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Saying 'Hi' Through A Dream: How The Internet Could Make Sleeping More Social
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Saying 'Hi' Through A Dream: How The Internet Could Make Sleeping More Social

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The Internet is a vastly more social place than it was a decade ago, with text and images on networks like Facebook creating new levels of interaction. Some time in the future, though, you may not have to be awake to connect to friends online - you could say "hello," even play games, while dreaming.

Sound far fetched? A few people are already carrying out experiments in so-called inter-dream communication, and while their results don't go as far as what we've seen in the movie "Inception," they do take a step towards something like it.

Daniel Oldis, a software engineer and former teacher from Costa Mesa, Calif. uses little more than a special EEG headband called the Zeo, a red light bulb, some clever programming skills and an Internet connection to engage in what he calls "social dreaming" with another person. It stems from his four decades of research into lucid dreaming, and his recent invitations to other lucid dreamers that he found online, to take part in his "open protocol" experiment.

The ability to have lucid dreams is crucial to what he does. Statistics are unclear, but it's thought that only around 10% of the population are active lucid dreamers, meaning they have at least one lucid dream a month. Lucid dreaming refers to the ability to become aware during a dream that you are in fact, dreaming, and being able to exert some control over what happens in the dream.

Oldis, 62, says people can develop it as a mental skill, though introverted and creative types tend to have an easier time. Christopher Nolan, the director of "Inception," said at Wondercon 2010 that he had experienced lucid dreaming as a teenager, which partly inspired the idea for his blockbuster film about dream-based heists.

Here's how Oldis' social-dreaming experiments work.

Two people in different parts of the world go to sleep wearing a EEG device like the Zeo, a sleep-monitoring gadget that wraps around the head. The device is modified to send brainwave data to an open-source computer program Oldis has developed, which is connected to the website, sleepstreamonline.com. (There are a few gadgets like the NovaDreamer that can also nudge people into lucid dreams with a light or sound cue, but Oldis prefers using EEG devices for more accurate brainwave readings and the potential online connection.)

Each sleeper also has a colored light bulb in their room. This is their "cue." When the program detects that both people are in REM sleep, meaning they are most likely dreaming, it sends one of them the cue, turning on a red or green bulb in their room. Sometimes they'll ignore it, or wake up, but sometimes they will incorporate the light into their dream -- in the same way you might dream about a loud ambulance siren when your alarm clock has just gone off.

If the first sleeper can remember why the light has suddenly appeared in their dream, they'll become lucid. Now they can signal back to the "awake" world with a unique physical gesture, such as looking twice to the left.

Eye movement is one of the few things that we do in both our dreams and with our bodies, hence the term Rapid Eye Movement, or REM sleep. Though our eyes are typically moving every-which way at this point in sleep, usually a deliberate left-left movement could be picked up by an EEG device, which might also pick up a rise in the brain's Delta waves. Slight finger movements can work too.

"If I make a fist in a dream, the corporeal fingers actually move together slightly," says Oldis, who is currently tinkering on a glove that detects tiny hand signals from someone who is dreaming.

Once the Zeo headband captures that unique eye signal, and transmits it via sleepstreamonline.com to the second dreamer, it will turn on a colored light where the other dreamer is, to send them a cue too. This essentially means that one person having a lucid dream has "pinged" (or Facebook-style poked) another dreaming person, and hopefully caused them to become lucidly aware of the first person in their dream.

Doing this successfully is not easy, and requires practice.

In one experiment, Oldis and another colleague named Marjorie Kaye had both entered REM sleep, when the program turned on the red light bulb cue for Oldis. In his dream, he saw a light flare while standing on a cruise ship. Realizing he was dreaming, Oldis sent his "left-left" signal, which was picked up by the Zeo and transmitted to Kaye, by turning on a similar light in her room. What she then saw in her dream was a glowing "Exit" sign in a theater. Before she could signal back with a deliberate eye movement, however, Kaye woke up.

"She wasn't able to call back," said Sean Oliver, a filmmaker who has taken part in Oldis' research, and who presented his and Oldis' findings at a conference for the International Association for the Study of Dreams in Berkley, Calif., in June 2012. "She heard the phone ringing and she wasn't able to pick it up… One dreamer said 'Hello,' and her dream said 'Goodbye.'"

The researchers have also tried racing against each other to make the "left-left" eye signal first, after being simultaneously cued with a light bulb. The experiment then becomes more like a game.

"Dreamers can communicate over the Internet," Oliver said. "That's not even a question. [But] lucid cues tend to be more effective when a social message is involved." It also opens the question of dreams as a purely internal world, he added. "What does that mean when your friend starts controlling the light switch or making a noise?"

Oldis and Oliver are keen to see advancements in technology that will allow dreams to become more social. Some smartphone apps like SleepCycle and DreamOn, along with the wristband product Lark and mask REM Dreamer or DreamStar can be used to detect REM sleep, with some even sending data to a common website. But Oldis says this is just half the story. "For inter-dream communication or synched lucid dreaming, you generally need a way to signal from the dream, with eye movements, or signal into a dream with lights. Any device for social dreaming adventures would need to be able to accommodate this also."

"Technology is almost there," said Oliver. "It just needs to be in one unit. What we really need is just one mask. One mask that has lights, eye reader and bluetooth that can get to your phone or your computer."

Oliver points to research showing that video gamers are more likely to be better lucid dreamers, and sees an opportunity for a future form of social media that employes a growing use of brain-reading gadgets like the Zeo, Muse and others. He envisions people setting up "dream appointments" online, playing dream games and engaging in shared dreaming.

"If you had a green light for one friend, blue for another and yellow for another, you could cycle through them with your glove, send a signal with your eyes and choose who you're going to say 'hello' to," said Oliver. "The goal is to get more people involved, to improve the social aspect, so there's more data. It's one of the few things that everybody does, you eat, you drink, you procreate, and you dream."

Watch his full presentation here: