Can I dream what you dream? 💭

Can dreams be lived, relived, stored or shared?

🕐 Year 2045. 📍Location: The Venetian, Las Vegas. We, me and my extended family, are celebrating my 50th birthday anniversary in an unusual fashion: gambling. My granny just doubled the one grand that she put on red [in Roulette]. We aren’t really astonished because she has a proven track record of pulling off spectacular feats. We just finished our session and a limo awaits us at the entrance to take us home.

This is what I dreamed last night. 😍 Increíble, I know! Fantastic, yes, based on my description. But did I paint the dream as vividly as I felt it? Maybe not. 😞

I tend to remember my dreams more often than most people I know around me. Most of these dreams I remember the following day, are kept with me or I’d recount it as a story to the people around. We will have a laugh or two and that’s about it. But, is there more to it, than that? 🤔

We, humans, have come a long long way in past couple of centuries. We’ve taken the survival of the fittest way too seriously, in my humble opinion. So much so, that in this race for survival, we have outwitted other species by so much that many of them are on the verge of extinction. As many believe, we are one war 💣 away from mass extinction, from returning the planet to its state a million years ago — dust, rubble, debris and that’s that. Coming back to the good things 🌟, we, humans, have achieved a lot more than I can describe in few words or few paragraphs. So, for such an overachieving species, taming their dreams 💭 shouldn’t be that difficult, should it?

Come to think of it, we’ve done little to control one-third of our daily time spent, one-third of our annual time spent and — by extension — one third of our lifetime. Yes, I’ve read a few articles on dreams, sleep, lucid dreaming and even “how to lucid dream”. But what I’m alluding to is tad bit different.

How can we store our dreams? and as if to unlock the golden question: How can we share our dreams?

Alright, give me 2 minutes to explain, how we could [if at all we could].

At bedtime, I wear a DDB cap. DDB stands for Dream Database. It’s a soft, cotton cap, with no visor. Imagine, the cap swimmers wear, but made of cotton, instead of spandex [a.k.a lycra a.k.a synthetic fiber]. This comfortable, snug cap is the store-house of our dreams. This cap is going to transform the way we understand dreams. While on the exterior, this cap feels like a normal cap, made out of cotton [or wool if it’s winters and you want to up the coziness index], on the inside it has a thin mesh of cells, wires and batteries that constantly gauge our signals. So, with this DDB, the all-powerful cap, on our head, I go to sleep. And hopefully, I dream that night. Next-day morning, I wake up to the sound of alarm, cutting short my trail-blazing journey. But, this time, instead of leaving a bad taste of loss, I’ll be excited to check out and share my dream. I take off DDB and leave it on a surface, the magnetic-charging table alongside my phone and other electronics. Alongside the “wireless” charging, it’ll start sync with the cloud storage. Ofcourse, cloud ☁️ is omnipresent by 2045. 😛

Over to the cloud! Image AWS/GCP/Azure, there’s a translation service, Slecognition [Sleep + recognition], crunching through the past 8 hours of sleep data, learning the pattern of brain waves/signals and constructing a meaningful dream out of it. That dream, I’m referring to, is essentially bits of brain wave signals, which can be transformed into text / audio / video. As a result, in a couple of minutes, you could choose to read your dream, listen to it or watch it. Play, stop, rewind, relive. 🤯

If you let me run further with this idea, I could think of a social media platform dedicated to dreams. A platform, where individuals post their yesternight’s dream. Yes, a chaotic world, indeed.

We are witnessing the power of data. With health, slotted front and center of the day to day discussions, health data has risen to prominence. Heart beats per minute, oxygen levels, sleep scores, BMI and other composite scores have become commonplace. However, I feel there’s lack of research and innovation happening around dreams. In the pandemic-struck world, treating and understanding dreams would come lower down the pecking order, understandably so. But, if there’s a researcher, tucked in a far-away university dorm room, who’s motivated to do dream data research post reading this article, I’d consider my time and my dream well spent.

Till then, I’ll continue to dream about dreams!

Uncut ✂️

Transferring dream data to bits and bytes is a very unusual💡. At first, I had imagined an invasive product solution for this idea. It would be a device attached to your brain, the one’s used early on for electroconvulsive therapy.

I’d be lying if the thought of Bergonic chair 🤐 didn’t cross my mind. But, ofcourse I didn’t want the new-age product to be brutal or worse, a murder machine.🤭

Bergonic chair | Wikipedia Commons

I refined that solution to a DDB cap, so as to be non-invasive (painless, harmless) and fit into today’s comfort-economy!