Something this advanced probably won’t be developed until many many years from now, but wouldn’t it be great to have a device to record the visuals of your dreams into a viewable media format? It would be great to see exactly what other people see as they are dreaming or to see what you were dreaming and what you didn’t notice was happening in the dream.
I wonder how they would extract the data though. It would be pretty funny to see everyone with a large slot in the back of their heads to plug into the dream machine just like they do in The Matrix .
It’ll be possible one day. Essentially, you’d have to be able to record the precise stimulus that affects the sensory components of the brain while you’re dreaming. Playing it back would just be a matter of sitting or lying somewhere safe, connecting the device to yourself and pressing ‘play’. The recorded signals would then target and influence your own visual, tactile, audile, (etc) senses and effectively replay the experience.
It might seem strange that you wouldn’t have any control over what happened, though.
I think it’s possible. All of our senses work clearly and normally in dreams, especially LDs – sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, everything (and the “sixth sense” usually works even better than in real life ). These are clearly the same senses, but obviously they’re not getting their input from the same sources as in waking life.
In waking life, our eyes provide vision. In dreams, something else does. But it all ends up in the same place in the brain- probably the part that controls consciousness. So if scientists can trace the “pathway” that vision takes from the eyes, and see where it ends up, then we can probably tap that endpoint to be able to record our vision, waking and sleeping.
Deciphering the “formats” that our senses use is important, but scientists must have already done it for vision, because they’re already working on bionic eyes that can replace biological eyes in blind people. And they’re already somewhat functional, and in testing- I saw a news story about that on TV a while ago, and even at that point they were somewhat functional. So it must be further along by now.
Nanotechnology would probably be useful for this, in order to implant a device like this in such a specific part of the brain. The device would probably have to transmit the sensual data, most importantly vision and sound, over radio waves or something. But this isn’t too far off: nanotechnology is already being used for simple purposes, and in a few years, it might be just as functional as early microtechnology.
Conclusion, I think that this will eventually be possible, and when it is, it’ll be a lot quicker and clearer than using a dream journal
Our senses are shut while we sleep.Its the mind/subcounciousness/soul/else whats reading the signals…thats why we are able to see colours that arent permitted for our eyes or see the music waves i.e.Taste it and smell it.
Thats where its great advantage lies-that we are not limited by our senses which can only see,hear this and that wave lenghts.
So i guess the device wouldnt have anything to do with our actuall senses as we know them.Like you said-its the question of pinpointing exact spots in…hmm…brain?subcounciousness…dunno yet
Our senses aren’t shut during dreams. “Sight” doesn’t mean “eyes.” I think of the senses as our mental “endpoints” for input from the outside world. Our eyes send pictures of the outside world to the sight sense. When we dream, it’s still the sight sense that’s acting- it’s just getting its input from the conscious and subconscious minds working together, instead of from the eyes.
What you said about being able to see different wavelengths, etc. is true, but not because we’re not receiving outside sensory information. It’s because the mind is creating a purely fictitious model of the world, so anything can exist. You’re not really “seeing” different wavelengths of light, or “seeing” sound, you’re just seeing how you imagine they’d look. The mind is just sending a certain picture to the sight sense of the consciousness.
I don’t know if I explained that well, and it’s really just a theory I have, but it seems to make a lot of sense to me. Oh well.
I understand what you mean but “You’re not really “seeing” different wavelengths of light, or “seeing” sound, you’re just seeing how you imagine they’d look.” is just unknown.
If we assume(and we may do it) that subcounciousness is separate from the brain than my poin is valid.
I said it not to argue,just to point that there might be more than one answer,and we have no idea about it yet.
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). These are clearly the same senses, but obviously they’re not getting their input from the same sources as in waking life.