Given the state of our world, being able to escape to a chosen alternate reality through dreams sounds like a, er, dream. Luckily, scientists at MIT’s Media Lab have been working on a way to let people control their dreams through Dormio, a device…
Dormio works by combining standard sleep tracking technology, which monitors the wearer's heart rate and electrical changes occurring on the surface of the skin, along with finger movements that indicate if a person is starting to enter a sleep state. Using these indicators, Dormio knows when a person has entered hypnagogia, a transitional period between wakefulness and sleep in which a person is still conscious but teetering on the verge of sleep.
Once a person enters hypnagogia, Dormio's app interface comes into effect. Prior to sleep, a person can tell the wearable what they would like to dream about.
Dormio produces similar effects as lucid dreaming simply by catching people when they are at their most easily influenced state. Users don't have the same level of control over their dreams once they enter that state as they would if they were lucid dreaming, but can still inject ideas into their mind just prior to sleeping, effectively creating the dreamscape that they want.
