Sleep is a forgotten country of the mind. A vast majority of our technologies are built for our waking state, even though a third of our lives are spent asleep. Current technological interfaces miss an opportunity to access the unique, imaginative, elastic cognition ongoing during dreams and semi-lucid states. In turn, each of us misses an opportunity to use interfaces to influence our own processes of memory consolidation, creative insight generation, gist extraction, and emotion regulation that are so deeply sleep-dependent. In this project, we explore ways to augment human creativity by extending, influencing, and capturing dreams in Stage 1 sleep. It is currently impossible to force ourselves to be creative because so much creative idea association and creative incubation happens in the absence of executive control and directed attention. Sleep offers an opportunity for prompting creative thought in the absence of directed attention, if only dreams can be controlled.

Inspiration

Sleep is a forgotten country of the mind. A vast majority of our technologies are built for our waking state, even though a third of our lives are spent asleep. Current technological interfaces miss an opportunity to access the unique, imaginative, elastic cognition ongoing during dreams and semi-lucid states. In turn, each of us misses an opportunity to use interfaces to influence our own processes of memory consolidation, creative insight generation, gist extraction, and emotion regulation that are so deeply sleep-dependent. In this project, we explore ways to augment human creativity by extending, influencing, and capturing dreams in Stage 1 sleep. It is currently impossible to force ourselves to be creative because so much creative idea association and creative incubation happens in the absence of executive control and directed attention. Sleep offers an opportunity for prompting creative thought in the absence of directed attention, if only dreams can be controlled.

Scientific Background

During sleep onset, a window of opportunity arises in the form of hypnagogia, a semi-lucid sleep state where we all begin dreaming before we fall fully unconscious. Hypnagogia is characterized by phenomenological unpredictability, distorted perception of space and time, and spontaneous, fluid idea association. Edison, Tesla, Poe, and Dalí each accessed this state by napping with a steel ball in hand to capture creative ideas generated in hypnagogic microdreams when it dropped to the floor below.

Engineering and Experimentation

In this project we modernize this technique, using an interactive social robot accompanied with a custom sleep stage tracking system, and auditory biofeedback. We are able to influence, extract information from, and extend hypnagogic microdreams for the first time: we found that active use of hypnagogia with the system can augment human creativity. This system enables future research into sleep, an underutilized and understudied state of mind vital for memory, learning, and creativity. This system is a tested prototype. Dormio has a published study in alt.CHI (see publications section), a second publication under review, and is being used in four independent labs for ongoing sleep research. We're actively presenting and testing the work in varied settings, like the McLean Technology in Psychiatry Summit and the International Sleep Replay Workshop, to gain information about sleep interventions in various conditions. We’ve just completed a second study (with 50 participants) on dream incubation and creativity augmentation. But sleep onset is still poorly understood, and dreams are still really a mystery—we're learning! Please reach out if anything seems off, or just to chat.

This work has been hugely collaborative. The following people, in alphabetical order by first name, have all made it possible: Abhinandan Jain, Adam Haar Horowitz, Christina Chen, Eyal Perry, Ishaan Grover, Kathleen Esfahany, Matthew Ha, Oscar Rosello, Pattie Maes, Pedro Reynolds-Cuéllar, Robert Stickgold, and Tomás Vega. For an in-depth dive, see the FAQ below and see more on this website.

If you want all the details, please read this thesis and offer any feedback!