Dreaming in AI ...
Lucid dreaming, AGI, & Ethics
A good way to escape 2025 is if you can manage get yourself fast asleep and into an extended dream-state. The potential for AI to manipulate dreams raises ethical questions about autonomy and privacy (& its not very good yet) - but, temptingly, it presents a chance to meet with our deepest consciousness.
Here is a post on AI & our Dream Futures.
Prologue: Dreamscaping with TeamLab
What is Lucid Dreaming?
Your dreams in AI
Ethical Considerations of AI in your Dreams
In concluding: Ancient Wisdom & Lucid Dreams
“dream is the dreamer's own psychical act.”
― Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams
Prologue: Dreamscaping with TeamLab
I was in Abu Dhabi last week, speaking at the Abu Dhabi Culture Summit with Tim Marlow & the Design Museum. I took the chance to visit the international art collective TeamLab’s new space. TeamLab is an interdisciplinary group of artists formed in 2001 in Tokyo, Japan. TeamLab creates artworks using digital technology; and the group consists of artists, programmers, engineers, CG animators, mathematicians and architects who refer to themselves as “ultra-technologists".
The building was rumoured to have cost $100 million to build. And even though I’d seen the Japanese creative tech’s other spaces in Tokyo and work in Miami, I was taken aback by the scale and scope of immersive art-tech-light-water-music dreamscape they’d achieved in the UAE, their biggest yet. The artist Daisy Ginsburg called it “a psychedelic experience without the mushrooms”.
Justine Simons (Mayor’s Office) and Tim Reeve (V&A and East Bank) both know culture better than anyone, and said that they couldn’t separate the experience from the future of museums, art, and even music.
They emerged giddy with millions of ideas; I felt slightly spent and with a bit of triggered vertigo. Be warned: not for the physically impaired, or anyone desperately seeking content or context. But if you’re in Abu Dhabi and you’ve been to the Louvre already, top of the list.
The issue is, of course, like any dream: waking up, coming down from the high, and emerging like a little mole into the blazing desert heat, and trying to flag down an errant Uber on a dust-covered highway.
What is Lucid dreaming?
“I never dreamed the sea so deep,
The earth so dark; so long my sleep,
I have become another child.
I wake to see the world go wild.”
― Allen Ginsberg
Lucid dreams are when you know you’re dreaming while you’re asleep.
It is a state of awareness where you're consciously aware that you're dreaming while you're still asleep. This awareness can lead to some level of control over the dream environment and storyline.
Studies suggest that about 50% of all people have had at least one lucid dream. About 20% of lucid dreamers have them monthly. And a small group of people have them every week or even every night.
Lucid dreaming thus reveals itself to be a hybrid state of the brain–mind, with both waking and dreamlike features—with its phenomenal aspects being reducible to differential activity in specific brain structures.
This suggests the brain and the mind operate as one, with even the highest features of conscious activity—such as self‐referential processing and insight— having definitive and functionally segregated neuronal correlates - UCL, London Minds and Brains, Sleep and Psychiatry J. Allan Hobson, M.D., Jarrod A. Gott, Ph.D., Karl J. Friston, FRS
Knowing our dreams.
I’m all for Lucid Dreaming.
Seeking out a magical dreamscape where I can go, be and do whatever I like does not seem like a bad way to spend the rest of this year. But the problem with controlling your dream is that it takes work, and often years of practice to get in and be able to steer your thoughts into dimensions of your choosing.
Possibly also, you need to be smarter than everyone else.
Metacognition is a state of awareness of one’s thought processes.
Lucid dreaming is believed to be a form of metacognitive activity. Dreams usually tend to be bizarre and unrelated. However, lucid dreaming demands conscious activity related to higher metacognitive functions in the people experiencing them.
Once people master it, life is never the same. Dreaming is, after all, the ultimate psychedelic experience. As a tool, it has been previously used by writers and artists for creative inspiration or to treat recurring nightmares. Although lucid dreaming is a trainable skill and has been studied for years, we still do not fully understand its causes or purpose.
Science & Lucid Dreams
Lucid dreaming has been part of various religions for thousands of years. But it's only been studied by scientists in the past century. In 1913, Dutch psychiatrist Frederik Van Eeden coined the phrase after documenting his own experience with dreams.
Sigmund Freud's perspective on lucid dreaming was largely skeptical and he only briefly mentioned it in later editions of "The Interpretation of Dreams". He viewed it as a "secondary revision" of dream content, possibly a form of censoring the true message of the dream. Freud believed the unconscious mind is the primary source of dream activity, and that lucid dreaming might interfere with the dream's natural expression of repressed desires or conflicts.
In psychoanalysis, dreams are viewed as disguised expressions of unconscious wishes, fears, and desires, reflecting the workings of the unconscious mind. Sigmund Freud's work, "The Interpretation of Dreams," established this foundation, emphasising that dreams provide a "royal road" to understanding the unconscious.
By the late 1970s and 1980s, researchers were able to agree on lucid dreaming as a scientific reality. They did so by devising a way to tell when sleep study participants had these intense dreams. Before they fell asleep, the participants were asked to move their eyes in a certain pattern, such as twice to either side and then back to center, once they began having lucid dreams. When they made these eye movements, researchers finally had the proof that lucid dreaming is real.
This I found useful, your Brain ON lucid dreams, from UCL
In REM (deep sleep, rapid eye movement) sleep, the idea is that cholinergic modulation (blue projections) of superficial pyramidal cells at intermediate levels of the cortical hierarchy preferentially enables these levels, while suppressing ascending prediction errors from primary sensory cortex.
In waking, aminergic (e.g., noradrenergic) neuromodulation boosts sensory prediction errors that are now able to entrain hierarchical inference in higher cortical levels for perceptual synthesis.
Your dreams in AI
Luckily, there’s an app for that. And Silicon Valley is dreaming up new pathways into controlling and managing our dreams.
How AI is being used:
AI is being explored as a tool to help induce and stabilise lucid dreams, where dreamers become aware they are dreaming and can exert some control over their dream environment.
On September 24th, 2024, researchers at the neurotechnology company REMspace achieved a historic milestone, demonstrating that lucid dreams could unlock new dimensions of communication and humanity’s potential. Using specially designed equipment, two individuals successfully induced lucid dreams and exchanged a simple message.
AI models, like Prophetic AI's Morpheus-1, are being developed to analyse brain activity and provide stimuli to induce lucid dreaming by targeting specific neural circuits. Scientists at Prophetic have identified that the defining characteristic of the lucid dreaming state is higher activity in the frontal regions of the brain during sleep. These regions are typically less active during other dream states.
Lucid dream induction refers to triggering awareness while dreaming, usually during REM sleep. Products like Morpheus-1, an AI model developed by Prophetic AI, and the Halo headband aim to detect REM and deliver targeted brain stimulation to prompt lucidity. This concept has partial scientific support—some small studies suggest stimulation of the prefrontal cortex can increase the chances of lucidity, but findings remain limited and inconsistent.
Lucid dream stabilisation involves helping the dreamer maintain awareness once a lucid dream begins. The Halo headband claims to monitor brain activity using EEG sensors and reapply stimulation if lucidity starts to fade. While this idea is compelling, it remains largely untested, and there is no peer-reviewed evidence to confirm its effectiveness.
[Source: Control your Lucid dreams using Halo Headband: PropheticAI, a world leader in the field of neuroscience, has recently launched Halo headband to control lucid dreaming. Morpheus 1, the world’s first ultrasonic Transformer designed to induce and stabilize lucid dreaming. This non-invasive neural device marks a significant leap in exploring the vast landscape of human consciousness.]
Prefrontal cortex activation is central to most lucid dreaming systems. This brain region is known to be more active during lucid dreams, and devices like Halo aim to stimulate it using ultrasound during REM sleep. While neuroimaging supports the link between this region and lucidity, external stimulation of it as a reliable method remains unproven.
EEG-based sleep monitoring is used to detect brainwave activity and identify sleep stages, helping AI time interventions with precision. This is a well-established technology and is widely used in sleep research and clinical environments.
Ultrasound stimulation is used in the Halo device to target the brain without physical contact, through what the company calls “ultrasound holograms.” While low-intensity ultrasound is an active area of research in neuroscience, its use for inducing lucid dreams is unproven. The term “holograms” in this context is more marketing than science.
Hypnagogic state training involves teaching users to recognise the mental state between wakefulness and sleep, which can serve as a gateway into lucid dreaming. Some early-stage virtual reality platforms are exploring this idea, but the approach remains speculative, with no formal studies validating its effectiveness.
AI-driven dream interpretation tools are being developed to analyse written dream journals using natural language processing, identifying themes, symbols, or emotional patterns. Most of these tools are experimental and community-built (e.g. shared on Reddit), and are not based on clinically validated psychological models. It is associated with vivid imagery and the possibility of inducing lucid dreams.
Ethical Considerations of AI in Your Dreams
It might be worth revisiting this if you are interested. I think its useful! Bioethics, the Brain & AI An introduction to bioethics & neurotechnology
AGI: Does AI dream yet?
AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) systems are designed to learn and adapt from data and experiences. The idea of AGI engaging in simulated, dream-like states is a topic of exploration and speculation within the AI field.
Some researchers suggest that Machines - through advanced neural networks and machine learning, could simulate experiences and even engage in a form of "lucid dreaming" where they explore different scenarios and outcomes.
Is this space regulated? Definitely not.
This could be a way for AI to develop imagination, learn from experiences, and even predict future trends.The concept of "dreaming" in AGI might refer to the ability to simulate and explore these experiences, even if they don't involve the same physiological processes as human dreaming.
Some argue that the ability to be aware of and control one's own thought processes within a dream state (lucid dreaming) could have an equivalent in AGI, where the AI could be consciously aware of and manipulate its own internal simulations. The idea is that these simulated "dream" states could be a valuable tool for experiential learning, allowing AGI to explore different possibilities, learn from mistakes, and even gain insights into human consciousness.
“When AI dreams” .. see below..
Mind Control
Some raise concerns about the potential for AI to be used to manipulate or control dreams. Any device capable of modifying brain waves would ordinarily be subject to significant ethical oversight, however. There has also been little research into the long-term effects of regular lucid dreaming, let alone the impacts of regularly inducing the dream state using brain modulation.
"The study that they've got on their technology roadmap demonstrates different patterns of activation in the prefrontal cortex associated with lucid dreaming and they're trying to modulate those circuits," Guy Leschziner, a professor of neurology and sleep medicine at Guy's Hospital and author of "The Secret World of Sleep" (Simon & Schuster, 2020).
"A lot of the time, we don't fully understand what we're doing by using either deep brain stimulation or transcranial stimulation, and sometimes the effects of these technological interventions are not necessarily doing what we think they're doing."
"The stuff that they've put out there suggests that this can modulate dreaming, but the research that I've seen suggests that they need to do more detailed assessments and to systematically demonstrate the efficacy of this device on a larger scale," said Leschziner.
Safety-protocols
Many of the products being developed—such as the Halo headband by Prophetic AI—use brain stimulation methods like focused ultrasound. These techniques are still experimental, and there’s no long-term safety data showing they are safe to use during sleep.
Overstating the efficacy of this tech
Some experts, including those interviewed by Live Science and Tom’s Guide, have warned that companies may be overstating what these devices can actually do.
Privacy of brain data
Devices that rely on EEG sensors record detailed brainwave activity, which is highly personal information. As legal scholar Nita Farahany has argued in her book The Battle for Your Brain (2023), this kind of data should be treated with the same care and privacy protection as other sensitive health records. She argues that we should prepare for this rise in neurotechnology by establishing an international human right to what she calls cognitive liberty.
[Source: Morpheus, The Primordial Greek god of dreams. He shaped and formed the dreams, through which he could appear to mortals in any form. This talent made Morpheus a messenger of the gods able to communicate divine messages to sleeping mortals. Though he could take any human form, Morpheus's true form was that of a winged demon. He was the son of Hypnos (God of Sleep) and Pasithea (Goddess of relaxation and rest).]
Protecting our mental health
For people with conditions like anxiety, PTSD, or dissociative disorders, interfering with dream states could cause confusion, distress, or even worsen symptoms. Some tools, especially AI systems that claim to interpret dreams based on text inputs, are still unregulated and not clinically validated. This raises concerns about emotional harm or misinterpretation.
Capitalism
Finally, as these technologies grow, there’s the broader issue of how dreams—one of the most private aspects of our inner lives—might be commercialised. If companies begin analysing or profiting from our subconscious experiences, it raises difficult questions about consent, ownership, and psychological autonomy.
Overall, while the field is exciting, many researchers and ethicists agree that it needs much more transparency, oversight, and evidence before being rolled out to the public
In concluding: Ancient Wisdom & Lucid Dreams
"A good dream is from Allah (God) and a bad dream is from Satan," the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him).
[Source: Nizami’s Five Poems, 'The Prophet Muhammad’s Celestial Journey'. Tabriz, Iran, 1539 – 1543. British Library, Or. 2265, f. 195.]
Ancient Egypt and the Temples of Sleep
There is the suggestion that lucid dreaming was used in Ancient Egypt, as far back as 3000 BCE. Hieroglyphs have been found combining two symbols; the bed, known to stand for sleep, and a single open eye, meaning ‘awakening’ or ‘to come awake’. The most literal translations of these, "Sleep Awakening" would seem to indicate lucid dreaming.
Ancient Egyptians believed a person existed in three forms; the corpse (Shat), the physical living body (Ka) and a spiritual/psychic manifestation (Ba). While some commentators translate ‘Ba’ as soul, others believe an ‘out of body’ state is more appropriate.
In ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, people would sleep in temples with images of deities to receive divinatory dreams, as explained by Martini Fisher. Similarly, in ancient Greece, Asclepieions (healing temples) used "sleep incubation" to allow patients to receive healing dreams from Asclepius.
The ancient Egyptians placed significant spiritual importance on dreams, and there is evidence that certain temples, like those of Serapis or Imhotep, were used for incubation—a ritual practice where people slept in sacred spaces to receive healing or divine messages through dreams. These "temple sleep" practices encouraged awareness during the dream state, and priests acted as interpreters and guides. While we don’t have direct evidence that the Egyptians practiced lucid dreaming in the modern sense, their emphasis on conscious interaction with dreams points to an understanding of dreams as more than passive experiences, but active states of insight and transformation.
[Source: Dreams, according to the ancient Egyptians, were like oracles that brought messages from the gods. It is clear how significant dreams were in ancient times from the regularity with which they are referenced in the first two books of the Old Testament. There are more than a dozen allusions to dreams in Genesis alone, the most of which are prophetic.]
Tthere are some Egyptian paintings that include an image of the sleeping body and Ba (a figure with a human body and head of a bird) hovering above it. Again suggesting some kind of out of body state associated with sleeping.
Tibetan Dream Yoga
One of the most structured and ancient systems for lucid dreaming comes from Tibetan Buddhism, particularly the lineage of the Six Yogas of Naropa.
[Source: Tibetan dream yoga is possibly the first form of lucid dreaming ever practiced. The aim is to gain control over dreams and carry out certain tasks while sleeping. Learning how to master your dream state is thought to enhance your awareness and take you closer to enlightenment.]
In this tradition, dream yoga is not simply about entertainment or personal insight, but a rigorous spiritual practice. Practitioners are trained to become aware that they are dreaming, and to then use the dream space intentionally—for example, by meditating within the dream or transforming dream imagery. The goal is to dissolve attachments, understand the illusory nature of both dreams and waking life, and prepare for death and the bardo (intermediate) state. Tibetan masters teach that by gaining lucidity in dreams, one can also gain lucidity in life itself, leading ultimately to enlightenment.
Hindu Philosophy and the Mandukya Upanishad
The Mandukya Upanishad, one of the foundational texts in Hindu philosophy, describes the self (Atman) as existing through four states of consciousness: waking (jagrat), dreaming (svapna), deep sleep (sushupti), and the transcendent fourth state known as turiya. In this model, the dream state is not dismissed as unreal, but is instead seen as a valid realm in which the Self can be known.
Ancient Indian sages perceived that understanding the nature of dreams—and maintaining awareness during them—could lead to profound insights into the continuity and unity of consciousness. Lucid dreaming, in this context, becomes a tool for perceiving the layers of the self and accessing deeper spiritual truths.
Aboriginal Dreamtime (Australia)
Among Aboriginal Australian cultures, the concept of Dreamtime (or The Dreaming) is a cosmological framework rather than a psychological one. Dreamtime stories describe the time of creation and the continuing presence of ancestral beings in the land, animals, and rituals.
[Source: First Nations Peoples believe that the Dreamtime was way back, at the very beginning]
While this is distinct from the modern practice of lucid dreaming, there are traditions among Aboriginal groups where dreams are used as a means of communicating with ancestors, navigating the landscape, or receiving instruction. Some elders describe practices where dreams are consciously entered and interacted with. The boundary between the dream world and the waking world is often fluid, and dreaming is considered an essential aspect of reality and knowledge transmission.
Kabbalah and the higher soul
In Kabbalah, dreams, including lucid dreams, are viewed as a bridge between the physical and spiritual realms, offering insights and divine messages. Lucid dreaming, where one is aware they are dreaming, is seen as a heightened opportunity to connect with the soul's higher realms and receive guidance.
Scientifically, lucid dreams often happen during REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep, a stage when the brain is highly active, and dreams are most vivid. While modern psychology sees lucid dreaming as a way to explore the subconscious, Kabbalah perceives it as an opportunity to engage with the soul's higher realms.
Those who obtain perfect mastery of the dream can enlarge it to the waking world. Recognizing that the waking state is not fundamentally different from the dream state gives them the capacity to create miracles. Kalu Rinpoche, Meditation Master
And there you have it. Back to Miracles & AI.
Love this
I remember I had a teacher say that if there could be a technology that could record our dreams, it would be even better than movies.