INTERESTING: Targeted Dream Incubation (TDI) may make something happen

Saturday, March 14, 2026

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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ENGINEERING:The interlocking bricks of glass are like future building Legos

Friday, September 27, 2024

https://news.mit.edu/2024/engineers-3d-print-sturdy-glass-bricks-building-structures-0920?utm_placement=newsletter

MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Engineers 3D print sturdy glass bricks for building structures

  • The interlocking bricks, which can be repurposed many times over, can withstand similar pressures as their concrete counterparts.

Jennifer Chu | MIT News
Publication Date: September 20, 2024 

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What if construction materials could be put together and taken apart as easily as LEGO bricks? Such reconfigurable masonry would be disassembled at the end of a building’s lifetime and reassembled into a new structure, in a sustainable cycle that could supply generations of buildings using the same physical building blocks.

That’s the idea behind circular construction, which aims to reuse and repurpose a building’s materials whenever possible, to minimize the manufacturing of new materials and reduce the construction industry’s “embodied carbon,” which refers to the greenhouse gas emissions associated with every process throughout a building’s construction, from manufacturing to demolition.

Now MIT engineers, motivated by circular construction’s eco potential, are developing a new kind of reconfigurable masonry made from 3D-printed, recycled glass. Using a custom 3D glass printing technology provided by MIT spinoff Evenline, the team has made strong, multilayered glass bricks, each in the shape of a figure eight, that are designed to interlock, much like LEGO bricks.

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As a fat old white guy injineer with a 7 year old boy, I will quibble that Lego blocks are easy to assemble and disassemble.  Not withstanding this critique, I find this very interesting.  Almost as good as that African handy fella making buildings out of soda bottles filled with water and mud.  Or the other fellow who made indoor daylights from water filled soda bottles.  

I was taught that “engineers turn interesting ideas into something valuable and useable.

Sounds like these people at MIT have a winner.

Very impressive.

I look forward to the practical use of these new (fangled) “bricks”.

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