The Dream Makers

This BBC Podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. How do you update old systems without slowing your business down? It's not about modernization just to modernize. Or move AI from pilot to production. It's not the technology that's failing. It's the use case that you pick. Find out how global leaders are turning enterprise change into real competitive advantage. Do it in a resilient way with speed and effectiveness. Follow resilient edge of business vitality podcast paid and presented by Deloitte. Check out our new episodes wherever you get your podcasts. If you're listening to my voice right now, it's highly likely that you love well-made podcasts. And that means that like millions of others around the world, you share the same problem. You can't get enough of them. Well, good news, because I'm here today to recommend the show Reflector. I want people all over the world to feel that our high noon is in the future. Where we blend history. A mystery disease known as the gay plague has become an epidemic unprecedented in the history of American medicine. With on the ground reporting, do you think we're getting to a point where violence might be needed to change the status quo? Yeah, I do. To make these cinematic stories that unpack the biggest debates shaping the world today. If that sounds like you're kind of listening, just search for Reflector on whatever you're using to listen to this podcast right now. Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service. I'm Anan Jagatilla and this is the Dreammakers. We'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 house is the ones still standing, sag in the middle, waterlogged. The sound of dripping and burbling 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, angling from a branch, a long iridescent snake skin, 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. My 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. And 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 have not had a single nightmare, and 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. You 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. Some of dream incubation goes almost as far back as we know thousands of years in history. This is Dr. D. D. 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 Oscar Lapius, 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. In the modern world, we no longer tend to believe that dreams have the power to heal medical afflictions. But D. D. D. 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 and 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 diagram and writes text notes and he runs a big team over in Harvard lab and they are completely used to Paul walking in in the morning and saying, "Okay, 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, in dreams we're thinking in this visual, intuitive, emotional, more symbolic state than when we're awake. So anytime 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. He was especially interested in what we psychologist 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 timer, 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 and 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. I 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 these 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. So yeah, let's give this a go. It was strange as I was falling asleep, I could sort of sense my brain shifting slightly in its behaviour and as I 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 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. Now we're talking. This is already much more exciting than texting my mother-in-law. No offense 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 let'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. This 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 study on it, and showed that in fact three quarters of our subjects, and 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, and 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's sort of fell by the wayside until Adam Horowitz came along. Adam's work is what really turned us into an expanding field without a doubt. Which brings us to the present day, where research into dream engineering is flourishing. Adam Horowitz is one of the pioneers of the field. He'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. -Sighted now? -Yeah, we too. -Oh he is? -He's not even working. -He's not even wearing shoes. -He's literally his pajamas, this is amazing. -Hello? -We're here for the sleepover. -Yeah. -It's going really well. -I was just on the edge of a nap when you guys called. Adam has just finished setting up an interactive installation at the museum, called Hotel Room Number Two, 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, 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. That's where you sleep right there. -Yeah, I can slide those beds out and 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 this is 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 just really a joy to watch. So this is cool. So me, you and producer Dan, we're all going to get into three parts, and then we'll have a nap. -Hack, yeah. -Okay, let's do it. -Let's do it. Now I'll just slide this whole tray out, kind of like a meat marketer or a morgue, and then slide you on back in, and then you go where you go. -I might just take my shoes off. -Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. -It's better to sleep if I. -Cool, okay? Ready to. -Ready? -All right. -And to the camera. -Let me slide out. -I'm going to slide you in, okay? 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. -Hipnagogia 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. And 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 strangest of this space take you where it dies. And then we'll see each other in a half hour, 45, and we'll try to about it. Okay, well so we'll check it in about what 45 minutes was. Yeah, I'm going to set an alarm. Okay, good night, goodnight, Lads. It seems like we're in there for a long time, and it doesn't feel like I'm ever actually asleep. (phone ringing) But I must have dosed off at some point, because eventually I wake up to Adam's alarm, and he started to tell us about what he dreamt. So I had a dream where I was rolling 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. It's kind of different to anything I'd experienced before to be honest, because it kind of felt like you know, 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 will 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 going to 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 hypnogadja, then you can start to choose the thread, and choose the direction." Yeah, I mean, how cool is it that the three of us have just sat here and observed what our brains do when we kind of half asleep, and then talked about, "What a fun sleepover this has been." 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 thread, 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. The 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 dreaming incubation came back to me when I was starting here. I thought, "Okay, how do we change dreams? How 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. We 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-talk 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, subdued 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, then a shoe. So it opens up this whole realm of new science. For 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 electro-dermal 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. And 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 in that time, they've been a source of inspiration for artists and scientists alike. And 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 Dreammakers. Cook a guess what time it is. Time for season 6. Time for season 6. So we'll see you soon. I'm Damylanta Combo and that's my daughter Coco. The inspiration for my award-winning podcast, Dear Dota, from the BBC World Service. And we're back. I'll be speaking to some amazing people as I collect your letters telling your stories. Dear Dota, being your mum has taught me so much about myself. And giving advice to people everywhere. I want them to be able to take this space that I know that they should have. And I would love to give them the complete agency to do that. Search for Dear Dota, wherever you get your BBC podcasts. Dear Dota. How does a global automaker actually make AI work at scale? I'm Ashwin Patil, host of Resilient Edge, a business vitality podcast, paid and presented by Deloitte. Discover how Deloitte, AWS and Toyota reduced manual effort and reshaped supply chain operations across the business. Available now, wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Anna and Jagatier 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 wellbeing. 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. The first is someone you've heard from already. Artist and writer will doubt. 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 Braindtree, 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. But 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 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 Harrowitz 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. And 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. And 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 Thomas Transthromer 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. And 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. The 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 immobilized, which I mostly am at this point. I don't interact with the world as much as I would like. One of the things that surprised me about the Dormio 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 gone 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. To 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 Haarwhit told me about a new method he's been developing. We've been working on a new app, and that is a mobile app which tries to squeeze all these different interventions from dream engineering onto one space and deliver them just via a phone. The app is called Dust, and while it's not been released yet, Adam gave me access to a test version. Each night, as you lie in bed, you listen to audio that gives you instructions for exercises designed to help shape your dreams. Feel your imagination gaining strength. Listen now, the faint sound of water. I started trying air-night, visualizing things in my mind like a tree or a river as I fell asleep in the hope that those images would infiltrate my dreams. I was climbing a tree, kind of crawling along a trunk that had fallen over. Last night, I tried to dream seed a dream about a dog, and I did actually have a dream about a dog. Who about my dog? I found a wallet with some money in it on the tree trunk, and I'm ashamed to say I took the money, but I handed it in the wallet. Just to be clear, if I found a wallet in real life, I would not pocket the cash. It took a bit of practice, but I was surprised at how quickly my dreams began to take on the images I was seeding them with. And now I'm wondering how far could I take this? Could I make the prompts more specific to dream about a particular person or place? Could I use a dream to rehearse something that I want to do in real life? And it's also got me thinking, who else might be interested in the content of my dreams? Good afternoon everyone, and thank you for joining us. This meeting will come to order. In 2022, concerns about advertisers trying to influence people's dreams were raised with the US Government's Federal Trade Commission, the FTC, which aims to protect the public from deceptive or unfair business practices. Our next speaker is Ashley Votal. Ashley? I'm here to say that the FTC should add targeted dream incubation to deceptive advertising rules and add examples. The audio you're hearing is from one of the FTC's online open meetings where a member of the public brought up dream advertising. There are already strict rules in the US about what counts as deceptive advertising, false claims about products or subliminal messages are prohibited. But currently there are no specific guidelines on using dream incubation to market to consumers in their sleep. And that's led some to argue for explicit regulations because some advertisers have already started experimenting with this. Not only is it possible in marketing, whoers did it successfully. In sleep studies, they implanted product imagery into test subject streams. Cours is an American beer brand that ran a dream advertising campaign in 2021. Hi there. Welcome to sleep study. Getting to your bed and get comfortable. Watch the video. I want you to tell yourself that you want to dream about the video as you fall asleep and go to sleep. The company produced a short film documenting an experiment where participants watched a specially created video as they fell asleep. The video was deliberately dreamlike, featuring surreal imagery in psychedelic colours. A figure made of water flies through mountain valleys. A talking fish in a tuxedo holds a can of beer in an icy cave. When the subjects woke up, they were asked if they'd dreamt about beer or any of the things featured in the video. Can you tell me what you were dreaming? I was dreaming about water for home. I was walking through snow. I saw some mountains. I think it was something to do with cores. Cours also invited people to try the experiment for themselves at home by watching a similar video online as they slept. It's unclear how rigorous or scientific this experiment actually was, but the marketing company did consult with experts from the field, including dream researcher Deer Tree Barrett, who we heard from earlier. The ad agency people approached me saying they wanted to illustrate dream incubation with some content that was the Cours mountain stream branding stuff plus make sure they had one beer can in there. Deer Tree says that for her the project was an opportunity to introduce the idea of dream incubation to a new audience. But there was a backlash against the campaign from others in the field who wrote an open letter criticizing the use of the technique for advertising. Its authors include two scientists we've met already Adam, Harwhawhits and Bob Stick Gold. Here's Bob again. There have been studies that show that if you play certain words while persons asleep, if you play Skittles or you play the word M&M's. And then you wake them up later. The first thing that subjects will do is they will tell you that they didn't hear anything. And the second thing they'll tell you is that whichever one they heard, they liked that one better and they were willing to pay more for it. The important thing about this is that we don't really control our dreams consciously. We don't control the content of them. We tend not to remember the content of our dreams. And yet the dreams have impact on our subsequent behavior. So we can get people to buy more M&Ms or get people to drink more curious beer by getting them to dream about it. For Bob the Cours ad campaign wasn't a harmless gimmick but something with real world health implications. If you step back, the goal of the campaign is to get people who already use an addictive drug to use more of it. I think it's one thing to have a dream advertisement that tries to get people to buy one brand of tissue instead of another. That's very different from having them buy one brand of alcohol and addictive drug. But I think it's all bad. So do you think there needs to be more kind of regulation in place? Yeah. I think we need to talk about and we need to legislate. And even if the regulations might already arguably prohibit such dream manipulation. That's a far cry from having a law that makes it illegal. And I think that's what we need. Put these concerns to Deirdre. I think that a lot of the people concerned about this just don't realize how powerful the waking advertising techniques are already pretty good at getting people to buy things and the idea that something sneaky you're going to do during sleep is first of all already allowed. It's not. You don't need specific dream legislation. But also that it wouldn't be nearly as effective as what they know to do. Deirdre says that in her opinion, many of the concerns around dream advertising are unfounded. The studies that try to influence dreams with like an auditory stimulus or vibrations or light. They sometimes get responses, but the responses are so mild and varied. I mean, I love that research. I think it's fascinating that the dreaming mind can incorporate some things around us. But to the extent that it's possible that advertising is going to get incorporated into a dream, that's already going to be happening in other ways. Deirdre also points out that people falling asleep watching television or listening to the radio may already be unintentionally seeding their dreams with adverts. For Bob though, the sanctity of our dreams is something that should be respected. They are everywhere else in our lives. And for me personally, it feels like a real insult to try to break into that time. We reached out to the company that owns Cores Beer, Moulson Cores for comment, but we haven't had a reply. It seems more research is needed on the impacts of dream advertising and it remains to be seen what stance regulators will take. We've heard a lot in this documentary about the possible applications of dream engineering, from potentially influencing what products we buy to provide creative fuel for artists or novel solutions for problem solving. In all these cases, the dreams themselves are largely positive experiences. But of course, the visions we see in our sleep can just as often be upsetting ones. For years and years, I had nightmares like screaming, yelling, my husband had to try and wake me up and I'd wake up and I'd continue to scream after I woke up. This is Mayor Lucas from California in the US, who began having terrible nightmares after the loss of her son, Zane. He was like so outgoing and very warm. Had a big laugh, would come in the room and people sort of gravitated towards home. He was a big, a big, a big, a big kid. He was a high school wrestler. He was a, had many, many moments of joy and big heart and loving. And at the same time, he was, you know, in a lot of pain. And those two things exist in the same person and in the same moment. Around eight years ago, shortly before his 19th birthday, Zane took his own life. In the years that followed, Mayor would relive the trauma of his death every night in her sleep. It was, you know, it was kind of what you would predict that, you know, me constantly trying to save him from some horrible thing that was happening. And then when I woke up from it, realizing that I didn't save him and that he had died, and then had to live the trauma all over again because my brain was processing that oh my god, he really is gone. During this time, Mayor was also diagnosed with breast cancer and had to undergo an operation under anesthesia. And it was when she was coming round from the procedure that something remarkable happened. I remember very vividly having this dream of watching the younger son be born that he's now 18 this son. And I was kind of like hovering above. And then this dream I'm having moves to Zane's birth. And it was again, like just watching him. It was this beautiful, beautiful dream. And then I have a dream about Zane running around with our corgi in a field near our house. And part of the reason I got this dog was because Zane always wanted a dog. And I had it done it for a lot of reasons. And so it was kind of like I want him to know I got the dog now like hey, we did it. We got your younger brother the dog, you know. And so then I like I officially wake up. And apparently in there I said to them like, thank you for giving me that time with my son. After having this intensely moving dream, Mayas nightmares suddenly just stopped. Like and I have not had a single nightmare in two and a half years. That has like it's changed my life on so many dimensions like I can lay down my head and go to sleep. And without fear of a nightmare and that alone has changed my life. Mayas dreams of her son had a profound impact on her. But amazingly she's not the only person to experience something like this following an operation. And it's a phenomenon that's now being studied by scientists. I am Dr. Bill Rinzika and I'm a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University School of Medicine. And currently I am working in the lab of Dr. Boris Heifetz where we are studying the therapeutic effects of anesthesia induced dreaming. The knowledge that people dream under anesthesia goes back you know decades really like until quite recently people wanted to say anesthesiologist wanted to avoid it like at least in a clinical setting because they thought that maybe this means that these individuals are actually awake on the where of what's going on. And so now more recently we know that okay actually being aware and dreaming are actually two different states. Then what is interesting and what really makes these dreams different from normal sleep dreams is that anesthesia dreams are the majority of those dreams are pleasant or positive. And so it's really interesting that these anesthesia dreams even and imagine people go through terrible surgeries. They are super anxious and you know there's every reason for them to have bad experiences under anesthesia and it doesn't happen. And so that is I think a very interesting phenomenon. Scientific interest in all of this began with an anesthesiologist at Stanford University called Harrison Chow. He noticed that if he brought people round from anesthesia after surgery more gradually so they woke up more slowly it improved their recovery. But it also tended to induce these intense positive dreams. Chow reached out to researchers at the university and they began collecting data from patients who had been through this experience including mayor who we just heard from. They found that the dreams seemed to have a powerful and lasting effect on some people struggling with nightmares from trauma. Building on this, Pillarin and the head of her lab, Boris Hyffetz are now running an experiment studying these dreams in a more controlled context away from the operating theatre. So we are currently conducting the first study outside of the clinical surgical setting. It is the experimental study where our goal is to test first can we induce anesthesia dreams in this kind of control setting. Secondly, what are these dreams like and third, what is happening in the brain when people report these experiences. And so far we have collected data from almost 30 healthy volunteers. We induce anesthesia, we keep the monitor for a certain period of time and then people emerge slowly from this state. And as soon as they emerge then I interview them. Do you remember having any dreams during anesthesia? Yeah, like the best way can describe it is like I was an alloy, like different metals. Sorry, where? Like an alloy of different metals. This research is cutting edge and our understanding of anesthesia dreams is still at a very early stage. But Pillarin says that the initial findings into whether carefully inducing these dreams states can help people with PTSD are promising. Let's say we find evidence for this, that the acid works. Then there is so much we can do. First of all, like for people who are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, this could be then a new and never-type of therapeutic approach to help with that. We don't know whether it might be helpful for other types of mental conditions or disorders. For example, maybe it can also be helpful for generalized anxiety, maybe depression, maybe some other things. So that could be like a standalone therapy for individuals outside the surgical context. Maybe some of the dream clinics available. But then when we think how many people undergo surgery like every day, like millions of people all over the world, if we can change the well-being of the people for undergo surgery, just to even make it more positive, that would be like amazing, that we could help so many people. The dream makers we've heard from are doing some truly extraordinary things. They've shown us that the barrier between the dream world and the real world is permeable. That what we do before we fall asleep can help us shape what we experience in our dreams, and that that in turn can influence our waking lives, sometimes incredibly profoundly. I've been surprised to discover for myself that my own dreams are not in fact as boring or unremarkable as I first thought. For years, I've basically written off an entire aspect of myself. I feel like I've been sleepwalking through sleep. Dr Adam Harwhorrowitz says this is something he hears from people a lot, and he wants to urge us all to pay more attention to our dreams. One point I try to make to people who say, "Why would I care about my dreams? I don't remember my dreams, I forget my dreams." Anyways, is that you're just losing a third of your life. Like a third of every day adds up to a third of a year, which adds up to a third of a life, and you could be having experiences, and those could be beautiful, and those could be meaningful. And instead, you're just like, "I'm just going to give up 30 years of full experience." So, what kind of tips maybe would you have for someone who's listening to this and thinking, "Gosh, I am really not very connected to this part of myself that is dreaming every night?" What are some things that people, you know, me included, can think about doing that might enrich their dream itself? The first thing you gotta do is go to sleep saying, "I will remember my dreams," and go to sleep thinking about why it's important. Second thing you wanna do is, in the morning, do not pick up that phone. In the morning, do not bolt out of bed and start stressing about work. Take two minutes, take three minutes, and stay totally still. The more you physically move, the more you will forget your dreams. It gets even more important to you if you commit to dream sharing. First thing I'm gonna do, I'm gonna tell you what I dreamt about, and you're gonna tell me what you dreamt about. But just that commitment is a reason for your brain to remember your dreams. The usual scientific questions about dreaming tend to be, "Why do we dream?" What could dreams be for? Are they fantasies of the unconscious, fragments of our day being organized into memory? But what I find fascinating about this new field of science is that it reframes dreams as deeply personal. Why do you want to dream? What could dreams be for you? And the limit, it seems, is your imagination. Dreams are a space where you can do more, think more, build more, be more. And inhabiting it means you get to pull a little bit of that possibility into the waking world, and then our shared world becomes bigger. You've been listening to the documentary from the BBC World Service. I'm Anand Jagatier, Sweet Dreams. "Cooka Guess What Time It Is." "Time for season six." "Time for season six." "So we'll see season six." I'm Damylanta Cumbur, and that's my daughter Coco. The inspiration for my award-winning podcast, "Dear daughter, from the BBC World Service." And we're back. Dear daughter, being your mum has taught me so much about myself, and giving advice to people everywhere. I want them to be able to take this space that I know that they should have, and I would love to give them the complete agency to do that. Such for dear daughter, wherever you get your BBC podcasts. Dear daughter.