This start-up company called "Prophet" hopes to develop a wearable device that allows you to experience the feeling of waking up from a lucid dream... Is "Inception" coming true? Have you ever had the strange experience of waking up in your own dream? At that time, you are not fully awake and can feel a dream around you, but you are conscious enough to control part of the phantom.
For about half of adults, this "lucid dream" is of extraordinary significance, and according to surveys, they have had at least one lucid dream in their lives.
That's why tech startup Prophetic hopes to develop a wearable device that allows more people to experience what lucid dreaming feels like.
Ultrasound combined with AI induces lucid dreams
When 29-year-old Eric Wollberg and 27-year-old Wesley Berry met in March this year, the two hit it off.
Wollberg is experimenting with using lucid dreams to explore consciousness, while Berry is working with musician Grimes to turn neural signals into art. How can brain imaging tools help map human thought patterns? Both were fascinated by it.
When a sleeping person realizes that he or she is dreaming and is able to control certain parts of the dream, this is a lucid dream.
That same month, the two founded Prophetic, hoping to create "the world's first wearable device for stabilizing lucid dreams," a headset that emits focused ultrasound signals.
Prophetic aims to combine technologies such as ultrasound and machine learning models with a device called Halo to detect when dreamers are in REM, thereby inducing lucid dreams and allowing them to stabilize.
Realizing that you are in a dream is an extraordinary experience, it is surreal.
Wollberg has been lucid dreaming since she was 12 years old. "Looking at it from an entertainment perspective, this is the ultimate VR experience. You can fly, make a building rise from the ground, and talk to characters in your dreams."
Berry pointed out that lucid dreaming has many benefits. It can aid in the treatment of PTSD, reduce anxiety, improve mood, enhance confidence, motor skills, creativity, and more.
Halo is tentatively scheduled for release in 2025, and Prophetic has not yet made medical claims about the product. But both Wollberg and Berry are optimistic. Many studies have proven that lucid dreaming can reduce nightmares related to PTSD, promote mindfulness, and open new windows on the mysterious nature of consciousness.
Paper address: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6451677/
Paper address: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-19624-4
Paper address: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7471655/
To further explore the connections between these phenomena, Prophetic collaborated with the Donders Institute, a research center at Radboud University in the Netherlands. This research center focuses on neuroscience and cognition and hopes to generate the largest dataset of electroencephalogram (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) observations of lucid dreamers.
The collaboration will also explore one of the core technologies behind Prophetic’s vision, transcranial focused ultrasound (TUS).
This non-invasive technique uses low-intensity ultrasound pulses to probe the brain and interact with neural activity with a depth and precision not possible with previous methods such as transcranial electrical stimulation or transcranial magnetic stimulation.
Nico Adelhöfer, a researcher at Donders Sleep and Memory Laboratory, said that he was very happy to develop a home lucid dreaming device.
"Although high-density research in the laboratory is needed to fully study lucid dreaming, the ultimate goal of this research is the broad public. If subjects must come to the laboratory to experience it, it defeats the purpose."
Home devices to improve the sleep experience, including inducing lucid dreams, have been around for several years, but they were bulky and had low induction rates, he said. "
But safety-focused neuromodulation is a recent technology that holds great potential not only for lucid dream induction, but also for the potential to flexibly alter other parameters of sleep and cognition.
It's exciting to see what's possible and where the limits will be.
While ultrasound equipment has been widely used in medicine for decades, using TUS to stimulate the brain is a relatively new technology.
According to 19 years of research, it may be used to study brain function and also regulate brain activity. Two decades of research shows it may even have potential as a treatment for depression and anxiety.
Paper address: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2020.00052/full
It's unclear whether TUS can induce or stabilize lucid dreams, but the Prophetic team hopes to find out for sure.
Halo, a wearable device developed in partnership with Card79, can read a user's EEG data. Card79 designs and manufactures hardware for Musk’s brain-computer interface company Neuralink.
Next, Prophetic hopes to use the data set from its partnership with the Donders Institute to train machine learning models that will stimulate targeted neural activity in users of ultrasound transducers as a means of inducing lucid dreams.
You don’t feel like you’re wearing the device at all
"Ideally, the user will not notice this device at all, and will only perceive subtle changes in the dream experience. These changes look natural and have no traces of artificiality." Adelhöfer explained.
He himself is a chronic lucid dreamer.
"The direction in which dreaming changes depends on the exact parameter settings. A moment of insight may be triggered, causing the dreamer to question the reality of the current dream, resulting in a lucid dream. When combined with complete perceptual immersion, dreaming can easily become one of the most curious and exhilarating experiences in humankind."
Depending on the device details and steering range of the ultrasound transducer, it is further conceivable that the emotional tone of dreams could also be modulated, for example by reducing negative emotions, which could be achieved by targeting the amygdala, which is located deep in the brain.
Sleep research targeting this specific goal is still ongoing. In the future, it may also be possible to modulate specific content of dreams through ultrasound technology, but more hardware iterations will be needed to achieve the high resolution and reliability required for this task.
Wollberg and Berry express confidence that, based on other methods, their technique will successfully induce lucid dreams.
For example, a 2014 study found that during REM sleep, low-gamma band stimulation affects ongoing brain activity and induces self-reflective consciousness during dreams.
Paper address: https://www.nature.com/articles/nn.3719
Wollberg started having lucid dreams when he was 12 years old. He had been lucid dreaming twice a week since college and realized he wanted to create a way to explore consciousness on a deeper level.
While today’s leading Transformer models underpin tools like ChatGPT to process text input and output, Berry aims to do something different with Prophetic – use convolutional neural networks to decode brain imaging data into tokens, and then feed that data into the Transformer model in a way it can understand.
"You can create this closed loop where the model is learning and figuring out what sequence of brain states needs to occur, what sequence of neurostimulation needs to occur, to maximize activation of the prefrontal cortex."
Prophetic's prototype aims to use focused ultrasound to stimulate the user's prefrontal cortex while dreaming.
Paper address: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35264943/
Research has shown that focused ultrasound stimulation can improve working memory, which Berry equates in part to one of his own thoughts - dreaming and not knowing how you got somewhere.
"When you use this focused ultrasound, it's like a quantum leap, and I feel strongly about that...," Berry said.
Inception come true?
It remains to be seen whether Halo will use TUS to achieve similar results in future iterations, or whether there will be bigger surprises.
And this concept naturally evokes some classic pop culture stories about dream manipulation, such as "Inception," "The Matrix," and the most classic and terrifying treehouse story from "The Simpsons" - "Nightmare on Evergreen Terrace."
Obviously, most of the drama in these fictional works comes from the worst possible consequences of disturbed dreams, without considering the scientific nature of them.
The Prophetic team recognizes the security and privacy concerns that people may have about these emerging technologies, and these issues have been addressed in their technology roadmap.
Adelhöfer also points out that safety is key in various sleep and dream regulation studies.
"Current technological developments show that advanced control of dream content is entirely possible in the future," says Adelhöfer.
Prophetic hopes Halo will contribute to the quest to understand dreams and consciousness.
"What lucid dreaming does to me is make the world more fascinating," Wollberg said.
When you have such an extraordinary experience, it really injects a lot of charm, mystery and depth into life.
Raised $1.1 million
The startup has raised a previously unreported $1.1 million in funding, with participation from a16z’s ScoutFund and led by BoxGroup.
Wollberg compared the company to OpenAI. Its mission is to "understand the nature of consciousness together," its LinkedIn page reads: "Prometheus stole fire from the gods, we will steal dreams from the prophets."
But with a prototype still a year away and the company planning to start delivering devices in the spring of 2025, Prophetic is still some way off from delivering on its promise.