Dreams are a very integral part while we are sleeping. We dream every night while sleeping. Now the question is can we record the dreams we see? Can those dreams which we see every night can be seen by others? Is there a device that can record dreams? Let us see in this article if we get answers or not. 

What Is a Dream?

A dream is a combination of images, ideas, emotions, and sensations that occur in mind spontaneously during specific stages of sleep. Humans dream for two hours every night. Each dream that a person has lasted between five and twenty minutes on average; however, the dreamer may feel that the dream lasts much longer.

Throughout recorded history, science, philosophy, and religion have been interested in the nature and purpose of dreams. Dream interpretation was used in psychotherapy for many years and was first used by the Babylonians in the third millennium BCE.

Oneirology is the name given to the study of dreams in science. It was also used by the ancient Sumerians even earlier. Most contemporary dream research focuses on the neurophysiology of dreams and developing and testing theories about how dreams work.

It is unknown where in the brain dreams begin, whether they have a single source or come from several different parts of the brain, and what the function of dreaming is for the body or mind.

Sleep and dreaming are related. Dreams mostly happen during the REM sleep stage, characterized by heightened brain activity that simulates being awake. It has been hypothesized that animals dream because REM sleep is measurable in many species and because research indicates that all mammals experience REM.

Though not all REM awakenings cause dream reports, people dream during non-REM sleep. A dream must first be reduced to a verbal message to be examined. This oral report accounts for the subject’s memory of the dream, not the subject’s experience.

Therefore, it is impossible to prove that non-human beings, human fetuses, or pre-verbal infants dream.

Can We Record the Dreams?

Scientists have created a technique that allows you to keep track of your dreams and even direct them toward specific topics.

To analyze dreams, researchers have developed a new wearable device called Dormio and a technique called Targeted Dream Incubation (TDI), according to MIT News.

The researchers claim that TDI and Dormio are intended to be “tools for controlled experimentation on dream content” in their article. These are designed to aid academics in understanding how dreams function and their impact on various factors such as memory, emotion, and creativity.

TDI is a protocol that may be used in an app on the Dorimo wearable sleep-tracking device to capture the wearer’s dreams. Furthermore, it is possible to steer the wearer’s dreams towards specific thoughts while falling asleep by constantly bombarding them with information around the notion.

The data is sent to the wearer during hypnagogia, the first stage of sleep, because people can hear sounds even when they are dreaming.

Dormio, a sleep-tracking device, can change dreams by detecting the wearer’s sleep stages and sending auditory signals when they enter hypnagogia. These signals are based on the individual’s incoming physiological data being supplied during the sleep cycle to alter the dream.

Dormio, according to Robert Stickgold, “takes dream research to a new level, connecting directly with an individual’s dreaming brain and influencing the actual content of their dreams.”

One of the study’s authors and the director of the Center for Sleep and Cognition at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. The potential benefits of Dormio for improving creativity and learning are just mind-blowing.

In addition to platforms for recording, storage, analysis, and streaming via apps for iOS and the web, researchers have developed an improved Dormio device. Additionally, the team is working with artists to assist them in producing new works of art by enhancing their creativity with cutting-edge dream technology.

Are We Getting Close to Discovering a Miracle?

Although most of us dream four to six times per night, 90% of our dreams are forgotten 10 minutes after they end. According to Antonio Zadra, a psychology professor at the Université de Montréal, dreams are made to be forgotten. It’s “critical not to mistake dream experiences with reality.”

“There is no unanimity among dream researchers regarding (the) function (of dreams),” noted Deirdre Leigh Barrett, a psychology professor at Harvard Medical School, but there are numerous competing views. Experts say we must experience dreams, even if we can’t remember them. Those experts cannot agree on why they are significant.

Drs. John Allan Hobson and Robert McCarley of Harvard University proposed the activation-synthesis hypothesis, which states that we do not dream at all. Instead, everything we think of as a dream is our brain trying to make sense of a series of electrical impulses that occur in the brain stem during REM sleep when we wake up.

Others feel that dreams represent a form of threat simulation, an evolutionary training ground for our brains to prepare for hazards in the real world.

Even if We Could, How Would the Recording of Dreams Work?

“We dream to forget,” wrote scientist Francis Crick. But what if there was no need for us to forget? What if you could go back in time and win the lottery, meet your favorite celebrity, or fly over the Grand Canyon? Around the world, scientists are developing technologies to understand the content, visuals, movement, and speech of our dreams.

Even though you’re not moving while dreaming, “nerve impulses are still traveling to those muscles,” Oldis added, and electrodes are placed on your arms, legs, and chin to assess them. They’re looking at fundamental movements like walking, picking something up, or shaking hands and connecting data from electrodes to an avatar that matches the individual’s dream movement.

Oldis and the team also attempt to understand speech in our dreams by inserting five or six electrodes on each participant’s lips and throat.

Though dream recording may sound like something from a science fiction film (it is in one, Wim Wenders’ “Until the End of the World”), there may be benefits to studying our dreams that go beyond just amusement. Barrett stated that we could learn about ourselves by paying attention to our dreams.

However, Stickgold cautions that one risk of dream recording is an excessive interpretation or reliance on them. He claimed that our waking thinking is “far more naive” than dreams.

In his hit movie “Inception,” Christopher Nolan may have had a point: Is there a risk you would wake up wanting to buy Colgate toothpaste or Apple goods? Cerf worries that recording could make it simple to hack dreams. His ideas about giving advertisers subliminal messages while you sleep are mostly harmless.

If you can record your dream using your skills, what’s to stop someone from recording your dream? Could military interrogation techniques in the future involve tapping into a prisoner’s dreams to get data? So, cool, isn’t it? It’s like recording the dreams and then watching them. It will also help us know ourselves better, like what we were thinking and all. 

How Soon Can We Start Recording it?

It may sound impossible, but asking Alexa to replay your most recent dream could herald the technology’s future. We’ll probably be years away, though.

A device that can perhaps tell you whether you dreamed and what the overall substance of your dreams was is available now. According to Cerf, in a few “months to a year,” we might witness this, and a device like that might inform you that you dreamed primarily about people.

He compared it to the initial PC operating system, which was quite basic and could not record any photos.

According to Oldis and others, a dream recorder capable of producing a full movie-like experience could be a decade or two away.

He envisions a set of pajamas with built-in muscle sensors and a sleep hat with a chin strap to record dream movement and speech as the more advanced consumer product. The sleep cap would do the task of documenting visuals. It would utilize magnetic resonance or near-infrared spectroscopy technologies.

All the data will be processed and transmitted as a dream movie to your computer, DVR, or Facebook, where all your friends can view and share your dream.”

Although such a recording is intriguing, it is currently a pipe dream.

Conclusion

Dreams are weird, unimaginable, and unrelated to the real world. It is shocking and hard to believe when someone tells you you can record them. They are a disconnection from the real world and make feel like entering another realm.

Scientists have started to work on this project sure it needs more research and proof to accept this theory. When this happens, though, people will be crazy about it, and then it will be a scientific miracle.

Last Updated on October 10, 2023 by ayeshayusuf