The first workshop on Dream Engineering took place on January 28 and 29, 2019 at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, MA. The workshop brought "roughly half of the world's dream researchers" to the Media Lab, to brainstorm alongside MIT engineers who develop new technologies for studying, recording, and influencing dreams. The workshop resulted in new ideas for devices as well as new opportunities for studies and experiments. Panels covered themes such as nightmares, lucid dreaming, memory replay, and sensory stimulation, as well as technology talks, demos, and posters. The program maximized time for brainstorming sessions, all on the theme of Dream Engineering—how technology can be applied to record or influence dreaming.

We’re very excited that, based on the talks and technologies presented at the first Dream Engineering workshop, the journal Consciousness and Cognition accepted a Special Issue on Dream Engineering. That journal is accessible here, with submissions gathered from labs around the globe. 

This article focuses on the Dream Engineering workshop.  This article focuses on the Dream Engineering workshop, community and research. To see the schedule, attendee bios, and updates on ongoing research, check out this website. 

Following the success of bringing together a community around this emerging field, we gathered virtually this year to host a Dream Engineering Seminar Series. This new series of demos, research presentations and discussions went on for 7 weeks, and all of the recorded talks are accessible and free at this link. They're awesome, take some time to watch! As a research community, we have to keep dialogue going both so we can collaborate and so that we can collectively work through ethical challenges in research, like this one.