I’m a big fan of Christopher Nolan movies, and Inception is one of my all-time favorites. I rewatch it regularly, and it never disappoints. If you haven’t seen the 2010 movie, it’s about a team of highly skilled individuals who can organize shared dream experiences between multiple people, with the objective of extracting secrets or planting specific ideas into a target.
Technology like that doesn’t exist in real life yet, but people are already working on the early phases of shared dreaming. A California startup called REMspace announced that they achieved communication between two people during lucid dreaming, which might have big implications for how we dream in the future.
Lucid dreaming refers to the experience of being aware you’re dreaming while you’re still in the dream state. This happens during REM sleep, and REMspace says it can have “numerous potential applications, from solving physiological problems to learning new skills.” The latter would certainly qualify as a form of inception.
The same company also developed a dream language called Remmyo. It’s a language made of specific sounds in dreams that facial electromyography sensors can decode.
The successful REMspace experiment happened on September 24th, when two participants went to sleep at home. They wore sensors so REMspace could monitor their brain waves and other sleep data remotely, as seen in the clip above.
Once the server detected that the first person had entered a lucid dream state, it generated a random Remmyo word and sent it to the person’s earbuds. The subject then repeated the word in his dream, and that response was captured and stored on the same server.
Eight minutes later, the second subject entered lucid dreaming. She then received the stored message from the first participant and confirmed the word when she woke up.
REMspace said this was the first “chat” in dreams, and the quotes apply. It wasn’t a real-time chat, as there was no back-and-forth between the two people. If anything, the second person left the first one on “read,” though the sender never knew the message was delivered.
“Yesterday, communicating in dreams seemed like science fiction,” REMspace CEO Michael Raduga said in a statement, likely referring to Inception. “Tomorrow, it will be so common we won’t be able to imagine our lives without this technology. This opens the door to countless commercial applications, reshaping how we think about communication and interaction in the dream world. That’s why we believe that REM sleep and related phenomena, like lucid dreams, will become the next big industry after AI.”
The company said that two other people were able to communicate during lucid dreaming using the same technology. REMspace is also refining the tech for better results. The next goal is real-time communication in lucid dreams, which could happen in the next few months.
We’ll have to wait and see how that goes. But I’ll tell you right away that I’m not too excited about texting in dreams. On the other hand, shared dreaming like Inception could be worth exploring if we ever get there.
As for the dream language, it’s not something you’ can’ll be able to understand. It’s not English or any other spoken language. The clip below from REMspace will help you understand how Remmyo works. Meanwhile, I’ll start work on my totem.
