Dream Weaver

I don’t eat pizza very often, but when I do, I try not to eat it late at night. As it turns out, the high dairy and fat content of pizza (at least the pizza I like) keeps the body pretty active during sleep. I don’t mind that so much, but an active body usually means some pretty strange and vivid dreams.

Last night, after a long day of training, the employee at the hotel I was staying at practically insisted I try a particular pizza place nearby. Twist my arm…

I woke up, all shook up, having had a very strange dream. So many players, so many scenes, so much drama. When I wake from a dream I want to remember I try to remain still and recount the events. Moving muscles when we wake acts like a chalk board eraser. If you don’t know what a chalk board is, look it up.

As the dream started to sift through my fingers, I wished for a moment we could have our dreams downloaded onto a hard drive.

That led me on a little journey…

As it turns out, we can already reconstruct rough visual content you’re seeing while you’re awake. So that should work when we sleep, right? fMRI combined with AI models can recreate shapes, objects, simple scenes, and loose colors. Loose colors are not a a color with low morals, but close approximations of the colors we are seeing. The results look like impressionistic paintings of what the person is seeing. Not literal footage.

In studies researchers have been able to wake a subject during their REM sleep, ask them what they were dreaming about, and them compare their verbal reports with brain activity patterns. From there, researchers can assign brain waves to certain objects (“face,” “car,” “street,” “water,” “dog”). Then, they can reconstruct vague, blurred images through AI. It’s primitive, but it’s a start. As you might imagine, they’re getting better at it each year. Ten years ago the images looked like stick figures. Five years ago: fuzzy blobs. These days, participants say the images look like the scene they remember.

Yet we can’t read dreams in real time. Nor can we reconstruct long dream narratives (like the dream I had last night). We can’t capture conversations or sound. And we can’t produce clear video footage.

So how far away are we from being able to download our dreams? In 5-10 years our image construction will be better and may produce short dream clips. But that will require a a fMRI, and we’re not close to a wearable one yet. Or an inexpensive one. Remember there Betamax? Of course you don’t; they came out in 1975. In today’s dollars they cost about $9,500.00! So new tech is never cheap tech.

30 years from now (when I’m 91), if non-evasive brain scanning becomes high resolution, we might see high fidelity dream reconstruction. The bottleneck isn’t AI, it’s brain imaging. That tech is developing at a snail’s pace.

Are you scared yet? If you’re not, then you’re not paying attention. Think about this: Your dreams contain unfiltered thoughts, fears, desires, memories, and random subconscious blends. Dreams are the most private thing humans have. If a technology can decode them, then the last private frontier, your internal world, becomes accessible. And you thought facial recognition and location tracking was dangerous.

Imagine a scenario where the courts subpoena dream data. Employers asking for wellness scans. Insurance companies wanting depression-risk indicators. The government scanning for threat profiles.

Then imagine advertisers targeting your specific subconscious desires. You’ll see billboards for items that you want, that you didn’t know you wanted. Of course, companies are already using browser behavior to shape your attention. I recently heard the term, “Boston Scally.” I’d never heard the term before (in case you haven’t either, it’s a style of hat). So I googled it, just to satisfy my curiosity. For the couple of weeks the internet was practically insisting I buy one of those things. That’s manipulation based on my behavior. What if we added subconscious material to the mix? That’s root level manipulation, and I doubt any of us are self aware enough to not be swayed by it.

Many ethicists today are advocating a Bill of Mental Rights to get ahead of this problem before it arises. What’s at stake? Currently we enjoy the freedom to think privately. But if dream data exists, then it can be hacked, leaked, stolen, and sold to the highest bidder.

Now that’s the stuff of nightmares.