Inside the emerging field of dream engineering
In the space between wakefulness and sleep flutters a fragile twilight zone long untouched by science. But new technologies are changing that. In laboratories across the country, including in Chicago, a glove can track your physiological signals while a whisper delivers audio prompts to influence your mind. Your dreams pause just long enough that you remember them.
This is the work of dream engineers — scientists who occupy the space between our subconscious and reality. In the latest field finding, researchers suggest that guided dreams could spark creative problem-solving, opening a broader conversation about the possibilities and implications of manipulating the sleeping mind.
In February, neuroscientists at Northwestern University published a study supporting a theory that dreams during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep can help people solve puzzles. Their research used a technique called targeted memory reactivation (TMR) to prompt people’s dreams with sound cues tied to specific puzzles they had failed to solve while awake. Roughly 75% of participants ended up dreaming about the puzzles after prompting, and they were more likely to solve the puzzles once awake.
While this doesn’t provide conclusive evidence of the relationship between TMR, dreaming, and problem-solving, the findings are a major milestone for the field of dream engineering.
Study author Karen Konkoly, PhD, a dream scientist at Cambridge University, says that by using interactive dreaming, her team hoped to reactivate memories to induce real-world outcomes. “Dream engineering seeks to systematically manipulate your variable of interest so that you can make stronger conclusions about why you dream,” she says.
The inspiration stems in part from remarkable creations that have greatly benefited society. “Mary Shelley came up with the plot of Frankenstein in a dream, and the periodic table was dreamt of,” Konkoly says. “Dreams are really creative, but we wanted to see if you had a specific dream about a specific, unsolved problem, would that help you solve [the problem] the next day? Would you be able to solve it in a dream?”
The Northwestern team specifically recruited lucid dreamers for their research. Lucid dreaming occurs when people become aware of their sleep state and often experience significant control over their dreams. While lucid dreaming sometimes occurs spontaneously, it can also be induced.
Some experts in the field, such as Remington Mallett, PhD, a sleep research scientist in San Diego, became fascinated by dream science after experiencing lucid dreaming himself.
“I hadn’t heard about lucid dreaming at all, so I was really confused by the experience,” Mallett says. “I loved the experience of recognizing I was dreaming and thought it was a really wild phenomenon.”
Konkoly says it’s amazing to witness someone experience lucid dreaming, “answering your questions and realizing that they’re in another world. You don’t know where they are, yet you’re communicating with them.”
Yet as the field expands, where exactly did dream engineering start, and why has it taken so long to gain legitimacy?
The history of dream science
Dreams have fascinated civilizations for centuries. Some of the earliest dream documentation traces back to ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt. In antiquity, dream interpretation often involved the presence of religious figures such as priests or images of deities. People sometimes practiced dream incubation, or the induction of sleep to receive prophetic dreams.
The ancient Greeks and Romans also interpreted dreams as divine in origin. During this time, though, alternative philosophies about dreams began to emerge. Philosophers like Democritus offered the first naturalistic theories of dreams, believing that while dreams came from external sources, they were not divine. Aristotle provided some of the most in-depth studies of dreams in his essays, believing that dreams were psychological and physiological phenomena.
Fast-forward to the 19th and 20th centuries. Sigmund Freud’s “Interpretation of Dreams” proposed that dreams were a form of wish fulfillment, often exposing repressed desires or motivations. In the 1950s, Eugene Aserinsky and Nathaniel Kleitman at the University of Chicago first described REM sleep, leading to the identification of sleep stages and dreaming phases.
But dream manipulation didn’t enter the scientific field until 1958, when William Dement and Edward A. Wolpert first attempted to manipulate dream content by applying sensory stimuli, such as loud sounds or a fine spray of water, to participants while they were in REM sleep.
After the mid-1900s, there was a standstill, says Robert Stickgold, PhD, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. “The field sort of died after that,” he says.
Then, in 2000, Stickgold and his team conducted a study that suggested further evidence that people sleep to process information. They ran experiments with the game Tetris and found that people dreamed about its visual patterns.
That work inspired a new wave of dream researchers, including Konkoly and Mallett, as well as the MIT Media Lab and scientist Adam Haar Horowitz, PhD.
The next generation of dream engineers
Horowitz approached Stickgold about developing a device, which later became Dormio, that could detect sleep onset. “I had minimal confidence in where he was going with dream engineering, but it was ridiculously successful,” Stickgold says.
Originally trained as a neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Horowitz created and taught MIT’s first course on sleep and dreams. He also co-founded MIT’s Symposium on Dream Engineering in 2019.
Horowitz’s Dormio device is a glove-like mechanism with sensors that collect signals from the hand. The sensors first identify when the wearer falls asleep and then trigger an audio recording asking participants to deliver a dream report, ideally while still semi-asleep. The system plays an audio cue after the dream report, prompting the person with specific words to integrate the cued topic into their next set of dreams.
According to Stickhold, TMR is targeted memory reactivation; Horowitz’s process is TDI — targeted dream incubation. Targeted dream incubation seeks to guide dream content through direct prompts, while TMR reactivates existing memories.
Horowitz now serves as an affiliate researcher for the DxE Lab and co-founded DUST, a dream engineering startup.
Stickgold, Konkoly, and several other researchers at the forefront of dream engineering serve on the DUST science collective, aiming to translate sleep and dream science into real-world tools that aid sleep health. Their focus areas include creativity, mental health, and learning.
Neil Agrawal, a founding engineer at DUST and an undergraduate student at Georgia Institute of Technology, found Haar’s work in high school while researching lucid dreaming techniques. After experiencing lucid dreams himself, Agrawal says he caught “the dream bug.”
“We’ve always felt like this small scientific community that wasn’t taken seriously, but now we’re finally producing the body of work to change that,” he says. “When I talk to people now, no one thinks it’s garbage. Dreams are so vulnerable. They’re so personal. Sometimes they’re magical.”
Future dream engineering
As researchers study how to influence dreams, they’re also looking into how doing so could affect neurological and psychological disorders.
“Bad sleep is something that’s been correlated with every single mental health disorder. We know that sleep is such an important part of our human life,” Agrawal says.
Konkoly says that dream engineering could enhance understanding of why we dream and, subsequently, assist people with emotional regulation and traumatic experiences. Studies have already determined that nightmares are one of the biggest predictors of suicide compared to other symptoms, particularly in those with post-traumatic stress disorder.
Many dream engineers say they view dream states as one of the last “sacred spaces.”
In 2021, beer conglomerate Molson Coors attempted to use targeted dream incubation. Before the Super Bowl, the company posted a brief movie and an eight-hour soundscape online, encouraging people to watch the video before bed and play the sounds throughout the night. The goal: to see if it would trigger dreams related to the brand.
After the campaign, 35 sleep and dream researchers from around the world, including Stickgold and Haar, signed an open letter opposing the use of dream engineering for commercial purposes.
“Multiple marketing studies are openly testing new ways to alter and motivate purchasing behavior through dream and sleep hacking,” the letter says. “Our dreams cannot become just another playground for corporate advertisers. Regardless of Coors’ intent, their actions set the stage for a corporate assault on our very sense of who we are.”
Stickgold says that he has faith in the younger generation of dream scientists to spearhead research that could answer some of these age-old questions.
And Konkoly hopes those answers empower people. “They are an active participant in how their dreams are created, not just a passive recipient of them,” she says.
(Above image from Hartwig HKD on Flickr, Creative Commons)
