Lucid dreams occur when a person becomes aware that they are dreaming and can consciously direct the dream as portrayed in movies like Inception.
Tech startup Prophetic is developing a wearable device that can get you into a lucid dream state and keep you there.
Co-founders Wesley Berry and Eric Wollberg were both exploring consciousness and brain activity when they met.
Wollberg was exploring how lucid dreaming could unlock the mystery of consciousness, while Berry was working with musician Grimes to turn neural signals into art.
Now their company is developing a wearable “non-invasive neural device to stabilize and induce lucid dreaming.” That sounds great, but reliable methods to induce lucid dreaming have continued to elude researchers.
Prophetic wants to “build the world’s largest EEG dataset on lucid dreams” from volunteers who have already experienced lucid dreaming. If you want to contribute your brain activity to a dataset for their AI model you can apply here.
Prophetic will use a convolutional neural net to tokenize the EEG data and then feed it into a transformer model.
“Perhaps dreams are an arena that can enable supracognitive powers to perform calculations and perceptions of reality that may be incomprehensible in our wake state.”
– Stephon Alexander pic.twitter.com/vHEZ28xM6c
— Axial Wanderer (@EricWollberg) August 30, 2023
Using machine learning they hope to identify the brain patterns associated with different sleep and dream states. Once a user is in a REM state they’re likely to be dreaming. At this point, the Halo will use focused ultrasound to stimulate the prefrontal cortex to become active.
Your prefrontal cortex is active during periods of deep focus, or intentional thought. In theory, Halo will detect when you’re dreaming, turn your prefrontal cortex on, and hey presto you’re in control of your dream.
Lucid dreaming sounds like great fun but Prophetic has bigger aspirations with its tech. The company hopes to unlock the mysteries behind human consciousness and believes lucid dreaming is the key.
We’re some way off from trying Halo out though. Prophetic only anticipates shipping the devices in 2025 but you can pay a $100 deposit to get in line for one.
It sounds farfetched but some semblance of credibility comes from the company’s partnership with Card79. Card79 is the company behind Neuralink, Elon Musk’s brain-computer interface.
Prophetic also secured $1.1m in funding from early-stage technology investment fund BoxGroup. Let’s hope they can ship their device earlier than 2025.
Would you let Prophetic use your dream brain data to train its AI model? And if AI gets a direct insight into our dreams will it like what it sees?
