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‘I think we’re gonna build a social media where people can share what it is they do in their lucid dreams’
This month, I embarked on a quest to unlock the human consciousness – the key I’m told can be found in lucid dreaming. For decades, the idea that we can hack our dreams has fascinated researchers and pop culturists across the world, from shamanistic traditions to the 60s psychonauts who saw consciousness as a bridge between our human biology and otherworldly experience. “I Get My News From a Reliable Source, Cryptic Symbolism in my Dreams,” goes the viral meme – the same mystical thinking that draws parallels between lucid dreaming and other altered states of mind awakened through things such as psychedelic drugs, floatation tanks, transcendental meditation and hypnosis. Across pop culture, dreaming has long captured the public’s imagination for similar reasons through cult films like The Matrix and Inception, while Reddit community r/LucidDreaming has over 500,000 members. Lucid dreams are liminal, transitional, hallucinatory – and offer endless possibilities, which makes dream tech big business over in Silicon Valley.
Many good ideas have come from dreams: the periodic table, for example, came from a dream, as did the double helix structure for DNA, the model of the atom, and Twilight (as in, the book). Imagining a hypnagogic world where we can make decisions outside our waking life is like putting godly power in our hands, which is exactly what prompted Eric Wollberg to launch Prophetic AI, a tech start-up working on a non-invasive headband that induces lucid dreaming (Wollberg’s co-founder Wesley Berry III got his start working with Grimes on translating neural signals into art). Though currently in the early stages of development, the company has already raised more than $1 million to develop the device, which is due for release next year, in collaboration with Card79 – the same designers behind Elon Musk’s controversial Neuralink. Click on the company’s website and you will see the following words appear on-screen: “What is consciousness? What is reality? Prometheus stole fire from the Gods. We will steal dreams from the Prophets.” If you’re familiar with this flashy West Coast lingo, this is a familiar trope used by Californian so-called freethinkers as a short-hand for technological progress – though now it’s as synonymous with technocapitalism as Bitcoin bros and Huel.
When I meet Wollberg over Zoom, he tells me that the name for Prophetic AI came from a trip to Jerusalem – “I was reading a lot of theology, as one does, and whether it's Abraham, Mohammed or Buddha, these prophets received their prophetic wisdom in their dreams. The thing that I asked myself was, what if we could give that power to anyone?” Speaking from his airy New York apartment, he talks about the company’s origins with the bright-lit confidence of a TED speaker, drawing comparisons to the adventures of Darwin (“Who are going to be the Darwins of consciousness?”) and the Industrial Revolution (“I want to build a steam engine for consciousness”). “My incentive to start this company is that I want to know the answer to the question, ‘what is consciousness’,” he says, “because in a really deep sense, it’s the most intimate, epistemologically rigorous way of asking ‘who am I?’”
Prophetic AI’s Halo device works by reading the brain’s gamma frequencies to detect when an individual is entering the REM stage in their sleep cycle, which lasts for approximately 20 minutes. “Obviously you’re going to use it for recreational purposes – it’s the ultimate VR experience. You want to sleep with one of your favourite celebrities? Not my business, go for it,” he says. “We simply want to bring you to a brain state and what you do in that brain state is completely up to you.” While riding the dream waves to discover their unlimited potential sounds fun in theory, the reality that we may soon be able to hack our dreams feels uncomfortable – like, if the algorithm can already track my behaviour enough to recommend lucid dreaming apps on IG, surely it won’t be long until it colonises our dream world, too?
“It’s the ultimate VR experience. You want to sleep with one of your favourite celebrities? Not my business, go for it” – Eric Wollberg, Prophetic AI”
There’s a scene in Kristoffer Borgli’s 2023 film Dream Scenario where a group of Hype House-style influencers use a device called Norio to access other people’s dreams to sell spon-con. Clearly, it’s fiction – but it's not much different from our own social media feeds where hyper-curated ads cater to our deepest desires and feel equally hallucinatory. “I do expect there to be influencers, or something akin to dream influencers,” Wollberg shares. “While they won’t be able to enter your dreams, I do think that we’re gonna build a social media in the [Prophetic AI] app where people can share what it is they do in their lucid dreams.”
“Not too different from many other pieces of information we share on social media, dreams are definitely sensitive content because they say a lot about who we are and about our current and past psychological state,” says Luca Maria Aiella, a professor of dreaming at Bell Labs. While this can obviously be used for, erm, capitalism, Aiella thinks it can also be used for good. “I personally believe that there are so many positive uses of AI in this domain (personal therapy and population-wide interventions being two clear examples) that the positives outweigh the potential risks,” he says. “AI can quantitatively ‘profile’ a dream and, if the exercise is repeated on many dreams by the same dreamer, an AI tool could provide indicators for mental health, which can be used to support experts (psychologists or dream analysts) in their work.” This could also be used to mine the contents of dreams at a bigger scale: “We can look at the dreams people share on social media to learn what people dream and how their dreams change in relation to traumatic collective events.”
The relationship between our unconscious mind and technology dates back to the cults of California and the mysticism of the global online. The internet came out of the hippies, Apple came out of a Steve Jobs acid trip. As Techgnosis author Erik Davis told Dazed in 2014: “There’s something uncanny about how digital information works and that’s related to some of the ‘mediated mysticism’ that you associate with the New Age in California.” Using tech to crack open our dreams is trippy, like really trippy – imagine a metaverse, a reality simulator inside our brains with limitless possibilities. AI utopians will say this is a good thing before turning Main Character mode and zipping up their thousand-dollar normcore hoodies with deranged glee. A more cautious approach would be to consider how this could play into Big Tech incentives and mass-surveillance – something like Minority Report, perhaps? “It's easy to imagine a dystopian future where ‘thought crimes’ become a genuine issue,” warns lucid dreaming expert Daniel Love.
I stumble across a Discord dedicated to dream tech, where users trade tips and reviews on products such as the Somni mask, a smart mask that tracks REM sleep, and the discontinued (though available to purchase on eBay) Novadreamer. These products don’t guarantee lucidity, though some reports prove their effectiveness in detecting dream states through gentle vibrations and light flickers that are said to induce lucidity in the user. Elsewhere, apps such as Lucidly are available on the app store and use AI to determine your REM cycle and send audio signals accordingly, while dream journal apps like Dreamkit interpret your dreams using AI without any actual interference to your sleeping pattern.
“AI is certainly going to change our world in ways we are yet to even imagine, but for the time being, remain wary of any exaggerated claims regarding AI and lucid dreaming – especially any devices that offer ‘magical solutions’ or ‘easy lucid dreams’, historically these are almost always over-hyped and hugely disappointing,” adds Love. “It’s unlikely that any short-term AI will be able to offer meaningful guidance from lived experience, as it can never experience the state directly.”
In the days following, I experience a lucid dream. It’s nothing special, just some flying-over-buildings-type beat. Perhaps all this California dreaming is getting to my head, I think, but it’s hard not to imagine a sci-fi future where brains in vats surf the astral planes daily. But the internet, and those tech bros behind it, have always been Bad Taste – think how much of a bland flop the metaverse was. Dreaming is cool, but it’s desperately in need of a reality check.