PillowTalk

Sleep and dreams are emerging as a new frontier for technological interventions by aiming to incubate, shape, and control our dreams, promising increased productivity and personal betterment. However, the content of our dreams is elusive, even to ourselves. We cannot control what we dream or when we dream it, highlighting that the wisdom of our bodies extends beyond the physical to the psychological. Dreams serve significant roles in both individual and collective contexts, cognitively and emotionally. Simulations aiding memory consolidation, reflecting fears and desires, and rehearsing future scenarios, dreams imply interpretation, and require us remembering them. There is no dream without recall. Without the ability to remember our dreams, valuing the work of our mind when we relinquish  control becomes hard to appreciate, making it easier for us to avoid resistance and become compliant to anyone who sees having a stake in a third of our lives in which we have no control like too good a proposition to pass in exchange for promises of personal betterment through “productive rest”. 

What is at stake when our restorative time becomes the next frontier for control? And what do we gain when we are more attuned to our dreamlives? PillowTalk is a three-part project exploring the implications of dream technologies. It begins with aiding dream recall through a speculative design object that allows users to voice record their dreams and wirelessly transfer them to a computer for analysis via voice-to-text transcription. The second phase involves deploying a robust soft circuit to test the technology on a larger sample. The final phase tests hypothetical futures to prepare for real-world scenarios by exploring different outcomes through storytelling.