of an autistic individual, someone suffering from schizophrenia, dementia, or just delusions in general. Could we develop any insights into how they might view the world? People prone to psychosomatic illnesses might be able to trace the origin of such delusions.
In the world of psychology, new treatments for people who display psychopathic behavior might be discovered. When the subconscious is made visible, we become exposed in ways far more intimate than our guarded confessions during therapy sessions. However, visualization of actions from the dream would be far from trust-worthy for the sake of diagnoses. The dream is where we exist unencumbered by laws of physics and morality, and surreal, obtuse events from the dream would be ripe for misinterpretation (just as the “interpretation” of dreams now). Psychiatrists sometimes use dreamwork as a means of overcoming debilitating fears; a DR could offer an entirely new approach.
Individuals would likely need to give legal consent to DR usage, whether awake or asleep. Countless ethical issues could arise in considering the devices as tools of treatment in psychiatric therapy. HIPAA laws and restrictions would certainly need a rewrite.
SCIENCE
Recorded imagery would be a scientific playground and/or battleground, rife with sparring factions of “materialists” (who believe that all consciousness, imagery and dream activity is physically based within the brain) and “fundamentalists” (who believe, to varying degrees, that consciousness is a fundamental force of the universe along with gravity, electromagnetism, and the nuclear forces). Would actual recorded evidence of subconscious activity provide real clues to explore regarding the origin and nature of consciousness itself?
First and foremost would be the pressing question that undermines all of reality TV, and also of quantum particle physics: being observed can change a particle’s state, and people who know they are being observed (or even suspect so) will change their behavior. But could they actually alter subconscious activity knowing that the activity would be viewed? Double-blind experiments may prove difficult and ineffective.
We could broaden the study of conscious experience and capture dream imagery at its shallowest layers—from the moment we close our eyes and our own inner visualization takes over. We could prove whether or not a “hypnogogic” state emerges from a different visual toolbox that transforms into dream imagery as we ride the conscious waves into—and through—our sleep cycles. Vitally, we could record our subconscious imagery even as we are awake and conscious with most of our attention and focus turned to the physical world. This is the basis of biconsciousness.
The ability to become lucid is key to using this technology to push the current limits of our conscious experience. Avid lucid dreamers could be enlisted to control their dream activities and do exercises that expand their simultaneous awareness in the world and the dream. They would become mental athletes in training. How far can they go? Would it be like an athlete watching tape of the day’s game; analyzing where they went wrong, what mistakes they made when losing lucidity, and how to correct them next time? After repeated viewings, they could learn how to hone their attention and focus to strengthen their dream stamina and control—and take it to new extremes.
ENTERTAINMENT
A recording device that displays all our wildest fantasies and epic surreal thought lines would be immensely addictive to watch and to learn about ourselves. Imagine taking a mental “selfie” of your current deep state thought. Would you be willing to share it with your friends? Your parents? Your wife or lover?
We would create “ultimate dream warrior” competitions; first person to achieve a wild goal within the dream wins. Lucid dreamers might broadcast their wild adventures; the “found footage” genre would have an entirely new springboard in which to experiment.
Put the DR on as you listen to music. You would essentially create your own music video to go along with it. Artists of all media—film, music, painting—could generate an endless creative loop that feeds on itself, exploring within the dream works of theirs that haven’t yet been produced, and producing them in the world.
We could possibly learn to value pure experience over “story.” People would create YouTube channels that are, literally, made of themselves, giving new meaning to “YouTube.”
Perhaps, at long last, we will be able to realize that people rarely, if ever, dream of “midgets” and people talking backward (thanks, David Lynch, for that trope). Maybe when confronted with real dream imagery and action, Hollywood will stop thinking that dreams are meant to tell stories or underscore plot lines. We don’t fold buildings in perfect geometrical lines, and shootouts are rare (thanks Christopher Nolan).
MILITARY
As with most technology, the military, especially in the hands of outlying terrorist factions, could put machines like this to horrible use. They could record the dreams of POWs and use them as interrogation bumpers. Sleep deprivation is already one of the most heinous torture methods. One of the last remaining comforts of a POW is that their captors can’t get in their heads.
Most frighteningly, if we can indeed capture video from the dream, would we also be able to insert visualizations into the dream? Brainhacking is a thing…would dreamhacking be far behind? And could it be used as a new form of subversive or subliminal advertising and marketing, or, worse, as a means of intimidating or terrifying an opponent?
If the reverse DR technology is realized and we are able to inject another person’s experiences into our conscious arena (just like the plot device in Kathryn Bigelow’s stunning 1995 film, Strange Days), groups could simulate terrifying and tragic experiences.
Military training might seek to tap into the wild and lawless “id” to further train special forces to prepare them for “black ops” missions.
RELIGION
If our consciousness is an intrinsic and vital part of our sense of self and our sense of spirituality, would these devices harness a more powerful tool for exploring, in a spiritual way, our connectedness with the universe? For centuries, some have felt that God speaks to them through their dreams; would people start seeing God in their dreams, the way we see Jesus in a piece of toast?
We would certainly see aspects of ourselves and our free, subconscious behavior that we might not recognize. As Carl Jung once wrote, “one does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
Most of these ideas may seem far-fetched now, but we have to remember just decades ago when artificial intelligence and quantum computing were the stuff of science fiction. Brilliant minds of today are cautioning against the rush to usage of technology we barely comprehend, technology that could be devastating and catastrophic in the wrong hands. It often comes down to weighing whether the benefits would be worth the abuses.
And so we ask the question that ethical scientists have asked for centuries: If we can, does it mean we should? Captain Kirk from Star Trek was wrong. “Space…the final frontier…”. The final frontier is exactly the frontier we started with…our own mind.
GARDNER EEDEN is a writer, photographer and avid lucid dreamer and author of Lucid: Awake in the World and the Dream. He recently presented his groundbreaking workshop on biconsciousness, “Lucidity & the Biconscious Mind” at the International Association for the Study of Dreams conference in Scottsdale, AZ. Eeden is producing a new video and workshop series titled “Hardcore Lucid: WTF, Dream?” that will be available in spring of 2019. You can follow him on Facebook or Twitter @gardnereeden. For interviews/correspondence, email: gardnereeden@gmail.com