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Lucid Dreams On Demand From Prophetic and Card79
Tech startup Prophetic, with help from hardware maker Card79, hope to create a wearable Halo that can promote a special kind of experience. Lucid dreams happen when you're not fully conscious, dreaming but with some control over your dream. Research suggests that lucid dreaming can help overcome PTSD and promote greater mindfulness and health.
(Halo headset, render via Prophetic and Card79)
“It's an extraordinary thing to become aware in your own mind and in your own dreams; it's a surreal and spiritual-esque experience,” said [Prophetic CEO Eric] Wollberg, who has had lucid dreams since he was 12, in a call with Motherboard. “Recreationally, it's the ultimate VR experience..."“It is great to see and support the development of lucid dreaming devices for home use that implement potent technologies such as transcranial ultrasound,” said Nico Adelhöfer, a researcher at Donders’s Sleep & Memory Lab who is working with Prophetic... Safe focused neuromodulation is a recent technological development that has huge potential not only for lucid dream induction but to flexibly alter other parameters of sleep and cognition as well.
Science fiction writers have long been interested in different ways to create a conscious dream experience. In his 1999 novel Starfish describes a Lucid Dreamer:
Alice Nakata lies twitching on her bunk, eyes closed... Leads trail away from insertion points on her face and wrist, drape away to a lucid dreamer on the bedside shelf.
In Roger Zelazny's 1996 novel He Who Shapes (The Dream Master), a Dream Console lets the therapist see and guide a patient's inner experience:
Charles Render sat before the ninety white buttons and the two red ones, not really looking at any of them. His right arm moved in its soundless sling, across the lap-surface of the console - pushing some of the buttons, skipping over others, moving on, retracing its path to press the next in the order of the Recall series.
(A Dream Console)
In his 1957 story Shadow World, Clifford Simak strikes a darker note with the peeper:
It was a simple thing to look at - like a lopsided pair of binoculars, with a lot of selector knobs on each side and on top of it.
('Shadow World' by Clifford Simak)You looked into it and you twisted the knobs until you had what you wanted and there was a picture. You stepped into the picture and you lived the life you found there - the sort of life you picked by the setting of the knobs. And there were many lives to pick from, for there were millions of combinations that could be set up on the knobs and the factors ranged from the lightest kind of frippery to the most abysmal horror.
The peeper was outlawed, naturally...
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 10/29/2023)
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I might also be thinking of K-9 from Doctor Who.
