“Night Shifts: Can Technology Shape Our Dreams?”, 2022-04 (; backlinks):
…Adam Horowitz envisions a time when the components of the Dormio [homepage] will be widely available; anyone will be able to download its blueprint and, with a few cheap pre-made circuits, construct her own dream incubator. The way it works is simple. The device connects to a website where you can record a voice message to yourself—“think about trees”—that will play as you begin to fall asleep. Dormio detects when you enter hypnagogia, waits a short period, then awakens you and prompts you to describe what you’re experiencing, and sends the recording to your hard drive.
…Okay. Focus. Just trees in general? I can’t think about trees in general. What was that Wordsworth line about trees? “Of many, one.” One tree. The magnolia tree in my backyard. I picture it. Pendulous pink blossoms, pale bark, spreading branches . . . Because something odd is happening to the magnolia tree. It’s the light. There’s no light. I mean there’s no sky. The tree is there, but there’s no sky. Yet I can see the tree. If I can see it, I think, there must be light somewhere . . . The sky, I think. The sky was inside. Inside of the tree. My thinking is heavy, slow. My eyelids flicker under the sleep mask. But the thought is persistent. What I saw was the inside of the tree. The tree was borrowing my vision and watching itself. That’s why it didn’t look the way a tree looks from the outside. That’s why it didn’t look the way a tree looks to humans.
“Pretty cool”, says my father over dinner. “What’s it for?”…The Dormio enables a limited shaping of the images that appear during sleep’s first stage. Yet this is enough to give bite to the question, to render it slightly less abstract. Why would I want to shape my dreams? What kinds of things can you do with dreams?
[cf. maladaptive daydreaming] …In the days following my tree experience, I continued using the Dormio. A couple of times, the word I selected was “quake”, the title of the classic 1996 computer game. I wanted to see what the chunky geometry and minor-tone palette of late-Nineties computer graphics would do inside me. What surprised me when I awoke was not that the tunnels and corridors of the game unfurled through a purple absence of sky at my wish, but that the color red predominated. That color is absent from my conscious memories of the game. But when I awoke, what I talked about was the red, the most vivid red, as if there’d been some kind of veil thrown over the reds I’d encountered in my waking life—as if in the dream I was standing very, very close to the color red. Maybe inside it.
After a few days of this, I found I was developing a sense, even a taste, for hypnagogia. Now, when I go to sleep, I watch for it. It’s the moment when thoughts take on a life of their own. Or more accurately, when they resume the life they’ve always led when I’m not there.
…My Dormio-assisted adventures in hypnagogia showed me how unbelievably, compulsively, naturally, and irresistibly creative the mind becomes once it slips loose of conscious control. [cf. discussions of GPT-3] At times it felt as if my awareness was coming apart under the pressure of creative energy, like a thin cotton shirt under a fire hose. One afternoon, I choose “basketball” as my incubating word. I close my eyes and picture a basketball. Soon the image starts to spiral out from its shape—the ball’s pattern of tiny leather bumps and the indented black lines that swim over its surface become directions for the evolution of an entire space, a world crisscrossed by unspooling lines, overlaid with orange squares, a world through which I’m moving at light speed. When, after 6–10 minutes, I am awakened, I’ve lived through several phases of this constantly evolving basketball world.
I’ve long been haunted by the Buddhist idea that we die and are reborn dozens of times per second. The ancient maxim intimates that beneath the scale of consciousness and conventional experience lies a ceaseless torrent of change, a swarm of chasms and metamorphoses. In one sense, it’s a kind of therapy for the fear of death. If you are afraid of dying, think of how much you have changed since you were 6—since you were a fetus—since before that—can you imagine a greater change? My hypnagogic experiences suggest that similar changes are constantly taking place beneath the illusory continuity of ordinary waking consciousness.
…And this is sleep? I think, jettisoned into wakefulness by the sound of my iPad. This is rest? This is unconsciousness?
I experience a vague horror. I feel, very slightly and for the first time, how one might long for nothingness. I feel a new sympathy for the expressions I’ve sometimes encountered among the old, the ill, the insane, or the ancients—expressions of the desire for everything to stop. When I finally quit using the Dormio, it’s because I’ve grown a little afraid of what it reveals.
This helpless creativity of my mind, this incessant hypnagogic generation of forms and worlds, isn’t like the productions of human artists. Looking at surrealist images by Salvador Dali or even Max Ernst while my vision is still saturated by the shapes and colors of hypnagogia, I’m most taken by the way, in the pictures, creativity has stopped. It’s suspended, pinned like a butterfly between the wooden edges of the frame. But the images of hypnagogia never stop; the creativity of the dreaming mind is a transformative force defined by the fact that it can’t be distilled into intelligible sentences, paintable images, tolerable music.
And when it escapes hypnagogia, this creative energy dives deeper into the sleeping mind, into late-stage dreams, where it takes a viral form, a form that you can bring back up into consciousness in deceptive, melting images and phrases, all marked by a trademark blur, a kind of birthmark, an emblem of its continuing participation in the ceaseless transformations of dreams. And these fragments, when examined closely, defamiliarize ordinary consensus reality in a manner different from that of hypnagogia.
For example, the night after my basketball experiment, I dreamed that I was a basketball player. In this late-sleep dream, I find the restless transformations of hypnagogic basketball have moderated. There’s still a fluidity to the outlines, a sense that I’m always standing a little too close to things to see them fully. But now my dreaming mind imitates a world stable enough for me to move around in the form of a human. I have the body of a basketball player. I’m nearly 7 feet tall, able to reach the basket with barely a hop. I can move at incredible speeds for a long time without losing my breath. But this body is new to me. I don’t really know how to use it, especially on the court. My shot is way off. So I hang out near the basket, dunk the ball—which I find to be easy. The people around me—my teammates, my coaches, and the people watching, the invisible pressure of millions of eyes, and, still worse, millions of dollars—are disappointed in me. Shocked even. Disgusted by the jerky, awkward way I move. So I pretend I’ve been injured. I need help; I need to relearn how to move, how to score, how to make this incredible body work again. Weeks or maybe years pass in the dream—and now we see the other side of hypnagogia’s micromysticism, now we see the mysticism of the large scale, of weeks, months, and years that pass in minutes of dream time.
I wake directly from immersion in a network of basketball anxieties, basketball relationships, and basketball movements accrued over years of dream time, into the present tense of wakefulness, with the sun coming through the blinds, my wife stirring beside me, the chirp of my daughter’s voice through the baby monitor.
…Adam told me an anecdote that expressed the challenges of a contemporary dream incubation culture. The Coors Brewing Company had gotten wind of his device and contacted him with a proposal. They’d hoped to provide a number of people with Dormios and incubate their dreams with the words “Coors beer”, the results of which would then be used in a new advertising campaign.
…I decided to conduct an experiment. Robert Stickgold had told me that what had surprised him most in his research was how easy it was to influence people’s dreams. The Dormio, as I’d experienced, offers a technological method for influencing hypnagogia, the initial stage of dreaming.
But Stickgold suggested you could also influence the deeper stage of dreaming, the stage that is less like a liquid mosaic of images and more like life—the stage where one encounters people, places, and things from one’s past. [see et al 1999]
I picked a place that has always seemed fundamentally sterile and alien to me—my university office, a space I primarily use for meetings, and where I’ve been unable to work. My office has a perceptual thinness to it—the surfaces seem empty. There’s nothing behind them, no memories, no importance.
So I took photos of my office using my iPad—the walls, the carpet, the desk. Every night for a week, I’d gaze at those images before going to sleep. Could I make my office a part of me? Could I intervene in the subconscious workshop where my important memories were assembled, and align my internal and external environments?
The result of my little experiment was ambiguous. I still don’t feel comfortable working in my office, though I am able to recall its contents vividly now in a way I wasn’t able to previously. In fact, I must confess that if anything, the effect has been the opposite of what I intended. I’ve developed a conscious aversion to the metal bookcase in my office, and have gradually been removing the books and taking them home.
Perhaps I can’t finally control which memories form a part of me and which don’t. Perhaps all I could do was show my office to the submerged part of me that decides what I hold on to and what I expel. For some reason, it likes the red brick of Baltimore row houses in the late summer sun. Maybe nothing will induce it to accept the drywall and carpet of my office.
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