Imagine being able to plant ideas in hordes of sleeping brains. My app did just that
IN THE film Inception , Leonardo DiCaprio plays a dream architect who enters sleepers' subconscious minds and manipulates their dreams. The idea of dream control quickly caught public imagination and the film became a huge hit.
But that was fiction. Is it really possible to direct someone else's night-time wanderings? I set out to answer that question with the Dream:ON project, which used people's smartphones to subtly manipulate their dreams as they slept. Half a million people subscribed, allowing us to track the patterns of their dreams in unprecedented detail – with results showing that the forces shaping our nocturnal life are even more mysterious than I had imagined.
The idea of manipulating dreams has a ...
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