Dormio: Interfacing with Dreams

Frequently Asked Questions

1. How does Dormio work?
2. What are sleep onset, hypnagogia, or stage 1 sleep? Do we dream during sleep onset?
3. What's new about Dormio compared to the steel ball technique and other past sleep neuroscience tools?
4. Does this technology enable lucid dreaming?
5. What motivated the development of Dormio?
6. What past work inspired you? Where can I read more about it?
7. How did the team form and develop Dormio?
8. How can I get one?
9. Can I try targeted dream incubation (TDI) without these technologies?
10. What are the main ethical concerns associated with Dormio?
11. Where has this work been shown?
12. What are the next projects you're planning?
13. What else are you all building?

1. How does Dormio work?

   The Dormio system is conceptually quite simple. The aim of the system is to influence and extend a transitional state between wakefulness and sleep. To achieve this, we must track the occurrence of this transitional state (hypnagogia) and then interrupt the user’s sleep to prevent them from slipping into deeper sleep stages. In the Dormio system, a user wears a glove-like device with sensors. These sensors collect biosignals from the hand to measure changes in muscle tone, heart rate, and skin conductance. In past research, all of these biosignals have been shown to change during the transition from wakefulness to sleep. When the biosignals signal the onset of sleep, a timer of a few minutes starts. At the end of the timer, an audio recording is played to ask the user for a dream report, bringing the wearer back into wakefulness, but ideally not into full wakefulness. We record everything the user says during their dream report, which could be useful for users to play back later to avoid forgetting a potentially useful idea. Following their dream report, the system then plays an audio cue, reminding the wearer to think of certain words (like "fork" or "rabbit"), in the hopes of integrating the cued topic into their next set of dreams. The user then drifts back to sleep, with the cue in mind. In our laboratory testing, we have found that the cued words reliably entered the hypnagogic dreams of our users. The system continues to track the state (awake or asleep) of the user, repeating the process described above of waking them up after a few minutes of sleep to collect a dream report. This protocol is carried out repeatedly to guide dreams and collect dream reports.

2. What are sleep onset, hypnagogia, or stage 1 sleep? Do we dream during sleep onset?

   Sleep onset refers to the transition from wakefulness to sleep. Hypnagogia refers to a state occurring in the transition between wakefulness and sleep. Stage 1 sleep (also called NREM1 or N1 stage sleep) occurs as you fall asleep and is the first stage of non-REM sleep. It typically lasts for only a few minutes. Most hypnagogic dreams occur during stage 1 sleep. A healthy debate exists around questions about dreaming during N1 in the scientific community. Dreams experienced in hypnagogia have variably been called dreaming, lucid dreaming, hypnagogic hallucinations, or micro dreaming. If you're interested in a classification of dreaming's core phenomenology and the placement of hypnagogia along this spectrum, please check out Tore Nielsen's 2017 Paper on Microdream Neurophenomenology. 

3. What's new about Dormio compared to the steel ball technique and other past sleep neuroscience tools?

   We hope the Dormio both formalizes and extends the scope and capability of the steel ball technique to harness the creative potential of the sleep onset (hypnagogic) period. In comparison to many other tools for sleep neuroscience, we built the Dormio to be a relatively inexpensive, unintrusive, and accessible tool for tracking sleep onset, while also bringing new capabilities to intervening in this stage to guide and collect dreams. We’ve expanded on these ideas in more depth below.

   The steel ball technique – famously used by Edison to gain insights into his inventions – is inspiring, but limited. Firstly, this technique relies solely on a coarse atonia (reduced muscle tone) signal and can only pinpoint one threshold of sleep onset (a loss of muscle control marked by the ball dropping). The traditional steel ball technique also requires that people wake themselves up fully to record any dream content (thus reducing potential for further cycles of hypnagogia) and doesn't facilitate dream theme guidance. In contrast, the Dormio system improves granularity of tracking sleep onset by measuring several biosignals, expanding capabilities for detecting sleep onset based on electrodermal activity, heart-rate variability, and muscle tension. Furthermore, the threshold associated with sleep onset for each of these measurements can be adjusted in software, enabling more personalization and the potential to tie feedback to multiple predetermined states defined by biosignals. Additionally, the Dormio system has been designed to prompt users for a dream report such that they are unlikely to slip into stage 2 sleep, while also avoiding startling users into full wakefulness, which helps enable users to have multiple rounds of targeted dream incubation. Moreover, the Dormio initiates automatic audio recording alongside our auditory prompt for dream reports, allowing users to speak their dreams in semi-lucid states, instead of waking themselves up entirely to record reports through writing as would be needed with the traditional steel ball technique. 

   Compared to other sleep tracking tools, ours offers improvements in being a relatively inexpensive and comfortable formfactor, with the aim of improving its relevance outside of the laboratory setting. Currently, much sleep tracking is done via polysomnography, which can be both unpleasant to wear and hugely expensive. In addition to reducing barriers in cost and comfort, our system also offers unique interactions to enable interventions at sleep onset in the form of targeted dream incubation. We use audio prompts and cues to guide dreams and collect dream reports, and our research has shown that these audio cues reliably enter dream content.

4. Does this technology enable lucid dreaming?

   A lucid dream is any dream in which the dreamer is aware of dreaming. In that sense, some Dormio users may experience a lucid dream. However, the popular culture reference to "lucid dreaming" usually refers to regaining lucidity in much later stage REM sleep many hours into sleep, not the hypnagogia that Dormio users experience within minutes after sleep onset. 

   A common question is if this technology can be extended to lucid dreaming. In our preliminary experiments with later-stage lucid dreaming, we found a few challenges that made it impractical for interface building. Some challenges include that later-stage REM lucid dreaming requires a full night of sleep, not just a nap like hypnagogia; as such, it often requires waking you up in the middle of the night and potentially disturbing your sleep schedule. It also involves full atonia unlike hypnagogia, so people would have much more difficulty describing their dreams without exiting them fully. Lastly, lucid dreaming is much rarer for people to experience than hypnagogic dreams, and as such, it was really hard to conduct experiments on lucid dreams. Additionally, when we chose to focus on sleep onset/hypnagogia, we were interested in a state that was semi-lucid (not fully lucid like late stage lucid dreaming) since in fully lucid dreaming, you are fully in control of your cognition in a way that seems less spontaneous than hypnagogic dreams. We personally found the hypnagogic state more interesting for creative idea generation. Still, late-stage lucid dreaming is super cool, important to the sciences, useful for self-exploration to so many people, and also just really fun, so we hope future work can eventually include lucid dreaming.

5. What motivated the development of Dormio?

   For Adam Haar Horowitz, the idea that there exists a state of mind which composes and constructs his conscious self, but remains inaccessible to him, was both frustrating and alluring. Haar Horowitz says, “Hypnagogia is a ‘me’ that I am unfamiliar with, a ‘me’ that slips past memory as we drift into unconsciousness. Good neuroscience, to me, is effective self-examination. Good technology in service of making neuroscience relevant outside the laboratory, then, should facilitate self-examination. The ends of this project are both practical and philosophical. I have no doubt that hypnagogia holds applications for augmenting memory, learning, and creativity. Yet also, after having explored the state myself, I find it to be a deeply valuable and inspiring sort of self-seeing which was inaccessible to me previously. As Nobel Prize winner Eric Kandel said, ‘human creativity...stems from access to underlying, unconscious forces.’ To know myself, and to be my most creative self, I'm interested in building tools for self-exploration in this sleep state. I would like to create a tool that I can hand people, that they can take home, and on their own explore and augment themselves.”

6. What past work inspired you? Where can I read more about it?

   This project is inspired by a very old technique – the steel ball technique – famously used by Edison to gain insights into his inventions. Our work, which both formalizes and extends the scope and capability of this technique, is impossible without past work investigating possibilities of influencing dreams in the neuroscience lab. This work includes that conducted by scientists like Stephen LaBerge and Benjamin Baird, who do wonderful work on later-stage lucid dreaming, focusing on the REM state. Scientists like Jonathan Smallwood and Jonathan Schooler have done work on mind-wandering and creativity, inspiring our idea that fluid thinking outside of executive control in hypnagogia (like mind-wandering) could augment creativity. Work by Deirdre Barrett compiling moments of inspiration found in sleep, and work by Robert Stickgold and Tore Nielsen on microdream phenomenology, all encouraged and informed us. Andreas Mavromatis wrote a whole thesis on hypnagogia, and his writing gave us a sense of the poetry and practical applications of this state (as did Nabokov, Oliver Sacks, Yoga Nidra practitioners, and Edgar Allen Poe writing on hypnagogia). Our sense of this vast work was given to us by the three advisors who have helped us most throughout this work, in and out of the classroom—Professors Pattie Maes, Ed Pace-Schott and Robert Stickgold.

7. How did the team form and develop Dormio?

   The development of the Dormio device was enabled by a deeply interdisciplinary team composed of members of the Media Lab community, including Ishaan Grover, Pedro Reynolds-Cuéllar, Adam Haar Horowitz, Aby Jain, Tomás Vega, Oscar Rosello, Eyal Perry, Christina Chen, Matthew Ha and more. There is a bit written about that process on this website, and you can see earlier versions of the project there too. It has been a long process! Ishaan Grover and Adam Haar Horowitz took the Human Machine Symbiosis class with Prof. Pattie Maes, while listening to Prof. Robert Stickgold lecture on dream states. We got together and tried to make an EEG detect sleep stages, and did a decent job detecting sleep spindles with a cheap Muse EEG, but thought that detection wouldn't generalize across individuals. We had friends like Rebecca Kleinberger and Sophia Yang who helped with our first glove prototype, and helped think through possible interaction designs. We had awesome subjects like Marie Therese Png who went in and out of hypnagogia and explained how our tech tweaks changed their experiences. Now we have a team of cognitive scientists, engineers, and makers who create experiments and possibilities. Plus we've had incredible past work to build with and build on from the neuroscience and HCI worlds, and advice and inspiration from mentors including Professors Pattie Maes, Ed Pace-Schott, and Robert Stickgold.

8. How can I get one?

   We do not offer Dormio for sale. However, the technology that drives Dormio is open source, meaning that you can build one for yourself with the right materials and tools. The software for our biosignal tracking is on Github and our Eagle file for circuit board design is online. Tomás, who led that build, wrote about it step by step here.

9. Can I try targeted dream incubation (TDI) without these technologies?

   We hope for targeted dream incubation (TDI), the method implemented by the Dormio device, to be technology-agnostic. We have developed an online timer that can be used to self-administer TDI: https://christinatchen.github.io/dormio/timer. 

10. What are the main ethical concerns associated with Dormio?

    We are deeply appreciative of questions about the ethical concerns about Dormio and the potential impacts of guiding dream content. A common question is whether this technology can be used for mind control. The answer is no; it’s a pretty terrible tool for mind control. Importantly, in hypnagogia, subjects are not entirely asleep (and not entirely awake), making them much less vulnerable than most people typically assume when they first learn about this project. Participants are aware that they are in an experiment room, though that awareness drifts in and out. Most, but not all, remember what they said throughout the experiment. Notably, we have had people wake themselves up when they had a weird enough dream that they did not want us experimenters to hear about it, and nothing in our system or protocol forced people to disclose things that they did not want to share; In other words, in hypnagogia, people are able to monitor their environment and be aware of their descent into sleep, limiting the capacity for inserting any ideas people don't want inserted, or extracting ideas they don't want extracted. 

    All that being said, we don't dismiss these ethical concerns at all. Even in its current state, this technology and the targeted dream incubation methodology raises ethical considerations regarding the impacts it may have on users. For example, the process of encouraging people to dream about certain subjects may change how they consider those subjects after waking up. We do not discount some diminished capacity for resistance to new ideas presented in hypnagogia. These are all things to keep in mind, although it is also worth acknowledging that hypnagogia has been known about and used for hundreds of years (for example, by Edison and other creative greats) and not used to nefarious ends, as far as we are aware. 

    To provide clarity on how this tool can be used, the Dream Engineering community is collectively writing a “Dream Engineering Ethic” in which outline our principles as a scientific community. We acknowledge that there is a fine line between using dream incubation for creative purposes, and using it for manipulation (such as advertising). We have expanded on our stance on dream advertising here (in addition to other platforms). We were pleased that the issue was raised on the floor of the Federal Trade Commission and has been written about in law journals.

11. Where has this work been shown?

    The Dormio device has been shown at the CHI 2018 Conference, Ars Electronica, the Science of Consciousness 2018 Conference, and the National Academy of Sciences. The project has also been shown in MIT's Museum Studio, covered in Studio International, and shown on ABC's 60 Minutes.

12. What are the next projects you're planning?

    We have many projects in the works. We want to extend our targeted dream incubation protocol to be device-free using online interfaces. We also want to test whether content we guide into hypnagogic dreams transfers into later stage REM dream content. Finally, we also want to test the memory, learning, and emotion regulation effect of guided hypnagogic dream content.

13. What else are you all building?

    We are part of the Fluid Interfaces group at the MIT Media Lab. We aim to design systems for cognitive support. Check out our group page here, and check out our projects focused on sleep here.