Wouldn't it be wonderful if you were in full control of your dreams? Imagine when you are dreaming, you could actually be conscious that you are in a dream. You could do all the crazy stuff you ever wanted to do.
Want to fly around? Do it. Want to drive the fastest car in the world? Do it! The sky is the limit when you're in a dream. Wait, no. Even the sky is not the limit as you could go to Mars in your spacecraft!
This already happens to some people. It is called lucid dreaming. It is the awareness that you are in a dream. It happens to a very small percentage of the human population and scientists are not sure exactly why that happens.
But if researchers at MIT's Dream Lab have their way, they could help anyone indulge in lucid dreaming. I for one would love to lucid dream and travel around in space in my special spaceship!
Induced Lucid Dreaming
The team at MIT want to establish once and for all that dreams are not nonsense. Rather, they can be hacked, augmented and swayed to our benefits. It matters greatly because we spend roughly a third of our lives sleeping. If we could tap into the dream state, we could make use of this time for our betterment too.
Dream Lab's solution is to induce lucid dreaming. If people realize they are in a dream, they could do all kinds of cool stuff. They could do all the things that scare them in real lives as there would be no real consequences in a dream. They could try out all the things they have always wanted to do.
To induce lucid dreaming, Dream Lab has created a glove-like device called Dormio. It is fitted with a host of sensors that can detect the state of sleep the wearer is in. When they enter into a state between the conscious and subconscious, the glove plays a pre-recorded audio cue. This helps the wearer enter into lucid dreaming mode. The team was successful in its testing of the glove.
The research done by the scientists could help us not only take command of our dreams but also better understand them. Till now, we don't have a complete understanding of why we dream and the meaning of the different variety of dreams we have. Hopefully, this will provide some answers.