Sleep is a forgotten country of the mind. A vast majority of our technologies are built for our waking state, even though a third of our lives are spent asleep. Current technological interfaces miss an opportunity to access the unique, imaginative, elastic cognition ongoing during dreams and semi-lucid states. In turn, each of us misses an opportunity to use interfaces to influence our own processes of memory consolidation, creative insight generation, gist extraction, and emotion regulation that are so deeply sleep-dependent. In this project, we explore ways to augment human creativity by extending, influencing, and capturing dreams in Stage 1 sleep. It is currently impossible to force ourselves to be creative because so much creative idea association and creative incubation happens in the absence of executive control and directed attention. Sleep offers an opportunity for prompting creative thought in the absence of directed attention, if only dreams can be controlled.

With Dormio we modernize this technique, using a hand worn sleep-stage tracking system, social robots’ unique interactive and embodied capabilities, and auditory feedback on sleep stage transitions. Using Dormio, we are able to influence, extract information from, and extend hypnagogic microdreams for the first time: we found all of our subjects indeed dreamed about themes chosen by experimenters prior to subject sleep, and that active use of hypnagogia with the Dormio system can augment human creativity as measured by flexibility, fluency, elaboration, and originality of thought. This interaction is enabled by custom-built, open source hardware and software tailored specifically for hypnagogia, circumventing the need for cumbersome and cost-prohibitive traditional sleep tracking technologies. This system enables future research into sleep, an underutilized and understudied state of mind vital for memory, learning, and creativity.

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