When I was about 10, my younger brother Steven came up to me, stuck out his hand and said, “See my thumb?  Gosh you’re dumb!” and then he added proudly, “I invented that”. 

When I told Steve I had already heard his little word game way back in first grade, he said it didn’t matter because he hadn’t, so he was still The Inventor!

It is in this sense of “things forgotten and things rediscovered” that I can claim title as inventor of the Dream Director.  While my own journey to invention was largely due to several weeks of “knocking dreams” caused by a noisy woodpecker living outside my bedroom, I’m really just one in a long line of inventors who have made dream machines throughout history.  Even the Dream Director name is a rediscovery of sorts.  In an embarrassing overlap (or as I prefer to imagine, an example of great minds thinking alike), an artist named Luke Jerram had previously created a beautiful exhibition called Dream Director  beautifully demonstrating the principles of external stimuli incorporation.   

In 1866 a French fellow named Marquis Hervey Saint-Denys invented the exact device I have here using wind-up music boxes and a manservant who would wake early and sprinkle his pillow with the perfume of ladies he had previously danced with in order to manipulate his dreams.  I’m sure that Saint-Deny would be amused to learn that scientists in 2008 have just “discovered” the power of scent to influence dreams. 

 Current scientific literature claims that the relationship between DreamSleep and Nocturnal Erections wasn’t discovered until the early 1950’s.  But some researchers now believe this cave drawing from 10 to 15,000 BC is aactually a drawing of a sleeping man (with a nocturnal erection) dreaming about killing a bison.   So it seem that even the phenomena of nocturnal erections is really just old news. 

Lascaux Cave in France Dreaming Man 10 - 15,000 BC

Bummer.  That erection thing… I always thought I discovered that!  :)

Our little monster is growing restless!

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The effect of external stimulation on our dreams has been documented by science and experienced nightly by millions.  No doubt, someplace in the world right now a neighborhood dog is barking and a sleeping man is being chased by wolves as a result.  But in a world where the occurrence of dream incorporation has previously been left to chance, things are about to get a little more interesting.   

By carefully replicating the unique conditions under which dream incorporations arise, the Dream Director enables users to replicate this phenomena and explore the effects of various stimuli on their own dreaming minds.  The Dream Director detects and/or targets REM sleep, delivers a slowly rising stimulus (of the users choice) to achieve incorporation and then wakes the dreaming user to enhance dream recall.  

Incorporation has been used extensively to deliver external stimuli in the form of “dreamsigns” using devices such as Stephen Lebarge’s Nova Dreamer (and other tools that copy his pioneering device).  But the total focus of these products has been on lucid dreaming, so the stimuli delivered was limited to purely functional lights and beeps.  Lucid dreaming is the holy grail of dreaming.  It’s an amazing experience everyone should try.  But non-lucid dreams are far more common and they can be equally vivid, wonderful and enlightening.  The “discovery” of lucid dreaming was so fascinating, we believe it naturally overshadowed interest in the phenomena of dream incorporation.  But incorporation is an interesting discovery in and of itself, and our knowledge about how and why it happens has increased in recent years. 

We created the Dream Director as a way to take one step back, in order to take two steps forward.  By expanding the range of available induction cues to a full spectrum of user selected visual, tactile, audible and scent based stimuli, we enable dreamers to explore the phenomena of incorporation, while expanding their options for lucidity cues far beyond the flashing red lights and electronic beeps offered by previous tools.  By harnessing incorporation to nudge the direction and inject interesting content into our dreams, we believe the Dream Director can spark new interest in dreaming as a form of entertainment and self knowledge. We believe this will create new interest in dreams of all kinds, while adding an interesting new tool to toolbox for lucid dreamers to play with. 

Will our creation excite the worlds imagination.  Will dreams become the new drug of choice?  Or, will our tinkering with nature incite the torch and pitchfork wielding mobs?  We are about to find out. The monster is restless and about to run free.  Enjoy the show!