Dream Machines with Will Dowd [Patreon Preview]

Welcome to the Otherworld Patreon. I'm your host, Jack Wagner. In this bonus episode, I speak to Will Dowd. He is an author and former MIT science writer who recently spent a year experimenting with a device created by MIT called Dormio. Dormio is an interactive wearable system developed by the MIT Media Lab that tracks sleep onset to capture, influence, and augment human creativity during hypnagogia. Hypnagogia is the name for that state between sleep and wakefulness. I'm sure everyone has some sort of experience with this state, even if you don't know the name for it. Usually, your brain is still active as that dreamy, twilight feeling starts to take over. Basically, the start of sleep. And sometimes, weird stuff can happen during that time. This state can bring vivid geometric patterns, faces emerging from darkness, snippets of voices or music, sensations of falling or floating, and oftentimes that sudden jolt you feel right before you fall asleep. Part of what makes it that the experiences feel neither like ordinary thought nor like true dreams. They arrive uninvited, often with startling clarity, while some part of us is still watching, aware that we're lying in bed. Hypnagogia is really woven into the supernatural and a lot of the stories that we cover on this show. Many spiritual traditions treat it as a thin veil between worlds, a doorway to astral projection, out-of-body travel, or contact with spirits and the dead. It's also when some people experience sleep paralysis. I myself suffered hypnopompic hallucinations when I was in my early 20s due to insomnia. I originally spoke about these on the show as a way of kind of rationalizing a lot of paranormal experiences and explaining them away, but as time has gone on and the more I've worked on this show, my views have kind of evolved. This is a really mysterious state that we don't fully understand, and many great thinkers in history have used this state intentionally as a source of creativity and problem solving. In fact, Thomas Edison is said to have napped with a metal ball in his hand that would fall and hit the ground, waking him up right at the hypnagogic state so that he could recall and utilize the information he was just thinking about. That is more or less what the Dormio does, and for Will, after a genetic disorder gradually took away his ability to read, he started to view dreaming as a similar state, kind of a way he could tap in to that escape he missed so much with his avid reading. So he decided to spend a year experimenting with the Dormio device that MIT gave him access to. I know that's a lot. I'm going to let Will explain it for himself because it's going to make a lot more sense when he does it, but I loved meeting him and speaking to him. I think you're really going to enjoy this conversation, and I'd love to do more episodes and research about hypnagogia in the future. This is a short preview. If you want to hear the full thing, it's out now at patreon.com slash otherworld. This episode is called Dream Machines, and you're listening to the Otherworld Patreon. Welcome to Otherworld. I'm joined by Will Dowd. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you for joining me, Will. This has actually been a long time coming. Yeah, thanks for having me. How would you like to be introduced, Will? What do you consider yourself now? Yeah, the worst, the scariest question ever. Who am I? So I'm a writer who grew up in and still lives in the Boston area. I trained as a science writer where I studied at MIT, which becomes relevant later in the story. Now I mostly write essay collections. I still write poetry if I can't help it. I have a free monthly newsletter that I send out on the night of the full moon that covers all weird, wonderful things about the moon. Essentially, what I would say most is that my next book, which is coming out soon. Or maybe out by the time this comes out. My new book is. My new book comes from a completely different type of experience, and it's far stranger than anything I've ever written. So, Will, you emailed us a while ago about this, and it caught my eye. I mean, I'm going to let you explain it for yourself, but this involves dreams, and specifically hypnagogia, like the state sort of. Between wakefulness and sleep. This is something that's been of interest to me, just as a curious person. I have personally experienced hypnopompic hallucinations, I believe. That's when you wake up. That's right. Which was very, very alarming. I mentioned that in the early stage of the show, I think, in one of the early episodes, I mentioned this. And it does kind of inform. My views of the paranormal in terms of what your brain could do. But at the same time, back then, I was not living right. I was a symptom of extreme stress and extreme insomnia. When that happened, I did not think it was paranormal. I was like, I need to go to a doctor. I'm not. I need to fix my life. But I digress. We are here to talk about you. Well, it's funny you say that, because my earliest memory is of my parents putting me to sleep in my crib. And whenever they would leave the room, the wallpaper, which for me was a bunch of bears passing a honey jar between them, would start moving. The bears would come alive. And I was adamant and telling my family all about this. And so much so that I was taken to the doctors for it. My mom had no idea what to do. And so she brought. Because I just wouldn't sleep or. It didn't feel like sleep to me. I suppose I was probably drifting off, and that's when this was happening. But I was brought to the doctors, and the doctor said, please, he'll get over it. And sometimes I think, did I get over it, or did I just stop talking about it? I don't know. Yeah, it's strange. And it's one of those things with the paranormal where it's really easy to be like, oh, that's not paranormal. That's dreaming. That's hallucinating. But then there's a world where you kind of go a step further into this stuff, and you're like, well, what is dreaming? Is there something to that? And then you're kind of back into the maybe it is supernatural what's happening category. And that's kind of what we're here to talk about, I suppose. Yeah, that's right. I became really. My very first brush with hypnagogia was when I first went to college, which was the first time. You talked about not quite taking care of yourself. So college was the first time I started to take afternoon naps because I'd be up all night studying, of course. But during those naps, I'd have 20-minute micro-sleeps, and what I would experience during them were these dreams, but they weren't regular dreams because I was semi-lucid. So I was sort of aware of what I was seeing. And they were hyper-realistic, like ultra-4D, just unbelievably realistic beyond even almost waking life. And so it didn't have any of the kind of fuzzy graininess, the kind of dreams that we have. And so I was having those, and I became really interested in it. And I looked. I remember going to the library at my college and seeing if they had a book on it. And there was only one book written at the time, and it was by this guy, Mavramadas. And I ordered it through intercollegiate loan, and it came. And it felt like some kind of Da Vinci Code thing I was looking into because it just seemed completely unexplored. A lot more has changed since then in the last two decades. But I've been interested in it for a while. So you were trained as a science writer. That's your background. Part of the reason you're here is this book. But the real thing that we're here to talk about is that. And I should let you explain this, is that you eventually started using this device developed by MIT called the Dormio device. Why you explain this, and then why. And you could even take it further back to explain why you even began using this. Yeah. So this whole story begins with my health, actually, and the fact that I have a genetic disorder that manifests in many different ways. And one of the ways it manifested is that I started to have trouble with my vision, my binocular vision, coordinating my eyes, like in my late teens. And so it was annoying and a problem, but it advanced. And eventually, by the time I was in my mid-20s. I just could not do activities that required a high degree of coordination with your eyes. So the number one thing, activity, is reading. Because that's all reading is, is just close tracking. And so this was particularly devastating for me not being able to read because I was a kid who grew up with my head in a book almost constantly. I felt so much more at home in the world of books and literature that that felt like my native habitat. The real world was sort of this isolated other place I had to visit every once in a while, you know, until I could get back to where, you know, my real life was happening, which was in Narnia or wherever. And so I grew up, you know, with, with that in my blood. And so naturally I became, um, wanted to be a writer and, uh, that's what I was, you know, studied. And so when I lost this ability to read. And then of course, writing becomes more difficult when you can't read what you're, what you're writing as you're writing it or afterwards. Um, it really felt like a loss of identity and the word that I would use to describe it was exile. I felt like, like I'd been kicked out of the garden of Eden and, you know, the, the rusty gates just clanged shut behind me. And so for years I sort of had to grieve this loss while adapting to it. And you, using assistive technology on the computer to try to salvage my writing life. But, you know, and of course I tried everything you could do to simulate reading in terms of like audiobooks and things like that. But I don't know, at least personally, audiobooks just didn't have that same immersive quality that reading does. And so it really made me think like, what is special about reading? You know, what gives it this unique power? And the qualities that I boiled it down to is that essentially your body is effectively paralyzed. You're not moving, that you are completely absorbed. So you've completely forgotten yourself and your surroundings, and that you are in total imaginative flight. And after a long time, I made this link, which is that there is one other time that- We are in a very, very similar state, and that's when we're dreaming. And weirdly, what sort of sealed it for me is the fact that with both reading and dreaming, our eyes are moving rapidly from left to right, left to right. I think that is, you know, I can't back that up in terms of anything scientific to explain that connection, but just metaphorically, it really made me consider that these two activities could be linked. And so I had this idea, which was basically, can I use dreaming to find a way back into the world of books? Can I program my dreams so that I get a reading experience? All right. Like I said, this was just a short preview. If you want to hear the entire conversation with Will Dowd, you can hear it at patreon.com slash otherworld.