The Dream Makers

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0:46Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service. I'm Anand Jagatia, and this is The Dream Makers.

1:00we're going to explore an exciting new field of sleep science when the water recedes finally i climb down from the roof and walk across the street fish are flopping on the glistening pavement all the cars lie upside down This is a dream. It's pretty strange, as dreams often are. The houses, the ones still standing, sag in the middle, waterlogged. The sound of dripping and gurgling is almost deafening. But this dream is particularly unusual. Not because of its content, but because of where it came from. As I climb over a downed tree, something catches my eye. Dangling from a branch, a long iridescent snakeskin shimmers in the morning light I drape it around my neck, scarf-like, and keep walking These visions are from the mind of an artist called Will But they didn't simply come to him in the night Instead, before he went to sleep, he decided what he wanted to dream about He planted a seed inside his subconscious and let it flower in his mind.

2:20My name is Will Dowd, and I am a writer and artist from the Boston area. I would also say that at this point, I'm probably a quasi-professional dreamer. I started to wonder if I could program my dreams with literature. And so that was the experiment I did. and then for a year I seeded my dreams, that boundary started to blur a little bit so I kind of became this sort of amphibian living in two worlds, you know, the real world and then the dream world. If you've seen the film Inception from 2010, you'll be familiar with the concept that Will is experimenting with, deliberately prompting your unconscious with an idea and following the thread into a dream to see how it unravels.

3:12And Will isn't alone. He's part of a growing community of artists, neuroscientists, doctors, patients, and believe it or not, advertisers, who see dreams as a vast source of untapped potential. According to them, dreaming could improve the way we learn, enhance our creativity, and allow us to solve problems that elude us when we're awake. Our dreams could even help us deal with grief and trauma. It's been like, was it two and a half years now? Like, and I've not had a single nightmare in two and a half years. I think the advertising industry should leave our sleep alone. It's our last bastion of privacy in our lives.

3:57You can only build something if you can imagine it. You have to really believe in it. You have to really feel it. You have to really step into it. And that's what a dream lets you do. We're going to meet people on the frontier of an exciting new field, dream engineering. We'll be exploring how it could be possible to manipulate our dreams by implanting thoughts into our minds as we fall asleep. And if doing so could really make us happier or more productive. But before we get to that, first, let's go back a bit. because turning to our dreams for help in our waking lives is nothing new. In fact, it's something people have done for a very long time.

4:39Some of dream incubation goes almost as far back as we know thousands of years in history. This is Dr. Deirdre Barrett, a dream researcher at Harvard University in the United States, who's written about the history of dream incubation. The term incubation comes from the Greeks who had temples to Asclepius, the god of medicine and dreams, where they went to incubate dreams. And they were asking for help in physical healing. Thai culture back in the same time also had dream temples that people slept in. And then many cultures around the world had some kind of tradition where they were focused on asking gods in some cases or just setting an intention to have a dream.

5:26In the modern world, we no longer tend to believe that dreams have the power to heal medical afflictions. But Deidre says that there are certain cognitive tasks we may be better at when we're asleep. A colleague of mine here at Harvard, Paul Horowitz, he designs the controls for telescopes. And he would be trying to build a computer chip to control just one part of the lenses. And when he was stuck on something, he would know that that night he was going to dream something. And he'd wake up sometimes in the middle of the night and scribble down the dream. He says he's always standing behind a man looking over his shoulder.

6:07And a male voice narrates and tells him what to do while he sees the man putting the lenses together or building the computer chip. And he wakes up and draws diagrams and writes text notes. And he runs a big team over in a Harvard lab. And they're completely used to Paul walking in in the morning and saying, OK, I dreamed what we're going to do next. And they look at his dream notes and carry it out. That's an incredible story. I mean, how is it that when you're asleep and you're dreaming about these things that you can solve problems you can't do when you're awake? When somebody is stuck because the conventional wisdom in their field is to approach the problem in a certain way.

6:51In dreams, we're thinking in this visual, intuitive, emotional, more symbolic state than when we're awake. So any time that you're stuck because you need to think outside the box, that's something dreams do easily. When we dream, we access a new way of thinking, a new way of being. And of course, this isn't just useful for scientific problems. Over the centuries, many artists have found this altered state of consciousness to be a rich source of creative inspiration. Within modern times, the surrealist artists were probably the most explicit in that. Salvador Dali was probably the most noted for his dreamed art.

7:37He was especially interested in what we psychologists call the hypnagogic state as you're falling asleep, which is not the long narrative that we most typically call dreams, but there flows a very vivid visual imagery right as we fall asleep. So Salvador Dali had a technique he developed called slumber with a key. And when taking an afternoon nap, he would pick a time where he was already getting sleepy, and he would hold a key between his thumb and forefinger. And he would start seeing images, and the key would drop and fall to the floor with enough noise to wake him up. So that was his slumber with a key.

8:18And the best known of those pieces is the flight of a bumblebee around a pomegranate, where there was really a bee buzzing off in the background that he was aware of around his half-eaten pomegranate. And he was seeing it transform into a goldfish from a bee and then a tiger. And so he painted this series of animals circling the pomegranate. At this point, I should probably make a confession. While I am fascinated by the science of dreams, I've never had particularly vivid or interesting dreams myself. Case in point, while making this documentary, my producer asked me to keep a dream diary. And this, genuinely, is one of the dreams I had.

9:02I think I may have just had the most boring and tragic dream that anyone's ever had, which is that I dreamt that I received a text from my mother-in-law. Is this really the stuff that my dreams are made of? I'm keen to start cultivating a richer dream life and perhaps Dali's slumber with a key technique could inject a spark into my night-time visions. So it's early in the morning and I'm going to try one of the dream experiments. So I've got in my hand a steel ball that makes quite a pleasing sound and I'm going to hold it, try to fall back asleep and when it falls out of my hand, the sound should wake me up and I can tell you what I've been dreaming about.

9:56So, yeah, let's give this a go.

10:13It was strange. As I was falling asleep, I could sort of sense my brain shifting slightly in its behaviour, and I started to get snatches of imagery. And then just before I dropped the metal object and it made the noise, I had a really vivid image in my head, but it was quite strange. It was like, there was like a piece of paper and there was a kind of creature curled up on top of this piece of paper. It had a snout and yellow eyes, but it was very vivid, this singular image. So yeah, quite an odd experience. I can really see why the surrealist painters experimented with this technique so much.

11:07Now we're talking. This is already much more exciting than texting my mother-in-law. No offence if you're listening. So how do we get from Salvador Dali, who painted his dreams more than 80 years ago, to the modern scientific interest in dream engineering? Well, some of the early experiments into dream manipulation came from an unlikely source. A classic shape-sorting video game from the 1980s. I came out with a paper about Tetris and what's become known as the Tetris effect, which is that people who start playing Tetris report that as they're falling asleep, they see Tetris pieces floating down in front of their eyes.

11:53This is Bob Stickgold, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, who's been researching dreams for the past 30 years. It's all anecdotal, and so we decided to do a study on it and showed that, in fact, three-quarters of our subjects on not the first night but the second night of playing Tetris had these dreams. And so we were just ecstatic. We had for the first time ever really demonstrated that you can influence the content of dreams. So that was the first paper on dream engineering, if you will. And we thought we had a new science. Those initial research papers came out in the year 2000.

12:39And despite what seemed like a breakthrough, this new science didn't take off. We then did a few experiments with other video games and saw similar effects and wrote those up. But within five years, the field had gone dry again. Most of my research has always been on sleep and memory, not sleep and dreams. And so it sort of fell by the wayside until Adam Horowitz came along. Adam's work is what really turned this into an expanding field, without a doubt. Which brings us to the present day, where research into dream engineering is flourishing. Adam Har Horowitz is one of the pioneers of the field.

13:22He's a cognitive scientist working on sleep research with Harvard and MIT. and he also runs a company developing technology for dream incubation. Me and my producer Dan are heading to the MIT Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts to meet him. But it's night time, after the museum is closed to the public, because we're having a sleepover. Excited now. Yeah, me too. There he is. He's not even wearing shoes. He's literally in his pyjamas. This is amazing. Hello. We're here for the sleepover. Yeah. Adam, how's it going? It's going really well. Come on in. I was just on the edge of a nap when you guys called.

14:11Adam has just finished setting up an interactive installation at the museum called Hotel Room No. 2, Communal Dreams. It features beds that people can lie down in as light and sound lull them to the edge of sleep. This is the night before the exhibition officially opens, but Adam has been kind enough to give us a sneak preview. Whoa. Yeah. Wow, okay. So this is the installation. So, gosh, it's kind of hard to describe. It kind of looks a bit like, maybe like an igloo. Yeah. But instead of being made of ice, it's made of metal. And instead of having one entrance, it's got three entrances, and they're all kind of extended out.

14:51That's where you sleep, right? Yeah, I can slide those beds out. put someone on and then they get slid in there and so everyone's head pokes inwards and you're looking up into all these different reflections across this slatted aluminum. Above the structure, the igloo structure, there are these three light bulbs on these arms that are rotating and also gently pulsing in and out and it's this absolutely beautiful hypnotic movement and that movement of the light bulbs is what's creating the moving of the light beams inside the structure but it's it's just really a joy to watch um so this is cool so me you and producer dan we're all going to get into three the three pods and then we're having that heck yeah okay let's do it let's do it and i'll just slide this whole tray out kind of like a meat market or a morgue and then slide you on back in and then you go where you go yeah i might just take my shoes off Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's bedtime.

15:48Cool, OK, ready to... Ready? Let me slide up. I'm going to slide you in, OK? We all get comfortable inside Adam's strange, futuristic creation, listening to sounds of rushing wind and hooting owls as red light bulbs wheel overhead, creating stripes of light that pass over our closed eyelids. It's part unsettling, part soothing. And it's all designed to help us drift into hypnagogia, the strange space between sleep and wakefulness that Dali was so fond of. Hypnagogia is the point where your thoughts become images, and then those images become experiences. It's the doorway, it's the lip. It's where the dreams, just the tendrils begin.

16:37And so I think your only job is to follow those, and it might feel like, huh, that's a weird thought. Or it might feel like that's a full dream. But just let all these motion cues and the strangeness of this space take you where it does. And then we'll see each other in a half hour or 45 and we'll chat about it. OK, well, so we'll all check in in about, what, 45 minutes or so? Yeah, I'm going to set an alarm. OK, goodnight, goodnight, lads. It seems like we're in there for a long time and it doesn't feel like I'm ever actually asleep. But I must have dozed off at some point, because eventually I wake up to Adam's alarm, and he starts to tell us about what he'd dreamt.

17:20So I had a dream where I was rowing a boat in this underground tunnel, and there were slats to the street above, and I could see the light passing overhead. And then I went to this kind of orphanage, and I had to carry all these kids down this hallway. wow i am it's kind of different to anything i'd experienced before to be honest because um it kind of felt like you know when you have a sunset and the sun is very orange and kind of glistening on the water had a couple of images like that also had a couple of images of clouds scudding across a night sky very quickly across a moon what about you dan i definitely felt a couple of points like a real sense of motion like sort of rolling of a wave and then a more visual thing was that I saw a green racing car like a really old school like 1950s type of racing car with a bride so someone in a wedding dress sort of going into this racing car and then I woke up again cool yeah i think there is that kind of practice of letting go because this thought will come up and it'll be this green racing car and there's this bride going towards it and then you have this option you can think oh that's kind of weird and then that'll wake you up a little bit or you have this other option which is i'm gonna quiet those other voices and just follow the thread of this car and this bride and see where it goes and once you get good at following the thread in hypnagogia then you can start to choose the thread and choose the direction.

19:10Yeah I mean how cool is it that the three of us have just sat here and observed what our brains do when we're kind of half asleep and then talked about it like what what a fun sleepover this has in. The hotel room number two installation is a surreal introduction to the practice of quieting your mind so that you can look through the doorway into your dream world. But achieving true dream incubation requires fully crossing the threshold into sleep. To find out more, the next day, after spending the night in our actual beds, we meet up with Adam again, and he tells us how his interest in the science of dreaming began.

19:48The origin story is very personal. I got pretty violently mugged when I was a kid and I had repeated nightmares about it, which is kind of classic after a traumatic incident. And what my mom would do is she would sit with me and she would, of course, tell me the bedtime story about the rabbit jumping over the moon. But then she would keep whispering to me as I fell asleep. She would keep whispering to me as I was asleep. And we repeated this, and it started changing my dreams. And I got over those nightmares, and I wasn't so afraid. And that story of dream incubation came back to me. When I was starting here, I thought, okay, how do we change dreams?

20:27How do we change dreams? And then at the beginning of our experiments, I just started whispering to people in their sleep, like my mother had whispered to me. I didn't do it myself. I did it with a robot, which was made here at MIT. But the concept was the same and it wasn't really mine. It was my mom's. At MIT, Adam wanted to manipulate people's dreams in a controlled way so that he could study whether what happens in them spills over into waking hours. So we know that nightmares are really tied to suicidal ideation and PTSD. We know that your dreams of substances are tied to your likelihood of relapse in addiction.

21:06We know that dreams are tied to creative performance. We know that dreams are tied to your language learning. None of those are controlled experiments. They're all post-hoc correlations. Dream engineering says we're going to change the dream. And then once we can guide the dream, suddenly we can make subject groups. So subject group A, dreamt of a tree. Subject group B, dreamt of a shoe. They wake up, they do creativity tests across those two categories. Turns out you're much more creative on tests about a tree, if you dreamed about a tree, than a shoe. So it opens up this whole realm of new science.

21:44For this to work, you have to have a reliable way of getting someone to dream about a shoe or a tree. And they have to remember what they dreamed about so they can tell you afterwards. This is where technology comes in, with a device Adam helped create called the Dormio. The Dormio device sits on your hand and it tracks your heart rate, your electrodermal activity, which is like a little bit of sweat on your skin that's very subtle. and your muscle tone. And that's because all those things start changing as you fall asleep. And it looks at all three of those. And at the right moment, it'll say something like, remember to dream of water.

22:24And then it'll let you slip a little bit into sleep. It'll wake you up at the right time and say, tell me, what were you dreaming about? You'll speak out loud. That will be recorded and stored and then let you slip back into sleep, rinse and repeat. In 2023, Adam and his colleagues published a study showing the Dormio device successfully incubated dreams in more than 70 % of test subjects. Simply hearing a voice that told them to dream of a tree as they fell asleep caused them to then dream of a tree. We've heard the interest in the power of dreams goes back thousands of years, and that in that time they've been a source of inspiration for artists and scientists alike.

23:10And now new research shows that it really is possible to influence what you dream about, and that it doesn't require the use of drugs or fancy technology. In fact, it's remarkably simple. So what then could dream engineering allow us to achieve? That's still to come on The Dream Makers.

24:01Transcription by CastingWords politics, your everyday life, and all the bizarre ways people are using the internet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

24:23I'm Anand Jagatia, and you're listening to the documentary from the BBC World Service, where we're exploring the development of an emerging field of sleep science, Dream Engineering. Imagine if you could decide what you're going to dream about tonight. If, as you fall asleep, you could give your subconscious some instructions. I want to dream about flying. I want to dream in French. I want to dream about a precious memory. The hope is that taking control of our dreams could enhance learning, boost creativity and improve well-being. But can that really be true? It's time for us to meet some of the people who have been trying dream engineering for themselves.

25:08The first is someone you've heard from already, artist and writer Will Dowd. Probably like most writers, I would say that I'm a reader primarily and a writer secondarily, but I just happen to be a reader who can't read anymore. We went to visit Will at his home in the town of Braintree, Massachusetts. He isn't able to leave the house much anymore because of a genetic condition that has slowly reduced his mobility. It's also affected his vision, something that's left him unable to read. I don't think I'll ever forget the sting of that because ever since I was really young, I was such an obsessive, passionate reader.

25:51But when I lost that ability to read, and when all the book covers of all the books in the world became like doors simultaneously shut in my face, I felt this incredible sense of exile. Because I just I couldn't go back to where I felt like I came from, and where I had lived all those years. Will's House is a short drive from the MIT University campus, where dream researcher Dr. Adam Har-Horowitz was developing a dream incubation device called the Dormio. And once Will caught wind of it, it gave him an idea. It occurred to me after a while that the only time that I felt the same absorbing, immersive experience that you get from reading is in dreaming.

26:39And then I started to think about all the parallels between those two activities. In both of them, you're physically immobilized and still. You're imaginatively in flight. And because I was familiar with Dormio, I started to wonder if I could use Dormio to simulate the reading experience, if I could program my dreams with literature. So Will reached out to Adam, who lent him a version of the device to experiment with. So I thought about what would make good seed phrases to put into dormio, because you don't want it to be too long, because this is going to play while you're drifting into sleep.

27:20And so I ultimately decided that what would be best to choose for this experiment would be poetry. Wake washes through the whole text. It's followed by the next wave, then the next. To source these seed phrases of poetry, Will got in touch with the Woodbury Poetry Room at Harvard University, an archive containing thousands of audio recordings of famous poets reading their own work, from T.S. Eliot and Sylvia Plath to Tomás Tranströmer, who you just heard. Each night he would load the opening line of a poem into the dormio, like this one from the poet E.E. Cummings. Swim so now, million many worlds.

28:06And then he'd fall asleep, hoping that the seed would take root in his mind as a dream, that he would write down the moment he woke up. I sprint toward the fox. Gracefully, it leaps off the jetty and races across the surface of the waves. Without thinking, I follow. We're running on horizontal beams of reflected moonlight. I would almost compare it to dreaming with sort of jet fuel in the dream. I feel like it really lit this fuse that made the dream stranger, more evocative, more immersive and more exciting. While these experiments didn't create the simulated reading experience that he'd hoped for, Will says that they instead allowed him to discover a new form of writing.

28:57The dreams that he experienced have become the basis of a short story collection called The Taste of Rain in Buenos Aires, being published later this year. One of the things that I discovered that I didn't expect was that dreaming can be a life raft for somebody who is immobilised, which I mostly am at this point. I don't get out, I don't interact with the world as much as I would like. One of the things that surprised me about the Dormeo project was that it really helped me to cope with that restriction. Because after a dream that was seeded by this poetry, I really felt that I had got out of the house, that I'd taken a rejuvenating walk, that I'd gone out not into the world, but into a world and come back.

29:49To be completely frank, art is the reason I'm alive right now. Essentially, my life has been a kind of slow stripping away of capacities and potential. And what's keeping me alive is my effort to keep creating work. As long as I can keep making things, as long as I can keep writing, drawing and making art, I'm going to stay alive. It was a real privilege to meet Will. After we said goodbye, I was left with a sense of awe at his ability to find hope and meaning through art and dreaming. And it's made me more curious to try dream seeding for myself. Back at MIT, Adam Harhorowitz told me about a new method he's been developing.