Dreams change us. We change dreams.
Dust is an applied science lab built to help you change how you sleep, what you dream, and who you are when you wake up.
For thousands of years, people have been incubating their dreams. Our technology helps you remember dreams and work to guide their direction, so you can connect with them more deeply and consistently.
In laboratory studies, 100% of the subjects that used Targeted Dream Incubation were able to recall a dream upon awakening.
Replace your alarm clock with something meaningful and wake up with a journey you can remember.
Sleep makes up 1/3 of your life, and we all spend years dreaming. Yet we let this magical mind state slip by, too often forgotten and ignored. But what if we could guide our dreams?
We have done 7 years of research on a method called Targeted Dream Incubation. This works in hypnogagia, a special sleep state when your brain is between being awake and asleep.
As you’re falling asleep, your dreams are being made: informed by thoughts, sounds in your environment, and other stimuli around you.
Products that we've built, like our app Dormio, look for the special moment when your ears and brain can still listen to stimuli just before your body fully goes to sleep.
In these moments, your device plays sounds to you to help guide you and plant the seed of a particular dream to have.
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The science is here to help you guide your dreams. There’s so much to learn. Here is our recommended reading to start.
Dream of a Fork
Steve Dreams
We asked a person to dream a dream of a fork. This is audio from their recorded dream.
The New Science of Controlling Dreams
“Engineering” sleeping consciousness could reduce nightmares, treat insomnia—and even induce specific dreams just for fun.
Scientific American
Article
Read more
The Interview: Carsten Höller & Adam Haar
The artist and the scientist are planning a new kind of sculpture – made of visitors’ dreams
ArtReview Magazine
Article
Read more
Scientists entered people’s dreams and got them ‘talking’
Dreaming experiments involved real-time conversations between sleepers and scientists
Science Magazine
Article
Read more
Night Shifts– Can technology shape our dreams?
A Harper's Magazine Article about a reporter's experience with Dormio, facilitated by Adam Haar Horowitz.
Harpers Magazine
Article
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Dream engineering: Simulating worlds through sensory stimulation
A research paper exploring how sensory stimulation technologies, particularly those from Virtual Reality (VR), can be applied to sleep and dream engineering.
National Library of Medicine
Research Paper
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Behind the Veil of Hypnogogic Sleep
Research on “creativity’s sweet spot” could inform treatments for people with nightmare disorders.
Harvard Medical Magazine
Article
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Are advertisers coming for your dreams?
An article covering our involvement with the scientific community in combatting dream researching being used for advertising
Science Magazine
Article
Read more
See full list
Our essence
Dust’s technologies are focused on three verticals.
Dreams for creative joy
For centuries we’ve known dreams can strike and give sudden creative inspiration. We’ve shown you can guide your dreams purposefully towards the challenges you’re working on now, and boost creativity.
Dreams for creativity
Dreams for mental health
The feelings we have in our dreams influence our waking mood. What if you could lower the stress and increase the joy you experience every night?
Dreams for mental health
Dreams for learning
Science has shown that what we dream about predicts what we remember the next day. Reactivating memories at night can influence what we forget and what we don’t. We’re building tools to make this process simple, and put it in your hands.
Dreams for learning
Resonance Library
We’re performing applied research and collaborating with other scientists, creatives, and researchers to push the boundaries of hypnagogia and the human sleep state. We're collecting work here for you to browse as a library of dream knowledge.
Everything
Articles
Books
Research Papers
Objects
Experiences
See all
Experiences
We're starting with an app to bring this technology to everyone, but we are bringing targeted dream incubation out of your phone and into people's lives in objects, smells, and more.
Our first offering, Dormio, is a dream incubation app for seeding your psyche with targeted dream incubation.
Dormio is now in private beta for iOS. Sign up to get access below.
THE DORMIO APP
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What would you do if you could change your dreams? And how would it change you?
Read about these dreams from people that have experienced targeted dream incubation.
The woman who flew for weeks
Laura Rysman, a NYT reporter, had flying dreams for over 6 weeks after experiencing our flying bed installation at Art Basel.
Grace Greenwald,
Woodworker
"I think a dream to an insomniac will always be a gift; and these dreams in the dream bed in particular felt so special to receive. It brought me right back, for the first time since, to a month-long period of full color."
Karen Van Kampen,
Journalist
"I dreamt of trees. Many kinds of trees from different points in my life, connecting me to places and events from another time. Since my at-home dream experiment, I haven’t looked at a tree the same."
John Bambery,
Actor
"It quickly became impossible to dream as anything else but Hamlet. In addition to learning the entire text with little effort I found that my experiencing was more easy and truthful than I had ever felt before"
Paul Seli,
PhD, Artist
“In dream states, we seem to be able to link things together that we normally wouldn’t connect, It’s like there’s an artist in my brain that I get to know through hypnagogia.”
Dream collective
We’re constantly making new things in the name of research and culture change around dreams. These people make it happen.
Adam Haar Horowitz
Co-founder, Dream Engineer
Dust Systems
Post doctoral associate MIT Media Lab Fluid Interfaces Lab, Harvard Medical School Center for Sleep and Cognition
Bob Stickgold
Professor of Psychiatry, Sleep Researcher
Harvard Medical School
Karen Konkoly
Lucid Dream Engineering
Northwestern University Cognitive Neuroscience Lab
Michelle Carr
Postdoctoral Associate, Sleep and Neurophysiology Research Laboratory
University of Rochester Medical Center
Tomas Vega
Co-founder, Dream Engineer
Dust Systems
MIT Media Lab Fluid Interfaces Lab, Tactical Hybrid Ecologies Lab
Westley Youngren
Sleep disorder & nightmare researcher
University of Kansas
THE EXTENDED NETWORK
Come with us on a journey to discover what your dreams could be made of.
Get on the beta to try out Dormio today, or sign up for our newsletter to get all you ever wanted to know of about dream research delivered to your inbox.
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