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Can Your Dreams Be Hacked? W/ Nick of The Occult Rejects · The Occult Rejects

• 0:02
  Speaker 1: You see, something's going to happen. What?
• 0:13
  Speaker 2: What's going to happen? Something wonderful. What? I understand how
• 0:19
  Speaker 2: you feel. You see, it's all very clear to me now.
• 0:24
  Speaker 3: Welcome back, everyone. This is Divulgence.
• 0:26
  Speaker 4: Thank you so much for tuning in. And, uh, we
• 0:28
  Speaker 4: have Nick of the call rejects back in the house.
• 0:31
  Speaker 3: Nick, what's going on, man? Good to see you again.
• 0:33
  Speaker 2: Thank you very much. Thank you for having me on. Definitely. Uh,
• 0:35
  Speaker 2: definitely been having fun covering topics on your show and, uh,
• 0:38
  Speaker 2: definitely interesting topic today to talk about that. Uh, I
• 0:42
  Speaker 2: think he's interesting. And I thank you for letting me
• 0:44
  Speaker 2: talk about it.
• 0:46
  Speaker 3: Yeah, man. I, like I said, I'm enjoying these episodes.
• 0:49
  Speaker 4: I've been getting some good comments and, uh, got a
• 0:51
  Speaker 4: couple of emails from people that are enjoying the.
• 0:54
  Speaker 3: Halloween specials, if you will. And yeah, I'm having fun.
• 0:58
  Speaker 3: I'm learning a lot. So yeah, it's giving me ideas
• 1:02
  Speaker 3: for the future as well.
• 1:03
  Speaker 4: So that's really good. So what are we dealing with today,
• 1:09
  Speaker 4: my friend? You mentioned this last week and I said,
• 1:12
  Speaker 4: whatever we were supposed to do next time, forget it
• 1:15
  Speaker 4: till the next time because we're doing that. You mentioned
• 1:18
  Speaker 4: something about dreams, hacking into dreams, dream manipulation.
• 1:23
  Speaker 2: For sure.
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  Speaker 3: So take the floor, my friend.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah. So basically, I think I have a bunch of
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  Speaker 2: studies that have been done, even a patent that's out,
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  Speaker 2: and stuff that even that course has done before in
• 1:34
  Speaker 2: the past. I think when I go over it, you
• 1:38
  Speaker 2: can definitely see, first off, with the patent, the part
• 1:41
  Speaker 2: of it, and it's even listed in there, is that
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  Speaker 2: they could put ads in your dream. So, like, I
• 1:47
  Speaker 2: do think they're looking towards engineering dreams, actually. But the
• 1:52
  Speaker 2: stuff that I'm going to show is, I think, proof
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  Speaker 2: that you can manipulate and push dreams and memories associated
• 1:58
  Speaker 2: with dreams, maybe in certain directions. And I think if
• 2:01
  Speaker 2: you put everything together, you can definitely probably manipulate someone's dreams.
• 2:05
  Speaker 2: But even the patent itself is kind of going towards engineering,
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  Speaker 2: which is, like, a little scary, in my opinion.
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  Speaker 1: But.
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  Speaker 2: And it's not, you know, this isn't to be like,
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  Speaker 2: oh God, like, I mean, it is weird. It is scary,
• 2:17
  Speaker 2: but I'm not trying, this isn't trying to be some,
• 2:19
  Speaker 2: I guess like a clickbait, like fear mongering stuff, but
• 2:23
  Speaker 2: it's just very interesting. And I do think like, it's
• 2:25
  Speaker 2: quite possible that they, they, whoever they are, uh, may
• 2:30
  Speaker 2: have already been like kind of manipulating dreams. Cause again,
• 2:32
  Speaker 2: like I'm saying, like after I think I get done
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  Speaker 2: covering all the studies that have been done, you know,
• 2:37
  Speaker 2: if you start looking at the different ways that it's
• 2:38
  Speaker 2: being done, like if you kind of collectively started using
• 2:41
  Speaker 2: all that together, I'm sure, I'm sure you can start, like,
• 2:45
  Speaker 2: really kind of pushing dreams in the direction you'd like
• 2:48
  Speaker 2: it to go. You know? Very interesting. So just, you know,
• 2:53
  Speaker 2: real quick, you know, again, can somebody hack a dream? Now,
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  Speaker 2: I just wanted to define that a little bit to
• 2:58
  Speaker 2: an extent. If you mean, like, upload an entire movie
• 3:00
  Speaker 2: into someone's sleeping brain, control every character, every emotion, and
• 3:04
  Speaker 2: make them wake up believing, whatever you chose, no. I
• 3:08
  Speaker 2: don't think so. Not yet. There's no credible evidence yet
• 3:11
  Speaker 2: that we can do that. But if you mean like
• 3:13
  Speaker 2: detect sleep, introduce information at precisely timed moments, influence dream imagery,
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  Speaker 2: reactivate existing memories, create simple new associations, modify learned fear responses,
• 3:28
  Speaker 2: or exchange messages with somebody inside a lucid dream, pieces
• 3:33
  Speaker 2: of that stuff is real. And there's another possibility that
• 3:37
  Speaker 2: might be even more important. What if you don't have
• 3:40
  Speaker 2: to control somebody's dream to influence what happens in their
• 3:44
  Speaker 2: brain while they're dreaming? What if the real opportunity isn't
• 3:48
  Speaker 2: inserting a command into a dream, but changing which memories
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  Speaker 2: get processed, which associations become stronger, and which emotional responses
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  Speaker 2: change while somebody sleeps? And that is stuff that scientists
• 4:02
  Speaker 2: are looking into right now actively. So, you know, I
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  Speaker 2: do think, again, after I'm done with this, it should
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  Speaker 2: make you question, you know, how susceptible are our dreams
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  Speaker 2: to being fucked with? People were deliberately attempting to influence
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  Speaker 2: dreams long before we had computers, brains, or artificial intelligence.
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  Speaker 2: In ancient Greece, visitors traveled to sanctuaries associated with Asclepius,
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  Speaker 2: the god of healing. These weren't simply places where people
• 4:30
  Speaker 2: fell asleep and hoped something interesting happened. Visitors entered a
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  Speaker 2: religious environment, encountered prayers, images, offerings, rituals, and expectations about
• 4:40
  Speaker 2: receiving healing or guidance through dreams. They prepared themselves before
• 4:45
  Speaker 2: going to sleep, then interpreted the resulting experiences within that
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  Speaker 2: religious framework. Ancient Egypt provides another example, which is something
• 4:54
  Speaker 2: I find interesting. In one of the papers I do mention,
• 4:56
  Speaker 2: I don't remember if I mentioned it in the paper
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  Speaker 2: or if I just, you know, whatever, I'm just going
• 5:01
  Speaker 2: to mention it here. One of them does actually quote
• 5:05
  Speaker 2: back to what I'm going to mention now. So I
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  Speaker 2: found that interesting that one paper even brought up this
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  Speaker 2: whole kind of magical Egyptian idea. But in ancient Egypt,
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  Speaker 2: they had ritual traditions associated with the god Bes, B-E-S.
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  Speaker 2: And that included preparation involving images, ritual materials, and sleeping
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  Speaker 2: in pursuit of dream knowledge. Like you would get your
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  Speaker 2: answers or you would get stuff Through dreams. And, you know,
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  Speaker 2: it could be done through, you know, this God. So,
• 5:36
  Speaker 2: you know, believing in dream manipulation or getting stuff through
• 5:39
  Speaker 2: dreams or trying to, you know, access stuff in your
• 5:42
  Speaker 2: dreams has been an idea kind of like in the
• 5:46
  Speaker 2: occult world or the spiritual world. Just, you know, just
• 5:49
  Speaker 2: wanted to bring that up in the past. Now, just
• 5:53
  Speaker 2: going on for people to understand stuff about sleep. There
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  Speaker 2: will be a couple of categories I will even go
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  Speaker 2: through just to give people an idea what I'm talking
• 6:01
  Speaker 2: about when I get into these papers and studies. First off,
• 6:05
  Speaker 2: sleep is not an on and off switch. Your brain
• 6:08
  Speaker 2: doesn't simply shut down for eight hours and restart in
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  Speaker 2: the morning. It moves through different physiological states, each involving
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  Speaker 2: different patterns of brain activity, sensory responsiveness, memory processing, and dreaming.
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  Speaker 2: The distinctions are important because one type of sleep intervention
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  Speaker 2: might not work in one stage and fail in another. Or,
• 6:31
  Speaker 2: I mean, it might work in one stage and then
• 6:33
  Speaker 2: not work in the next, which is things that you'll
• 6:35
  Speaker 2: see as I get into some of these studies. They'll
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  Speaker 2: be doing it in different ways. And one is the
• 6:43
  Speaker 2: border crossing. That is the transition from waking consciousness into sleep,
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  Speaker 2: often associated with hypnagogia, which we'll get into later. You
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  Speaker 2: begin losing ordinary waking awareness, Images appear spontaneously. Memories start
• 6:59
  Speaker 2: to blend with imagination. Fragments of conversation, faces, places, and
• 7:04
  Speaker 2: ideas can combine in weird ways. Information from the outside
• 7:09
  Speaker 2: body can still enter that developing experience. The sound may
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  Speaker 2: be part of the imagery. A word may influence what
• 7:16
  Speaker 2: the mind begins constructing. That's why N1 is particularly interesting
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  Speaker 2: for dream incubation. The brain is beginning to generate dreamlike experiences,
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  Speaker 2: but the boundary between the external environment and the internal
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  Speaker 2: imagery remains relatively permeable. So it's still very susceptible to
• 7:35
  Speaker 2: the outside world when you're in N1. N2 is established sleep.
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  Speaker 2: The brain now produces characteristic events known as sleep spindles
• 7:45
  Speaker 2: and K-complexes. I don't think you really have to remember those,
• 7:49
  Speaker 2: but if your brain's doing that, it shows that you're
• 7:51
  Speaker 2: still paying attention to the outside world. Sleep spindles are
• 7:55
  Speaker 2: brief bursts of rhythmic electrical activity, and they are associated
• 8:00
  Speaker 2: with processes involved in learning and memory consolidation. So if
• 8:06
  Speaker 2: you're seeing that, like you know your brain, you're still
• 8:09
  Speaker 2: doing something even though you're going to sleep. K-complexes are
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  Speaker 2: large electrical events that can occur spontaneously or in response
• 8:18
  Speaker 2: to stimulation. So then if that's coming up, then it's
• 8:22
  Speaker 2: still showing that you're being stimulated somewhere. Important point is
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  Speaker 2: that the brain is still processing information even though the
• 8:28
  Speaker 2: person is asleep. That becomes significant when scientists try to
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  Speaker 2: reactivate something somebody learned earlier. And three is a deep,
• 8:37
  Speaker 2: slow-wave sleep. Large, slow electrical oscillations become especially prominent. The
• 8:44
  Speaker 2: person is harder to awaken, and this stage is particularly
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  Speaker 2: important in memory research. The slow oscillations aren't merely background activity.
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  Speaker 2: Their timing is associated with changes in neuronal excitability and
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  Speaker 2: with the coordination of other sleep rhythms. That creates opportunities
• 9:02
  Speaker 2: to investigate whether outside stimulation can influence memory processing. REM
• 9:08
  Speaker 2: is where many elaborate and emotional intense dreams occur. The
• 9:13
  Speaker 2: brain becomes highly active while most major skeletal muscles are
• 9:17
  Speaker 2: inhibited through REM atonia. That's why, like, if you're dreaming
• 9:21
  Speaker 2: that you're running, you're not going to be running in
• 9:22
  Speaker 2: your bed, you know, because of the tonia. In some cases,
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  Speaker 2: dreamers realize they're dreaming, too. That's lucid dreaming. Some lucid
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  Speaker 2: dreamers can intentionally move their eyes in predetermined patterns while
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  Speaker 2: remaining asleep. Researchers can record those movements and use them
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  Speaker 2: as signals, something we're going to get into later also.
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  Speaker 2: Now information can potentially enter the dream from outside and
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  Speaker 2: a person inside the dream can intentionally communicate back. Keep
• 9:54
  Speaker 2: these distinctions of mind throughout the episode influencing dream content
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  Speaker 2: influencing memory and communicating with a dreamer or different scientific
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  Speaker 2: achievements none automatically proves the other though um the thomas
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  Speaker 2: edison this is another thing i just wanted to kind
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  Speaker 2: of mention Thomas Edison and Salvatore Dali are famously associated
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  Speaker 2: with a technique involving holding an object while falling asleep.
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  Speaker 2: As their muscles relaxed, the object would fall and awaken
• 10:25
  Speaker 2: them near sleep onset. The idea was to capture unusual
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  Speaker 2: associations produced at the boundary between waking thought and sleep.
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  Speaker 2: Those historical anecdotes aren't controlled scientific experiments, but modern research
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  Speaker 2: gives us a reason to take that idea seriously. In 2021,
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  Speaker 2: Celia LaCow, or however you say her name, and colleagues
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  Speaker 2: studied 103 people working on mathematical problems containing a hidden shortcut.
• 10:55
  Speaker 2: The participants didn't initially know the shortcut existed. After a
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  Speaker 2: rest period, 83% of participants who spent at least 15
• 11:04
  Speaker 2: seconds in N1, like I mentioned before when you kind
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  Speaker 2: of started to doze off, discovered the hidden rule compared
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  Speaker 2: with 30% of those who remained awake. So, I mean,
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  Speaker 2: there was, like, a 53% difference in people that, you know,
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  Speaker 2: took that nap. So the advantage, you know, disappeared among
• 11:22
  Speaker 2: participants who progressed into deeper sleep. And the advantage disappeared. So, like,
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  Speaker 2: if people you went into were even a different sleep,
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  Speaker 2: you even had less of a chance. So it really
• 11:31
  Speaker 2: is showing it was that N1 part. So there's something
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  Speaker 2: there with that. Crazy, man. Yeah, right?
• 11:40
  Speaker 4: When you talk about Dolly, like, with the paintbrush or,
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  Speaker 4: you know, trying to, catch themselves. It just reminds me
• 11:47
  Speaker 4: of like the old, I think it's like an old
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  Speaker 4: trucker trick where you, you burn down your cigarettes, uh,
• 11:53
  Speaker 4: in your.
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  Speaker 1: Fingers, right?
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  Speaker 2: And then that way it.
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  Speaker 3: Burns your fingers.
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  Speaker 4: If you're falling asleep, it keeps you going, right?
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  Speaker 3: Wakes you up before you crash. Yeah.
• 12:01
  Speaker 2: You know, I've, I've heard that before actually.
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  Speaker 4: Crazy.
• 12:05
  Speaker 2: Yes. And, uh, yeah. So, um, it, yeah, it suggests
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  Speaker 2: that a brief period near the threshold of sleep may
• 12:12
  Speaker 2: create favorable conditions, for discovering previously unnoticed patterns. And if
• 12:19
  Speaker 2: that window eye can be identified, another possibility appears. Could
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  Speaker 2: somebody deliver a specific idea during that moment and influence
• 12:27
  Speaker 2: what the sleeping mind does with it? This is when
• 12:30
  Speaker 2: we start to get into some of the shit now.
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  Speaker 2: That is where Dormio enters the story. MIT researcher Adam
• 12:38
  Speaker 2: Harowitz and colleagues developed Dormio, a hand-worn prototype designed to
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  Speaker 2: intervene near the beginning of sleep. The technique is called
• 12:50
  Speaker 2: targeted dream incubation, or I might call it TDI going forward,
• 12:55
  Speaker 2: just to shorten it. And Dormio wasn't a mind-reading machine.
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  Speaker 2: It didn't display dreams on a monitor or control the
• 13:01
  Speaker 2: entire experience. It monitored physiological signals that could help estimate
• 13:07
  Speaker 2: whether somebody was drifting into sleep. The original system tracked
• 13:11
  Speaker 2: three signals, heart rate, Electrodermal activity, meaning charges in the
• 13:17
  Speaker 2: electroconductance of the skin, and finger flexion, which provided information
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  Speaker 2: about the relaxation of hand muscles. These signals helped estimate
• 13:27
  Speaker 2: probable sleep onset. They were an equivalent to complete polysomnographic
• 13:35
  Speaker 2: confirmation of every sleep stage. It did check to make
• 13:41
  Speaker 2: sure to see if they were starting to fall asleep.
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  Speaker 2: Then the researchers selected a target. It was a tree.
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  Speaker 2: Participants heard instructions suggesting that they think about a tree
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  Speaker 2: before falling asleep. When Dormio estimated sleep onset, a timer began.
• 14:00
  Speaker 2: Approximately one to five minutes later, a prompt interrupted the
• 14:04
  Speaker 2: participant and asked them to report whatever had been passing
• 14:07
  Speaker 2: through their mind. Participants spoke their reports and described whether
• 14:12
  Speaker 2: they thought they had been awake halfway asleep or asleep.
• 14:16
  Speaker 2: The device then repeated the tree's suggestion, and the process
• 14:19
  Speaker 2: began again. The procedure continued for approximately 45 minutes. So
• 14:24
  Speaker 2: the experiment wasn't simply playing a recording throughout the night.
• 14:29
  Speaker 2: It was a feedback procedure, and that's even like a
• 14:31
  Speaker 2: little bit different of a thing that I might try
• 14:33
  Speaker 2: to specify. You introduce a theme, you estimate the sleep onset,
• 14:38
  Speaker 2: allow imagery to develop, collect a report, reinforce the theme, repeat.
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  Speaker 2: Researchers compared four conditions, sleeping with tree suggestion, sleeping without
• 14:51
  Speaker 2: the tree suggestion, remaining awake with the suggestion, and remaining
• 14:55
  Speaker 2: awake without it. The results you got among participants sleeping
• 15:00
  Speaker 2: with tree incubation, 45 of 67 reports, or 67%, contained
• 15:08
  Speaker 2: tree-related material. Among participants sleeping without incubation, only two. The
• 15:15
  Speaker 2: 69 report of the 69, or 3%, contained any references
• 15:20
  Speaker 2: of a tree. The waking groups also demonstrated the influence
• 15:24
  Speaker 2: of suggestion. Among waking participants receiving the tree Q29 of 56,
• 15:31
  Speaker 2: or 52%, contained tree-related material. Without the suggestion, none of
• 15:37
  Speaker 2: the 48 waking reports contained it at all. So you
• 15:41
  Speaker 2: did something there. The waking results are also important because
• 15:45
  Speaker 2: they demonstrate that deliberate priming can influence conscious thought. Nevertheless,
• 15:51
  Speaker 2: the difference between the sleeping groups was substantial. One participant
• 15:55
  Speaker 2: produced a particularly interesting sequence of imagery. The early reports
• 15:59
  Speaker 2: involved ordinary trees. Later reports included a remembered childhood tree
• 16:05
  Speaker 2: and trees breaking into many pieces. Then the participant described
• 16:09
  Speaker 2: a desert, a shaman, and a tree beneath which dreamer
• 16:13
  Speaker 2: and a tree beneath which the dreamer received directions. You know,
• 16:17
  Speaker 2: just some weird shit. Then, can that influence what somebody
• 16:24
  Speaker 2: does after waking? In 2023, researchers conducted another Dormio experiment
• 16:30
  Speaker 2: to investigate whether incubating a particular theme might affect creativity.
• 16:36
  Speaker 2: They enrolled 50 participants and analyzed data from 49. The
• 16:41
  Speaker 2: basic comparison involved four groups, sleeping with tree incubation, sleeping
• 16:46
  Speaker 2: without it, waking with the tree suggestion, and waking without it.
• 16:51
  Speaker 2: Following the experimental period, participants completed three tree-related creativity assessments.
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  Speaker 2: One required an imaginative story involving a tree. Another asked
• 17:02
  Speaker 2: participants to generate unusual uses for a tree. The third
• 17:07
  Speaker 2: involved producing creative verb associations in response to nouns. Researchers
• 17:13
  Speaker 2: used human ratings and measures of semantic distance to evaluate
• 17:17
  Speaker 2: the responses. Semantic distance measures how conceptually different or unusual
• 17:23
  Speaker 2: particular associations are. The sleep plus incubation group scored 43%
• 17:30
  Speaker 2: higher on the combined creativity measure than the sleeping group
• 17:34
  Speaker 2: without incubation. and 78% higher than the waking group without incubation.
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  Speaker 2: These are relative differences on particular experimental creativity tasks related
• 17:46
  Speaker 2: to the incubated theme, not evidence of a general increase
• 17:49
  Speaker 2: in intelligence. The researchers also observed that stronger target incorporation
• 17:55
  Speaker 2: in sleep reports was associated with better creative performance. Kind
• 18:00
  Speaker 2: of like what I was saying before with even like
• 18:02
  Speaker 2: that whole thing with waking yourself up during that onset.
• 18:06
  Speaker 2: That result takes us beyond simply asking whether researchers can
• 18:09
  Speaker 2: make somebody dream about a tree. Now we're asking whether
• 18:12
  Speaker 2: guided sleep imagery can influence a specific kind of waking performance.
• 18:18
  Speaker 2: In 2024, researchers investigated DormioLite. Now this is a browser-based
• 18:23
  Speaker 2: version of the procedure. The original Dormio required specialized hardware.
• 18:29
  Speaker 2: DormioLite ran through the Chrome browser and used time instructions
• 18:34
  Speaker 2: rather than a custom program. rather than a custom wearable.
• 18:37
  Speaker 2: You don't even need a glove. The trade-off was that
• 18:40
  Speaker 2: it could objectively identify and want. Instead, the system relied
• 18:44
  Speaker 2: on estimated sleep latency and participants' own descriptions of their experience.
• 18:51
  Speaker 2: Researchers recruited 132 people online with 80 meeting the criteria
• 18:56
  Speaker 2: for inclusion in the final analysis. Participants completed both an
• 19:00
  Speaker 2: attempted hypnagogic condition and a waking mind wandering condition. Their
• 19:07
  Speaker 2: assigned object was either a tree or a fork. And
• 19:11
  Speaker 2: here's the fascinating details. Participants recorded the instruction in their
• 19:16
  Speaker 2: own voices. The browser played their recorded suggestions and prompted
• 19:20
  Speaker 2: them to report their experiences. Among the 80 analyzed participants,
• 19:26
  Speaker 2: 73 reported target incorporation during the attempted hypnagogic condition. That's
• 19:32
  Speaker 2: approximately 91%. However, incorporation was not significantly greater than in
• 19:39
  Speaker 2: the waking comparison. So that was a difference. Is there
• 19:44
  Speaker 2: anything you want to say before I keep going?
• 19:47
  Speaker 1: No, man.
• 19:50
  Speaker 2: Not yet.
• 19:50
  Speaker 3: No, not yet. I have some things written down, but
• 19:52
  Speaker 3: not yet.
• 19:54
  Speaker 2: And then can a theme be introduced at sleep onset
• 19:57
  Speaker 2: return during REM? So now that's kind of like almost like,
• 20:03
  Speaker 2: could you kind of put an idea into a person
• 20:05
  Speaker 2: when they're falling asleep and will it reappear while they're
• 20:08
  Speaker 2: in deep sleep? A 2026 pilot study investigated whether a
• 20:12
  Speaker 2: theme introduced near sleep onset could reappear during later REM sleep.
• 20:17
  Speaker 2: 11 participants completed the initial tree incubation procedure. All 11
• 20:23
  Speaker 2: reported tree-related material during at least one sleep onset report.
• 20:29
  Speaker 2: Eight out of that 11 then subsequently entered REM. In
• 20:35
  Speaker 2: the first REM reports, four of those eight participants reported
• 20:38
  Speaker 2: tree-related imagery. Across 21 REM reports, 10 contained the target,
• 20:45
  Speaker 2: and seven of the eight participants reported tree-related content at
• 20:49
  Speaker 2: least once during REM. The dream imagery included inverted trees,
• 20:57
  Speaker 2: fantastical structures, enormous trees resembling rockets, and childhood scenes involving trees.
• 21:05
  Speaker 2: So even with that, they show that, I guess, if
• 21:08
  Speaker 2: you get somebody thinking about something or picturing something, as
• 21:12
  Speaker 2: you start to fall asleep, it could return again in
• 21:14
  Speaker 2: deeper sleep. Great. In 2025, Karen Conkley and colleagues published
• 21:23
  Speaker 2: the study on neuropsychology titled Investigating Dreams by Strategically Presenting
• 21:29
  Speaker 2: Sounds During REM Sleep to Reactivate Waking Experiences. This experiment
• 21:36
  Speaker 2: approached dream influence from a different direction. Instead of simply
• 21:40
  Speaker 2: telling somebody to think about a tree, the researchers first
• 21:44
  Speaker 2: create specific associations between waking experiences and sounds. Participants perform
• 21:51
  Speaker 2: two distinct activities while awake. Each activity was paired with
• 21:56
  Speaker 2: a particular sound. So when you would do something, this
• 21:58
  Speaker 2: particular thing would be a sound played with it. So
• 22:01
  Speaker 2: you kind of like, you know, associate them together. The
• 22:05
  Speaker 2: associations were reinforced before sleep. Then when participants entered REM sleep,
• 22:11
  Speaker 2: researchers played one of those two sounds. So now you're
• 22:14
  Speaker 2: going to hear that sound that you've already associated with
• 22:16
  Speaker 2: whatever you were doing before you went to sleep. The
• 22:19
  Speaker 2: question was whether a sound associated with one waking activity
• 22:23
  Speaker 2: would increase the likelihood that elements of that activity appeared
• 22:26
  Speaker 2: in the dream. And that's what the researchers reported. Dream
• 22:30
  Speaker 2: reports contained more elements from the cued activity than the
• 22:34
  Speaker 2: uncued activity although incorporation of both activities were already relatively common.
• 22:40
  Speaker 2: They also found associations between dreaming about a task and
• 22:44
  Speaker 2: measures of creativity and emotional processing, including reduced negative emotional valiance.
• 22:51
  Speaker 2: That doesn't mean the sound itself was proven to cause
• 22:54
  Speaker 2: every creative or emotional improvement, but they seemed to have
• 22:59
  Speaker 2: less bad dreams, I guess, or negative dreams.
• 23:02
  Speaker 1: Um.
• 23:03
  Speaker 2: Then another one, the sleeping brain can turn outside stimulation
• 23:07
  Speaker 2: into an internal experience. A 2024 systematic review covering 51
• 23:14
  Speaker 2: publications examined the influence of sensory stimulation on dreams. The
• 23:20
  Speaker 2: research included sound, touch, smell, visual stimulation, and movement-related sensory input.
• 23:28
  Speaker 2: Reported rates of stimulus-dependent dreams changes ranged from nearly zero
• 23:33
  Speaker 2: to to roughly 80%. That enormous range reflects differences in
• 23:38
  Speaker 2: experimental methods, stimuli, scoring, and other limitations. The more important
• 23:44
  Speaker 2: finding is how external information can become incorporated. A sound
• 23:49
  Speaker 2: from outside may appear as a sound produced by something
• 23:52
  Speaker 2: inside the dream. A physical sensation may become part of
• 23:57
  Speaker 2: the dream narrative. Pressure on the body may be experienced
• 24:00
  Speaker 2: as something holding the dreamer. Cold may become a winter scene.
• 24:05
  Speaker 2: Music may become of an imagined environment. A party, club,
• 24:08
  Speaker 2: whatever's going on. These examples illustrate possible incorporation, not predictable
• 24:14
  Speaker 2: one-to-one transformations. The key idea is that the brain can
• 24:18
  Speaker 2: incorporate outside information while constructing its internal dream environment. Something
• 24:24
  Speaker 2: originating outside the dream can be experienced as though it
• 24:27
  Speaker 2: belongs inside the dream. That becomes especially interesting when we
• 24:31
  Speaker 2: investigate voices, messages, and apparent encounters. Which is something, you know,
• 24:37
  Speaker 2: I do question, too, when you get these people that have, like,
• 24:39
  Speaker 2: these prophetic things from, like, you know, I had this
• 24:43
  Speaker 2: in a dream, or I encountered this thing in a dream. Right.
• 24:48
  Speaker 2: You fucking could have overheard the guy next to you
• 24:50
  Speaker 2: fucking babbling about something.
• 24:51
  Speaker 3: Right, yeah.
• 24:52
  Speaker 2: You know what I'm saying? Interesting, yeah. Your boy just
• 24:55
  Speaker 2: got done smoking a joint. He was dropping some jewels
• 24:57
  Speaker 2: and you overheard it and you thought he had a
• 24:58
  Speaker 2: fucking premonition. Smell, too. Smell is particularly interesting. We're going
• 25:04
  Speaker 2: to get into that. Because odors can become closely connected
• 25:07
  Speaker 2: with memories and emotional experiences. In 2012, Anit, Arzi, and
• 25:13
  Speaker 2: colleagues paired tones with pleasant or unpleasant odors while participants slept.
• 25:20
  Speaker 2: When researchers later played the tones with the odors, participants
• 25:24
  Speaker 2: displayed different sniffing responses based on the earlier pairings. This
• 25:29
  Speaker 2: demonstrated a limited form of associated learning during sleep, not
• 25:34
  Speaker 2: the acquisition of an entire language, not the implantation of
• 25:38
  Speaker 2: completed beliefs, but a relatively simple learned relationship between two stimuli.
• 25:43
  Speaker 2: In 2014, researchers took this idea further. They studied 66
• 25:48
  Speaker 2: people who wanted to quit smoking. Participants were exposed to
• 25:52
  Speaker 2: cigarette odor paired with unpleasant smells during wakefulness or particular
• 25:57
  Speaker 2: sleep stages. Following conditioning and N2 sleep, self-reported smoking decreased
• 26:05
  Speaker 2: by approximately 34.4% over the observation period. Following REM conditioning,
• 26:13
  Speaker 2: the decrease was approximately 11.9%. The same significant effect wasn't
• 26:18
  Speaker 2: observed after waking conditions. But they did show that you
• 26:23
  Speaker 2: could even kind of, I guess, affect people that way.
• 26:28
  Speaker 2: So that's a weird one to me. Scientists have also
• 26:33
  Speaker 2: altered learned fear responses during sleep. This is a weird one.
• 26:38
  Speaker 2: In 2013, Katharina Horner and colleagues published stimulus-specific enchantment of
• 26:48
  Speaker 2: fear extinction during slow-wave sleep in nature neuroscience. The basic
• 26:53
  Speaker 2: question was whether a learned fear association could be selectively
• 26:58
  Speaker 2: modified during sleep. Researchers first used fear conditioning while participants
• 27:03
  Speaker 2: were awake. Particular visual stimuli became associated with unpleasant outcomes
• 27:09
  Speaker 2: within specific odor contexts. The participants then went to sleep.
• 27:15
  Speaker 2: During slow-wave sleep, researchers presented an odor associated with the
• 27:20
  Speaker 2: earlier learning experience. They weren't replaying the entire frightening event,
• 27:25
  Speaker 2: just the odor. They were presenting a sensory cue connected
• 27:29
  Speaker 2: with the context in which the fear had been learned.
• 27:33
  Speaker 2: After sleep, researchers measured participants' conditioned responses. They found that
• 27:38
  Speaker 2: re-exposure to the relevant odor during slow-wave sleep promoted a
• 27:43
  Speaker 2: reduction in their associated fear response. Brain measurements also showed
• 27:49
  Speaker 2: changes involving the hippocampus and amygdala. The hippocampus plays important
• 27:54
  Speaker 2: roles in learning, memory, and contextual information. The amygdala is
• 27:59
  Speaker 2: heavily involved in processing emotional significant information, including fear. The
• 28:05
  Speaker 2: study reported reduced hippocampal activity and reorganization of amygdala activity
• 28:11
  Speaker 2: patterns associated with the fear learning. Think about what that means.
• 28:16
  Speaker 2: Researchers established a fear association while participants were awake. They
• 28:21
  Speaker 2: presented a related sensory cue while participants were asleep. Later,
• 28:26
  Speaker 2: the learned fear response was different. This is now proof
• 28:29
  Speaker 2: that the scientists can remove arbitrary fears, erase trauma, or
• 28:33
  Speaker 2: make somebody fear anything else. Or make somebody fear anything
• 28:37
  Speaker 2: they choose. It's just evidence that specific condition emotional responses
• 28:41
  Speaker 2: can sometimes be modified by presenting a relevant cue during sleep.
• 28:45
  Speaker 2: You know, that's what the paper's getting at. Can you
• 28:50
  Speaker 2: actually learn something new while asleep? Up to this point,
• 28:55
  Speaker 2: a lot of the science has involved reactivating information somebody
• 28:59
  Speaker 2: already encountered while awake. But what about introducing something genuinely
• 29:04
  Speaker 2: new during sleep? In 2019, Mark Allen Zust and colleagues
• 29:10
  Speaker 2: published Implicit Vocabulary Learning During Sleep is Bound to Slow
• 29:15
  Speaker 2: Wave Peaks in Current Biology. Participants heard pairs consisting of
• 29:21
  Speaker 2: invented words and familiar words while they were sleeping. These
• 29:26
  Speaker 2: weren't complex lectures or entire language courses. They were simple
• 29:30
  Speaker 2: word associations. The researchers were interested in the timing of
• 29:34
  Speaker 2: the brain's slow oscillations. During deep sleep, slow waves alternate.
• 29:40
  Speaker 2: between periods associated with reduced neuronal activity and periods of
• 29:45
  Speaker 2: greater excitability. The more excitable periods are often called upstates.
• 29:51
  Speaker 2: The researchers found that word pairs presented a favorable, sorry,
• 29:57
  Speaker 2: The researchers found that word pairs presented at favorable moments,
• 30:01
  Speaker 2: particularly when repeated presentations aligned with slow-wave peaks, could produce
• 30:07
  Speaker 2: evidence of new associative learning. When participants were tested after waking,
• 30:13
  Speaker 2: they performed above chance on an implicit classification task related
• 30:21
  Speaker 2: to the learned things. So basically... It was an above-chance
• 30:25
  Speaker 2: percentage that these people have possibly learned something. But the
• 30:30
  Speaker 2: later responses contained information related to the pairings. That's the
• 30:34
  Speaker 2: important distinction. The learning was implicit, not ordinary conscious vocabulary recall.
• 30:41
  Speaker 2: Nobody woke up speaking a new language. Sometimes the timing
• 30:47
  Speaker 2: matters more than the sound. Consider what researchers learned about
• 30:52
  Speaker 2: the electrical rhythms of the sleeping brain In 2013, Hong
• 30:58
  Speaker 2: Viet and colleagues published auditory closed-loop stimulation of the sleep.
• 31:07
  Speaker 2: Slow oscillation enhances memory and neuron. The researchers weren't trying
• 31:12
  Speaker 2: to implant a particular dream image. They were investigating whether
• 31:16
  Speaker 2: sounds delivered at specific moments could influence the brain's natural
• 31:21
  Speaker 2: sleep rhythms. During slow-wave sleep, the brain produces large oscillations
• 31:27
  Speaker 2: reflecting coordinated changes in neural activity. Researchers used EEG to
• 31:33
  Speaker 2: identify the timing of these oscillations. The system then delivered
• 31:37
  Speaker 2: brief sounds timed to particular phases of the ongoing rhythm.
• 31:43
  Speaker 2: This is called phase-locked or closed-loop auditory stimulation. It's different
• 31:49
  Speaker 2: from playing random sounds all night. The system monitors the
• 31:53
  Speaker 2: brain's ongoing activity and tries to intervene at a selected moment.
• 31:58
  Speaker 2: The researchers found that stimulation aligned with the appropriate phase
• 32:02
  Speaker 2: strengthened slow oscillatory activity and related sleep spindle activity. The
• 32:08
  Speaker 2: study also reported improved performance on a declarative memory task.
• 32:13
  Speaker 2: Delivering stimulation at an ineffective phase did not produce the
• 32:17
  Speaker 2: same result. This suggests that the sleeping brain has moments
• 32:21
  Speaker 2: when a particular intervention may be more effective than at
• 32:25
  Speaker 2: other moments. But there is a necessary qualification. A later
• 32:29
  Speaker 2: double-blind study successfully enhanced slow oscillations in spindle activity without
• 32:35
  Speaker 2: producing a corresponding improvement in memory performance. In other words,
• 32:40
  Speaker 2: scientists could alter the brain's measured sleep rhythms, but that
• 32:44
  Speaker 2: did not guarantee better memory. That's a valuable limit, I guess.
• 32:48
  Speaker 2: Changing brain activity isn't automatically the same as changing behavior. Nevertheless,
• 32:54
  Speaker 2: the broader technological principle is important. The intervention can be
• 32:58
  Speaker 2: synchronized with the brain's electrical activity instead of merely being
• 33:03
  Speaker 2: delivered at a particular clock time. So basically, you know,
• 33:07
  Speaker 2: the whole thing with that one is like knowing that
• 33:09
  Speaker 2: you can even start like doing stuff to the brain
• 33:12
  Speaker 2: or putting it into certain phases differently. That's... Kind of
• 33:18
  Speaker 2: what I was just getting at with that one. Targeted
• 33:22
  Speaker 2: memory reactivation. You don't need to control the dream. Now
• 33:25
  Speaker 2: let's connect these experiments to a larger scientific technique. TMR.
• 33:31
  Speaker 2: Targeted memory reactivation or TMR involves associating information with a
• 33:36
  Speaker 2: cue while somebody is awake, then presenting that cue again
• 33:40
  Speaker 2: during sleep. For example, somebody studies material while a particular
• 33:44
  Speaker 2: sound plays. Later, researchers play the sound during an appropriate
• 33:48
  Speaker 2: period of sleep. The goal is to influence how the
• 33:51
  Speaker 2: brain processes previously learned information. The person doesn't necessarily need
• 33:57
  Speaker 2: to dream about the sound or the material. The effect
• 34:00
  Speaker 2: may show up in a memory test after waking. This
• 34:04
  Speaker 2: is a different mechanism from targeted dream incubation. Dream incubation
• 34:08
  Speaker 2: tries to influence reported dream content. TMR tries to influence
• 34:13
  Speaker 2: processing information. or previously learned memories. Sleep conditioning can establish
• 34:19
  Speaker 2: limited new associations. Those distinctions are important because they prevent
• 34:23
  Speaker 2: us from combining different experimental findings into an imaginary machine
• 34:28
  Speaker 2: that can do everything. But together, they suggest something interesting.
• 34:33
  Speaker 2: If you wanted to influence somebody through sleep, you might
• 34:36
  Speaker 2: not need to introduce a complete new message. You might
• 34:40
  Speaker 2: instead try to influence which existing memories or associations are
• 34:45
  Speaker 2: become active. Think about advertising. Ordinary advertising already tries to
• 34:50
  Speaker 2: associate products with emotion, music, comfort, belonging, nostalgia, and social status.
• 34:57
  Speaker 2: A hypothetical sleep-based advertising system might attempt to reactivate those
• 35:02
  Speaker 2: associations later. That is an evidence that dream advertising can
• 35:07
  Speaker 2: reliably alter purchases, but it shows why researchers and ethicists
• 35:12
  Speaker 2: are interested in and the difference between inserting a command
• 35:16
  Speaker 2: and influencing a learned association. In 2025, G. Juan Shin
• 35:23
  Speaker 2: and colleagues published Personalized Targeted Memory Reactivation Enhances Consolidation of
• 35:31
  Speaker 2: Challenging Memories via Slow Wave and Spindle Dynamics. The fucking
• 35:36
  Speaker 2: names of these things are so fucking long. Yeah, man.
• 35:39
  Speaker 2: It's like almost as bad as when you go look
• 35:41
  Speaker 2: at these old grimoires and like, Yo, because they had
• 35:44
  Speaker 2: a whole cover on the front of the book. It's like,
• 35:45
  Speaker 2: let's use that motherfucker. And you got like a paragraph
• 35:48
  Speaker 2: name of a book. It's crazy. The researchers examined whether
• 35:52
  Speaker 2: memory-related sleep stimulation could be adjusted according to a person's
• 35:57
  Speaker 2: learning performance and the difficulty of particular material. 36 participants
• 36:02
  Speaker 2: took part. Before sleep, participants studied 104 related word pairs.
• 36:08
  Speaker 2: Researchers assessed how successfully participants could recall the associated words
• 36:14
  Speaker 2: and how difficult the pairs were. Then they compared different
• 36:21
  Speaker 2: sleep conditions, including conventional targeted memory reactivation, a personalized version,
• 36:28
  Speaker 2: and a controlled condition. The personalized procedure adjusted the frequency
• 36:33
  Speaker 2: of auditory cue presentation based on individual retrieval performance and
• 36:38
  Speaker 2: task difficulty. so the system wasn't simply replaying every cue
• 36:42
  Speaker 2: at the same rate. It used information about learning performance
• 36:46
  Speaker 2: to describe how to distribute stimulation. The personalized condition produced
• 36:52
  Speaker 2: improvements in memory retention and error correction, especially for more
• 36:57
  Speaker 2: challenging material. EEG measurements also showed changes involving slow wave,
• 37:03
  Speaker 2: sleep spindles, and their coordination. That is significant because the
• 37:07
  Speaker 2: experiment connects three ideas. Individual learning performance, tailored sensory stimulation
• 37:14
  Speaker 2: during sleep, and measurable changes in subsequent memory performance. It
• 37:20
  Speaker 2: was still a small study involving a specific word pair task.
• 37:25
  Speaker 2: It does not prove that an algorithm can personalize somebody's beliefs, emotions,
• 37:29
  Speaker 2: or dreams at will, but personalized sleep-based memory intervention is
• 37:34
  Speaker 2: no longer merely a speculative advertising concept. Scientists are already
• 37:39
  Speaker 2: studying how to make cueing procedures adapt to differences between participants.
• 37:46
  Speaker 2: Here's another part of the puzzle. People often imagine memory
• 37:49
  Speaker 2: as a recording. An event happens, the brain saves it,
• 37:52
  Speaker 2: and later we retrieve the original. But human memory doesn't
• 37:56
  Speaker 2: work like a perfect video file. Remembering often involves reconstructions.
• 38:01
  Speaker 2: The brain preserves some details, loses others, and can combine
• 38:06
  Speaker 2: information with existing knowledge and expectations. A 2024 study titled
• 38:12
  Speaker 2: Sleep and Retrieval Practice both strengthened and distorted story recollection
• 38:17
  Speaker 2: investigated this process. Participants listened to a recording of the
• 38:22
  Speaker 2: War of the Ghosts, a traditional story used in psychological
• 38:26
  Speaker 2: memory research. Some participants were tested after a period that
• 38:32
  Speaker 2: included sleep. Others remained awake during the comparative interval. The
• 38:37
  Speaker 2: researchers also compared participants who practiced recalling the story with
• 38:42
  Speaker 2: participants who had already listened to it. They measured both
• 38:46
  Speaker 2: accurate recollections and distortions. The results showed that sleep and
• 38:51
  Speaker 2: retrieval practice could improve memory accuracy under certain conditions. but
• 38:56
  Speaker 2: both were also associated with an increase in plausible inferences
• 39:00
  Speaker 2: about details that had never actually appeared in the original story.
• 39:05
  Speaker 2: Participants sometimes remembered or supplied information that fit the story
• 39:09
  Speaker 2: without having been explicitly presented. That is a different effect
• 39:13
  Speaker 2: from researchers deliberately implanting an autobiographical false memory. The study
• 39:19
  Speaker 2: did not demonstrate that a sound during sleep could make
• 39:21
  Speaker 2: somebody believe an invented event had happened to them, What
• 39:25
  Speaker 2: it demonstrated was that the process associated with sleep and
• 39:28
  Speaker 2: remembering can preserve useful information while also contributing to reconstruction
• 39:34
  Speaker 2: and distortion. Now connect that carefully to dreams. A person
• 39:39
  Speaker 2: might experience a dream involving strange imagery, external sensory information,
• 39:44
  Speaker 2: familiar symbols, and emotional associations. After waking, they remember their
• 39:49
  Speaker 2: experience and interpret it through their own beliefs and expectations.
• 39:55
  Speaker 2: The eventual story they tell may involve the original dream experience,
• 39:59
  Speaker 2: ordinary memory reconstruction, and later interpretation. Those elements can be
• 40:03
  Speaker 2: difficult to separate. For an occult investigation, this is extremely relevant.
• 40:09
  Speaker 2: It doesn't prove that the dreams of spirits, gods, or
• 40:12
  Speaker 2: visitors are false, and it doesn't establish that all such
• 40:16
  Speaker 2: experiences are caused by external stimulation basically kind of what
• 40:22
  Speaker 2: I was gonna get out what I got out earlier
• 40:24
  Speaker 2: it's because you know you happen to have a dream
• 40:28
  Speaker 2: doesn't mean you weren't this prophetic dream doesn't mean it
• 40:30
  Speaker 2: isn't from your outside stimulation nightmare show how sleep cues
• 40:36
  Speaker 2: away hold on you know let me get down to
• 40:39
  Speaker 2: let me see how long we've been going 40 minutes
• 40:42
  Speaker 2: I'm going to skip a couple of things and try
• 40:43
  Speaker 2: to get to something a little bit more with the patent,
• 40:47
  Speaker 2: I think. Sure. Yeah, because I do think that gets
• 40:51
  Speaker 2: a little weird. Oh, can a smartphone help trigger lucid dreaming?
• 40:56
  Speaker 2: That is pretty interesting. Another technique is called targeted lucid reactivation.
• 41:02
  Speaker 2: The basic idea is to create an association between a
• 41:05
  Speaker 2: sound and the intention to recognize that you're dreaming. While awake,
• 41:09
  Speaker 2: a person practices connecting the cue with the thought, I
• 41:13
  Speaker 2: am dreaming. Then the same sound is played during sleep.
• 41:18
  Speaker 2: The sound itself doesn't contain any special power. Its meaning
• 41:22
  Speaker 2: was learned before sleep. The hope is that hearing it
• 41:25
  Speaker 2: again will reactivate the intention and help the person become lucid.
• 41:30
  Speaker 2: A 2024 home-based smartphone study reported increased lucid dreaming reported
• 41:36
  Speaker 2: reporting when conditioned cues were used compared with comparison conditions.
• 41:42
  Speaker 2: That doesn't establish a guaranteed method of induced lucidity, but
• 41:47
  Speaker 2: it is another example of the same general principle. Create
• 41:50
  Speaker 2: an association while awake, present the cue during sleep, see
• 41:54
  Speaker 2: whether the learned association becomes active. That seems to be,
• 41:58
  Speaker 2: I mean, that is like kind of a thing that
• 42:00
  Speaker 2: is repeated in a lot of these studies, so obviously
• 42:03
  Speaker 2: something behind that. Can scientists actually read dreams? No. But, okay,
• 42:10
  Speaker 2: wait a minute. The commercial term. This is where we
• 42:13
  Speaker 2: start getting into, like, I mean, I'm including this, but
• 42:16
  Speaker 2: it really isn't, like, anything that huge, but I do
• 42:19
  Speaker 2: find it interesting. In 2020, Xbox ran a campaign called
• 42:24
  Speaker 2: Made from Dreams. Gamers participated in dream-related experiences connected with
• 42:29
  Speaker 2: the Xbox Series X. Their dream reports and imagery were
• 42:33
  Speaker 2: transformed into films, artwork, and branded media. It wasn't a
• 42:37
  Speaker 2: demonstration of secret advertising inside an unconscious person's dream, but
• 42:43
  Speaker 2: it showed dreams becoming part of a commercial media campaign.
• 42:47
  Speaker 2: Then we had Coors in 2021. Molson Coors promoted a
• 42:53
  Speaker 2: targeted dream incubation advertising campaign. Company marketing material publicly entertained
• 43:01
  Speaker 2: the possibility of putting an advertisement inside somebody's dream. Participants
• 43:07
  Speaker 2: encountered imagery involving mountains, water, refreshing environments, and Coors products,
• 43:13
  Speaker 2: along with sleep-related audio. The participants were volunteers. The campaign
• 43:19
  Speaker 2: didn't establish that dreaming about Coors caused anybody to buy beer.
• 43:23
  Speaker 2: and it didn't prove that advertisers could remotely control the
• 43:26
  Speaker 2: dreams of unsuspected people. But that doesn't make the campaign irrelevant.
• 43:31
  Speaker 2: A major company was openly experimenting with the idea of
• 43:34
  Speaker 2: dreams as advertising territory. Dream researchers Robert Strickgold, Antonia Zadra,
• 43:42
  Speaker 2: and Adam Har-Horowitz responded with an essay titled, Advertising in
• 43:47
  Speaker 2: Dreams is Coming, Now What? they warned about the possibility
• 43:52
  Speaker 2: of intrusive marketing involving sleep and dreaming. That raises a
• 43:56
  Speaker 2: question which becomes more significant when considered alongside everything we
• 44:00
  Speaker 2: just covered. If advertisers eventually develop reliable methods for associating
• 44:05
  Speaker 2: brands with sounds, images, or emotional experiences before sleep, would
• 44:11
  Speaker 2: they attempt to reactivate those associations during sleep? There is
• 44:16
  Speaker 2: no definite evidence, but Again, like, get everything that I
• 44:20
  Speaker 2: was just going on about. I can see how it's possible.
• 44:24
  Speaker 2: Then we have the Dream Directing Patent. The United States
• 44:30
  Speaker 2: patent application, if people want to hear it, it is US20240307652A1.
• 44:33
  Speaker 2: And that is titled Dream Directing System and Method for
• 44:37
  Speaker 2: Using the Same. The named inventor is Kenneth Rajon Leslie,
• 44:50
  Speaker 2: and the application was filed in 2023 and published in 2024.
• 44:53
  Speaker 2: The patent application does not establish that a functioning product
• 44:59
  Speaker 2: exists or that the proposed methods work, but the architecture
• 45:03
  Speaker 2: is interesting. The application describes possible combinations of physiological monitoring
• 45:09
  Speaker 2: and sensory stimulation. Potential sensors include smartwatches, heart rate monitors,
• 45:16
  Speaker 2: movement sensors, EEG, eye movement detection, cameras, microphones, and sleep masks.
• 45:24
  Speaker 2: Potential stimuli include speech, music, lights, vibration, motion, temperature, and scent.
• 45:32
  Speaker 2: The proposed system could allow a user to establish a
• 45:35
  Speaker 2: desired dream beforehand and then attempt to bias dream experiences
• 45:40
  Speaker 2: through time stimulation. It even describes a dream joystick. The
• 45:46
  Speaker 2: concept involves using deliberate eye movements from a lucid dreamer
• 45:50
  Speaker 2: as commands, and a sleep mask detects the movements, a
• 45:55
  Speaker 2: computer interprets the signal, and the system responds by changing
• 45:59
  Speaker 2: what the dreamer hears or otherwise experiences. Kind of like
• 46:03
  Speaker 2: what I was getting at before, how I thought it
• 46:04
  Speaker 2: was going to be important to know, like, you know,
• 46:06
  Speaker 2: they have, like, they've done testing. Where you can ask
• 46:09
  Speaker 2: somebody questions. And like maybe move your eye to the
• 46:11
  Speaker 2: left three times. Means yes. Another way. Different amount of times.
• 46:15
  Speaker 2: Whatever means no. You can get people. So now we
• 46:19
  Speaker 2: can have people kind of like fucking with their dreams.
• 46:21
  Speaker 2: I guess by moving their own eyes. If you get
• 46:25
  Speaker 2: into that state. And you can do that. The application
• 46:29
  Speaker 2: also discusses an auditory dream ed. It throws it in
• 46:35
  Speaker 2: there as being a possibility. Once again. patent isn't evidence
• 46:38
  Speaker 2: that the advertising technique succeeds or works but it's out
• 46:42
  Speaker 2: there but it demonstrates that commercial advertising also has been
• 46:46
  Speaker 2: expressly contemplated as a part of proposed dream directed systems
• 46:53
  Speaker 2: you know they if this is out there obviously people
• 46:55
  Speaker 2: are thinking about it to see if it can be
• 46:57
  Speaker 2: done in my opinion of course yeah And then I
• 47:01
  Speaker 2: guess you get into the whole privacy thing, but I
• 47:04
  Speaker 2: really don't think. I mean, I think that's self-explanatory for
• 47:07
  Speaker 2: your listeners and for the people that listen on my end.
• 47:11
  Speaker 2: I think we just automatically understand that's a whole invasion
• 47:15
  Speaker 2: of privacy, but that's that whole aspect, too, that you
• 47:19
  Speaker 2: can get about cracking dreams.
• 47:21
  Speaker 4: Yeah, that's the biggest thing I was going to bring up, really,
• 47:25
  Speaker 4: is the privacy and consent.
• 47:28
  Speaker 2: Exactly, yeah. There's no fucking consent in that. Yeah. And, um, Hey,
• 47:33
  Speaker 2: you know, it's so fucked up though, is I could
• 47:35
  Speaker 2: easily see this selling because of people wanting to be like, sure.
• 47:41
  Speaker 2: Who knows what kind of life you can live in
• 47:42
  Speaker 2: your own dreams. If you, you know, depending on what
• 47:44
  Speaker 2: kind of options they give you, you know what I'm saying?
• 47:47
  Speaker 2: I mean, you'd be the fucking man. You'd be rich
• 47:50
  Speaker 2: and getting laid, getting laid different, you know, from a
• 47:52
  Speaker 2: different chick every day in your dreams.
• 47:55
  Speaker 3: Yeah, it's like.
• 47:56
  Speaker 2: You know what I'm saying?
• 47:58
  Speaker 3: It's similar to The Matrix.
• 48:00
  Speaker 2: Or to be a drug kingpin. It's more like....
• 48:05
  Speaker 3: What is it?
• 48:06
  Speaker 4: I think it's from Minority Report where... Yeah, yeah, he
• 48:11
  Speaker 4: goes and he... He goes to like a club where
• 48:16
  Speaker 4: people go to.
• 48:19
  Speaker 3: What was it?
• 48:22
  Speaker 4: They go to relive memories not so much relive their
• 48:27
  Speaker 4: own memories, but relive moments. Like some guy is, um,
• 48:32
  Speaker 4: you know, having sex with his mother. Um, one guy
• 48:36
  Speaker 4: is like, uh, in a boxing ring or, or wait, no,
• 48:40
  Speaker 4: maybe I think one guy's having a prostitute and one
• 48:42
  Speaker 4: guy's in a boxing ring, beating up his mother or,
• 48:45
  Speaker 4: you know, just, they can put you in any scenario
• 48:50
  Speaker 4: you want.
• 48:50
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 48:51
  Speaker 3: And so it's very similar to what you're saying now.
• 48:53
  Speaker 4: Um, they can just stick you in, you know, whatever
• 48:58
  Speaker 4: scenario you want to be in, in that moment. Right. Um,
• 49:02
  Speaker 4: that's interesting, but I'm sure there's very nefarious, um, uses
• 49:09
  Speaker 4: going on and testing where.
• 49:11
  Speaker 3: I'm sure there's no consent, uh, with some of these
• 49:15
  Speaker 3: Guinea pigs. Maybe they're working on, who knows?
• 49:17
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 49:17
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 49:18
  Speaker 1: Who knows?
• 49:19
  Speaker 2: And then, uh, i guess like even just to just
• 49:21
  Speaker 2: wrap it up i even have a little bit more
• 49:22
  Speaker 2: here so i actually went through this a lot faster
• 49:25
  Speaker 2: than i thought on the four levels of dream influence
• 49:27
  Speaker 2: you know after looking at all this research i think
• 49:29
  Speaker 2: there are at least you know four levels we should
• 49:31
  Speaker 2: distinguish the first is dream content influences Researchers can sometimes
• 49:37
  Speaker 2: bias what appears in a dream report by introducing sensory
• 49:40
  Speaker 2: information or learned cues. That's been demonstrated under particular experimental conditions.
• 49:46
  Speaker 2: The second is memory influence. Researchers can sometimes reactivate previously
• 49:51
  Speaker 2: learned material during sleep and under restricted conditions, establish simple
• 49:56
  Speaker 2: new associations. That does not establish the ability to upload
• 50:00
  Speaker 2: complicated new autobiographical memories or beliefs, but you know, The
• 50:05
  Speaker 2: third is emotional and behavioral influence. Some experiments have shown
• 50:10
  Speaker 2: changes in conditioned fear responses, nightmare outcomes, emotional processing, or
• 50:16
  Speaker 2: particular waking behaviors. Those findings are important, but their effectiveness
• 50:21
  Speaker 2: and generalizability depend on the specific intervention. And then fourth
• 50:26
  Speaker 2: is control over complex beliefs and decisions. The ability to
• 50:31
  Speaker 2: reliably insert complicated beliefs, command behavior, or manipulate purchasing decisions
• 50:36
  Speaker 2: through dreams has not been established. That distinction matters because
• 50:41
  Speaker 2: otherwise we could take several legitimate scientific findings and accidentally
• 50:45
  Speaker 2: combine them into claims that none of the experiments actually demonstrate.
• 50:49
  Speaker 2: But here's the interesting part. The first three levels already
• 50:52
  Speaker 2: give us plenty to investigate. We don't need to invent
• 50:55
  Speaker 2: a fully functioning mind control machine. The demonstrated ability to
• 51:00
  Speaker 2: influence particular memories, associations, dream experiences are already pretty fucking
• 51:06
  Speaker 2: out there already in my opinion so again can somebody
• 51:10
  Speaker 2: hack a dream under limited uh under limited experimental conditions
• 51:15
  Speaker 2: researchers can influence some of the imagery and themes people
• 51:18
  Speaker 2: report about dreaming they can present cues that reactivate previously
• 51:23
  Speaker 2: learned information they have demonstrated restricted forms of new associative
• 51:28
  Speaker 2: learning during sleep they have influenced certain conditioned emotional responses
• 51:33
  Speaker 2: They have used precisely timed sound stimulation to alter aspects
• 51:39
  Speaker 2: of sleeping brain activity. In rare cases, they have exchanged
• 51:43
  Speaker 2: simple messages with people experiencing lucid dreams. But those achievements
• 51:48
  Speaker 2: don't add up to a reliable covert control of a
• 51:53
  Speaker 2: person's entire dream, beliefs, or behavior. The most plausible future
• 51:57
  Speaker 2: probably doesn't look like inception. It's going to look more
• 52:01
  Speaker 2: like a smartwatch, a smartphone, a sleep mask, earbuds, sensors,
• 52:08
  Speaker 2: and an algorithm that learns from a person's responses. It
• 52:11
  Speaker 2: could be therapeutic. It could help people investigate lucid dreaming.
• 52:15
  Speaker 2: It could support creativity. It could become entertainment. And eventually,
• 52:20
  Speaker 2: it might create opportunities for advertising and commercial data collection.
• 52:24
  Speaker 2: The unsettling possibility isn't necessarily that somebody builds a machine
• 52:28
  Speaker 2: powerful enough to break into every human dream. It's that
• 52:32
  Speaker 2: somebody builds a dream-related platform people genuinely want to use,
• 52:42
  Speaker 2: something helpful, something fascinating, something they're willing maybe to bring
• 52:46
  Speaker 2: into their bedrooms. Because the line between dream therapy, dream entertainment,
• 52:51
  Speaker 2: dream research, personal data, and commercial persuasion may become increasingly
• 52:56
  Speaker 2: important long before anybody can reconstruct a dream like a movie.
• 53:00
  Speaker 2: And that brings us back to the original question. Maybe
• 53:03
  Speaker 2: the future of dream hacking isn't controlling what somebody sees
• 53:07
  Speaker 2: while they're dreaming. Maybe it's influencing with memories, associations, and
• 53:12
  Speaker 2: emotions their brain process while they're unconscious. For thousands of years,
• 53:16
  Speaker 2: people asked what dreams meant. Now we're beginning to ask
• 53:20
  Speaker 2: something different. Who gets to influence them and who profits
• 53:24
  Speaker 2: when they do? So, I mean, that's even how I think, like, again, well,
• 53:29
  Speaker 2: if this even does become a thing, It's going to
• 53:31
  Speaker 2: start coming in like real cool sounding helpful toys. And
• 53:36
  Speaker 2: I think they'll actually be able to manipulate us and
• 53:40
  Speaker 2: possibly engineer due to our fucking feedback. Thinking we got
• 53:45
  Speaker 2: cool toys on our phone in our living room, in
• 53:48
  Speaker 2: our bedroom.
• 53:49
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 53:50
  Speaker 3: Right. And then it just.
• 53:53
  Speaker 2: And then at that point, they already know way too
• 53:55
  Speaker 2: much about everything going on inside our heads.
• 53:57
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 53:58
  Speaker 2: Right. Right.
• 54:00
  Speaker 4: And with everything that they just pushed the envelope to
• 54:02
  Speaker 4: the point where, like you say, it's in our bedroom
• 54:05
  Speaker 4: and we're very comfortable with it.
• 54:08
  Speaker 3: And all of a sudden, you know.
• 54:11
  Speaker 2: I've even wondered, like, you know, do you remember a while,
• 54:13
  Speaker 2: like for a while, and I still think like it's
• 54:15
  Speaker 2: still probably a problem for some people. But like, you know,
• 54:19
  Speaker 2: at first people were like really scared about virtual reality. Oh,
• 54:22
  Speaker 2: people are going to get lost out there, this and that.
• 54:24
  Speaker 2: I was like, what if it's not even the virtual reality?
• 54:26
  Speaker 2: It's actually the whole thing of like getting lost in
• 54:28
  Speaker 2: your dream. You know what I'm saying? Like, what if
• 54:33
  Speaker 2: that's actually the real problem with that virtual reality? Because
• 54:36
  Speaker 2: this is the thing. I can see that accepted a
• 54:40
  Speaker 2: lot easier because you're going to be like, oh, well,
• 54:41
  Speaker 2: that's my own brain. That's me. It's not a computer
• 54:45
  Speaker 2: system giving me the fantasy. I'm constructing it myself. It's
• 54:48
  Speaker 2: my own dreams. Who's to say it's your own dreams
• 54:52
  Speaker 2: and it's not being constructed? You know, maybe it is
• 54:55
  Speaker 2: your dreams, but it's being influenced. You know what I'm saying? Like,
• 54:58
  Speaker 2: I could see, like, maybe... people getting lost, actually not
• 55:01
  Speaker 2: virtual reality, maybe actually lost trying to live a separate
• 55:05
  Speaker 2: life in their own dreams. I mean, cause I'd be quick.
• 55:15
  Speaker 2: I can see myself being quicker to buy into that. Like,
• 55:18
  Speaker 2: Oh fuck. I could, you know, control my dreams instead
• 55:21
  Speaker 2: of like getting lost inside of some fucking PlayStation set
• 55:24
  Speaker 2: up on my face. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Yeah.
• 55:29
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 55:34
  Speaker 3: Damn, man.
• 55:35
  Speaker 4: I mean, so when did, do you recall when that
• 55:41
  Speaker 4: patent was put through and how long they've been kind of.
• 55:43
  Speaker 2: Working on that? Yeah, that one was, I think, if
• 55:45
  Speaker 2: I remember correctly, 2023, and then it was published in 2024. So, again,
• 55:50
  Speaker 2: I mean, that's even a few years old, man. I mean,
• 55:55
  Speaker 2: and then even the Coors thing, that was six years ago.
• 56:03
  Speaker 3: And, I mean, that's just.
• 56:05
  Speaker 4: The point when they actually patent it. Who knows how
• 56:11
  Speaker 4: long they've been kind of dicking around with it.
• 56:15
  Speaker 2: I would even say the reason that patent literally could
• 56:19
  Speaker 2: have been put out because, again, it does say that.
• 56:22
  Speaker 2: It doesn't necessarily mean it works. But sometimes I wonder,
• 56:25
  Speaker 2: it's like, do we know this is coming and we
• 56:27
  Speaker 2: know that this is going to be part of the formula,
• 56:28
  Speaker 2: so let's patent it now so then somebody has to
• 56:30
  Speaker 2: create it differently to fucking get around that. You know
• 56:33
  Speaker 2: what I'm saying? Like, that could be like, you know,
• 56:35
  Speaker 2: because then you own the patent to that idea. I
• 56:38
  Speaker 2: just don't think... I don't think, like, I think if
• 56:40
  Speaker 2: that patent exists... I mean, unless it was some sort of, like,
• 56:45
  Speaker 2: fear tactic. I really don't think it's that deep. I
• 56:48
  Speaker 2: think it's actual, like, you know, they're trying to do
• 56:50
  Speaker 2: that shit. I do think they're on their way to
• 56:52
  Speaker 2: looking to try to do it. It may not, but
• 56:55
  Speaker 2: I think if that patent exists, it shows that science
• 56:58
  Speaker 2: is looking in that direction. And you know what the
• 57:01
  Speaker 2: thing is, though, too... You know, like, I don't know
• 57:05
  Speaker 2: how this works, and I'm sure it really doesn't make
• 57:06
  Speaker 2: a difference if it's shady looking or not. I'm sure
• 57:08
  Speaker 2: there's ways of doing it. But, like, these companies could
• 57:11
  Speaker 2: fund these fucking scientists in these schools to be like,
• 57:14
  Speaker 2: figure this out. You know what I'm getting at?
• 57:18
  Speaker 3: Oh, for sure.
• 57:19
  Speaker 2: Like, I mean, these people could, like, be getting paid
• 57:22
  Speaker 2: to work on this shit. You know, I'm sure, like,
• 57:26
  Speaker 2: you know, they got tons of money to keep throwing
• 57:28
  Speaker 2: at it. You know what I'm getting at?
• 57:30
  Speaker 3: Exactly, dude.
• 57:31
  Speaker 2: Exactly.
• 57:32
  Speaker 3: Exactly. It's all a matter of what they want to
• 57:34
  Speaker 3: be thrown.
• 57:35
  Speaker 2: Yeah, because, like, you might look at, like, well, this
• 57:37
  Speaker 2: is how much we're willing to, like, donate to the
• 57:39
  Speaker 2: cause because these are the numbers we can see projecting
• 57:41
  Speaker 2: possibly from it working. It's a total payoff. We'll give
• 57:45
  Speaker 2: you a million dollars because we know it'll help generate
• 57:48
  Speaker 2: 10 million after six months.
• 57:51
  Speaker 1: Hmm.
• 57:53
  Speaker 3: Crazy, dude.
• 57:54
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah.
• 57:55
  Speaker 4: Well, man, you've... Damn, this was just as good as
• 57:59
  Speaker 4: last week's show, man.
• 58:00
  Speaker 2: Oh, thanks. I appreciate that.
• 58:01
  Speaker 3: Crazy, dude.
• 58:03
  Speaker 4: Um, yeah, I, I, I wonder what, I'd love to
• 58:09
  Speaker 4: get someone on who like, you know, can understand the technology, right?
• 58:15
  Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, right.
• 58:16
  Speaker 4: That, oh man, that's wild stuff. Well, dude, as usual,
• 58:22
  Speaker 4: I enjoy myself when, uh, when you come on, dude,
• 58:25
  Speaker 4: I love it. We'll, uh, we'll do this again soon. Uh,
• 58:28
  Speaker 4: I know we still have some other topics in the bag.
• 58:31
  Speaker 2: Definitely.
• 58:32
  Speaker 3: Um, Yeah, man, for anyone who's new or anyone who
• 58:37
  Speaker 3: hasn't seen you on my side of the fence, can
• 58:39
  Speaker 3: you just let everyone know where they can find you, Nick?
• 58:41
  Speaker 2: Yes, the Occult Rejects. That is on Rumble, YouTube, mainly YouTube,
• 58:46
  Speaker 2: and then all major audio podcast hosts. You will probably
• 58:52
  Speaker 2: find more audio than video. So, I mean, if you
• 58:55
  Speaker 2: don't mind just listening to audio, I would suggest just
• 58:58
  Speaker 2: to check out the podcast over YouTube. This is purely
• 59:01
  Speaker 2: because of censorship issues. I'm going to have more stuff
• 59:04
  Speaker 2: on audio than YouTube. But yeah, yeah, check that out.
• 59:07
  Speaker 2: And again, I really appreciate you having me come on. on.
• 59:10
  Speaker 2: I appreciate it. Like, I'm going to use this episode
• 59:11
  Speaker 2: on my own then. You know what I'm saying?
• 59:13
  Speaker 1: Nice.
• 59:13
  Speaker 2: I'm not going to bother covering it myself. I just
• 59:16
  Speaker 2: did it on your show. So yeah, this worked out
• 59:18
  Speaker 2: for both of us. I appreciate it, man.
• 59:20
  Speaker 3: Cool, brother. Well, I'll be in touch, and we'll see
• 59:22
  Speaker 3: you back here again soon, okay?
• 59:24
  Speaker 2: Okay. Be good, brother. Yeah. All right, buddy. Take care. Later.