ABSTRACT
Sci-fi has had a lot to say about dreaming over the years: film director Christopher Nolan, fiction writer Ursula Le Guin, anime director Satoshi Kon, and many others have explored the weird and wonderful world of dreams. Inception begins with the premise that it’s possible to enter someone’s dream and extract information from their mind. In the first experiment of its kind, a research team led by Yukiyasu Kamitani was able to translate images from the brains of people who were dreaming to pictures of their dreams on a screen. DeepDream uses artificial neural networks to create what end up as very psychedelic images. In psychedelic consciousness we may hallucinate – in other words, have a kind of ‘waking dream’, and there are many other similarities between the two states of consciousness. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have been developing technology that will allow far more specific content to be implanted into a dream.
