Only The Dreamer Wakes II

on dreamspace

One of my favorite sleep studies tried to prove that we are always dreaming, every single night. To collect evidence, they gathered a group of people with a condition that presented as the opposite of sleep paralysis, the part of their brain that suppresses movement during sleep was malfunctioning. Every night, they would awaken compulsively — acting out their dreams, in a series of strange languid movements. Some gestured animatedly in silent conversations, someone who had recently quit smoking would wake every night and raise their fingers to their lips enjoying a phantom cigarette, some would take long adventuring walks around the room. They would each wake in the morning and confidently declare that they had been deep in a dreamless sleep, while physical evidence routinely proved the contrary.

What occurs in the realm of dreams still remains a mystery, but we spend half our lives in these states - accessing our realm of intuition. Some of my best work has come from concepts that came to me deep within a dream — if they were able to survive the harsh disintegrative gaze of daylight.

MIDJOURNEY EXPERIMENTS

As we inch closer to visualizing our thoughts and innermost images, here are a few sketches that serve as inquiries into other realities:

1. Understanding the world and ourselves
   Our minds crave meaning, and seeks patterns to make sense of our experiences: certain cultures see dreams as portents of what is yet to come, as mirrors for what we may most fear or love or need. Others see dreams as the opposite indicator of the future eg. the promise of a long life ahead is foretold by seeing death in a dream, as interpreted by the dream-hunting mazzeri of Corsica.

   The Dream Recorder is machine that records your dreams and summarizes them, providing insights from what’s occupying your subconscious. A wearable chip that weaves into your hair collects the data from your brain, like a portable micro-fMRI scanner, and transmits that wirelessly to the Dream Recorder.
   Revisit summaries of dreams, view visual glimpses in your dream-reels, use the knobs to adjust timescales and see the themes that recur, the ones that will not leave you, the fleeting preoccupations that fly through your mind never to return.

2. Therapeutic Intervention
   In the film Paprika (2006), psychotherapists used dream-machines to wander around their patients’ minds and nightmares, probing for anxieties and triggers and course-correcting (until something goes horribly wrong). Dreams, like life forms in the depths of the ocean, remain unexplored yet hold so many keys within their latent space.

   A civilization in the 18th century, the Iroquois believed, dreams held cures to illness, and revealed unconscious desires that, left unchecked, could grow into madness. They looked for guidance and instruction to avoid misfortune, and turned dreams into a communal experience - with retelling and re-enactment within a community, to interpret and release and share the messages within.

   Send a prompt into your LucidMask: you could dictate a scenario, a problem you’re trying to solve, a series of symbols, a piece of inspiration. Set your preferred duration, and it works with your mind to generate a dream. Put the sleep mask on to begin your dream.
   A transparency toggle allows you to have the dream reflected on the external surface of the mask, inviting in external intervention. For example, a dream therapist could reach in, as though they were putting their hands into liquid, causing controlled changes in the structure of your dream.

3. Intuitive and Sensory Connection

   
   Lucid dreams are where we try to exert a degree of control: by way of rituals like smearing the raw flesh of a pig on the face of the dreamer. While there is a long history of ritualized problem-solving in dream incubation, we know less about controlled sharing of dreamspaces.

   They can sometimes materialize as a result of deep connectedness between people, unintentionally sharing the same dreams and bringing pieces of that back to reality. I love the concept of exponential time dilation from Inception, one of my favorite films, where depending on the level of nesting of the dream, your timescales could shift in the order of minutes to decades.
   
   Are we capable of more while we sleep? If we were to semi-consciously move through self-architected worlds without the constraints of the physical world - it starts to sound reminiscent of what the promise of the metaverse is.

   The REMGlove activates a predetermined dream environment for the dreamers who intend to meet, the space is configured to allow entry to unique IDs of gloves, ensuring that only vetted dreamers are allowed in. Dreamers can be experience anything together within their agreed upon environmental constraints (or lack thereof), and can boot anyone from their dreamspace at will.