why would we want a machine that can record them?
Everyone knows two things about dreams, namely 1) other people's dreams are dull and 2) they're going to tell you about them anyway. And as they burble on about how they dreamed they were trying to build a windmill with Eamonn Holmes but his hands were made of candles, or how they dreamed their little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character, it's hard not to fall asleep and start dreaming yourself: dreaming of a future in which the anecdote has finished and their face has stopped talking and their body's gone away.
But maybe in future they won't have to tell you about it at all. They'll just play it to you on their iPhone. A researcher at New York University called Moran Cerf (an anagram of "Man Forcer", but that's not important right now) has produced an article for the science journal Nature in which he claims it may soon be possible to create a device that records our dreams and plays them back later.
Obviously, the reality is 909% less exciting than it initially appears. It won't be a magic pipe you stick in your ear that etches your wildest imaginings directly onto a Blu-Ray disc for you to enjoy boring your friends with later.What Cerf is actually proposing is a way to make other people's dreams seem even more boring. But first: the business of capturing them, which all boils down to neurons. After studying the brains of people with electronic implants buried deep in their noggins, Cerf discovered that certain groups of neurons "lit up" when he asked his subjects to think about specific things, such as Marilyn Monroe or the Eiffel Tower. Therefore, he postulates, by recording these subjects' sleeping brain activity, then studying the patterns generated, it should be possible to work out whether they were dreaming about starlets or landmarks. In other words, he's isolated the stuff that dreams are made of. And it turns out to be a few blips on a chart.
So the "dream recordings" will probably come in the form of an underwhelming visual transcript – a graph with the odd squiggly line on it. Brilliant if, like Vince Cable, you dream about nothing but graphs – but hardly Fantasia II.
Not that real dreams would make great movies anyway. For one thing, the continuity is all over the place. One minute you're helping the cast of Robin's Nest crucify Father Christmas in a space station, the next you're trying to impress Botticelli by climbing Everest with your teeth. Even Greek television makes more sense than that. And most of the time, they're not even that interesting. The majority of my dreams are unbelievably pedestrian. I once dreamed I was watching a cat food commercial featuring a surprisingly good jingle. The world doesn't need a backup copy of that.
Samuel Coleridge once famously dreamed the epic poem Kubla Khan in its entirety, and upon awakening, immediately began scribbling it down line by line, only to be interrupted by a man from the nearby village of Porlock, who detained him with some petty chore for an hour, after which he could no longer remember the words. That one might have been worth recording. But Coleridge has been dead for years. Right now the best we'd get is a Sky pay-per-view channel on which Peter Andre dreams about his favourite sandwich toppings, or Jedward take turns to sneeze inside a terrifying, hairy cave.
Perhaps more promisingly, it would only be a matter of time until some enterprising psychopath hooked up the dream recorder to Twitter, making it possible to enjoy live dream-tweets from Kanye West in which he makes approximately 50% more sense than he does while awake.
Putting aside the entertainment value, what practical use is there for a recorded dream, anyway? It'd only encourage the "science" of dream analysis – the psychological equivalent of Gillian McKeith prodding a turd with a stick. And six months after the invention of a reliable dream recorder, you can guarantee we'd find ourselves in a nightmare scenario, in which dream transcripts are pored over in divorce hearings and terrorism trials.
From there, it's surely only a short step to some kind of reverse-engineering system via which ideas and suggestions can be planted inside your dreams, Inception-style, while you're still asleep. Which probably means in-dream product placement – so next time you climb Everest with your teeth, you'll have the great taste of Colgate in your mouth as you do so. Or maybe the advertising won't be that subtle. Maybe all your future dreams will simply consist of a gigantic mouth shouting the words "DIET COKE" over and over until you wake up in tears, and immediately reach for a Diet Coke, hands quivering, without really understanding why.
In fact, yes. That's PRECISELY what's going to happen.
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