I have an overactive imagination (shocking, I know) and so I usually have pretty wild, action-packed dreams. Most nights I can even remember what happens in vivid detail, enabling me to write them down or recount them with my friends. To the point where I’ve even been able to use some of my night-time adventures to generate incredible screenplay ideas that my waking mind never would have come up with on its own. However, if I were to seriously look into turning my dreams into reality i.e. an actual screenplay I’d still have to sit down and write out my thoughts, fill in some plot holes, and come up with all the dialogue. A process that might take months, or even years, which explains why my lazy ass has never done that before. But in the future there may be a far easier way to turn our dreams into playable movies. A technological, Black Mirror style solution that would do all the heavy lifting for us.
The basic premise is that, in theory, we may be able to use fMRI machines to capture images of what a person is seeing when they dream. For now those images are pretty rudimentary but the thought is that the imagery will become crystal clear within a decade or two. We would then attached electrodes to a dreamer’s speech muscles to record dialogue and throughout the rest of their body to record their movements. Combine all three – speech, movement, and imagery – and you have everything you need to turn a dream into a movie.
But what would be the point of turning everyone in the world into a human movie studio? Aside from pure entertainment purposes would there be any real reason to record and playback our dreams on a daily basis?
Well, according to Tessa Love on Medium there could be some therapeutic benefits for people undergoing counseling:
“Because some people don’t remember their dreams or remember only bits and pieces, being able to play them back in full could add important insight into a patient’s state of mind. But, she says, this is all hugely speculative. After all, the recordings would have to be extremely accurate to capture more than just the basic movement and speech of a dream, and psychologists who work with dreams are more focused on the emotional content than the physical.”
There are plenty of other downsides to a technology that would enable us to view our dreams. For instance, would we become obsessed with viewing these dreamscapes, spending all of our free time watching and obsessing over them, trying to gleam insights from them the way the characters in Ready Player One obsessed over every little detail from James Halliday’s life? Some people already try to analyze their dreams, wondering what certain reoccurring themes mean. Others obsess over every little detail in their favorite show looking for hidden Easter eggs, a phenomenon that started with Lost and has continued on to Westworld, Game of Thrones, and countless others. Can you imagine what it would be like if those two elements were combined? If people could comb through their own dreams to look for clues and hidden meanings, for explanations that might help them navigate their way through life?! Or if they could thoroughly analyze the dreams of others?!
Armed with this technology would we stalk the dreams of our favorite celebrities to find out what make’s them tick? Would job seekers have their dreams analyzed by their prospective employers? Would significant others accuse their loved ones of cheating on them if other guys/girls start showing up in their dreams? Would we basically get to the point where it would be impossible to keep a secret?!?!
Conversely, would we get to the point where we’d want to stay in bed all day, trying to dream for as long as possible, just to generate more content for our adoring fans? Just think about how time-consuming and physically-demanding it is to run a popular YouTube channel or podcast. People get burned out all the time. Could you imagine how much worse it might be if someone could become a famous influencer just from dreaming?! People might be tempted to just lay around 24/7, throwing away any chance they had at enjoying real life as their bodies turn to mush.
Or would we become obsessed with lucid dreaming, with getting to the point where we could control our dreams? After all, if we could gain fame or fortune from dreaming why would we leave our fate to chance when we could control the action? And could a rogue Hollywood executive try to enslave a prolific dreamer, using their mind to churn out blockbuster hit after blockbuster hit?! Would advertising companies try to pull off a meta version of product placement, surrounding a subject with their products during their waking moments, in hopes that the dreamer’s subconscious will pick up on the not so subtle hints and then incorporate those elements into their dreams?
And last, but not least, in perhaps the most Black Mirror sounding scenario of all, could a nefarious hacker alter the imagery that our dreams produced, tricking our fans or ourselves, into seeing something that never really happened?
The possibilities are truly endless when it comes to dreaming up nightmare scenarios that this technology might bring about. But that doesn’t mean we should abandon the idea. I for one would love if we could get to the point where we could view our dreams because for all of the risks there are plenty of benefits as well. I had a friend who once had an extremely vivid dream about a place he had never been to before. Using Google Maps he was actually able to locate the place from his dream and then planned a trip to Europe to go see it. A dream inspired pilgrimage. If we can play back our dreams perhaps others could make similar pilgrimages to the places they’ve dreamt about.
In addition, there are plenty of people who believe that dreams are more than just random thoughts. Rather, they are actual snippets of information i.e. specific memories and imagery of the people, places, and things that we’ve seen recently. When we dream there’s a method to the madness as our brains try to make sense of all the new sensory inputs they’ve encountered recently. A process which helps us form long term memories. If we were to view our dreams, after our brains took at first pass at trying to make sense of the imagery it first encountered, then perhaps we could further enhance our memories. Essentially, what we would be doing is further remembering what it was that we just remembered.
All in all, it remains to be seen whether turning our dreams into movies will ultimately come to pass. There are multiple technologies that would be needed to successfully pull this off and most of them aren’t quite ready for prime-time. Realistically, it may be several decades before this technology joins the mainstream. Plenty of time for Black Mirror to do an episode or two on how this game-changing technology might be put to use. A scary thought indeed.
Is turning dreams into movies the Greatest Idea Ever?
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