Real-time dialogue between experimenters and dreamers during REM sleep

February 19, 2021 12:00 PM

It's not, but this reads like the entrance to an ARG.* Instead of waiting for dreamers to tell us about a dream after it has ended, when they have transitioned to the waking state, we sought to obtain evidence showing that it is possible to interview them about their dreams at the time they are experiencing them. […] Demonstrating the viability of this “interactive dreaming”—when experimenter and dreamer communicate with each other in real time—would be a large step forward to promote future progress in dream research.

*Alternate reality game.

posted by bixfrankonis (13 comments total)

This is very cool, but because they experimented by having the dreamer do math, my first thought was "They're gonna try to make me do work in my sleep!"
posted by spenser at 12:31 PM on February 19, 2021 [6 favorites]

In college, in the dorm, a friend was sleeping, we asked him for the derivative of X squared. He mumbled 2 X. Upon awakening we told him he could do calculus in his sleep. He was really pissed we did that.
posted by njohnson23 at 1:18 PM on February 19, 2021 [12 favorites]

My wife gets stress dreams, often about negotiating a bunch of children through some hazardous situation. So when she seems to be struggling in her sleep I'll say something like "All the kids are safe now" and sometimes that works and she relaxes back into a deeper sleep.
posted by hypnogogue at 1:29 PM on February 19, 2021 [22 favorites]

Do you want Freddy Krueger? Because that's how you get Freddy Krueger.
posted by Glegrinof the Pig-Man at 1:30 PM on February 19, 2021 [12 favorites]

sometimes that works and she relaxes back into a deeper sleep.
posted by hypnogogue

eponysomnolent
posted by saturday_morning at 1:39 PM on February 19, 2021 [26 favorites]

Being able to get sleeping people to do cognitive work... You know some tech people are already considering how to extract value from this and scale it:

"It's like airbnb, but for your mind. Make money while you sleep!"

Basically, we've just made The Matrix's humans-as-cognitive-power-source viable.
posted by meehawl at 1:47 PM on February 19, 2021 [9 favorites]

Ursula LeGuin to the white courtesy phone, please.
posted by Gelatin at 2:05 PM on February 19, 2021 [12 favorites]

I hope this eventually translates to a way to harness the words and music I come up with in my dreams, because that shit is fire.
posted by vverse23 at 4:07 PM on February 19, 2021 [7 favorites]

My thought, too, Gelatin. George Orr, you're next in line. Say, you look a bit sleepy...
posted by doctornemo at 6:12 AM on February 20, 2021 [2 favorites]

"It's like airbnb, but for your mind. Make money while you sleep!"
That's the premise of a funny YouTube Premium episode of Bad Internet (link to free preview)
posted by grokus at 9:20 PM on February 20, 2021

"It's like airbnb, but for your mind. Make money while you sleep!"

See also: Neuromancer.
posted by gurple at 9:38 AM on February 21, 2021

I immediately thought of Peter Watts' "Blindsight" and the concept of soldiers operating while unconscious.
posted by Thistledown at 12:34 PM on February 22, 2021

"In college, in the dorm, a friend was sleeping, we asked him for the derivative of X squared. He mumbled 2 X. Upon awakening we told him he could do calculus in his sleep. He was really pissed we did that."


Doing integrals and derivatives is my personal gauge for how well a sexual encounter is going. If I pose myself the question "what is the derivative of x²?" and my answer is "2 uh ummm aaaaaaah 2 x.... aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa um is that divided by anyTHIAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA" then it is going well.
posted by rubah at 2:33 PM on February 23, 2021