By Will Dowd

Three years ago, I began a strange experiment—strange even for a poet. For nine months, I seeded my dreams with recorded poetry from Harvard University’s audio archive, then tried to capture the resulting dreams on the page. I called the project Dreamfall.

I relied on Dormio, a targeted dream incubation device from the MIT Media Lab. Worn like a glove, the device’s sensors tracked my descent into hypnagogia, the borderland between waking and sleep, where thoughts give way to hallucinatory imagery. As I crossed that threshold, Dormio played a prerecorded prompt (in this case, the crackling voice of a poet). Minutes later, it would sound a gong and begin recording, and I would groggily recount my dream before it could fade from memory.