https://thewalrus.ca/dream-engineering/
Science
Meet the Researchers Who Can Engineer Your Dreams
The tech is called “targeted dream incubation”—and it changes everything we know about sleep
by Karen van Kampen Updated 1:25, Mar. 2, 2026 | Published 6:30, Feb. 28, 2026
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What’s new, and what I set out to investigate, is Targeted Dream Incubation (TDI), which uses external stimuli to connect with a dreamer and encourage them to focus on a particular topic or theme. Adam Haar and researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University developed this contemporary incubation method using sound and touch to reach a dreamer as they traversed through sleep onset, moving from waking to sleep. These first few minutes of sleep are characterized by hypnagogia: dreamy thoughts and images that are often related to recent waking experiences. As a montage of images, thoughts, and sensations flooded a person’s mind, a voice recording prompted them to focus on a chosen topic.
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I’ve always been interested in “lucid dreaming” and what dreams could possibly mean.
Is it “nothing” or just the brain doing the biological equivalent of a computer’s garnage processing?
IDK!
I guess because I have “night terrors” as well as “very vivid dreams”, I always have thought that is why my parents were functional alcoholics. They had “night terrors” so bad that they were often afraid to go to sleep. Hence the alcohol which seems to disrupt it.
Not wanting to be an alcholoic, I have trained myself to not take these too seriously. The more I laughed at them and shared them, the less the impact they would have.
A frequent one was being lost in a hotel where the room numbers were not sequential or there me four digit room number in between three digit ones. For example, 135 would be next to 1351 and 1352 then 136. And on and on.
Strange?
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Reinke Faces Life 